35. New York, City

The first time I went to the east in my young adult life I thought I was going to see city everywhere but when I drove through Pennsylvania, upstate New York and northern New England I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t all so different from my own northern Idaho. Ok, the little towns are much closer than out here but it’s still rural, wooded and beautiful. The east coast itself was much as I had imagined—sprawling megalopolis—but I still found myself enjoying the Big Apple and I still do. Anyone who likes lots of open green spaces, however, has to put that aside for awhile because in that densely populated city there isn’t much to be found. But Central Park is there and people swarm to it. While it is a different green space, the observation of people is a thing I rather enjoy. Every variety of person imaginable can be found in Central Park or New York as a whole for that matter.

            When you walk down the city streets the buildings tower over you much as the canyon walls of my own Salmon River. You can set in lawn chairs at Times Square and tune into something on one of the big screens through your cell phone. You can stand in line for Broadway tickets on discount. (We went to The Lion King.) You can catch a ferry to Lady Liberty. You can ride the bus and get snapped at for not having exact change (though that was years ago and now you can probably just use some sort of metro-pass). You can go spend hours at the Museum of Modern Art or the Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or any other museum. You can go into Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s and fight off the perfume sellers at they try to spray you with the latest scent. You can ride the elevator to the top of the Empire State building or so many others. (I went to the top of the Twin Towers on my first visit, but alas…) You can chat with the man selling $5 I ♡ NY T-shirts and then buy a couple from him. You can walk through the one really old cemetery at the Episcopal Church to prove to yourself that it really is an old colonial city. You can go into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and light a candle and say a prayer. And you can always go back to that park bench in Central Park and watch the ducks, maybe even wonder where they go in the winter. It’s just one city on a famous Dutch named island but it is America, disarming and welcoming, teeming and lonely all at the same time and I’m thankful for it. (And yeah, I’m pretty thankful I don’t live there either.)