Walk #26

walk26pic.jpg

5 February 2005
9:10 am to 10:10 am
Heads: 44
Tails: 33
Total intersections: 66
Ending point: 5 Gold Street
Latitude/longitude: 40:42:26.71N/74:00:26.09W
Distance from home: 0.1701 miles
Literature received: none
Coin: 1989 P nickel

Still jetlagged from a reporting trip in Europe, I was up early. I walked out the door eating a banana.

I started by flipping five heads in a row, followed by four tails. As I went around in circles, I thought about how New York looked different from Rome and Prague. Suddenly my city looked new: not just to me, but in relative terms, in the history of western civilization.

There were piles of dirty snow everywhere, and everything felt dead on a Saturday morning. I headed east and south, then looped around and went back up to Fulton Street, where it was sunny! The light felt like it was baptising the city, bringing it back to life.

I zigzagged over to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the cars overhead go by, and passing a construction site. I went west, circling around the World Trade Center, bought two bagels on the way, sticking one in each pocket, and then headed back east.

I went around the block, and when I heard the noise of the construction work after finishing that circuit, I felt oddly omniscient, as if I had some special knowledge of what that noise was, just because I saw it a few minutes ago. As my college roommate Andrew used to say, “I don’t mean to sound like I have a messiah complex, but whosoever shall worship me shall know the way, the light, and the truth and enter the Kingdom of God.”