Areas of Unrest

8 August 1999 - Weekend in New York

It is, obviously, insane to travel cross-country just for the weekend, but I am so used to similar length trips for business that I figure I can do them for pleasure as well. So I took off Friday and flew to New York.

Getting to LAX was a nightmare because I made the dubious decision to stop by an ATM first and was, therefore, running late and ended up having to park out in the back 40. But, I still made my flight with plenty of time. The flight itself was fine - a newer 767 which was quite comfortable. The movie was Cookie's Fortune and, while I did try to watch it, I fell asleep so I can't tell you whether or not it was any good.

At any rate, my flight arrived at JFK pretty much on time. It had been ages since I'd dealt with public transportation there, since the last couple of times I'd gone to New York, I'd had things to do that necessitated a rental car. This time I had checked car rental prices and decided it wasn't worth it just to go to and from my mother's house. It should have been easy enough to get the bus to Jamaica and take the LIRR, but the bus that used to run every 10 minutes is now every 30 minutes, which meant that I actually waited over an hour for it in one of those moments of horrid inefficiency. This was merely irritating for me; it was far worse for the people trying to connect to flights at LaGuardia. Particularly so as approximately 16 of the 18 people doing this spoke only Finnish. Still, I got safely enough to Jamaica, bought a train ticket, called my mother to have her pick me up at the train station and got to Island Park merely two hours after getting off the plane.

After settling in, making a few phone calls, and having supper, it was time to attempt to help Mom with the computer. Attempt is the operative word because I was entirely unable to figure out why her graphics software insists on printing in landscape mode even if you set it to portrait. I did show her how to download pictures from the internet and introduce her to the concept of the clipboard, but I'm not sure how much she actually absorbed of what I showed her.

Saturday's plans were the real motivation behind my excursion. Mom dropped me off bright and early at the train station. I figured I'd be on my feet all day, so I was lazy and took the subway uptown to the Museum of Natural History.

Now, you have to understand that the American Museum of Natural History is considered a pilgrimage site in my family. Approximately half of the photos in my mother's family albums show someone or other posed next to a taxidermied grizzly bear or a dinosaur skeleton. Mom claims she went to the museum every weekend when she was growing up. I didn't go nearly as often, but we made regular excursions when I was growing up. Despite all this, it had probably been a good twenty years since I'd been there - one of the downsides of not living in New York.

My immediate motivation for the trip was to see the exhibit on Shackleton's Endurance expedition and that's where I started. This is a marvelous exhibit - well worth the additional admission. Film footage, lots of Frank Hurley's photos (including several in color! I hadn't known there were any color ones), and what had been advertised as "artifacts" from the expedition. Those artifacts were a major thrill, including some of the journals (Hurley's and McNeish's), Worsley's sextant, Macklin's medical kit, a hoosh pot, and - best of all - the James Caird itself. The James Caird was the lifeboat in which Shackleton, Worsley, Crean and three other men crossed 800 miles of open sea from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island to get help. Seeing it was a grim reminder of what a remarkable feat of navigation that was. Two sextants were set up, with a film of roaring seas, so you could try your hand at navigation. Let's just say that if it were left to me, they wouldn't have made it.

If you have any interest in Shackleton - or in exploration in general - and you can possibly get to New York between now and 10 October, do not miss this exhibit.

After the ordeal in the Antarctic, Frank Hurley (the expedition photographer) joked that he was going to spend the rest of his life in the tropics. While he didn't quite manage to do that, he did sign up for a few expeditions to New Guinea and the room just outside the Endurance exhibit had several of his photographs from New Guinea.

I meandered through various other exhibits at the museum, including a pilgrimage of sorts to the dinosaur rooms, which are radically changed from my childhood. They've left the skeletons in the rotunda (the Central Park West entrance to the museum) unchanged, but the upstairs displays reflect more modern knowledge of likely dinosaur behavior. I didn't attempt to read all of the placards, but I still felt that they overemphasized the point that birds are living dinosaurs. I also noticed the absence of pterodactyls. I remember when they decided the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus, but are pterodactyls wrong too? I always liked them for the bizarreness of the name, which is as good a reason to like an extinct animal as any.

By the way, I was never really all that into dinosaurs, always preferring living creatures to long-dead ones. But we had this very weird board game when I was a kid. The game board was essentially an evolutionary tree, with numbered circles. And the playing pieces were little plastic dinosaurs that you moved around the board in response to a spinner. We probably got this game at the museum shop and whenever I see, say, a triceratops skeleton, I find myself thinking about the plastic dinosaurs from this game. (It turns out that my brother actually still has the game. We've speculated on what it would take to market something like that now, with likely protests by fundamentalists at any store daring to sell it.)

After the dinosaurs and board game nostalgia, I walked through a couple of the other special exhibits (ones that didn't require an additional fee). One was on infectious disease and was reasonably interesting, though it didn't tell me anythng I didn't already know. They had some cute computer displays to supplement the static displays. One allowed you to be an epidemiologist studying an outbreak and interviewing the victims to find common links. Another one had you trying to be a microbe evading the body's immune system. In general, I think these activity oriented displays are a good way for children to get more of a feel for the material, but they're rarely sophisticated enough to capture the interest of adults.

The other special exhibit was of winners of a wildlife photography contest. I noticed that a lot of the winners were South Africans. Of course, they have an unfair advantage, having so many great wildlife viewing areas within easy driving distance. On the way to the photos, I'd had to walk through some of the mammal halls. On the way out, I passed through the "Peoples of Asia" area. I didn't have enough time to look thoroughly, but I didn't see anything about Tuva, though there is a fairly large section on Siberian tribes.

I'd left myself barely enough time to walk up to Broadway and 92nd, site of Murder Ink, which was the first bookstore in the U.S. to specialize in mysteries and is still one of the best. I browsed a bit but, since I had done a major mystery binge not long ago at Rue Morgue in Boulder, I didn't buy anything. Toni and Evan, with children in tow, arrived befire I was quite done browsing and we set off for coffee. They're friends of John's and we had exchanged a little email but not met in person before. We spent a little over an hour talking about travel, life in general, and what a great person John is. Then they wrangled the boys back to New Jersey and I took advantage of the good weather to walk back to Penn Station.

Thing I miss most about New York: walkability.

Thing I miss least about New York: the accent

Sunday was occupied with an attempt to fix my mother's doorbell (it remains to be seen whether or not I succeeded, as the random ringing she complained about was always sporadic) and a visit from old family friends. Supposedly, Phyllis and Nat had desparately wanted to see me. But Phyllis spent most of the time discussing dental problems with my mother, while Nat teased her about her complaining. We also got to see various photos of their kids, who are a few years younger than I am and were, therefore, never close friends. On the plus side, I did hear a couple of good stories about my mother's childhood. For example, I learned that she had her first cigarette at age 8!

Then it was back to JFK (via a van service) and a reasonably comfortable flight home. LAX is always a madhouse on Sunday evenings and it took roughly an hour from when I got off the plane to getting in my car, so I was glad to have a relatively short drive home. Then I did all the routine - take in mail, check email, unpack, pack to go to Colorado tomorrow. Getting up for work in the morning is likely to be, er, challenging, but it was worth it to see the James Caird. I can get enough sleep when I'm dead.