Being Somewhere, for a Day, in Coney Island

Lorenzo is at his computer, studying an online map of the New York City subway system as if our survival depends on his ability to decipher the message hidden among the tangle of colored lines, numbers, and letters, and to find our escape route before the sand runs out of the hourglass. It’s Memorial Day, and we’ve made an early-morning, pre-coffee decision to get out of New Jersey and spend the day at Coney Island. I have misgivings about allowing my directionally challenged husband to plan out the route for our little impromptu excursion, but I have, of late, lost the instincts necessary to navigate the New York City transportation system on the fly. So I leave it in his hands; it’s up to him to decide whether we take the A to West 4th Street and pick up the D train, or start downtown and get the F somewhere.

We’re doing something that we haven’t done since my relatively new incarnation as a travel writer began to allow me to regularly pick up and go to distant destinations and call my journeys ”work,” thereby satisfying to some extent my near-constant drive to go somewhere. With no passports, no luggage, no e-tickets, and no transportation option other than to surrender ourselves to the vagaries of the subway system, we’re simply making a traditional New York daytrip.

It’s the kind of thing that Lorenzo and I did a lot in our proverbial poor-but-happy newlywed days. Sometimes we’d even go to Coney Island in winter; we’d walk the empty boardwalk, listening to the calls of gulls circling in the gray sky, watching the Russians who make up much of the local population wander serenely in and out of the freezing surf, and speculating on the reason why all of the Russian restaurants along the boardwalk serve sushi. On other weekends we might take the M15 bus downtown for a ferry trip to Staten Island, or a series of buses for a two-hour journey up to the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters. (We could have taken the train part of the way and cut an hour or so off of those trips, but a good part of the fun was the journey itself.) At the end of the day we’d straggle back to our one-bedroom apartment, exhausted but exhilarated by the fact that, for the price of two subway fares and a couple of snacks, we’d seen something, and been somewhere.

Route chosen (A to D), animals fed, snacks packed, we head out. I ask Nicco and Alessandro, our sons, if they remember a trip we made to Coney Island over four years ago, but Alessandro was still in a stroller then, and Nicco was half the height he is now, and much more child than man at that point. Nicco remembers something about a game in which one shoots at targets in a kind of old western town; Alessandro remembers nothing, but he’s up for anything that involves a train ride and a boardwalk.

Port Authority is crowded with couples and families in their weekend clothes, making their way, like us, to the places most likely to make them feel that their day off has been spent well--most likely to seem, if only in a small way, like an adventure. Everyone is freshly showered and dressed for summer. I remember this from years ago—the atmosphere of relaxed optimism that you can breathe in on a summer weekend morning in Manhattan. People who, whether by choice or because they lack the means, are not leaving the City for the weekend, collectively affirm that We don’t need no stinking Hamptons, or, for that matter, anywhere else that can’t be reached by public transportation.

We’ve explained to Alessandro that it will take a long time to get to Coney Island, and that the subway ride is part of the adventure, but my little vagabond-in-the-making already knows. He’s up on his knees watching out the window as the D train emerges from the tunnel into the light, thrilled with the concept of a subway that runs outdoors, and the pigeon’s-eye view of streetscapes, backyards, laundry on the line. Below us, the familiar landscape of Chinatown seems, from this perspective, wondrously unfamiliar, as does (although we used to live a block away from it) the East River. We can’t even figure out which bridge we’re crossing into Brooklyn.

Nicco is sitting next to three Russian girls, who are dressed, at 11 in the morning, in full spaghetti strap-and-sequins nightclub regalia. He’s listening intently, and very conspicuously, to their conversation. He notices that we’re watching him, and smiles.

“I’m only getting about half of what they’re saying,” he says. Lorenzo and I are a little confused, because the girls are speaking Russian, and Nicco studies French. No matter. He’s enjoying himself, and he’s smart enough that he may well be picking up on some of what they’re saying.

The trip seems shorter than I remember. A child at the other end of the subway car yells, ”We’re here! We’re here!” as the silhouette of the Wonder Wheel comes into view ahead. The train looked fairly empty while we were on it, but once we get into the terminal at Coney Island we’re caught up in a current of people. They’re carrying beach chairs and children and coolers; the party, it seems, has already started, and we’re part of it.

The terminal is a brand-new, futuristic construction of glass and metal—nothing at all like the decrepit place I remember from a few years ago. I, however, like decrepitude, at least in certain places, and I’m hoping that no one’s gone and completely erased the gaudy, Arbus-esque tawdriness of the boardwalk a la the recently sanitized Times Square.

My fears are put to rest once we get outside, cross Surf Avenue, and head up Stillwell toward the beach. Even in the full, flat light of midday, the carnival colors are magnificent. Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs has had a little work done, but it still looks pretty much the way it did when it opened 85 years ago (I’m not remembering, thank you very much—I’ve seen pictures). The Parachute Jump and Wonder Wheel have been painted. But Coney Island is still in its iconic, kaleidoscopic, decrepit glory, and as much of a beautiful assault to the senses as ever. Bells ring, buzzers buzz, children shriek, and music of every kind blares simultaneously in cacophonous layers. There are flea markets, freak shows, arcades, souvenir shops, photo booths, cotton candy stands, churro vendors. The air smells of candy apples, salt water, and fried chicken. Rides of every kind swirl, plummet, twist, and swing. On the boardwalk, a full-scale Gospel chorus and orchestra proclaim the world-view of the God (heart)NY Ministry Tour 2005 with inspirational swells that roll across the beach; cheerful people in black t-shirts are dispensing free Bibles and advice of a very specific nature. At the same time, we hear the subversive rhythms of an impromptu drumming session from the pier at the other end of the beach. In Coney Island, nothing matches, but everything fits.

The beach is crowded with young Latino men playing volleyball, Indian women in saris, Asian families, black families, white families. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses sits in the sand. Hasidic children, their wigged mothers keeping watch, ride the fire truck and Willy the Whale rides at Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park. Moslem children, their mothers in hijab, do the same. I could travel for a year and never see such as many nationalities as I do in these few blocks of Brooklyn.

Nicco is quiet, taking it all in, winning tickets for his brother to redeem in the arcades, taking me up on my challenge at the shooting gallery (neither of us wins). Alessandro, every inch a 6-year-old at a carnival, bounces from ride to arcade to beach and back, asking for stuff. Bystanders, perfect strangers, cheer and coach him when he tries to win a prize using a fishing pole. He has also, somehow, become a damned fine skeeball player. Lorenzo, who hasn’t had many opportunities lately to take pictures for fun, rather than for work, frequently wanders off to compose a shot.

For the most part I am, like Nicco, content to absorb it all, and to make sure that Alessandro doesn’t disappear into what is by late afternoon a tidal wave of people churning through the amusement parks and arcades. The continual stimulation of my various senses is inducing flashbacks. When I look down at the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of the beach, I’m thrown back 35 years or so to the miraculous (or so it seemed at the time) moment when I pulled a sopping wet 20-dollar bill out of the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of Jones Beach (New York’s other great democratic beach getaway). From there, memory drops me into the front seat of the baby-blue Rambler convertible that used to take my mother and me there. I remember with near-perfect clarity watching the heat rise from the pavement and the hoods of the hundreds of other cars with whom we crawl along on the Long Island Expressway toward the beach, and the promise of a day’s escape from the familiar.

On the way home, I’m thinking about which shards of images from today might embed themselves in Nicco’s and Alessandro’s memories and reveal themselves, decades from now, as unexpectedly and in such vivid detail as mine have a tendency to do. I wonder about this every time we travel.
But can our little daylong escape from the familiar be called “travel?” How far from home does one need to go to have the right to say, “I traveled?” And if a day’s excursion can’t be considered travel, does that mean that the thousands of people hauling their (now sleeping) children, their coolers, their towels, their Frisbees and their picnic lunches all through the boroughs today, seeking escape, and those who may never have the means to get to Europe, or the Caribbean, or even Disney World, have not really been anywhere?

I seem, of late, to constantly come across someone’s opinion of what separates the traveler from the tourist, and what constitutes ”authentic” travel. Here’s mine: I believe that you’ve traveled when, because your mind is open, and you’re willing to hang back and allow things to happen that might not happen anywhere else, you’ve had the chance to see something that you ordinarily would not, or to see things that you thought you knew in an entirely different way.

It’s not that I don’t believe that it’s incredibly important that people get out and see as much of our world—the mundane, the magnificent, the tawdry—as possible. But the number of miles you’ve racked up is less important than whether or not you come back home at the end of the day, or the week, or the year, feeling that there’s a little bit more to you than there was when you left—even if it’s just a few new memories to remind you that there are places, and ways of living, other than the one you know.

At home, shaking the fine, dirt-brown New York sand out of Alessandro’s jeans, I’m content to know that we’ve seen something, and we’ve been somewhere.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008