After a month of living in New York, I have come to the conclusion that it is truly impossible to have a boring day in this city. Stressful, chaotic, even terrible – but boring? Not unless you’re living in a cave, and even then it’s likely that some excitement will find its way to you. Below is a retelling of a typical (in a gloriously random and not at all predictable) day in the life of a culturally displaced, chronically sleep-deprived port chaplain/intern. Be forewarned, it's rather long - I wanted to put it behind a cut, but blogspot makes that absurdly difficult. Feel free to skip or skim as you please.
I wake up, as usual, not to my alarm, but to the roaring of diesel bus engines and the sound of car horns. It’s not fair to say that Harlem awakens, because that would incorrectly imply that Harlem ever sleeps. At 7:10, I leave the comparative quiet of our apartment and walk the 5 or so blocks to the 125th St. ABCD stop. For some unknown reason, rush hour is worse than usual this morning. All this really means is that, instead of the A train being standing room only (which it almost always is anyway), there are so many people that it’s not even necessary to brace oneself as the train stops and starts – we’re all so tightly crammed together that not even I, who manage to fall over on the train with embarrassing regularity, have room to move. At Chambers St, I extricate myself from the throng with great difficulty and transfer to the much calmer PATH train to Newark.
My coworker, Jacques, who has braved the hellish Newark rush hour traffic to come pick me up, greets me at Penn Station with the news that two of our chaplains and our van driver won’t be in today. Since I still don’t have my TSA ID card, which would let me go about the port solo, that means we’re effectively down to one staff person. We fight our way through a throng of semi trucks to the Seamen’s Center, where we’re awaited by a group of burly Croatian seafarers who want to go to the mall. Preferably immediately. Meanwhile, the phone is ringing off the hook, and in the time it takes us to evaluate the daily ship list and don our attractive neon yellow safety vests, we have our day’s work cut out for us.
In the midst of all the chaos, Jacques decides that NOW is the time to teach me how to drive in the port. Granted, I have to learn sooner or later, but I’d been putting it off as long as possible because….well, frankly, the port still kind of terrifies me. The traffic is unfailingly horrendous because it consists, not only of cars, but of trucks, trains, straddle carriers, police jeeps, and any other kind of construction vehicle you can imagine. The port is also labyrinthine, and the Port Authority police are always creating and dismantling new detours as the container ship traffic ebbs and flows. All in all, you have about a 10% chance of getting where you want to go in any kind of timely fashion, especially if you’re a timid Midwesterner and not an aggressive New Jersey driver.
No matter. I shepherd the Croatians into a van, brace myself for imminent death, and head out into the fray. We arrive at Jersey Gardens Shopping Center and find 8 frantic Filipinos, who had somehow gotten left off our pickup list and were due back at their ship 10 minutes ago, awaiting us. That kind of thing happens all the time – there’s simply too much going on in port for anyone to keep track of it all. Port Rule #1: go with the flow. Port Rule #2: don’t freak out. We load them in the van and head back to port.
As I’m speeding (as much as I dare) to the main container terminal (there are 3) to deposit the tardy Filipinos, we get a call from our receptionist: the APL Arabia requires phones and phone cards IMMEDIATELY. This kind of thing also happens all the time. Ship-bound crews (often from Myanmar) that don’t have US visas are desperate to contact their families, and we’re their only resource. So we drop of our passengers, and head to container terminal #2, which has the maddening policy of requiring all visitors to be driven to ships in a security van (as it happens, our chauffeur is a lovely Tunisian man, who is thrilled to have even a 3 minute opportunity to speak French to someone). We climb the treacherously wobbly gangway, and are greeted by the chief mate, a lovely young man from Germany. “She sprichest dutch!” Jacques proclaims, butchering my native tongue, and shoving me at the astonished officer like some sort of human peace offering. I sheepishly admit that, yes, I do indeed speak German (not Dutch…seriously, people), and ask how we may be of service. The chief mate lights up with evident delight (having been the only German speaker aboard ship for 7 months, he’s thrilled to find a fellow countrywoman), and ushers us into the officers' dining room for an astonishingly gourmet lunch. Again, port life is like that: a day will transition from the insanity of double-booked crew pick-ups to a relaxed, jovial luncheon and back again. All you can do is go with it.
Clutching our stomachs, and stammering our inadequate thanks, we deposit the phones and phone cards with the chief cook, and resume our rounds. By 3:00, we have been to every terminal in the port at least once, and to the mall four times. We have transported about 40 people from about 10 different countries. Waving goodbye to a vanload of I-Kiribati (Wikipedia informs me that’s what people from Kiribati are called. You learn something new every day.), we head back to the center to fill out some final paperwork and, at long last, go home.
For me, the trip home is only the beginning of the day’s adventure. Working in NJ and living in Uptown Manhattan means I have a reverse commute, so the trip on the PATH train is always blissfully easy. But the minute I get off at the World Trade Center, the madness begins. Deftly navigating my way through the hoardes of Wall Street execs and jabbering tourists trying to catch a snapshot of Ground Zero through holes in the fence, I manage to arrive at the subway station without either tripping over someone or getting tripped over (I wish I knew how to impress upon you that this is truly the most remarkable thing about my day). I swipe my metro card and wait an appalling 15 minutes before a C train comes rumbling in. And now the fun really begins.
There’s one seat left, and I run to snag it. It’s only once I’m there that I realize I’m sitting next to the requisite C Train Crazy Person. In this case, insanity is embodied by an immensely fat woman wearing a rather impressive giraffe suit (in itself, not that odd for the C), who is muttering to herself with surprising aggression. It takes me a few minutes before I realize that she’s going systematically evaluating every person in the train and devising vicious insults for each one of them. Just as I’m beginning to wonder if and when she’s going to deliver these curses, she gets off. Not to be outdone, she’s replaced by a mangy homeless man, who’s wearing an orange, plastic, pumpkin-shaped trick or treat bucket on his head. The train rattles on. A disheveled old woman carrying an enormous mop sits down on my other side, and the empty space in front of me fills up with a flock of Spanish-speaking (or rather, screaming) high-schoolers. Normal.
By the time my stop comes around, mop woman has fallen asleep on my shoulder. Shoving her away as gently as I can, I fight my way out of the train, turn on my iPod, and begin my walk home. I haven’t gone 2 blocks when an 8 year-old pulls up alongside me on her scooter and motions for me to remove my headphones. Figuring she’s lost or something (there’s no parent in sight, after all), I oblige. “I like your hairstyle!” she shouts, and zooms off. Please bear in mind that I’ve been in a windy port all day, and the only word that’s appropriate for the state of my hair is ‘messy.’ At this point, I actually have to sit down, right there on the sidewalk, so that I can adequately laugh at the total randomness of my life.
And so it is. I could go on; the evening was only slightly less ridiculous, but I think that’s more than enough normalized insanity for one blog post. My greatest fear is that I’ll eventually become jaded to the glorious expression of human diversity that is life in New York City and I hope that, by sharing it with you here, I can continue to delight in it on a day to day basis.
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