High Line ~ Turkey ~ Palestine

Roaming is how discovery sounds…
DON’T FEAR FOUL BALLS, THEY STILL FLY OVER THE FENCE

Turkey’s Mount Ararat (viewed from Armenia)

If you hit a foul ball instead of that hoped for home run, remember it may have still cleared the fence. When people hit a foul ball in life, give them a break.

Akin to a Roman ruin rebirth, one of New York City’s elevated railways made a comeback as the High Line. Originally built in the 1930s to lift freight trains 30 feet above Manhattan’s then industrial West Side, it was abandoned, and decades later, revived into a public park. In the mid-80s, the High Line was still a desolate, elongated slab of crumbling concrete sprouting spindly trees and wildflowers. Mixed in were homeless people’s campsites, pigeon roosts, and rodent hideouts. It was a secret society hovering above the buzzing city.

Back then, the ominous railbed still extended north of 50th street above the West Side Highway—a block from my Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Skyscraper rooftops aside, this corroded section of tracks was my favorite urban escape. Getting up there meant scaling vertical steel support columns to locate entry points in the barbwire that barricaded this otherworld. The holes in the barbwire were constantly relocating, as it was cyclically slashed by itinerant squatters and then repaired by city workers.

I’ve always sought out railroad track environments. Before girls dismantled my pre-adolescent bicycle gang, we wandered for miles along the Long Island Railroad, day and night. A highlight was parking coins on the rails to be pulverized by commuter trains. There was other mischief, but I won’t admit any of it until I’m 70.

Some habits are hard to kick. In my early 20s, on a midnight ramble with my brother Basil along the pre-restored, then apocalyptic High Line, I tripped on a rope that was supporting a drifter’s plywood and tarp gazebo. Tugging the rope caused the plywood to shift, which alarmed the dweller and made rats scatter. My misstep actually expanded the size of his shelter. Like an earthquake instantly freeing a prisoner, my actions caused him to bolt from his hovel. Nearly naked in the August sizzle, he resembled a tortoise without a shell. I apologized for tripping over his home, but he was still visibly angry, and not yet fully awake. As he fidgeted with reasons to battle, the logic of his own argument led him towards a conclusion he tried to avoid. A grin overtook his face. Because his lean-to had morphed into a larger safari tent, he extended a hand and praised me for the upgrade.

My brother resecured the structure while I asked the man about the vagaries of living upon the lowly High Line. One more nomad at home, his head spun away from his modified fortress and smiled at me without front teeth to say, “VIP baby. Vagabonds In Power!”

You never know when you’ll encounter a radical utopian. Wild turkeys in the woods are hard to find, no less catch.

Turkey

Sometimes you wander, and the pictures stare at you. The remarkably preserved and photogenic Roman coliseum in the ancient metropolis of Ephesus made me wonder what it was like to be a gladiator waiting in an underground tunnel before surfacing to fight for your life. Sometimes, it ain’t easy being human.

Seating hundreds, this coliseum is still in use today—for mellower spectacles. The restored coliseum hosted full-on rock acts until the mid-80s when, apparently, a vibrating Sting show damaged the stone structures. Throughout the Greco-Roman world, once-abandoned relics that weren’t looted for new construction materials or foreign museums (or rocked by Sting) have been given new lives.

I met a charismatic carpet-vending Turkish elder near Ephesus’ spa ruins. He had probably slept in the oversized, dusty sweater he wore like a robe. When his lively carpet pitch—a hurried medley of outdoor furlings and unfurlings—failed, he told me that he lived in one of the tunnels where “the gladiators prayed before battling the lions.” When I asked him what it was like to live among lions, he stood up straighter and announced, “If lions could talk, the gladiators would not.”

“A foul ball is still a home run to the person who recovers it.” —Guy in Jericho, Palestine, wryly commenting on his neighborhood

[from: The Directions to Happiness: A 135-Country Quest for Life Lessons]