Todd Terwilliger

For the past few weeks, I’ve exchanged my morning subway ride to work with a walking commute. Even though the time spent in transit has not changed overmuch (on average walking takes me ten to twenty minutes longer), the experience is a completely different animal. Without having to worry about practical matters such as jockeying for subway car position or perfecting proper platform placement for an incoming train, my mind can wander to more esoteric planes, asking questions like, for example, why is that woman screaming in the middle of the street?

That question, like so many, are hopelessly unknowable. What puzzled the brain was her sheer outward normality. Decently dressed, clean, purse impaled on one arm, she was no disheveled street prophet. She was someone on her way to an early appointment, a civilized soul who, somewhere between Flatbush and Jay Street, had snapped like a worn rubberband. Whatever internal dykesdikes that held the dark floodwaters of her mind had hopelessly burst. Her mouth was incapable of censuring her mind. Her break was an inevitable outcome, dictated by forces of nature no less real than unfathomable to the human psyche.

From Brooklyn into Manhattan, it’s been my usual course to take the longer path, over the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall then slightly uptown to the office in Tribeca. It’s the longer road but not without its charms: the bridge, the ample joggers, the scenery of City Hall and Tribeca. What it lacks in brevity, it makes up for in beauty.

The shorter road lies by way of the Manhattan Bridge which drills directly into Canal street and into a virtual straight shot towards my workplace. However, while the Brooklyn Bridge radiates an old world charm, walking along the steel enclosed footpath fused onto the Manhattan Bridge is to enter a nightmare landscape of surging subways, cold iron, and spiked steel. This is a place a deranged hobo might stalk with impunity, lancing unfortunates with sharpened pencils, eating the choicer bits of their innards and hoisting the rest into the river.

Who would investigate these crimes? Who would brave this grim road to protest the savagery? No one. It is outside and beyond all societal constraints. There’s no escape except at either end of the span, no room to maneuver, no escape, no hope. To walk that bridge is to know the bald fear of anarchy.

I walked it once, just once, before retreating back to my former route. No savings of time is worth that price of sanity, fear, and blood.

From the bridge to the office is a leisurely jaunt, a calm sea through which I can float, steeling my mind for another day at the meat-grinder. Such mental jumping jacks keep the mind fresh, ready for whatever bureaucratic horrors await me at my desk, emails lurking like bogeymen in my Inbox, needing only a mouse-click to assault my brain.

Caffeine can only do so much. I need these sweet respites, these breaks from the fray. There are only so many times the brain can be summoned once more into the breach before it breaks. When it does, you’ll find me wandering, somewhere between Flatbush and Jay Street, howling like a wolf in need of a moon.

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