Big Sky

How beautiful! I'm so envious! I, too, want to go where the West commences, gaze at the moon till I lose my senses, etc. New York has its own strange mysteries, especially as glimpsed from the back of a cab at 2:30 am, speeding down Fifth Avenue, but I am ready for some different mysteries.
When you cross the Brooklyn Bridge with the windows open you pass over the Fulton Fish Market and you can actually smell it, or you used to be able to. The fish market, which operated in the same location since 1838 or something, moved to the Bronx this summer. But maybe the smell remained. Something is always vanishing here, and yet strange vestiges of the past linger on, a stretch of Joralemon Street that still has cobbestones, here and there a little wooden house that time forgot.
When I want to feel part of something larger I go to the promendae. Here you can see an expanse of water and sky and Governors Island, Ellis Island, Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty, New Jersey, the cranes at Red Hook where they unload container ships, and of course Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Brige. A plaque informs us that Abraham Lincoln stood here and looked at the view. (He was impressed.) Of course, it looked a lot different when he was here, and in trying to imagine that I seem to see not so much the cityscape bfore me as the past in my mind's eye. There are boats in the water now: ferries to Staten Isand, water taxis, little sailboats, the Circle Line cruisers. But in Lincoln's time -- I try to imagine it: a forest of masts, wharf after wharf along the shore of Lower Manhattan. Fishing boats, ferry boats. No Brooklyn Brige. No skyscrapers. No helicopters.
And when I am dead as long as Lincoln, what will people stand here and look at? The stars over South Dakota looked the same to the settlers 150 years ago, to the Indians 1,500 years ago, and that's the enchantment of them. Here all is restlessness, change, ferment.