Pictures 21: African Burial Ground National Monument

This was one of the coolest National Monuments we have been to so far. The African Burial Ground National Monument is a memorial to all slaves - more specifically, those kept in Manhattan - more specifically still, those who were buried under the monument's location on Duane Street. The bodies were discovered in 1991, when construction of a federal office building uncovered hundreds of skeletons.

New York City (nee New Amsterdam) was mostly a farming community in the century-ish before the American Revolution. The slaves on those farms were allotted a space in the no-man's land just north of the city proper to bury their dead; the area is believed to span about seven acres in what is now Lower Manhattan, near City Hall. Between construction, the building of the subways and the building of roads, most of the grave sites were obliterated over the centuries.

When the skeletons were discovered in 1991, there was an uproar from the community about how to respectfully deal with the remains - not to mention an uproar from developers who wanted to build on the site. Eventually, a compromise was reached, which included designation of the site as a National Monument and the ceremonial re-burial of the recovered skeletons after archaeological review.

The monument is especially cool because it's so new, I think. The visitors' center is very cool, with tons of information about the history of slavery in New York City. An informational video is re-created with spookily realistic life-sized sculptures of the actors in the film. After studying African-American and post-colonial literature out the wazoo in college, it was really cool to visit this site and increase my knowledge.


i wuz heer.

Find 9 more images below the jump, including the visitors' center as well as the outdoor memorial.

Pictures 20: Irish Hunger Memorial and Castle Clinton

While tooling around Lower Manhattan, we went to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which my mom first showed me back in May, as well as Castle Clinton National Monument in Battery Park. As you will see, they are two very unique and very different monuments, both of which I liked a lot. We visited these sites on June 16, 2010.


Approaching the Irish Hunger Memorial from the west.

7 more images below the jump. Click any image to see it larger on Photobucket.

Pictures 19: World Trade Center

Virtually everyone in America had their own intense experience on September 11, 2001 - some more potent than others. I will never claim to have been deeply personally affected by it, since my concept of "deeply" is based on seeing people whose spouses, children, parents and friends were killed in the attacks. Meanwhile, compared to someone in Idaho, perhaps I could be considered "deeply" personally affected.

Living in New Jersey - and northern New Jersey, at that - at the time of the attacks automatically made my experience more immediate than the experience of 99% of Americans, and visiting the World Trade Center site and thinking too long about the whole thing is always an unsettling experience.

Having studied creative writing (namely poetry) in what I deem a pretty rigorous undergrad program for five years, I think I have a pretty strong aversion to abstract quasi-patriotic words/concepts like "courage," "bravery," "freedom," "tragedy" and the like - but talking about 9.11 is a strange exception in my literary brain. It's as if I can't use concrete words. I can only refer to that day in terms of abstractions, in terms of words you can't necessarily define - as if to be able to define it would be too painful, too raw.

I don't quite feel like getting into it here, so I'll let some pictures suffice.

The PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson) station at WTC obviously closed shortly after the attacks and re-opened only a few years ago. Thousands of people use it every day - and I might even say it's my favorite PATH station. Hopefully this image can give you an idea of its size.

The best place to view the "reconstruction" of Ground Zero is in the World Financial Center just west of Ground Zero. You can see they have made a lot of progress. (End sarcasm.) Personally, I think the whole site should just be turned into a simple park, but who am I to decide.

In addition to simply thinking about the attacks, the way the site has turned into a tourist attraction is unsettling as well. I appreciate that people from all over the world want to see where this event took place, but what I cannot forgive is the commodification of what is essentially a graveyard. While Patrick and I looked at the site through the World Financial Center's large glass windows, a woman with a European accent came up to me, asked brassly, "Is this where the attack happened?" and pointed out the window. I said yes, and she then turned to her group of friends and spoke loudly in her native language, gesturing to the scene. It was like she was asking, "Is this where King Kong was?" while pointing at the Empire State Building. I wanted to tell her to shut the hell up. But it wasn't worth it.

7 more images below the jump.

Pictures 18: Midtown

June 18 found us wandering Midtown (we spent one day in Lower Manhattan, one day in Midtown and a half a day way up near Grant's Tomb - that photo post is coming later). We skipped most of the touristy stuff for lack of funds (no adventure to the top of the Empire State Building - it's $18 a head to stand in line for three hours! What?!) but did manage to see everything that we could see that was free. And now you can see some of it too.

Click any image to make it bigger in Photobucket.


Nerd! Sometimes being a tourist is fun. We lamented that we couldn't go to the top, but then again, if we were inside it, we wouldn't be able to see it, now would we?

17 more images below the jump.

Pictures 17: Summer in the city

Having grown up in New Jersey, I think I'm a little blase to the city - well, I'm kind of blase to any city.

You know how there is always some "big city" of your childhood? Like, if you grow up in Nebraska, maybe it's Omaha, and if you grow up in eastern Washington perhaps it's Spokane, or if you're from Florida it's Tampa. You can be used to going to Omaha or Spokane or Tampa and still be totally blown away when visiting New York. But it's hard to be used to going to New York and be blown away by Omaha or Spokane or Tampa or... anywhere, really. So when New York City is "the city" of your childhood, you're kinda hard to impress sometimes.

That's not to say that I'm city-savvy. I think I was pretty good when I was in high school and during the first half of college, but now that I've lived away for seven years and haven't spent an extended amount of time at home for five of those years, I find myself getting "misplaced" (I prefer to use that word rather than "lost," because I think "lost" connotes hopelessness, whereas "misplaced" implies that I've only gone slightly off-course and will be righted soon) more often than I ever used to.

One thing I can definitely recommend to anyone visiting New York is that you should have a plan. Have places you want to go and know where they are. There is always a time and a place for spontaneity, and I'm hardly saying you should put a chokehold on your schedule, but I've done New York both ways - wandering around aimlessly and going in with an agenda - and personally, I prefer the latter.

It's especially useful in New York because, since the buildings are so tall and there are just so damn many streets, it's very easy to miss what you wanted to see. For example, we had to basically spiral around inward on streets around in order to find the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site - there's no way we would have found it if we didn't know it was there. Had we just wandered around the city, we certainly would have missed it - and I'm glad we made it there, because it was pretty awesome.

But anyhow, I promised you pictures, so here are some pictures - these were all taken on June 16 (wow, that was a long time ago!). I present you with a random sampling of lower Manhattan before I move on to more specific locales.

Click any image to make it larger in Photobucket.


Buildings. I like buildings. This is somewhere down in the Financial District.

17 more images below the jump...

They're just things.

There is so much to write about, and before I was getting overwhelmed that I could never, ever possibly catch up. But then I realized that I've been in this predicament before. Last time I got behind was the first time this summer that I went to Pittsburgh, and I solved that problem easily enough by writing about Pittsburgh via pictures, and showing pictures via writing about Pittsburgh. Eventually, then, I will show you pictures from the first three weeks of this trip, and tell you about the trip via pictures. Problem solved! Ta da!

But what I find far more interesting than simply showing you pictures is telling you about all the things we have broken, lost or otherwise destroyed.

LOST


1 pair of earrings. When we stayed a night in Northampton Beach State Park, a great little campground in the Adirondacks, we were tempted to stay a second night. It was just that nice. Our campsite was right on the shore of the Great Scandaga Lake, the park was quiet, the landscape was beautiful, and the people were nice. That night I went to take a shower, and I was wearing a pair of tree earrings I got a few years ago at Santa Fe Hemp. I hung the earrings by poking them through the shower curtain. "I'll probably forget these," I thought to myself. And then I did. I went back the next morning and found the little holes in the shower curtain, but no earrings hanging from them.

1 sock. I pride myself on getting through three years of living in college dorms without ever losing a single sock. Seriously. But then, in the months of October-January 2007-2008, I somehow lost 6 socks from 6 different pairs. As a result, I am truly haunted by the prospect of losing socks. When we stayed with Patrick's uncle in Burlington Flats, New York, we did some laundry, and I lost a sock. RIP yellow and white sock.

1 laptop charger. My laptop is very old - in laptop years, at least. It's a Compaq Presario V2000 that I got in spring 2006, when I spilled coffee in my old(er) laptop during midterms week and had to make an emergency purchase of a new computer. It's still trucking, though, even though the battery only holds about 5 minutes of charge. So when I left my laptop charger at a Wendy's in Rome, New York, discovered I did so in Rochester, New York, and I had some work due to my editor in Santa Fe only a few days later, it was no good. I called my dad, who keeps extras of everything on earth, and he had an extra laptop charger for my computer. He sent it to my brother's house Pittsburgh, where we would be in the next few days, and we went to Best Buy and picked up a replacement charger (for $86!). Once we got the charger from my dad in Pittsburgh, we returned the charger to the Best Buy there. Crisis averted.

BROKEN


1 car radio. On the 4th of July, we were driving to the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, New York. A super incredibly horrible and obnoxious commercial came on the radio. I freaked out and turned the volume down to nil. And the radio clicked completely off. I thought, whatever, I must have just turned it off. But when I went to turn it back on, it didn't come back on. Not even the clock. Patrick checked the fuses, and they were fine. Everything else on my dashboard works. RIP Radio. (We had my mom send me by battery-powered iPod player from NJ, but of course she couldn't find the power cord. My iPod, which is also from 2006, only holds about 2 hours' worth of charge, so we have to charge it periodically.)

1 external hard drive. My laptop, being 800 years old, doesn't have much storage left, so I have been totally dependent on an external hard drive for a few years now. I have all my images since I started college (August 2003) on my external drive. So you can imagine my confusion when, while we were still in New Jersey, I plugged it in one day to have it just... Not show up on my desktop. We tried plugging it in to my parents' desktop, and it worked - so we thought it was my USB ports. But then we plugged Patrick's phone into my USB port and it showed up fine. I knew I wouldn't be able to empty my camera's memory card unless I somehow got external storage space,  so when we went to the Best Buy in Pittsburgh to return my laptop power cord, we stopped by Target to get a Western Digital 320-gig Passport. This is literally smaller than Patrick's wallet, needs no AC power source (like my old hard drive did) and olds nearly 2 times what my old drive did (it held 186 gigs). Plus, it's pink. Needless to say, I'm happy. It had mixed reviews online, but we have been using it for a few weeks now and I couldn't be happier. We didn't want to spend $15 on a case so we keep it in a sock. Meanwhile, I sent my old drive home with my brother for my dad to tinker with.

BROKEN AND RESURRECTED


1 camera. Patrick has an old Nikon digital camera that he's been toting around the country with him, and since my Canon takes better pictures, we have been using my camera for stills and his for videos. When we went to Niagara Falls, we went on the Cave of the Winds tour, which is pretty much the coolest thing ever - you can basically stand under the falling water on the "Hurricane Deck." Naturally, Patrick did, and he wanted me to get some photos and video of him doing so. They call it the Hurricane Deck for a reason - I've never been in a hurricane, but Patrick has, having lived most of his life in Florida, and he said the name is pretty accurate. The camera got completely soaked. Naturally, later that night, it wouldn't turn on. But we left it in the sun for a while that day, apparently dried it off enough, and it turned on again eventually. Soon we'll get that video off the camera and see how awesome (and totally unintelligible) it is.

STILL WORKS (THANK GOD)


Car air conditioner. As I mentioned in my last post, it has been hot as hell pretty much the whole time we've been on the road (it was a little chilly in Burlington Flats, but that's about all the respite we've gotten). If the car air conditioner conks out, I swear to god I am going home. Or just driving north until I hit the arctic circle.

Computer. Sure, I have sucked at blogging, but Facebook has been my link to everyone else in the world to let them know what I'm up to and how we're doing. Not only that, but we have made extensive use of Roadside America, state land bureau websites (to find free or cheap camping) and the like - and once we get to areas where we don't have many friends, we will be using CouchSurfing more (Pat and I both have accounts).

OTHER STATS


Received: 1 speeding ticket (Charlotte in Batavia, New York - we hate Batavia)
Locked in car: 1 car key (Patrick in Batavia, New York - did I mention we hate Batavia?)
Copy made: 1 car key (Henrietta, New York)

There will undoubtedly be more things to add to this type of an entry, but hopefully nothing else vital breaks or goes missing. But if they do, oh well. They're just things, right?

Just another day on the rebound road...

Patrick and I have been on the road for nearly three weeks and I have yet to finish my entries about our NY/NJ adventures from before we left. This is a problem with me and my writing lately (and by "lately" I mean the last 5 or 6 years that I have attempted to re-start a daily journal) - when I get really behind, I find it hard to start up again because I feel like I have missed so much and it's almost a lost cause. I want to be able to record everything, every day, every place we go, everything we do. It's impossible - especially when I am a full month behind, blog-wise.

So I am sitting here in Dexter, Michigan, realizing I have put this off for far too long - and since yesterday was a perfect example of the kind of incredibly strange day I expect to have on the road, I knew I needed to sit down and write about it.

This is what I have skipped blogging, and what I hope to catch up on eventually: wandering around Manhattan, deciding suddenly that we needed to leave (and fast), figuring out precisely how to leave so fast, spending a week in upstate New York from the Hudson Valley to Niagara Falls, a few days in Pittsburgh, a few days in Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park (which I definitely do have to write about; it was a mixed bag, but overall pretty cool), two days or so in Columbus, Ohio, and now Michigan.

So read about yesterday below the jump - which includes (but is not limited to) giant ears of corn, a house-sized fiberglass loaf of bread, Manchester, Michigan's world-famous chicken broil, and a bunch of Christians in a flooded basement.