So it isn’t all that special, this NOO YAWK of ours. And yet. And yet and yet and yet. Maybe there’s something to it. Hard to believe, hard to admit, pain-in-the-ass place that it is, bunch of arrogant fuckheads, no reason for it to be anything special, a coincidence, just the luck of the landscape, the bay and the bight, the luck of the draw, space and time congealing to a history, to have come into being in its moment, accidentally growing the head, guts, and tumescent genitals of the American dream, the magnet for desperate dreamers, the place made of people from everywhere else, the city of immigrants, the people made of other people, very rude people, loudmouthed obnoxious assholes, often, but more often just oblivious and doing their own thing with no regard for you or yours, many strangers banging into each other, dodging each other, yelling at each other sometimes but really mostly just ignoring each other, almost polite you might say, using the city-sharpened skill of looking past or through people, of not seeing the other, the crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you’re doing more than you would be if you were in some sleepy village or Denver or really anywhere else. New York, the great stage set—well, there may be something to it.
Anyway there it lies filling the great bay, no matter what you think or believe about it, spiking out of the water like a long bed of poisonous sea urchins onto which dreamers cling, as to an inconveniently prickly life raft, their only refuge on the vast and windy deep, gasping like Aquaman in a seemingly-impossible-to-survive superhero’s fake low point, still dreaming their fever dreams of glorious success. If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere—maybe even Denver!
In 1924, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, “the Black Eagle,” the first Negro to obtain a pilot’s license, parachuted onto Harlem wearing a devil’s costume and playing the saxophone. Later he flew to Europe and challenged Hermann Goering to an air duel.
A pygmy named Ota Benga was exhibited for a month in the primate house of the Bronx Zoo. 1906.
Typically American, we had no ideology.
—Abbie Hoffman
f) Amelia
One of Amelia Black’s favorite flyways ran from Montana east over the Missouri River and south toward the Ozarks, then east into Kentucky and through the Delaware Gap and across the pine barrens, briefly out to sea and up to New York. For this entire distance her airship, the Assisted Migration, flew over wildlife habitat and sky ag corridors, and if she kept to a low enough altitude, which she did, there were hardly any signs of people, just a tower here or there, or a cluster of lights on the horizon at night. Of course there were many other skycraft in the sky, from personal airships like hers to freight dirigibles to spinning skyvillages, and everything in between. The skies could seem crowded, but below her North America stretched out looking as empty of people as it had been fifty thousand years ago.
That wasn’t even remotely true, and when she reached her destination she would be reminded of the real state of affairs in a big way, but for the four days of her voyage, the continent looked like wilderness. Amelia’s cloud show was about assisting the migration of endangered species to ecozones where they were more likely to survive the changed climate, so the sight of all the nearly unoccupied land passing below, for hour after hour, was fairly common for her, but nevertheless always encouraging to see. She and her cloud audience could not but realize that there were indeed habitat corridors, well established, and in them wild animals could live, eat, reproduce, and move in whatever directions the climate pushed them. They could migrate to survive. And some of them were even lucky enough to catch a lift in the right direction on the Assisted Migration.
This trip had started over the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of her favorites. Her ultrazoom cameras showed her audience herds of elk chased by packs of wolves, and a mother grizzly and cub she had featured before, Mabel and Elma. Then came the high plains, mostly abandoned by people even before the habitat corridors had been established, now occupied mainly by vast herds of buffalo and wild horses. Then the convoluted ridges of the northern Ozarks, green and gnarly, followed by the wide braided floodplains of the Mississippi River, dense with flocks of birds. Here she had hovered to catch images of a skyvillage swooping down onto an immense apple orchard and harvesting it from above, deploying scoops and nets and carrying off a crop of apples without ever touching down. Then the rolling hills of Kentucky, where North America’s great eastern hardwood forest covered the world with an endless carpet of leaves.
Here, as she headed toward the Delaware Gap, she dropped the Assisted Migration low enough to take a closer look at the top of the canopy, an unbroken billowy spread of oaks, walnuts, and elms. Five hundred feet was the champion height from which to view landscapes, and even more so if an attractive woman was lowered from the airship’s gondola on a long line, after which she could swing back and forth like a Gibson girl under a tree, although in this case over the tree. Today a red sleeveless dress; there would of course be viewers hoping she might get enthusiastic and take the dress off and throw it fluttering down into the trees, where it would match some of the autumn’s turning leaves. She was not going to do that, she had retired from that part of her career, as she kept telling her producer Nicole. But the dress would make her exceptionally visible. And if it blew up around her waist from time to time, well, these things happened.
Swinging over the world from below her airship was one of Amelia’s signature moves. Now she did it again, leaving the Assisted Migration in the hands of her very capable autopilot, Frans. Back and forth on the swing’s seat, pulling hard on the ropes, until she was swooping like a pendulum weight over the endless rolling quilt of autumn leaves, glorying in the rush and beauty of the visible world.
But then Frans spoke up through her earbud to report that the motor necessary to reel her line back up into the gondola had failed again, something it was prone to do when the line was at full extension. She was stuck down there at the end of the line, oh no!
This had happened before. Amelia’s producers had assured her the motor was fixed, and yet here she was again, hanging two hundred feet below the airship, and just above the trees. Getting cold in the wind, actually. Could not just stay hanging in the air all the way to New York. A problem!
But Amelia was used to these kinds of situations; she wasn’t called Amelia Errhard for nothing; and she was in good contact with Frans. The wind was mild, and after some thought and discussion, Frans lowered the airship until Amelia could kick around in the uppermost leaves and twigs of the forest canopy, find one of the highest branches of an elm, and stand on it. Yay! There she rested like a dryad, thigh deep in foliage, looking up at the Assisted Migration and her various camera drones with a plucky smile.
“Now watch this, people,” Amelia said. “I think Frans and I have figured out a solution to this one. Oh look, there’s a squirrel! It’s either a red squirrel or a gray squirrel. They’re not as easy to tell apart as the names would lead you to believe.”