View from the pier
The conspicuously leisurely tenor of last week’s post was
already succumbing to pre-packing jitters when the ringing of the telephone
interrupted this initial sentence after its third word. (I am not making this up.)
On the other end of the line was my daughter in New York. She was concerned that I might be on
campus—meaning, of course, the Princeton University campus. Now as a matter of fact I was sitting
in my private house, in what my wife calls my “Empire” and I call either my
“library” or “the pressroom” as fancy directs me. Although it was only eleven in the morning I had already
twice been to, and returned from, the campus. I had gone swimming early as usual, conveying myself to and
from the gymnasium at a lively pace on foot. I later returned by vehicle after the Student Center
had opened to see whether I could achieve a piece of travel-related business. I couldn’t. And so I got back in the pick-up and drove across Route 1 to
the Credit Union, where I could.
My
daughter then explained her strangely urgent concern about my location as it
related to the location of the Princeton campus. For the Princeton campus had been, for the last twenty-four
minutes, under an emergency order of evacuation. There had been a bomb threat! Why should my daughter, roughly fifty miles away on the
campus of another university—why should she
be aware of an emergency on my
campus, one mile away, of which I was
entirely unaware? I have not yet
found the time to explore that question, but I did go immediately to the
University website where I found, under the lurid rubric: “BOMB THREAT ON
CAMPUS; evacuate immediately!” the
following:
There has been a bomb threat to multiple unspecified campus
buildings. Please evacuate the campus and all University offices immediately
and go home unless otherwise directed by your supervisor. Public Safety
officers and Princeton Police will direct drivers leaving the campus and those
without cars will be directed to evacuation sites. You will receive an update
later today. Do not return to campus for any reason until advised otherwise.
Lately
the university website has been noisy with alarums. Last week it was a black bear poking about Dodge Osborne
Hall. When precious, manicured
Princeton NJ becomes too Wild West, it is obviously time to take off for the
Mysterious East, which I propose to do tomorrow. In the meantime, though, all the putative excitement has
rather diverted me from my bloguistical plan, which probably can, however, even
yet be manhandled into a spurious conformity with the day’s explosive theme.
As
we are planning to be gone for a couple of weeks, we thought it might be nice
to work in a visit to Rich, Katie D., and Ruby, who kindly invited us for an
overnight on Saturday. Their house
on Coffey Street is being prepped for some major additions and renovations, but
by extreme good fortune they have found a rental, on the same street, a couple
of hundred yards even closer to the water. One feature of their temporary abode is extremely unusual in
New York houses: it has a narrow extensive, leafy front garden. Practically all the others are set
close to the street and have back
yards.
The
yard has a small brick patio shaded by a substantial maple tree. Between a couple of other trees Rich
has slung a hammock. The effect is
of their own urban Catskill cottage or, perhaps, given the particular use to
which we put it, a cabin in the Smokies.
For Katie D. is a Tennessean and a fair guitar-picker—an outstanding
one, actually, for a Yalie. Joan
had thought to bring along her violin and the music for some old jigs and
reels, and Rich, Ruby, and I got to enjoy a Red Hook Hoedown right there in the
leafy front garden.
Red Hookers fiddling, Ruby raviing
But that was actually the second installment of the “circuses” subdivision of our pagan Sunday morning—the “bread” part consisting of huevos rancheros and other transgressions at a local eatery known as Fort Defiance. The morning began early with a big bang—or several of them, to be precise, and in rapid succession. Coffey Street ends, sort of, at Valentino Park, from which a sizeable, well built pier juts out into the bay, affording a superb view of the Statue of Liberty. That means that the pier likewise affords a superb view of parts of nearby Governor’s Island—including a certain large abandoned building thereon that, at precisely 7:36 am, was spectacularly destroyed by controlled implosion.
not long for this world
The
building had once served as military housing, I believe, and was of an
exquisite ugliness. If ever there
was a building that deserved what it got, this was it. In-the-know early birds, of whom there
were probably fifty or more, congregated on the viewing plaza of the pier. This is what we saw. Rich got it all on tape. You can read more about it on his blog. The campus bomb threat, I am happy to say, has ended in a welcome whimper.
Next week, Sri Lanka!
