For bears of little brain like
myself certain abstract concepts encountered daily in the newspapers—“city
planning,” “community organization,” “social dislocation,” and many others—tend
to take on meaning only through instances of small, local, and sometimes even
trivial exemplification. I am prepared
to follow my thought-leaders in the belief that Robert Moses, who carved up New
York City’s old neighborhoods and repackaged them with gaudy ribbons of
expressways and flyovers, is one of the great sociological criminals of the
last century. But my censure is as
tentative and imprecise as the phenomenon was huge and consequential.
The
reshaping of Dillon Gym is a different matter.
This week is my second without a morning swim. The Dillon pool is closed for two months as
part of a major upgrading of the whole gymnasium. The sense of dislocation is intense. There are of course alternative pools, and
their opening hours will be more convenient for my own particular needs
beginning in May, when I should also be recovered from a minor surgical episode
and ready for the plunge. When Dillon
does reopen in the summer, however, everything is likely to be changed as much
as if Robert Moses had pierced it with the West Side Highway. The Men’s Locker Room is to be gutted, and
all the old rusting metal lockers scrapped.
Their replacements, of which we
have already seen a sample model in mock up, will be in spiffy red, with
built-in combination locks like those in hotel room safes or (as I imagine it)
the offices of CIA bureaucrats. They
will obviate the need for the clunky portable locks we all have now, so easily
forgotten or accidentally attached to someone else’s locker.
All this
will be part of Princeton’s Great Leap Forward in Fitness—except for one
unfortunate consequence. A reconfigured
gym will undoubtedly destroy the adventitious communities that have grown up
over many years of people who for a variety of reasons happen to show up at the
same long row of lockers each weekday at about the same time. I have mentioned “my” locker community
several times over the years in the blog.
I had
reason to think about all this last week.
One morning Joan found resting on the windshield of her car in our open
carport a copy of William Langewiesche’s American
Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.
I understood immediately what for her had to be a puzzle. The book had been dropped off for me by one
of my locker room buddies, Steve S., a financial expert in the Budget
Office. He is one of a very large number
of top professionals in many fields whose work enables the vast and intricate
enterprise that is a university. In the
normal course of events few faculty and fewer still students ever encounter
these men and women—even though we couldn’t be here without them.
I have
locker-room bonhomie to thank for meeting Steve, a sage and witty commentator
on the current political scene and a voracious reader of interesting
books. My conversation with him is
usually limited to about forty-five seconds a day, though every six weeks or so
he and another locker buddy and I spend forty-five minutes together over coffee
and gab at Panera. It is he who had told
me about American Ground, offering to
let me have his old copy. I had
forgotten about it, but he hadn’t, and he took the trouble to seek out our
house and drop the book off. American Ground, which I think enjoyed a
certain acclaim upon its publication in 2002, is about what happened at Ground
Zero after the devastating attacks. What happened in a nutshell was one of the
most humongous, technically challenging, and politically charged cleanups in
world history.
I read it
within forty-eight hours of posting my last blog entry, “Earth Works,” in which
I had dramatized the difficulties of redistributing a cubic yard or two of
topsoil over a couple of hundred square feet.
The irony did not escape me. At
Ground Zero the workers were faced with acres of dangerously unstable debris,
mountainous in its contours, incalculable in its weight, containing an unknown
number of rotting bodies. There were
unremitting lethal threats of avalanche, flooding, and uncertain toxins. There were all sorts of things that you would
never have thought of—at least I
would never have thought of. There was
the danger posed by the large quantities of Freon that had been needed to keep
thousands of stock-brokers cool. A
collapsing skyscraper, it turns out, is the world’s greatest pile-driver,
requiring the expertise of mining engineers to redress. There were indeed heroes galore, but also
major conflicts between policemen and firemen as to which were to be more
heroic. This recalled to me the medieval
fist-fights between Franciscans and Dominicans over the issue of which group
should be given the humbler position in ecclesiastical processions. Looting was endemic, and of heroic
proportion. There were after all
computers and executive suite tchotchkes lying around everywhere. But above all there were the staggering piles
of concrete, cement dust, and steel. How
could you possibly pick it all up? What
could you possible do with it if you could?
But they did find a way, and I suppose that if the Financial District
can get used to such a dramatic relocation of its neighborhood, I will
eventually get used to a new locker room.
But what will I do without my bibliographer Steve?
