A View From the End of the Line: An Imperial Impression of Faraway Rockaway

The bus takes about two hours to arrive at the Port Authority from Mount Pocono. On a normal morning the bus is full, and we arrive on time. Today we arrive ten minutes early. It’s Presidents’ Day and I’m weary and disoriented as the classical music stirs through the mid morning throng. I waver about getting food before deciding to reward myself when I arrive at the end of the blue line. Today I’m taking the downtown A train to see what is at the end of the line in Faraway Rockaway. I aim to compare the terrain to fever dreams I used to have of outlying New York transmuting into dirt road suburbs, secret territories sectioned off by drawbridges and steam trains and unnamed beaches.

On the subway map the Rockaway Peninsula evokes an impossible distance (that is, unless you live there). The distance of Far Rockaway from anything I was familiar with incidentally gave away to new agendas. I would spend the whole day commuting by bus, train, foot and reverse. I would stretch my borders as a one man transit authority. However, there was also the curious challenge of what to do once there at Far Rockaway.

The A train is mostly empty by 10:30 am. I take a seat by the window and monitor the etiquette of my fellow passengers. Dropped gloves and other fallen articles are given back to their owners by an instinctive kindness of strangers. Two girls with pretty brown skin talk comfortably about the much ado about boys in their lives. One girl departs at Broadway Junction while the other stays for the remainder, plugging her ears with small, white buds. I sip my orange flavored vial of liquid energy. Staring into the darkness of the A train caverns, I feel the liquid burn inside my arms and legs leaving a remote euphoria as I consider the pleasure of going to unknown places just to go. I take pleasure at being a discreet, unknowable probe in places poised to dust away my foot prints as if I never happened. The pleasure in this foray is the politest kind of voyeurism. I will not know intimately the details of any one person’s life in Faraway Rockaway. But I will know how blue the beach water looks against the coast colored a hue of bone from the snow and the metal rails on the boardwalk void of pedestrians.

The train emerges from the ground after the Grant Av. stop in Queens. Suburbs caked in snow leave little to the imagination. Passing baseball diamonds and playgrounds are rendered sheets of white sometimes interrupted by thick grey strips of highway cramped with cars made dull by the winter sun’s lunch hour blight. The passing landscape is nothing extraordinary yet freshened by its freshness to the novice. I’m hopping from side to side of the subway car taking pictures, feeling soothed by the fake shudder sound as I capture nondescript images of snow covered New York suburbs. I thrill when the train passes over water, and then shudder at the dark musing of a drowned subway train in the narrow, freezing bay. My mind wanders back to the half crumpled docks connected to withered, paint-chipped homes. I eye the big white planes drifting sullenly into JFK like origami swans scrolling through stray, blue afterthoughts of sky. The air feels heavy and dull as the train closes in on its next and last stop—Mott Ave.

The pedestrian traffic around the subway station is pleasant and bubbly despite the looming drabness of project housing a few blocks east. Children lag about in front of grocery stores. Police officers patrol the corners, give high fives to kids, and make little fuss at midday. I pass the mainstay businesses of low income neighborhoods—Chinese food to-go, USA fried chicken, Laundromats with racing arcade games and crane machines.

I walk to the beach to catch the blue/gray winter view. The water is a rich azure dotted by land and sea with seagulls cluttered in their own packed clubs. A summer food stand is smashed in and covered with graffiti close to where one project begins. The two men loitering there make me nervous, and I avoid aiming my camera at them.

I eat lunch at the Corner Donut Shop in front of the subway station. The waitress is a curvy Hispanic girl who will ask familiar customers about their kids and mention her own. She will speak Spanish to all the Spanish-speaking customers. I order a bacon cheeseburger deluxe and strawberry milkshake. The food is good, but I regret eating so much. I feel like I’m going to die when I get back on the train. I fall asleep against the window in a dazed vertigo from the hour and a half trek back to Manhattan. I look at the skyscrapers from the train before returning to the underground. I think about the unwalkable distance in between the two worlds and how this disparity travels further than mere distance. I feel sick. I don’t know what I’ll say to you. I don’t know what I’ll say I saw, or if you’ll believe me when I do.