From Awe to Autumn in New York

Driving back toward New York through Vermont, we found the kind of foliage we had hoped to see. The hills and the roadside were aflame with red, amber, yellow, gold, brown and purple leaves.

We drove through tidy towns with few cars, few people, no billboards and no trash. Most of the porches were decorated for Halloween with witches, ghosts, goblins and grinning pumpkins. Yards were buried under autumn leaves. Every town had its row of souvenir shops and its steepled church. We passed pretty farms with cows and stacked hay. Rivers rippled along beside the road and streams fell down steep granite walls.

Though Vermont was not their inspiration, I was reminded of the paintings of Grandma Moses and Norman Rockwell and the poems of Robert Frost. Except for an occasional television saucer, it was a countryside that seemed hardly to have been touched by modern technology.

In Boston my wife had picked up a magazine called M: The Civilized Man. She pointed out an item in an article called “Civilized Man: Traits of the Species.” It said: “Will do corny things like taking a trip to look at the fall foliage. He will also admit to doing it if asked, though he won’t volunteer that information.”

We spent the night at an inn in Killington, and, with growing incredulity, I watched Orel Hershiser shut out the A’s on three hits for a 6-0 win. Dodgers 2, A’s 0.

On our final day we drove through Massachusetts and Connecticut again, which gave our tour guide, Ms. Eagleson, a chance to tell a couple of Cal Coolidge stories, including his answer to a dinner companion who told him she had bet a friend that she could get him to say more than two words. He said, “You lose.”

Ms. Eagleson disclosed that she was reading that anecdote from a column she had clipped from the Seattle Times, by one Jack Smith. I enjoyed a moment of peer-group recognition.

On our approach to New York City we passed Shea Stadium, home of the Mets. It was empty and silent, as if a great melancholy had settled over it. Below the crown of the stadium a large sign said, “Let’s Do It Again!” I almost felt sorry for them.

The bus dropped us at the Waldorf-Astoria and we had two days in New York City on our own.

I am not going to try to describe New York the way Eastern columnists describe Los Angeles after two days, but I remember that when we walked east on 49th Street that first evening to dine at a restaurant irresistibly called Smith & Wollensky’s, my wife said, “It’s different, isn’t it?”

She was referring, I think, to the heavy traffic on the sidewalks and in the streets; the rapid pace of pedestrians; the near misses of taxicabs flowing like a yellow river through the streets; the incessant honking. The sirens. The presence of teeming cosmopolitan life.

Smith & Wollensky’s was a plain restaurant with bare floors and mature male waiters. It was almost empty when we went in, but half an hour later it was full; almost all the patrons were men who wore business suits and carried briefcases. Men eating together without women. Obviously they had just been loosed from their corporate warrens and were eating in pairs or groups before facing up to their long commutes.

It was Monday, Oct. 17, a travel day, so that night I put the World Series on hold.

In the morning we walked over to Rockefeller Center, where the ice skating rink was still dry, and rubber-necked at the towers. Billboards around a new one, mostly still a skeleton, announced that it was to be the Worldwide Plaza, apartments and condominiums and a fabulous shopping center. It had one of those ornaments at the top, like a crown, that New York builders seem to fancy.

We found a subway entrance and took a car to Greenwich Village. To my surprise, the car was made of aluminum or some other shiny metal, and it was quite free of graffiti. But as we waited on the platform to transfer, an exuberantly decorated car came by. So the art isn’t dead.

In the daytime the incessant chattering of jackhammers was added to the symphony of horns and sirens.