How to Travel at Home: Finding New Routes Through Our Daily Lives
Many of us don’t look up from our smartphones long enough to notice what’s around us.
Grandpa Schiffman joshed that he was taking us grandkids on an ocean voyage to Europe. The round trip on the Staten Island Ferry to the city’s farthest-flung borough and back to lower Manhattan took a little over an hour and cost a nickel, a bargain even in the late 1950s.
While Europe would have to wait, New York Harbor was unusual enough for kids brought up in the asphalt jungle. There was a limitless bowl of sky above us, swift tides, salt-tanged breezes, even wildlife: cormorants diving headlong into the waves and seagulls snagging the chunks of baked pretzel we tossed them. There were boats too of all sizes—tugs and barges, a fireboat fountaining rainbowed streams of water, an...