The Flâneur File: Coney Island Winter

photo © Urban75

Only residency or lunacy would bring one to the very ends of Brighton Beach in January.

On Brighton Avenue the wind through the el howls and bites, gusting with the bravado of a typically cruel servant of this New York City winter. But a mere block away, the air turns genuinely sinister, as though willfully trying to suck the air from your body and replace it with its own icy vapors.

To walk up the ramp to the boardwalk is to cross a threshold. If one is able to linger long enough, or perhaps to observe by peering through the one of the hundreds of faceless windows that face the street, one would witness the challenge of mettle and courage the ramp presents.

Typically, two or three bouyant companions will wrap their arms about each other for support and begin the ascent of the ramp to the boardwalk. With its malign consciousness the wind buffets them back, testing their resolve. Most make it halfway before turning back. Some brave few actually crest the lip and catch a glimpse of the blinding white sand and sparkling blue sea before being forced back by the barren vista and its wailing guardian.

I cross this threshold, propelling myself beyond an unmarked checkpoint, and for reasons unfathomable even to myself, I stroll down the boardwalk. I am astonished to find I am not alone here. Dotting the landscape of gray diagonal planks are old bundles of clothing and sometimes fur. These ancient titans shuffle along the boardwalk soundlessly, even sometimes stopping and resting on a bench. Their faces are invisible behind their scarves and their oversized sunglasses which they have brought to defend them from the pitiless glare and the perpetual icy sand blasting into the pores of the skin.

As I progress along the boardwalk, my shoulders hunched and my legs already weak, even the hardy old souls bow before the cold onslaught, thinning out then disappearing.

Then the old Parachute Jump pierces the sky and the Cyclone rises from the earth like the Pantheon or the Coliseum. Mostly intact, but seemingly ruined, bereft of all vital energy. The mighty Cyclone brought low by a wind greater even than itself. Fear grips my heart as the air whistles along shuttered alleys accustomed to light and life and energy of youth. There is no lonelier place in the world than here.

In an increasingly agitated state I laugh to think of those intrepid men of leisure who trek the globe in search of blessed isolation from their fellow man. If they only knew that the bastard El Dorado they seek is at the last stop on the F train.

My strength failing I lean against the railing dividing the sand from the boardwalk. If not for this steel lighthouse, one might cross the drifting sands and leave the boardwalk without even knowing. Through the glare a bundled figure trundles toward me. I fleetingly think of Charon or perhaps my own personal Virgil of Brooklyn come to take my hand, but it is not to be. It requires some deal of shouting against the wind punctuated by mad gesticulation to determine that I am being asked for a cigarette. The madness of enjoying a relaxing smoke in this lonely hell seduces me, and so after some difficulty I light two cigarettes and hand one to my companion of the living.

I remark to him, in an awkward tone that would be probably be better suited to a cocktail party or an after-work piano bar, that the area had a surreal feel to it. I could not find words to describe my visions.

The laugh that came from him was bitter and hollow.

"Man, don't you know? Come winter, even the ghosts leave Coney."

With that he turned and shuffled back in the direction he had come, abandoning me, his only human ally, as though our shared moments had never occurred at all. I turned and walked back the way I came. What else could I do?

And I never turned around to watch him go, lest I discover he'd never been there at all.

Postscript: I woke this morning suddenly and too early, my apartment cold outside the blankets. My mind was filled with images of the Boardwalk running between Brighton Beach and Coney Island, crude approximations of which appear above. Shortly after posting this piece I was made aware of a tragedy of eerie similarity.

Nanny, homeless man freeze to death as pitiless cold grips city

The frigid weather, accompanied by a wind chill that made it feel like 5 below, claimed its first casualty just after 7 a.m., when the body of a woman, believed to be a live-in nanny, was found on a Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, boardwalk bench...

Cops said a passerby found the 45-year-old nanny's body on a bench at Brighton First Road and Boardwalk.

She was fully dressed and carrying identification, according to cops, who were trying to find her relatives.

"It's terrible that someone should be out here in this weather," said Ron Kriegel, 49, who was hustling home on the boardwalk yesterday afternoon.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/272785p-233548c.html