Watch The Gap

For the past week I have been ensconced in New York City, sitting on on SiriusXM Radio on the Martha Stewart Living Radio Channel which has been quite an experience since its been 15 months since I sat behind a microphone with any regularity and nearly five years or more since I did the 3 hour a day back to back to back thing on LIVE radio...which is the only way to be...LIVE.

Stayed in Manhattan a couple nights but for the past few days been bunking with friends about 25 miles or so outside of The Big Apple which entails taking a train back and forth each morning and evening. When I am home in Upper Michigan the mode of transportation is by automobile...here throngs use the railways to commute and its a pleasant 40 minute ride or so right next to the Hudson River which is truly a remarkable landscape to behold. I imagine the first native people of the area living and thriving along its banks, fishing and hunting and its as if I can almost see the smoke from their fires across the river on the bluffs. Incredible.

Of course there are other sites to see, serious graffiti on dilapadated buildings, human refuse and junk strewn along the inner portions of the tracks next to the residential side of the rails, homeless shelters built askew into the stone walls marked with black paint and more crushed glass bottles than you can count. Leftovers from construction projects, dead animal carcasses and piles of unknown garbage have built up over the years like a monument to our existence. We throw so much away...but not really away.

As I sat waiting for the train to do its thing a mechanical voice kept warning me to "Watch out for the Gap"..that half a foot no-man's land between the floor of the train entrance and the platform you are stepping to or from. Its printed all over the train and on the back of the ticket.."Watch The Gap" is the cry of the day and I sat envisioning hundreds of lost souls that somehow became very thin and slipped into the crevice of no return, the emptiness, the chasm of treachery that seems to swallow passangers and never give them back. I guess slipping between a railroad car and a stationary platform could do some serious damage and no doubt a lawsuit of some kind prompted the signage..but "Watch For The Gap" has other applications too.

The gap between what those early people on the Hudson experienced as home and the transit system that now occupies the shores of the river has been filled...and not always for the better. As I look out over the mighty waterway and think of how important this river is, to commerce and transportation, boating and education I cannot help but also see the utter disregard by the latest inhabitants of the Hudson...those that dump waste, chemical and otherwise..rundown buildings and rotting junk heaps along with the most destitute among us...living among that filth.

The gap of what was..and what is...is something we really do have to keep a watch on.....after all the signs have been ignored...that gap maybe something we cannot recover from. If we always do what we have always done...we will always get what you have always got....