At the pier, I eat a chicken shawarma and finish it just as the two o’clock Hoboken ferry docks. The boat doesn’t tarry more than five minutes and it takes off for the New Jersey side. The ferry is small and light, it bobs on the water, unlike the larger, plodding Staten Island ferry that I sometimes ride for fun during lunch. The financial district recedes, and more importantly, my office building recedes, if you could call it receding. The herd of imposing monoliths of America’s financial might is stacked up on the tip of Manhattan like a cubist Picasso, each one dwarfed by The World Trade Center with the two towers being perfectly symmetrical except for a TV antenna projecting off the one.

The day is bright, hot, breezy, near-perfect and the dazzling blue sky and white benches of the top deck reflect too brightly  and I squint even behind my shades.  The American flag and “W” flag of the New York Waterway Company fly stiff in the breeze not ruffling but out straight from the pole. In ten minutes, we point our nose into the berth of what was formerly the Erie Lackawanna terminal and is now the more mundane NJ Transit hub in Hoboken—a squat little city, the so-called Mile Square City. Hundreds of pilings from an old pier rot in the oiled water, still arranged in a grid, worn down to different heights. Some have disappeared under the water and none stick out more than four feet. All are black from rot and mold, weather-treated with creosote to no avail. Soggy wood remnants from a time before the commuter subway—the PATH trains—went under the Hudson, back when dozens more ferry lines made the trip back and forth thirty or forty times a day to all points west side Manhattan.

I disembark and walk through the near-empty train terminal adjacent to the dock, a place that will be teeming in a few hours with commuters hurrying back to their bedroom communities; but now there are only a few stragglers, and the place has a lazy, dog-days air about it. I walk past train conductors chatting with Pakistani newsstand proprietors, while black women in blue shirts sweep up around the tracks and concrete platforms with longhandled brooms and flat bottom dustpans, and girls in brown smocks stand at coffee counter windows and stare vacantly toward the trains or read those bestsellers where the author’s name is larger than the title. I walk past all these people out into bright sunshine into Hoboken, a city of my past.