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We swam for three days in a shallow sea of human flesh. Even late in the afternoon, two rivers of tourists washed into the Metropolitan Museum, separated by an exiting trickle at the center of the wide stone steps. Inside they swirled and bobbed around towering masterworks like waves against the pilings of a fallen pier.

We stood in line to pay our $15 entrance fee, stood in line to have our packages searched, stood in line to see the art, to have a snack, to use the bathrooms. We stood in line to leave.

At Katz's we stood crushed against the chest-high deli counter for 30 minutes waiting just to order a pastrami sandwich on rye. That's because the guy with the $50 haircut in front of us kept taking orders on his cell phone and feeding them to the cutter in the white butcher's uniform. He knew the score -- we didn't -- and New York City is all about knowing the score.

We swam for two full days, the marathon broken only by nighttime hours of decompression in our dingy $200-a-night hotel room at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. We moved with incredible intimacy among faces of every color, through bodies of every scent, past lives at every level from exaltation to despair.

Manhattan, to me, is less an island than an ocean. The swim from side to side, I'm told, grows easier with practice. That surrounding din of intimate conversation fades. The fear of empty subway platforms dulls. The weight of unending replenishing anonymity lessens. I would not see, with practice, the broken soul of the old Chinese man who sold me two dollars worth of candied cashews. I would learn, in time, to just swim on.

In Chinatown and through Times Square we moved elbow-to-elbow with our unknown companions. In the Lower East Side we visited the Tenement Museum where immigrant families huddled in rooms even dingier than our hotel. From 1865 until 1940, our guide explained, over 7,000 men, women and children had lived in this single three-story building. We were told to touch the wooden banister that so many thousands of passing tenants had touched before. Minutes later, aboard the subway, ten hands gripped the shiny metal pole with mine as our submarine rocketed beneath the city streets. We touched, but did not talk.

"It's so crowded in here," I said out loud, "that I just picked my own pocket."

My wife, a former New Yorker, just frowned back. Go with the flow, she said telepathically. Don't draw attention to yourself. Just shut up and swim.

Our swim through Central Park was much more civilized and synchronized. Thousands of us moved rhythmically beneath the flowing "Gates" of orange cloth installed temporarily by the artist Christo. This was what we and zillions of others had floated here to see, lured by cheap bus tickets. We paid just $26 for the round trip from Boston to the Big Apple. The lure worked very well. Hundreds of us overflow travelers stood for up to three hours in long lines in the icy bus station. Eventually more Greyhounds arrived and we sat tightly for the four-and-a-half-hour journey from New England to New York.

We were invited, out of the blue, to dinner on the 15^th floor of a high rise apartment building in the upper East Side. The doorman knew our names when we arrived. The spacious condominium was warm. The owners, the parents of a friend, were extraordinarily gracious. There were fascinating guests, gourmet dining, warm drinks, brilliant conversation. There was room to spread out and stretch.

I could survive life in the city, I thought, if I could have a place like this. I could write my novel here. The apartment was an island, much like my safe and quiet little haven in New Hampshire, except that this one hovers 150 feet above the endless tide of people, rushing home to write their novels.

Manhattan, in my short visit, seemed less an island, than an ocean full of islands. It is a miracle really -- millions of intimately disconnected people who can touch without talking. They know the score. They know what's what and who's who and where the action is. And through all the epochs of time it takes to criss-cross the New York City ocean, to get from here to there and back again -- they exercise the secret of survival locked in our shared DNA. They practice the prehistoric wisdom that kept our ancestors going when we all wore fins and gills. Just shut up and swim, man. Shut up and swim.

Text and photos copyright (c) 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson, All rights reserved.

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