Adaptations Large and Small

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A freelance writer and a concert pianist climb into an Uber in Trenton, NJ…

Back in March, you see, I’d bought an Amtrak ticket to and from Philadelphia so I could attend a panel of Chief Heat Officers from around the world at UPenn. I was thinking more about how cities and communities can clash or collaborate as they adapt to extreme heat, and I thought (correctly) that I’d take thorough notes on what I learned if I passed up the Zoom invitation and put myself in the room. Then, on the way home, I put myself in the path of a wave of brush fires that roared onto tracks in Edison, NJ and stalled all service between Philadelphia and New York. (You can look it up.)

You hear how public servants from Greece, Chile, Sierra Leone, and Florida are advocating for a lot more notice and a lot more shade, and then the commuter rail catches fire. You can’t make this stuff up, nor can you ignore it.

Well, I had the afternoon ahead of me and I could have milled about on the platform in Trenton, or walked around New Jersey’s capital looking for stories. But I saw a woman stride off the train, onto the now-crowded platform. She asked if anyone was going to New York and wanted to share an Uber taxi. And I thought I could add more net value at home - you know, sauteing greens, filling seltzer bottles, editing stories - than on the scene. So I volunteered to join her.

We walked through the russet-brownish station to the busy semicircle out front, where at least a dozen people were beseeching their GPSs to tell them how long it’d take them to make headway north. I told her I didn’t have a lot of cash, and she clapped me on the back and said: “You look trustworthy.” We introduced ourselves by first name. I hadn’t calculated the take for an Uber from Trenton to Manhattan during a rail failure, but the worth in sparking trust seemed higher. She told me she had to get to a concert at Columbia by 7. I assumed she had tickets to watch it. Turned out she was performing it.

Being a partway self-taught reporter, I pulled out my phone to check for a concert at Columbia that night. There it was. Being a lapsed musician, I had stuff to discuss with my new buddy.

Now, it took us more than a minute to say adios to Trenton, but once we crossed onto I-95 we came in for smooth sailing. The pianist and I talked about her growing up in Baltimore, her love for New York, and the abstract-expressionist path of my career. When a friend called to wish her well in the concert, which she seemed likelier and likelier to reach on time, she told the friend that she was riding with a “writer for the New York Times,” which is charitable.

Meanwhile, back at Penn…

The talk I watched served as the first dose in a longer conference looking at extreme heat. That means fires that come every year for months, that worm into peoples’ lungs rather than worrying their commutes, and that millions of people can’t spend their way into avoiding. It’s hokey for me to now think of how famously the concert pianist and I got along, or about how kindly she asked after the driver as he swiveled his shoulders to stretch a little once we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel.

And yet openness, friendly introductions, and the space to commit to getting yourself home so you can be accountable to others have to factor into the urban heat elixir. We can smell lots of fires on the tracks ahead. We could do much worse than to assist neighbors who have music to share.