The Holland Tunnel

Last Wednesday, I took a bus to New Jersey to visit my parents, and we returned to New York via the Holland Tunnel. I was brought back to the days of my youth, when I was utterly fascinated by the tunnel. Its tile walls are often interrupted by oddly shaped metal doors with rings to open them--what are those, anyway?--and glassed-in booths where attendants used to stand in the days when the Port of New York/New Jersey Authority had the money to pay them. But the most fascinating thing to me was the line drawn in the middle of the tunnel which divides the state of New York from the state of New Jersey. I used to hope that we would get stuck in traffic right at the line, so that the front seat of our car, with my mother and father, would be in one state, and the back seat, with my sister and me, in another. It never happened. I don't know what I loved so much about that line. Maybe, it is that, in the Holland Tunnel, boundary lines are clearer than they are in life.