Good for one fare — blown in on a gust from 1970

My buddy Mike Fink has a way of appearing on his own land like an elf that stepped out from a veil between the dimensions. Usually he makes a little sound when he’s about 20 feet away so he doesn’t startle me. I was camped out next to the raging stream earlier today reading The Catcher in the Rye when I heard a stick scrape rock, turned around and it was him and his ferocious cuddling dobermans Suki and Katya. Mike is an arborist and he had been out the past day and a half chain sawing trees out of the way of traffic.

The forest near the stream was pretty torn up by the flood waters that had come through the past 24 hours. Whole sections of forest floor had been picked up and moved. Mike started digging around the overturned moss and roots that were near a kind of gigantic rock. First he produced a nasty, jagged hunk of bottle glass that was washed out of the earth by the flood. Numerous beer can pull tops were scattered around. Then he found an old nickel that looked like it was made of copper. Then a moment later he turned up a subway token from the 1970s. That’s quite a distance for a little bit of metal to travel — it must have been quite a storm.

“People used to hang out here,” he said, referring to when his land was a dude ranch from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. By people he meant wall to wall naked tripping hippies. That era ended when he and his partner Karen took over the land around 1987. The people who would hang out on that rock, for years on end, would invariably drop things taking their clothes on and off. In a few minutes he produced an afro comb, vintage ’70s, finding everything like he knew were to look. Then he was collecting plastic scraps. Mike has spent the last 20 years gathering this kind of stuff and getting rid of it — the stories are incredible, the dozens and dozens of dumpster loads that came off the property as the dude ranch era ended and a time of rest began. There are still abandoned campsites in the East Woods.

Anyway — there he was with this subway token, which happened to be from the era that I first started using mass transit in NYC. This was the “Large Y” token that was used from 1970 through 1980 (the Y stands for York in New York City). This was good for one fare, costing between 30 cents and 50 cents as the years went on. The coins don’t have years stamped onto them, so it’s impossible to know what year this was left there, but we do have a range. I took some photos and just as he was putting it in his pocket, I asked him for it and he gave it to me.

Then we took a little tour of the forest. He knows the land — and all land — much better than I do, and he could see plenty I never would have noticed. More photos soon.