The
Thai food—sausages in buns with cilantro and a trace of sriracha
sauce—was very good. But they took a minute and a half to eat. We went
back up the hill, toward the entrance, hoping to find some stands with
shorter lines. We circled a log cabin-like structure that had vendor
windows on all four sides. Bagel halves were on display under cheese
bells, each draped with a limp and pallid blade of lox. Around the
corner two women stood at a bakery counter. All they had left for sale
were sticks of salty bread. I was so surprised that a vendor with
something in stock had no line before it that I bought some. The women
seemed more surprised than me.
We
got some sweets in the dessert sector—those were not hard to obtain.
After a wait in two lines—one line earned you permission to stand in the
other, essentially—we got duck hot dogs created by a particularly
famous restaurant. The cabbage topping seemed, weirdly, to be mixed with
orange zest. I popped a piece of Orbit gum.
Frustrated,
defeated, we walked to a little hill beside some trees and lay down for
awhile. The cool grass felt good against my neck. On my palms. I gazed
serenely at the sky through the gaps of the branches looming over us. It
was still a beautiful day. I began to feel good.
Suddenly something fearsome and raw violated the idyll. KRANGG!! It was a ferocious chord from an extremely loud, distorted guitar. CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA KCHANG KANG CHUGGA-CHUGGA it went, again and again and again. A jolting expression of id to cast a damning pall on the gentle afternoon.
We arose blearily, as though hung over.
“It’s a Van Halen cover band,” observed Sara.
It did not seem possible to me—they sounded more like death metal. But sure enough, they were playing “Panama.”
We
gravitated toward one of the exits, at the south end of the park. To
get there we walked past rows and rows of portable toilets. Something
seemed strange about them—an incongruous, dreamy quality. I’d never seen
these objects in quite this way before. Then it occurred to me what it
was: there were no lines.