ROUTE 3.(travelling New Jersey)

Between me in a New Jersey suburb and New York City, fifteen-some miles to the east, runs a highway called Route 3. For many bus and car commuters, it is essentially the only direct road from here (and other suburbs) to there. To say that billions of vehicles use it daily is an exaggeration, traffic experts will tell you. People have written songs about the fabled Route 66, and the phrase "New Jersey Turnpike" has a metrical neatness that fits it into certain rock-and-roll tunes; but as far as I know nobody has sung about Route 3. Its unavoidable, traffic-packed, un-alluring, grimly lifelike quality defeats the lyric impulse, probably. Route 3 starts on the low north-south New Jersey ridges where many suburbs are, crosses the miles-wide swamp that developers started referring to as the Meadowlands some years ago, rises to another ridge near the Hudson River, and joins an artery bringing an accumulation of traffic down the spinning drain into the Lincoln Tunnel and, at the other end, the vast retort of Manhattan.

An eastbound traveller on Route 3 sometimes has the serrated skyline of midtown straight ahead. At certain times of the year during the morning commute, the sun comes up right behind the city; the shadows of the buildings theoretically stretch the whole length of the highway, and slide backward gradually, like tide. When the road reaches the Meadowlands, the sky opens out, with the tall light poles of the Giants Stadium parking lot receding to a remote vanishing point and the pools of swamp water perfectly reflecting the reeds along their edges, the radio towers, the clouds, and the intricate undersides of cautious airplanes descending to Newark Airport. Along much of the road on either side, the landscape is as ordinary as ordinary America can be: conventioneers' hotels and discount stores and fast-food restaurants and office complexes and Home Depot and Best Buy and Ethan Allen, most of the buildings long and low, distributed in the spread-out style of American highway architecture. And then suddenly, just before the Lincoln Tunnel, that ordinariness ends, and you're in jostling, close-up surroundings about to become New York. At no other entry to the city is the transition between it and everyday, anywhere U.S.A. so quick.

I usually travel to and from the city by bus. The one I take to go home leaves from the fourth floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Most bus commuters sensibly occupy themselves with newspapers, laptops, CD players, and so on. I always try to get a window seat and then look at the scenery. If this were a ride at an amusement park, I would pay to go on it. The bus comes out of the terminal on a high ramp above Tenth Avenue. For just a moment you can see clear down Tenth, a deep ravine usually filled at the bottom with taxicabs. From the ramp, the bus descends into the tunnel, either straight or in a loop, depending on traffic and time of day. Once in the tunnel, it can be there forever. Brake lights on vehicles ahead reflect on the bus ceiling and tint people's faces. During an evening rush hour, my son and I observed a foot sticking up from the narrow electric tram cart that runs on a track along the tunnel wall. The foot had on a work boot and the shin was wearing work pants. We decided that it must belong to a tunnel worker who was out of sight down in the cart taking a nap.

When the bus leaves the tunnel, it is in Weehawken, New Jersey. It climbs the elevated spiral of highway that people call the helix, and then for a mile or so there's a complicated section of road where traffic bound in different directions sorts itself out. Then the bus turns northwest onto Route 3. At this point, it is in Secaucus. A newspaper story some years ago said that state police had seized about a ton and a quarter of cocaine in a truck just as it left a warehouse in Secaucus off Route 3. I'm not sure which warehouse it was, but I have some likely ones in mind. Route 3 in Secaucus is where the transition to ordinary America occurs; prominent on your right are two large signs that say "Royal Motel."

What fixed the Royal Motel in my mind, and what makes me glad, somehow, every time I pass it, was a story that appeared in the News in 2000. The story said that one morning, at 2:13 a.m., New York City police arrested a woman for soliciting prostitution at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. The woman gave her name as Tacoma Hopps. The police handcuffed her, put her in the back of a Ford minivan they were using to transport ...