The Bagpipe Guy is Back on the East River

Since I moved to the East Village, I’ve made a habit of running along the East River in Lindsay Park. The boardwalk stretches from the Williamsburg Bridge—across the river from the defunct Domino Sugar factory—to around where the East River Ferry sets off at 20th Street. The whole thing is about one-and-a-half miles. Up and back, you get a good three mile run out of it. It’s much more pleasant in the winter months, when the wind howls over the river and you can hear sheets of ice clinking against the boardwalk. But in the summer, the breeze off the water and the sun setting on the opposite side of the city do their best to keep you cool.

You go to a spot like that frequently enough and you start to recognize familiar characters, or at least familiar types of people. Depending on the season, high school football, baseball, or track teams use the fields or running for conditioning. There’s always the fishermen, each with a few rods propped up on the railing, waiting for a bass or an eel to bite—every now and then you’ll see a spot of blood on the concrete right by the rods and know that one of them was successful. Running alongside you, there’s the old guys you can never keep up with. Clad in twenty year old shoes, headbands, and sunglasses, they don’t even seem to break a sweat. Also running after work are the Wall Street and tech industry supermen, tall, broad, muscular. Despite their three-hundred-dollar jogging shorts, they can’t keep up with the old guys either. In the warmer months there’s the stoners and sunbathers and first date-ers, the occasional parent with a stroller or lady with a small white dog—different ladies, different dogs, but somehow always the same.

The most notable character, for a time, was the bagpipe guy. He was nothing special, just a young guy always wearing his khakis and practicing the bagpipes. It makes sense, his place at the river. If my roommate took up the bagpipes I’d make him go down to the river to practice too. He was there in the sun, in the rain, in the snow. But he wasn’t always there. During my good running months, I’d see him maybe once a week. Then, last winter, he disappeared. He’s been gone for a couple of months; at first I assumed he’d gone home for Christmas. When January passed sullenly by—then February, then March—and he was still gone, I assumed he’d given up bagpiping altogether. Or, more optimistically, maybe he’d found a better place to practice.

How he ever got into the bagpipes in the first place is something I wonder. Where do you even buy a set of bagpipes? Every time I saw him, these questions prodded at the back of my mind. The bagpipes are not an instrument you pick up with an ulterior motive in mind. You can play the guitar because you want to impress pretty girls, and you can play the piano because your mom signed you up for lessons when you were seven and you don’t know how not to. But the bagpipes have to call to you. They were not meant for a quiet bedroom on a summer night, or someone’s living room at a small gathering, or even a ballroom filled to the breaking point. No, the bagpipes were meant for an open field, a vacant stretch of the Scottish highlands, the morning mist still curling up from the grass. They were meant to embolden armies, to tighten grips on pikes and longswords, to lighten the weight of fifty-pound steel breastplates. They were meant to dull the pain and hide the blood in the grass, to drown out the screams of the dying and the racing thoughts in your head.

At the time, running had become a comforting sort of pain for me, a way to drown out the thoughts in my own head. A full-body breathless exhaustion I could let burn through me without consuming my being, a daily annihilation I could walk home and shower off afterward. A catharsis of force. Whenever I was agitated, I could vent my stress, my frustration, my hopes, and fears on the pavement—and on my own body—in a way that remained constructive. Some days it helped me more than others. The best days were the days the bagpipe guy was there. His bagpipes, like my running, felt like a catharsis of force. The bagpipes are not a piano or a guitar or any other delicate instrument, gently playing on the heartstrings, seducing you into feeling an emotion. The bagpipes crash through your chest with a hammer and beat the feeling into you. In the absence of an open field in the highlands, a riverbank works just fine. In the absence of an army to inspire, I was there, running back and forth along the boardwalk, passing him along the way, and turning around and running back towards him when the sound of his music felt just out of reach.

For a while, I quietly mourned his sudden disappearance. Running hadn’t quite felt the same without the chance to hear his echoing sounds. But since the end of spring, the bagpipe guy is back on the East River. He’s taken up a new spot on the path, further north now, in a quiet corner between a loading dock and the East 20th St. exit off FDR Drive. He stands in a small grass patch, surrounded by flowers and spiky ferns, practicing his bagpipes for all the world to hear. Well, not all the world—this new spot is much louder than where he used to play. The noise is almost suffocating over there. There’s the highway and the loading dock, and of course across the highway is the Con Ed power plant, its four smokestacks rising higher in the skyline than any other building in the East Village. I wonder why he’s chosen this new spot. The gardens are nice, sure, if only three feet wide, but the view of Greenpoint and Long Island City can’t possibly be that enticing. I wonder if the noise is exactly the reason—that he does not want people to hear him. Maybe he’s out of practice since he took those few months off, only now being able to mend a fraught relationship with his instrument. Or maybe he went on tour. Either way, I’m happy to have him back. He doesn’t sound out of practice to me. But I don’t exactly have a trained ear for bagpipes, so what do I know?