Ramblin’ out of the Wild West

’til I come into New York town

Those are Bob Dylan’s words, from some 40 years ago when he left small-town Minnesota for the bright lights of Times Square and the Bohemian culture of Greenwich Village — when he left his home for New York City. He traveled those thousand miles to claim a record contract and, as it is apparent in his autobiography, to discover he was more than a scratchy-voiced kid from the Midwest.

I’ll soon make the same journey. In the fall I’m moving away from the familiar landscapes of Ames, Iowa and Lawrence, Kan., to the hulking concrete island of Manhattan. Like Dylan, I’m going for pragmatic reasons — to study at Hunter College as part of the National Student Exchange — but, even more so, to fulfill the intangible goal of discovering something about myself.

I’ve been there only once before — for a week last May — but those seven days were all I needed to realize the city held something I had to find and internalize. Everywhere I looked, I found something amazing and something I recognized in myself. The hard geometry of the blocks spoke to my rational mind, while the unending culture, life and motion stirred my sense of wonder. The names and numbers — Lennox and Lexington, the forties and seventies — all sounded familiar, if not from history books, then from “Law & Order,” Wu-Tang Clan, Truman Capote or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I stayed that week at New York University in the Village — Dylan’s old stomping grounds — where I attended a training program for an internship. Each morning I walked past Washington Square Park on the way to class, and at lunch I crossed through the park to MacDougal Street, where closet-sized restaurants representing six continents, vied for my business.

One afternoon, I wandered down East Eighth Street, befuddled by a block where a half-dozen consecutive T-shirt stores faced a dozen consecutive shoe stores. I shrugged at the lack of logic, picked a store at random and bought a T-shirt that said “NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY.” In the next few days I saw Times Square, too. And Ground Zero.

On Sunday, as I rode in a taxi over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway toward LaGuardia Airport and looked back on the city glittering in early-morning light, it was apparent to me that New York City was the center of the universe.

This trip will be my chance to realize what was only hinted at in that week — to discover for myself what Dylan discovered in New York in 1961.

I can’t say exactly what that discovery will be or how it will come about. Perhaps there will be a singular instance — a moment of clarity — when I see, like Paul Simon, “the words of the prophets … written on the subway walls.”

I suspect, however, that it will be something far less distinct and far more gradual — a creeping maturity and understanding about the people who inhabit this world and my place among them.

It didn’t take Dylan long to realize what New York would mean to him.

In his book, he describes one frigid winter night when his destiny appeared before him, filtered through the lens of the city:

“I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don’t think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I’d come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”

I hope I’m so lucky.