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New York City has always been a striking city, but in my many visits here, I have never thought of it as beautiful. But last night, I got a glimpse of what sits in the hearts of New Yorkers that rests their souls amid the swirl of chaos and the press of people that defines day to day life here.

Yesterday’s drive down to New York City was surreal, and if it set the tone for this long weekend, so much the better. Traffic was decent; there were slowdowns at the two predictable spots. Getting on to I-84 at Sturbridge, the traffic piled up seemingly based on funneling the weekend traffic through the Mass Turnpike toll booth. Because Massachusetts residents are notoriously stubborn about owning a Fast Lane, the queue to pay by cash clogged and backed up traffic about 4 miles down the pike.

It’s amazing that one single barrier could cause that much back-up, but the design of the toll booths, with the two Fast Lane lanes in the middle meant that anyone who wanted to speed past the cash-payers had to weave through a jumble of cars themselves trying to narrow and merge down into two cash toll lanes. We managed to escape the morass by heading off to the far right where a lone Fast Lane lane patiently waited.

By simply keep the Fast Lanes to either side, at least some of the cross-congestion at the exit would free itself up because all the cash payers could just pile to the middle of the toll area. But what do I know?

The delay started before the Charlton service center, forcing industrious families off the road for lunch. The place was a madhouse.

The second delay was predictable, though even that had an unexpected cause. The interchange at I-91 and I-95 in New Haven is always a shitshow. At the onramp for I-95, a pair of police cruisers had were along the side of the road with a sedan and a van. It was hard to tell if it had been a collision or just a pull over but coming from I-91, all lanes of southbound traffic end up merging at the one spot, which was now made substantially slower because drivers were essentially navigating a police stop too.

As we crossed into New York, the first big drops of rain hit the windshield and in the far off sky, we saw brilliant bolts of lightning shatter through the gray clouds. The rain started to fall fast and furious. The sky darkened to a film of black, the wind whipped around the water and the streets begin to roil furiously with water that couldn’t get out of our way fast enough. Traffic dipped down to a crawl, visibility was about two car lengths. Drivers turned on their hazards, some more tentative drivers pulled over to the side of the road. Since the storm was heading northeast, though, they essentially were parking at its front with the entire tail still to come while the rest of us were forging towards the storm’s break.

Then came peanut-sized hail. It started to batter the car and talk became useless. The weather warnings were for a tornado watch, high winds, flash floods and a lightning storm.

We drove as such, about 10 mph, the entire stretch from the New York City border to our exit at the 278 interchange, at which point, it lightened up enough to at least turn off our hazards and speed up to a more reasonable highway speed. About 20 miles.

By now, our quick 3-hour drive was shot to hell. We made it to Long Island City, at a 30-story condo complex near the Citylights Building. The Pepsi Cola sign sits along the water just outside. The view across the East River is a stunning panorama of Manhattan. Somewhere in the distance is the Empire State Building.

Friends invited us to Brooklyn for a Vegan raw restaurant (there are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don’t know where to begin) but something special happened to me on the drive. Staring in awe at the views speeding past our window, I got a glimpse into the city’s soul. I’ve never seen it before, just the idea that there is this awesome engine of life chugging inside the city’s chore. Granted, masked by what we see on the surface, most of it unpretty, unfriendly, unrelenting and what had always been to me uninviting.

I won’t say I’m a complete convert. I’m still an LA boy at heart and it’s hard to realign my allegiance just based on night, but it was strange feeling in my stomach that for once left me feeling joyous instead of tentative about New York.

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