Maybe we were delirious. It was after two in the morning and I had my kids out on the street in Manhattan. With how hot August was, we tried to stay out late, taking advantage of cooler nighttime temperatures. This was our eighth night knocking around the city, urban exploration I called it, an extracurricular crash course in subways and public restrooms. We’d been staying at a different place almost every night, moving from friend to friend across Brooklyn and New York City and carrying our belongings on our backs.

Along the way, we explored nooks and crannies, whatever oddity caught our senses, at one point chasing a paper bag a few hundred yards down the street, sticking with it for half an hour. We were playing a sort of Pokémon Go, but without Pokémon, just Go.

I don’t know which of us saw it first, but on 39th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues we found ourselves staring at a small toy airplane hanging high above the street. It was one of those rubber-band-powered balsa toys you get at the grocery store. Its propellor spun a little, but that was the breeze. Its rubber band, if it ever had one, had disintegrated and fallen off.

The plane was high enough in the air, and well-lit from the street, that we couldn’t see the fine wire that must be holding it in place. We wondered, is it strung between buildings? How would you do that, shoot an arrow across or lift it up on both sides from street level late at night when traffic died down? Philippe Petit pulled it off between the World Trade Center towers, becoming a toy himself balanced on a high wire, so this wasn’t such a great feat. But it was bewildering. Why was a toy plane up there?

We stepped into the street craning our necks, when the driver of a parked food supply truck rolled down his window.

“Are you guys looking at that plane?” he called to us.

He looked up at it with the same bewildered expression. “I’ve been looking at that thing for months, day and night,” he said, “and I still can’t figure it out.”

He rolled up his window and went back to whatever he was doing.

Like I said, it’s not a great thing. It’s just a floating toy. It was, in a sense, the purpose of our trip. We were looking for mysteries, for wrinkles in the city, needles in haystacks. In Green-Wood Cemetery, one of the highest points in Brooklyn, we saw an enormous nest from a local population of hundreds of feral Argentine parrots living in a sandstone spire. We stalked crabs in their tanks in Chinatown and chased graffiti through the subways, watching through the windows for a passing lightbulb in the darkness, a work of art flashing by. There was the bag in the street, and, of course, the toy plane.

We were engaged in a kind of travel known as dérive, a French term coined in 1956 by Guy Debord, who called it “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” The word means, drifting. It is where you allow yourself to be drawn by “the attractions of the terrain.” Debord wrote that this endeavor is best served through “small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness.”

That would be us, ages 9, 13, and 49. We wandered the city like three antennae, not discussing our manner of exploration, but doing it out of habit. The boys grew up off-grid in Colorado, accustomed to wilder or at least more natural landscapes. We traveled here the same way we do there, not bound by trails or particular routes, but hopping out of the subway when the notion struck us.

This brought us to the plane. My older boy set his phone to record audio. He said into it, “What are you?” and he held it up in the air as if interviewing the floating toy. Then he said into the phone, “Why are you here?” He held it up again.

I don’t know what kind of answer he was expecting, but he seemed satisfied, as if he’d gotten one.

Photos by the author.