New York City is a destination in Ish’s plans for an expedition east, not a place the narrative shows the travelers reaching. In his imagination it stands at the far end of a difficult route and represents more than distance: Ish wants the expedition to find other surviving communities and learn how they are rebuilding. The boys set out toward the great cities of the Old Times, but turn back near Toledo, leaving New York an unvisited endpoint and a measure of the gap between Ish’s plans and the world’s conditions.

A destination made possible by a working automobile

For years, automobiles had ceased to be useful in the community. Cars stood ruined along San Lupo Drive, their tires flat, while children played in them. Keeping a car running promised more labor than pleasure; earthquake damage, fallen trees, and collapsed chimneys had obstructed roads, and the younger men had no experience of driving under good conditions. Dog-teams, adequate for bringing cans and bottles from stores and making fishing trips to the bay shore, met ordinary local needs. A car offered a different scale of movement, but there were few nearby reasons to travel.

The older people nevertheless saw a possibility in restoring one. If it could run on deteriorated tires and be kept below roughly twenty-five miles an hour, it could cover a distance that a dog-team could not. Ish judged that New York might be reached in about a month, provided the roads were passable. That estimate turns the city into a practical, if conditional, objective: the limiting question is not simply whether a car can move, but whether a route still exists across a landscape no longer maintained for travel.

Ish’s changing route east

Ish supplies the expedition with knowledge from his earlier life, consulting the geography and old road maps in his memory. He considers the direct eastern approaches across the Sierra Nevada and the northern roads likely to be blocked by landslides and fallen trees. His first preferred approach is south through more open country, along the route he had once taken to New York. Desert roads might remain usable; the condition of the bridges over the Colorado River is unknown, so the travelers would have to discover whether they still stood.

Beyond the Colorado, Ish expects the mountains to present manageable obstacles. The next major river crossing would be the Rio Grande at Albuquerque; beyond it, the party would have to get through the Sandia Mountains to reach open plateau country. Farther east, the choice of roads should widen. Ish also considers fuel: gasoline might still be found in drums, making it less of a concern than the roads. On the plains, he thinks the travelers might cross the Missouri or Mississippi, whose high steel bridges he expects could have survived, judging by the condition of the Bay Bridge.

This early route is a working hypothesis, not a report of a completed journey. Beyond the Mississippi, Ish cannot predict how much natural forest has overgrown the roads. Fires might have limited vegetation in parts of the old prairie country in Illinois, but the only way to know is to travel and decide as conditions become clear. New York is thus both a goal and a point beyond which the map ceases to offer reliable answers.

From far-off goal to expedition instructions

When Ish later gives the boys their route, he directs them through Denver, Omaha, and Chicago, intending them to see what had become of the great cities. He expects them to reach that stage by spring, then to continue toward Washington and New York by whichever road seems most passable. The plan has acquired a sequence of urban destinations: New York is no longer only a far-off estimate of travel time, but part of an exploratory itinerary meant to examine places central to the vanished world.

Ish also leaves the return route to the travelers’ judgment, since they will know more about conditions than he does. He suggests that they swing well south on the way back, reasoning that cold winters may have drawn survivors toward the Gulf Coast. The journey is meant to gather knowledge about other communities, not merely to reach a famous city. Ish urges the boys to look for groups rather than isolated people, and to observe how those groups are solving problems and beginning again. New York belongs to this broader search for evidence of human life and social recovery.

The journey’s limit and Ish’s regret

The boys do not reach New York. They have to clear obstructions with axes and shovels, and the repeated labor wears them down; isolation adds to the strain. Dick recalls that a cold day and a north wind made them fear they might never get home. Somewhere, probably near Toledo, they turned back. Heavy rain began as they retraced their route, flooding roads and raising the fear that bridges over large rivers might wash away and cut them off from their community. They did not take the southern route Ish had hoped for. Instead, they followed familiar ground back, reassured by recognizing places they had already passed, and returned having learned little that they had not learned on the outward journey.

Ish does not blame the boys. He considers their decision determined and intelligent, and directs his criticism toward his own instructions: he may have sent them toward the great cities of the Old Times without adequately accounting for northern winters. He wonders whether a southern route toward Houston and New Orleans would have been better, but recognizes its hazards too. Farther south, floods would have been more severe and vegetation would have overgrown roads more rapidly; Arkansas and Louisiana, he reasons, would have become wilderness sooner than Iowa and Illinois. New York’s place in the story is therefore defined by the journey that fails to reach it. The city remains a powerful point on an inherited map, while the return from near Toledo teaches Ish that no old route can be trusted without testing it against the changed world.