Every other occasion page for this borough is about beating a clock. A funeral starts at ten, a birthday dinner starts at seven, a hospital has visiting hours. Just-because has no clock at all, and that is exactly what makes it the hardest delivery in Alpine — the entire point of the gesture is that the recipient does not know it is coming, and this is the least forgiving town in Bergen County for a delivery nobody is waiting for. The dwellings stand deep inside their own plots along Route 9W, Church Street and the Rio Vista streets, and an intercom at the kerb is as common here as a bell at the door. Nothing in 07620 is built as apartments, so there is no desk, no porter and no parcel room in the whole ZIP to fall back on. The house next door may not be visible from this one. So the unglamorous advice on this page is to spend the surprise: send a text saying flowers are coming this afternoon, or give us the name and mobile of somebody who will be in. A gesture that gets received beats a gesture that was better in theory.
The everyday routes into the borough are short and few. Route 9W is the spine, running the length of the ridge from the Englewood Cliffs end north to the state line, and it is how deliveries can arrive. Closter Dock Road comes in from the west off Piermont Road and is the way a shop in Closter or Demarest reaches the borough — the same road that then drops down the escarpment on the far side toward the river. The Palisades Interstate Parkway crosses the borough as well, but there is nothing commercial along it in either direction, so a driver coming up from the bridge generally stays on 9W or turns in at Closter Dock Road rather than using the parkway at all. Weather on top of the Palisades is its own factor and worth allowing for on a low-stakes order: the ridge ices and blows while the valley towns are merely wet, wet leaves make a two-hundred-foot gravel drive genuinely awkward in October, and the park roads on the cliff side close before anything else does. None of that stops a delivery. It does mean a morning slot beats a late-afternoon one from November through March.
Who sends these is a specific list in a borough like this. A neighbour — except that in Alpine the neighbour is frequently in another municipality altogether, because Closter, Demarest, Cresskill, Tenafly and Englewood Cliffs all press up against the borough line and the shops, schools and errands of daily life are in those towns rather than this one. A daughter or son in Manhattan, fifteen miles and one bridge away, who thinks about the parents on the ridge more often than they visit. A colleague from the Sylvan Avenue offices in Englewood Cliffs, three miles down 9W. And a friend directly across the water in Yonkers, three and a half miles away in a straight line and unable to simply drive over, because there is no crossing between the George Washington Bridge at Fort Lee and the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge at Nyack — sixteen miles of Hudson with Alpine in the middle. That last one is the quiet reason just-because flowers exist as a category here at all: for a lot of people the river makes dropping in a forty-minute undertaking, and a bunch of flowers is the thing that crosses easily when you cannot.