Photos from last night's premiere red carpet outside the Leicester Square Odeon, for the new David Cronenberg film, Eastern Promises. Viggo Mortensen wasn't around, but Naomi Watts was there looking fairly fabulous. Also in attendance, film director and former Python Terry Gilliam, former supermodel Elle Macpherson and Martin Freeman from The Office and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
It was fairly dark, so the pictures are a little blurry - my little camera can't cope with the dim light and long ranges. Colin Firth was there too, but didn't linger for pictures... sorry ladies.
Sunday 2 September – They’ve all come to look for America
In the morning we drove by Whole Foods to gather some breakfast and supplies for my coach ride to New York that afternoon. Then R & P dropped me at the downtown Greyhound station in DC, and I had to say goodbye. It was certainly sad to bid them farewell after such an enjoyable visit. What legendary hosts and prime examples of traditional American hospitality.
I hopped the non-stop Peter Pan coach to New York, which may have left 45 minutes late, but at least I got a window seat this time. During the four hour drive there was an ‘in-flight’ movie: Will Smith’s passable The Pursuit of Happyness (sic.) – passable in that it was commendable as a rags-to-riches real life success story, but rather grim in that the film focused entirely on the gloomy hard times. Obviously you can tell where the story’s going, and you know Smith’s character will be the one unpaid intern who wins the coveted stockbroker job at the end of the movie. But this begs the question: what about the other 19 people who completed the internship, only to be designated a ‘failure’? Well, for a start they didn’t get movies made about them.
Soon enough the coach passed Newark Airport and weaved its way through the New Jersey traffic, with long lines of cars returning to the city at the end of the weekend. Then out the right-hand window the tall buildings were framed by exponentially taller buildings on the horizon, and as I craned my neck to get a better view between the cars and trucks, I realised that I was finally seeing the magnificent Manhattan skyline after all these years of waiting.
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike They’ve all come to look for America… (‘America’, Simon & Garfunkel, 1968)
Entering New York by the Lincoln Tunnel, the coach quickly slid into the basement of the Port Authority bus depot, and spat out its passengers into the low-ceilinged diesel fume-ridden underground garage. Donning my pack and clutching my daypack closely like generations of new visitors to unfamiliar cities, I followed the stream of travellers to the adjoining 8th Street subway station, a rambling mess of interconnecting tunnels and stairways like some contemporary vision of an M.C.Escher drawing, clogged with hundreds of New Yorkers, each taking their own personal speed-walking tangent through the confusion. Having eyed up a ticket machine, I purchased a US$24 Metro card, which gave me the liberty of the city’s public transport network for a full seven days. (The same ticket in London costs me ₤43, about three-and-a-half times as much). Naturally I conducted the electronic transaction with one firm hand on my wallet and a wary eye on all within a 20 metre radius, knowing full well that in the movies it’s always the green newcomers who are sized up for a robbery by the canny New York swells. Proper New Yorkers probably laugh at people like me, because they know that New York is actually very safe, with a relatively low crime rate.
Having had the coach ride to prepare myself, I knew where I was going, and once I’d obtained the Metro card I made my way purposely through the subway network across Manhattan and a few stops southwards to East 27th Street. My steely gaze must have radiated an impression of helpful knowledgeability, because within minutes of taking a seat on a New York subway train for the first time, I had already been asked for directions. (More on the subway later).
A couple of blocks from the subway station I found my hostel for the first three nights of my stay in New York – the funky Gershwin Hostel, all decked out in bright primary colours and Warhol-esque pop art. The downstairs common area features a ballroom painted bright red, adorned with beach loungers and neon palm trees. The Gershwin’s owners have a canny promotional sense: the website advertises its normal dorms, and then there’s a separate category of dorms for aspiring models. (A brightly painted fire door bore a gold-etched warning: ‘Occupancy by more than 100 models is illegal and too beautiful’). Not that I noticed anyone particularly stunning in the hostel, mind. My six-bed dorm had its own bathroom and a booming air conditioning unit next to my bed. Trusty earplugs to the rescue yet again.
Quickly dropping my bags, I headed out to get my bearings. It turned out to be a great location: while midtown is not the most exciting part of town, it’s handy for everywhere. And there’s a certain luxurious cachet in being able to hang a right up Fifth Ave, admire the Empire State Building four blocks to the north, then stroll west along 42nd Street to the buzzing outdoor cafes in Bryant Park. A crowd of people were congregating on a closed-off section of Sixth Ave for a Brazilian Festival – ticket-holders only, sadly. Yellow football jerseys were everywhere, and samba beats rolled over the throngs.
Every few blocks I was reminded that New York is the centre of the world’s fashion scene, not because I know anything about fashion, but because I kept spotting improbably beautiful women who must’ve been models; they possessed that rare skill of being far too skinny but not actually appearing anorexic. Some sort of conjuring trick, presumably. One rail-thin six foot tall pouting goddess waiting to cross the road had the look of someone whose (tasteful, expensive, minimalist) clothes just happened to occupy the same space as her, as if the body and the cloth had wound up together purely by accident.
Soon enough I was meandering through the hectic nexus that is Times Square, bright lights burning and flickering in storm of neon and flashbulbs. Walking on London’s Oxford Street is all about avoiding the slow-moving tourists staring at the shops or gawping at their fold-out maps, but exploring Times Square, particularly at night-time, is all about avoiding everyone who’s looking up – which is just about everyone. Everything is lit up. There’s the obvious neon advertising signs like Coca Cola, Hershey’s chocolate bars, Corona beer, plenty of theatres staging shows like A Chorus Line (still!), Wicked, and even Legally Blonde. Then there’s bright neon for concerns you’d not expect: Ernst & Young (a massive 20-storey name in lights); the police station; the Army recruiting office. (Hey kids! See a Broadway show, and then why not sign up for a tour in Iraq?). The lights are remarkable when seen in person, and no amount of TV and film visits can afford the same spectacle. Piccadilly Circus is a mere stripling by comparison. I suspect you’d need to visit Tokyo for a fair comparison with this gaudy radiance.
Before it got too late I walked back south down 7th Ave, admiring a bright neon sign in a shop window advertising ‘Psychic Tarot readings’. A psychic tarot reading must be at least twice as good as a regular tarot reading, right? In looping back to E 27th Street I passed street vendors selling Orthodox Jewish religious texts, Lebanese falafel trolleys, and even a movie director’s New York stereotype: ten young black guys gambling by throwing dice against a brick wall, with the winners executing a victory jig on the sidewalk.
Before I got back to the hostel I’d already been asked for directions a second time. This purposeful striding thing must have been working out.
Monday 3 September – Labor Day
Having been fully air conditioned overnight, I got up around eight for a bagel at the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts. While enjoying this and reading a free copy of the local printed edition of The Onion (what a city!) I was sure I heard a guy at the counter ask for a coffee that was “really sweet, y’know, like 12 sugars in there”. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper for him to just buy a cup of sugar?
Collecting my camera, I walked westwards along 42nd Street to western Manhattan. At Pier 83 I took the 9.30am Circle Line ferry tour that circumnavigates the whole of Manhattan Island in three hours – an ideal way to get your bearings and see most of the city’s best known sights. The ferry’s tour guide was the sort of loquacious chap who would’ve fitted in on the Love Boat, but there was no trace of insincerity or blandness – he was just a guy with the gift of the gab and a deep collection of Big Apple stories. (Although no-one in New York actually calls the city ‘the Big Apple’, much like no-one in San Francisco calls it ‘Frisco’).
Motoring anti-clockwise around Manhattan, the ferry swung out into the Hudson River and soon passed the site of Ground Zero, then swung out into the channel to pass Ellis Island and Liberty Islands (more on both of which later). Then we swung back towards Lower Manhattan and took in the stunning views of the world’s capital city: our host intoned “take it all in folks, you’ll never see the likes of this again”, and yes it was corny, but yes he was right too. The sight that inspired generations of immigrants entering the harbour to begin their lives in a new land is still a stirring prospect – the sheer dense verticality of it takes the breath away.
Then the ferry cruised up the East River, passing under the famous trio of bridges: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge. On the midtown shore of Manhattan we passed the Kubrick monolith that is the United Nations, all austere and jutting. We skirted the Brooklyn shore on the right, and heard about the old tram cars that used to cause the locals to jump and dodge out of their way, thus bestowing the name of the famed Brooklyn Dodgers. But in a bittersweet reminder that sports in America is foremost about hard cash, Brooklynites still rue the dark day in 1957 when the Dodgers were bought out and jetted off to Los Angeles to reside in treasonous sunshine. Then on the right, the sliver of Roosevelt Island, which is crossed but not served by the 59th Street Bridge – the one referred to in Simon & Garfunkel’s '59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)'. Until 1969 when the subway finally arrived, the island’s residents had to commute to Manhattan by aerial gondola.
Further north past the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem the East River narrows and narrows again, and the domain of the Yankees looms on the right. Yankee Stadium, ‘The House That Ruth Built’ (i.e. Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat) is a focal point for the Bronx, but it’s soon to be demolished, to be replaced by an even bigger stadium. Baseball fans are missing the old stadium and its multitude of legends already. As the river became more of a shipping canal, the ferry passed the occasional fisherman trying his luck in the murky waters. One black guy was fishing from the passenger seat of his car, letting the rod do the work; when the ferry swept past and took his hook with it the Korean guy fishing 50 metres along the canal shouted “Thank you! Thank you!” to the ferry captain for seeing off his rival while he slapped his knees and just about killed himself laughing.
Ambling back down the Hudson to the pier, the stunning views of the tall tree-clad cliffs of the New Jersey shore are known as the Palisades. They appear today pretty much as they did when Henry Hudson first explored the river in 1609 – but only because a gang of mega-rich New Yorkers including John D Rockefeller decided to club together and buy the entire view to prevent it ever being developed.
Back on dry land, I used a shiny New York payphone to call cousin Winnie in Brooklyn to arrange to catch up that evening. In the meantime I did some more exploring, including spotting Liberty Re-chained on Broadway (pic), and grabbed a cream cheese bagel from a 7/11 to keep me going. I loitered in Madison Square Park to watch a bit of the US Open tennis from Flushing in the New York suburbs, while New Yorkers sunbathed on the grass amidst the skyscrapers. I took a quick detour to photograph the iconic Flatiron Building too – my guidebook quoted Katherine Hepburn as saying in an old TV interview that she hoped she’d be admired as much as that grand old building. While Hepburn isn’t around anymore, the Flatiron is still there – bookend thin and full of elegance.
Next I hopped back onto the subway and grabbed an ‘F’ train out to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where cousin Winnie lives with her husband Bjorn and their two children, Ruby and Max. (Good New York kid names, those). I’d not seen Winnie since she showed me around Wellington during my first visit there in the mid-90s, so there was a lot of catching up to do. We went for a walk in the vast open spaces of Prospect Park a few blocks from their apartment, enjoying the sweeping views and the happy buzz of people enjoying a late summer afternoon on their day off. Didn’t manage to see a chipmunk though. There were plenty of squirrels around to compensate, and you can never have too many squirrel sightings, particularly if they’re in a hurry, because the bobbing tails are hilarious. There’s extra points if you see one mid-meal too.
Bjorn and I went to collect dinner from a nearby Italian joint, and Bjorn discreetly pointed out that one of the diners at the small restaurant was Morgan Spurlock, the writer and director of Super Size Me. Back at the apartment we enjoyed a nice bottle of Californian rosé and a superb tiramisu. There’s no better way to round off a pleasant evening of good company.
Tuesday 4 September – Bright lights, big city
I devoted Tuesday to well and truly pounding the pavements of Lower Manhattan to get a better idea of the architecture and the history. Starting off at City Hall, I swung past the airy gothic bulk of the Woolworth Building (1913) and paid a brief visit to the site of Ground Zero, although I didn’t linger because there’s little to see: tall barricades hide the vast construction site where the twisted glass shard of the Freedom Tower will stand, but at the moment there’s little to show.
There was time for a short detour through New York retail institution Century 21, a department store where I tried on a US$1100 jacket to see how the other half live. Next, I perused the 18th and 19th century gravestones in the yard of the Trinity Church, dwarfed by a palisade of tall buildings. There I admired a memorial to the prisoners of the British during the Revolutionary War. A middle-aged local man approached and asked to see if my Lonely Planet described the British cruelty to prisoners during the war – they were locked up in prison hulks in the harbour and many died of virulent contagious diseases. I think he’d decided to hang around the churchyard in case any Britishers (or look-alikes) ventured in. Despite this, he was perfectly polite. I guess he just didn’t have anything better to do.
Leaving the churchyard, I walked down narrow Wall Street (the site of the 17th century New Amsterdam fort wall) to see the heavily guarded New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall across the street, which is built on the site of New York’s original town hall, where Washington took his oath of office in April 1789. Heading towards the southern tip of the island, I enjoyed exploring leafy Battery Park, full of memorials to early settlers, the punctured chrome sphere from the plaza of the World Trade Center, and collections of chancers painted green and dressed as Statue of Liberty, on the lookout for tourist dollars.
A quick subway ride to midtown later, I checked out Washington Square Park, where a trio of busking musicians played complex free-jazz rhythms, despite no-one asking them to. Then it was up to Grand Central Station to admire the huge vaulted ceiling and solid neoclassical stonework, and hop across Lexington Ave to peer inside the opulent art deco foyer of the Chrysler Building (1930), its ceiling decorated with a stylish mural of Depression-era high technology, including the Ford Tri-Motor aeroplane.
As the sun crept lower I headed back to City Hall where I’d started the day, and set out to walk the pedestrian footpath on the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), to admire both sides of the East River in the lowering light. The sun dodged in and out of the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan as I walked across, casting dramatic shadows and throwing the intricate suspension wires of the bridge into soft relief as the homeward-bound traffic rumbled below.
After photographing to my heart’s content, I zipped across town to Times Square for a quick meal and a gawp at the Ferris wheel inside the Toys R Us store, and then ended the day back at the Gershwin sorting through the day’s pictures.
Wednesday 5 September – The business they call show
When I was planning my visit to New York a month before I’d decided to stay in two hostels, to get a feel for different parts of the city. So after an early breakfast at a small McDonalds (where the counter guy couldn’t understand a single word I said) I packed up my stuff and checked out, storing my bag for later that day. I reached Battery Park in time for the 9.30am ferry to Liberty Island. The main objective of the morning was to visit Ellis Island, but the ferry stops at Liberty first, so visitors might as well take in the statue, despite the security nuisance of frequent queuing, pat-down searches and chemical sniffers.
I spent an hour or so on Liberty, taking a quick look at the museum that explained its construction in Paris and looking around the base of the statue and enjoying the morning sunshine. But most of my time on the island was spent trying to extract my daypack from the electronic lockers that the security restrictions insist you use. Assuming my passcode would allow me to access the locker, I’d quickly forgotten the actual locker number. There were 64 to choose from. After 10 minutes the attendants freed my bag and I scampered off, vowing never to return (rather than vowing to improve my memory or be better prepared next time, of course).
The ferry soon took me to Ellis Island, which for decades was the gateway for the steerage passengers arriving to populate the rapidly expanding American cities and chase the dream of a better way of life for their families. Now a museum to the millions of new Americans who passed through its halls, Ellis Island is a fascinating focal point for the immigrant heritage of the nation. The displays and audio guides stress the more humane approach taken at Ellis in the 20th century, while give scant mention to the corruption that was rife in the 19th century, but overall it’s a fascinating place. The multitude of stories and voices of immigrants was particularly rewarding:
“They asked us questions. ‘How much is two and one? How much is two and two?’ But the next young girl also from our city, went and they asked her, ‘How do you wash stairs, from the top or from the bottom?’ She says, ‘I don’t go to America to wash stairs!’” (Pauline Notkoff, a Polish Jewish immigrant in 1917, interviewed in 1985)
After returning to Manhattan, I had burritos for lunch (in honour of the DC Cobra girls) on Pier 17 overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, and then hurried to the half price ticket booth to get a ticket for a Broadway show for that evening. I ended up with a seat at a new musical comedy called Curtains, starring David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles in ‘Frasier’.
In the afternoon I collected my bag from the Gershwin and took the subway north to the Jazz on the Park hostel on the Upper West Side, half a block from Central Park. I wondered what I’d landed myself with, because the two-bunk dorm I was placed in was absolutely tiny. Oh well. I consoled myself with a long walk through the quiet winding forest paths of northern Central Park, taking in the pretty lakes (pic) and avoiding the super-fit joggers and cyclists.
Back in Times Square to eat before the show, the cashier greeted the lady in front of me in the queue with a rather familiar “what you havin’, sexy?”, although in the interests of accuracy I can confirm that he was being rather hyperbolic. Times Square was buzzing outside. A street cop paused to consult his black notebook with all the three-numbered police codes in it, as if to say “a 312? What the hang is a 312 again?” Over by the brightest lights of 42nd Street a coupe had knocked a pedestrian down and she lay quietly on the pavement while the cops questioned the driver and the thousands of tourists and New Yorkers parted on either side of the incident as if nothing was out of place.
Eight o’clock soon arrived, and I filed into the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, on West 45th Street, for the performance. The story: a Boston musical theatre company is performing a Western show, but one by one the performers and management of the show are being murdered; Hyde Pierce’s stage-loving detective lieutenant arrives to lock down the theatre, find the killer, sweep the ingénue off her feet, sashay his way through a few dance numbers, and rewrite the Western play to knock the socks off old Broadway. Some of the jokes were a little thin at times, but there was no faulting the talent of the actors, the lavish sets and the choreography. The writers had added deft touches too, such as the opening scene in which the off-key diva is poisoned, which the audience views from ‘behind’ with the actors facing the imaginary audience at stage rear, or the introduction to Act Two, which as a small surprise was sung by the orchestra conductor after he’d finished leading the overture. Hyde Pierce was unsurprisingly likeable as the Kennedy-vowelled gumshoe, having demonstrated his comedic talents for years on Frasier. His big starry-eyed dance number with the belle of the show was an expert impersonation of someone completely incapable of dancing footing it with one of the best.
Thursday 6 September – A little culture
The Jazz afforded a lousy night’s sleep, with a smokers’ courtyard just below the dormitory window, with excitable Europeans yammering their jetlag away until 4am, including one German girl with a piercing laugh that smote my eardrums through the windowpane and my firmly embedded earplugs. I took off from the hostel as soon as I’d grabbed a bagel for breakfast, and walked east across the width of Central Park to reach the Metropolitan Museum of Art just after it opened for the morning. Sure, US$20 is expensive for a museum, but the collections are truly overwhelming in scope and quality: gallery upon gallery of ancient statues, the cream of the world’s art both old and new, venerable swords and armour, suites of entire rooms from Renaissance dwellings, and complete Egyptian tombs uplifted from the Aswan floodwaters and rebuilt. There were too many treats to list them all, but some highlights included:
• Paintings of garlands from the wall of a Roman villa, circa 50BC • A beautiful hammered gold Colombian funerary mask from the first millennium BC • Hans Holbein the Younger’s amazingly sharp portrait of an Englishman from the Wedigh family, with his steely stare and well-kempt bangs peeking out from under his silk cap • Pieter van Laer’s 17th-century self-portrait as a necromancer, caught summoning the devil through eldritch rites – his face is a study in terror as he looks to his left where the wickedly barbed claws of the devil himself can be seen reaching into view (pic) • A completely intact suit of cavalryman’s clothes from a thousand year old burial in the Caucasus • A collection of round flat stones from Israel with artistically incised parallel lines… from the 7th millennium BC
Taking it all in took five hours. New Yorkers are lucky to have the Met on their doorstep – well, the New Yorkers with twenty bucks to spare, anyway.
I crossed the park again, happening upon the twin of London’s Cleopatra’s Needle, with the plaque recording its journeys through the centuries, to the point at which it rests now, a rendezvous for joggers and a few curious tourists:
This obelisk was erected first at Heliopolis, Egypt, in 1600BC. It was removed to Alexandria in 12BC by the Romans. Presented by the Khedive of Egypt to the City of New York it was erected here on February 22, 1881, through the generosity of William H Vanderbilt
Taking the subway downtown to Sixth and 43rd, I visited the International Center of Photography to enjoy the selection of exhibits, including a portrait gallery of black political and cultural leaders, a photo montage of the rise and demise of pioneering American aviatrix Amelia Earhart, and some strangely affecting on-the-road pictures from the 1970s – backwater motels, truck stop breakfasts, rundown strip malls and abandoned cars, all bathed in an eerie fluro glare.
Next stop: the Top of the Rock. The Rockefeller Center, that is, the skyscraper soaring above Rockefeller Plaza, next to Radio City Music Hall. You pay your money, step in the lift, and in 45 seconds you’re whisked to the 67th floor. If you’re holding onto the walls you can even risk a glance at the transparent roof of the lift, where each of the floors has a blue neon light – they stretch on up into a vertigo-inducing eternity. The rapid change in altitude threw my inner ear into turmoil, but in a few minutes I got used to it, and proceeded to explore the Manhattan skyline. Visitors to the Top of the Rock are treated to an easy progression of viewing options, from completely indoors, to outdoor viewing with sturdy railings and nine-foot solid glass panels, to the topmost floor where it’s just railings. Don’t worry though: the top level is smaller than the others, so there’s nowhere to fall except the viewing deck one floor below. It’s an odd sensation to be 70-odd floors up above New York with the wind in your hair and the faint traces of traffic noise filtering up through the canyons of commerce. Of course, the 360 degree bird’s eye views are tremendous. Central Park dominates the northern prospect, while the architectural glories of boom times rule over lower Manhattan like graceful giants.
The trip up to the Top of the Rock improves on that more popular tourist option, the trip up the Empire State Building, in two ways. First, there are almost no crowds to worry about, and no queues. Second, when you’re up the Empire State, you can’t take pictures of the Empire State!
I stayed up at the top admiring the views and taking loads of photos until just after the sun set behind the thick layer of clouds over New Jersey. Then I left by the Radio City Music Hall exit, and as I did I couldn’t help noticing the heaving crowds of onlookers gawping at a red carpet set up across the street for the Fashion Rocks show at the Music Hall. There must’ve been half a dozen camera crews and a dozen or more photographers present, so I assumed it was worth joining the masses to wait to see if any celebrities turned up. They soon did. I snapped away from across the street as Jessica Alba angled her perfect cheekbones to catch the paparazzi flashgun light just so. Then pop-tart Ashlee Simpson showed up, Tommy Hilfiger (okay, someone shouted out his name, otherwise I’d never have known him), Mischa Barton, and comedian-turned-TV star Dennis Leary. Not a bad haul for a quick trip to town.
Friday 7 September – Going underground
After a tolerable night’s sleep, I took my morning bagel up to the bench in Central Park where I’d eaten for the past two mornings, and watched the New Yorkers exercising their dogs in the open lawns. Then it was time to loop around the jogging track that circles the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, the largest lake in Central Park. The far shores of the reservoir are fringed with a backdrop of parkland trees with an immediate backdrop of the cliff-like apartment buildings of the Upper East Side. I arrived in time for the opening of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, more commonly known just as the Guggenheim. While the dramatic spiral of the museum’s grand atrium is stunning, unfortunately many of the galleries were closed for refurbishment and the installation of the post-summer exhibitions. Only about a third of the museum was open for business, but on the plus side, at least the entry price was half price. As for the collections, while I’m generally more of a fan of traditionalist artworks, I certainly enjoyed the series of Kandinskys on display.
Next came an abortive detour out to grimy, studenty Williamsburg in Brooklyn, to find a Brooklyn Industries clothes outlet, which turned out to have closed down. But I did enjoy nosing around the tiny stores near the overhead subway tracks running through the middle of the place (pic), including Bencraft Hatters, a shop in which old men can buy old men’s hats. Borsalino, Stetson and Antonelli, they’ve got them all, including a special on a Greek Fisherman number for only $20.
Momentarily thwarted, I returned to Manhattan to walk up the Bowery to check out the intersection of Bowery and Bleecker, the former location of legendary punk and new wave music venue, CBGBs. Closed by developers earlier in the year, the tiny venue that kick-started the careers of the Ramones, the New York Dolls, Blondie and countless other scene-setters is no more, locked up behind rock solid security. Partially bereaved, I sought solace in retail when I found a Brooklyn Industries shop nearby and scored some drainpipe trousers at half price.
My last tourist stop for the day was out at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, where I descended into an out-of-service subway station that now houses the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s New York public transport museum. The old station was taken out of service long ago when subway trains were lengthened and it was discovered that the stations were too close together for trains to stop at the platforms and queue in the tunnels between stations. Now it’s a museum telling the story of the very fine New York subway network, which benefited from the lessons learned from the London Underground experience when it was designed and built in the first decade of the 20th century.
It’s worth mentioning the many qualities of the subway system, particularly when compared to the London Underground. The wisest decision of the New York city fathers was to build the tracks and tunnels on a wider gauge than the narrow London model, so now a New York subway train has wide aisles with plenty of room to strap-hang in, unlike the cramped confines of the Underground. And while the summer heat and smells of the big city are sometimes powerful when passengers wait on the subway station platforms, once on board the swift-moving subway trains the airconditioning is relentlessly powerful, instantly cooling passengers to a comfortable shirtsleeve temperature. New York also dug plenty more tunnels so it can run express trains up the lines, leapfrogging the slower stopping services.
The MTA museum tour was led by an enthusiastic young black guy who admitted to having a model train set in his apartment. Aside from the standard exhibits on the methods of construction used, the real highlight of the museum is the old station platform, where more than a dozen historic subway cars have been restored and exhibited. Most are still used on scenic weekend runs out to Rockaway Beach, even the old wicker-seated vintage carriages from 1913, which are decked out with period advertisements inside, like the pre-female suffrage placard for dish-washing liquid: ‘Every woman will eventually vote – for Gold Dust’. In another more modernist powder blue carriage built in time to run on the 7 Line (Flushing Local) for the World’s Fair, I realised that these very seats would have carried frenetic teenagers out to Shea Stadium for the scream-fest that was the Beatles’ famous 1965 performance. Aside from a few other museum visitors, the most active exhibit was the station cat, a pretty grey girl called Sadie, who leapt around the subway carriage interiors like a subterranean ninja monkey.
A short interlude ensued, as I visited the Borough post office to buy stamps before the staff headed off for the weekend. I ended up in a massive queue in front of Internal Monologue Man, giving voice to his delay-related frustrations – lucky he wasn’t Tourette’s Man I suppose. In front there was a tall young chap from West Africa who decided to call his main squeeze and conduct a lengthy conversation with her with his mobile switched to loudspeaker so everyone else nearby had to listen. To speak, he twisted the phone up to his lips and spoke with an exaggerated lip motion that was quite like a giraffe selecting the juiciest leaf to eat. It'll probably catch on.
Duly armed with stamps, I went up to Prospect Park to write postcards and conduct another futile chipmunk hunt. Then it was time for dinner and a good chat with Winnie & Bjorn, who will soon be packing up their lives and moving to New Zealand.
On their tip-off, I ducked out to a local sporting goods shop and purchased a t-shirt proudly bearing the MTA logo for their neighbourhood: the F Line, 7th Av Park Slope.
Saturday 8 September – The final countdown
The day started with an even earlier breakfast up in the park – 7.30am this time – as I realised there was so much to fit in before my flight back to London that evening. I started with a subway journey a couple of stops south down the line to pay a quick John Lennon-related visit to the Dakota Building and Strawberry Fields (which was thronging with a Quebecois tour party). Having had a look and taken a few pictures, I then sped to the massive Whole Foods organic supermarket on Union Square to buy a hearty lunch, and browsed in the equally massive Strand Books (“18 miles of books”) and purchased some New York themed books, including Rich Cohen’s excellent Sweet and Low, the story of his grandfather’s Brooklyn company that grew into a multinational empire selling Sweet ‘n Low sweetener. The company was riven with corruption, and the family was torn apart by bitter internal rivalries and petty arguments that led to Cohen’s branch of the family being completely disinherited. It's got a great cover too.
Anxious not to miss out on the legendary collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), I joined an impressive queue for entry – damn, that’s right, it’s the weekend. Like the Met, entry was US$20, but again it was truly worth it. The amazing collections included van Gogh, Picasso, Mondrian, Leichtenstein, Pollock, Rothko and plenty by somewhat over-rated old Mr Warhol too. There was van Gogh’s The Starry Night from 1889, the one that inspired Don McLean to write 'Starry, Starry Night'. Apart from the superb painting galleries, I also enjoyed the design section, which featured the coolest and grooviest mod cons and luxury designer must-haves of the past century; pride of place was held by a lusciously curved Jaguar E-type. A photography exhibit displayed the crumbling grandeur of Soviet architecture, all abandoned factories and towering rocket launch gantries. And both inside and outside MoMA in the courtyard there were the giant iron vertical wave sculptures of Richard Serra, as if by magic a dozen ocean freighters had been carved up and formed into a rusting maze to delight and confuse the many patrons.
I had a delicious gelato in the sculpture garden (pic), then made tracks to collect my bags. At Pennsylvania Station I had to wait 45 minutes for the supposedly more regular train service out to Newark airport. (Another example of the efficiency of Amtrak?). On the way out I sat next to a young family with three kids, the eldest of whom – about seven or eight – fell asleep and emitted the most remarkable old-man size snoring despite his tender years. The rest of his family giggled at him and searched for their cameras.
After a security search of all my bags by the brusque airport staff at the airside perimeter, I had an hour or two to wait for the Gatwick plane. Finally I boarded and the 777 sprung into the darkening eastern skies, bound for London and a return to the real life of employment, regular shaving and flat hunting. I felt lucky to have had such a tremendous time in America. And I didn’t even get murdered or meet any Republicans. What a superb holiday.
John F Kennedy once said that Washington DC boasted a unique mix of ‘Southern efficiency and Northern hospitality’. As far as a sense of character goes, DC’s spirit is shrouded in imposing imperial edifices. It’s a city of sweeping architectural significance, with mammoth parks strewn with monuments and statues of impressively-dressed Presidents and stern-jowled war heroes, girding rows upon rows of neo-classical edifices containing the National this, the American that. (The Australians loved the impersonal approach too, and built Canberra along similar lines).
DC is not built for people to live in, although plenty do and many enjoy it; it was built as a testament to the kingly reverence with which the Founding Fathers held George Washington. Later on, it was augmented by the application of the vast wealth of what became the world’s richest nation, to show the rest of the world that the US had gravitas and restrained style on the largest possible scale.
My hostel was less than grand, but it was in a good location, and boasted an odd sort of breakfast (far too many things with sugar in them) for a mere dollar. On the downside, my dorm housed a thirty-something quantity surveyor from Nevada with a god-awful window-rattling snore, and the criminally-overpowered air-conditioning rendered the whole floor icily cold, despite the 30-degree night-time heat outside. I must’ve been the only guy in DC who slept with a jersey on that night!
I set out for a day’s exploring, strolling the kilometre to the fence ringing 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a.k.a. the White House (pic). Unless you’re on a tour, it’s definitely a long-distance view from between the railings, all the time eyed up by numerous law enforcement types. The only sign of movement is a change in shift in the special forces snipers on the White House roof – decked out in tan fatigues, rifle-bags slung over their shoulders, pistols strapped to their hips.
As the day warmed up and the temperature rose and rose, I admired the neoclassical architecture of the various federal agencies nearby, including the clean lines of the stone masks guarding the Environmental Protection Agency, and snapped a photo of a stray butterfly feeding on a wavering flower (pic) beside the busy Constitution Avenue thoroughfare that runs along The Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Then I took advantage of Washington’s greatest asset – one of its many free attractions, the National Museum of Natural History. I would’ve loved the dinosaur skeleton exhibits when I was 11! Nowadays I preferred other exhibits like the stunning National Geographic animal photography, and the minerals exhibit including the famous Hope and Tiffany Diamonds.
Next I visited the broad halls of the National Gallery of Art, or at least the west wing of it. It holds a world-class collection of European and American art, but it was certainly odd to see people taking flash photography of Rembrandt self-portraits – this is one of the few art galleries I’ve been to that permits the use of a flash. But I couldn’t bring myself to fire a strobe at a masterpiece, no matter what the rules. So instead I soaked up all the centuries of artworks:
• the beautiful chalice of the Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, a pre-Christian era cup set in a stunning 12th-century silver mounting • a detailed wood relief of the Holy Kinship from 15th-century Franconia • an imposing 16th-century bust of a Knight of Santiago • a regal bronze of Louis XIV from circa 1700, depicting his luscious locks and swirling cape to good effect • a stately portrait of Madame Moitessier from 1851 by Ingres, which I had seen in a 1999 exhibition at the National Gallery in London
After lunch I paused briefly at the National Archives to pay a visit to the impressive hall with a high domed ceiling, in which the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are displayed. Off to one side sits a lonely 1297 copy of the Magna Carta. More entertaining are the Archives collections of letters sent to US presidents over the years, like the one seeking Ronald Reagan’s assistance to declare a child’s bedroom a disaster area, or the friendly hand-written missive from a 12-year-old Cuban boy to President Roosevelt introducing himself and requesting a US ten dollar bill in return. The young boy’s name was Fidel Castro.
As the afternoon ebbed into early evening I explored the sculpture gardens, and was most impressed by a bizarre yet seemingly accurate fibreglass model of a typewriter eraser that happened to be five metres high. By then I was feeling peckish, so I detoured up Louisiana Avenue to Union Station for an excellent burger in the long tiled foodcourt.
Friday 31 August – The final frontier
Another sleepless night led me to extract myself from the hostel as soon as possible in the morning. Walking south to the Mall past Ford’s Theatre where President Lincoln was shot in April 1865, I crossed the grassy Mall to wait for the opening of the huge National Air & Space Museum – the most visited museum in the world. While the Natural History Museum was interesting, the Air & Space was definitely my sort of place. I ended up spending four hours poring through the many exhibits and ogling the many multitude of aircraft and spacecraft hanging from the roof of the vast building, including Lindberg’s Spirit of St Louis, the first aircraft to fly the Atlantic non-stop, Amelia Earhart’s bright orange Lockheed Vega, the original Wright Flyer from 1903 with its massive 12hp engine, and the pint-sized but epoch-making Apollo 11 Command Module. And the museum featured a selection of material from the closed-for-refurbishment National Museum of American History, including the original R2D2 and C3PO suits from Star Wars, President Lincoln’s top hat, Kermit the Frog, the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, the Lone Ranger’s mask from the 1950s TV series, and Seinfeld’s ‘puffy shirt’ (pic) from a well-known 1993 TV episode. This section displayed a section of a cafeteria counter and four stools: these were the famous seats in which four black youths staged a sit-in at a “whites only” Woolworth’s café lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, which later sparked similar sit-ins all across the segregated South.
Having taken my fill of wonderful aircraft, I then partook of more lofty entertainment by visiting the east wing of the Museum of Art, which was designed by I.M. Pei, the chap who would later erect the stylish glass pyramid in the central court of the Louvre. I particularly enjoyed the Museum’s modern art displays of some of the world’s most celebrated artists: Mark Rothko’s bright swathes of colour (pic), Jackson Pollock’s wild outburst of chaotic splatters, Jasper Johns’ stylised American flags, Piet Mondrian’s angular abstracts, Roy Liechtenstein, Picasso, and more. I also went a bit mad photographing the sweeping steel walls of the museum underpass, which took my fancy.
Taking a spell in the powerful afternoon sunshine, I wandered behind the Capitol Building to see the imposing Supreme Court Building, and explored the ornate interior of the old Library of Congress Building (pic). Then I took the Metro westwards to Foggy Bottom and walked down to see the Lincoln Memorial and admire the view along the length of the Reflecting Pool, past the Washington Monument to the Capitol Building, about 3.6 kilometres away. I walked back eastwards the length of the Mall, taking in the solemn black marble Vietnam Memorial (pic) carved with all the names of the US dead, the circular WW2 Memorial with its jetting fountains, and the towering spectacle of the Washington Monument, the 169 metre marble obelisk that dominates the city skyline.
At the conclusion of the day’s epic trek I staggered back up to the hostel, footsore and weary, to write my postcards and plan my next excursions.
Saturday 1 September – Rockin’ the Galaxy
I was able to get a decent night’s sleep because the snoring guy must’ve fled back to his evil lair, so it was a slightly later start. I booked a place for the Capitol tour in the early afternoon, then went to the nearby Postal Museum to pass an hour or so before lunch. It would be stretching the truth to describe the museum as exciting, but at least there was only a relatively small section devoted to stamps. Most of the collection was designed to tell the story of the US Postal Service, which is actually kind of interesting given the history and the scale of the operation. I particularly enjoyed the sections of the museum that showed how the postal service helped knit together the young country, and the story of the Pony Express, which lasted less than two years but still left an indelible mark on the American psyche. The museum also displays the keys from the Titanic’s mailbags.
The Capitol tour was led by a keen young chap called Trip (or was it Chip? or Biff?), who rattled through the potted history of the grand rotunda, the old Senate chamber (now littered with umpteen statues of politicians donated by the states – including the Vermont war hero Ethan Allen, and the Louisiana payola hero Huey Long), the old Supreme Court room in which the first ever telegram was sent by Samuel Morse in 1844, and the crypt designed to hold the tomb of George Washington. Unfortunately the spot is empty because Washington died in Virginia and the state refused to allow his remains to leave the state!
The afternoon sunshine was even more punishing than usual – even the sliver of shade afforded by a slender lamppost at a pedestrian crossing was worthwhile. I slunk into the cool domain of the National Portrait Gallery, which has more than its fair share of paintings of wealthy middle-aged white men from the 19th century. More interesting were the photographs of the wedding of Tom Thumb to a similarly minuscule lady during the Civil War in 1863 (apparently it set off a media frenzy at the time).
In the early evening I met up with Ruth and Phil and Ruth’s sister Adair, with the plan of seeing their friends’ bands play later that night. We went for a nice glass of wine in trendy Adams-Morgan, and followed it up with an Ethiopian dinner in a nearby eatery. Then we took our places in the indie-scene local music venue the Galaxy Hut, where the star attractions of the evening were Ruth & Phil’s friends in Victor/Victoria, supported by band-within-a-band Cobra In A Cash Register (which is a Simpsons reference). The support act consisted of two spunky Tegan and Sara fans on keys and lead guitar, sporting big chords and sweet singing, and gracing the performance with their signature tune, (Do You Like) Burritos? Then the Cobra girls were joined by a funky drummer, an Amazonian girl bassist, an elegant cellist and the star of the show, Victor herself. The band wore tuxedo t-shirts, and the lead singer… well, it’s not every day you see a drag act dressed as Amy Winehouse. Quite convincing it was too, although the faux-English accent might’ve been a little fishy. The 80s covers that Victor/Victoria jammed on were top notch, attaining a peak of authentic excitement in their cover of Sisters of Mercy’s 'More', in which the relentless cello refrain instilled a frantic sense of immediacy and drama. Victor’s lead vocals impressed too, reminding me of Brian Molko from Placebo.
After the gig finished and a bit of chatting in the bar, we retired to Ruth & Phil’s friends’ place in nearby Clarendon, and I managed to get to bed by 1.45am, ears still buzzing from the lively gig.
Three hours pre-flight sleep - that's three more than my Iceland trip at least. As I lugged my pack down to the train-station the early morning mist still lay over the quiet streets of Purley. I took the train out to Gatwick for my flight to America - the first time I'd visited the country since 1999. The Continental Airlines flight took seven hours, but departure was delayed for 50 minutes for some reason. I needn't've worried about making my connecting flight in Newark though; it was even more impressively delayed. Something of a pattern emerging there.
On the way across the Atlantic I chatted to the neighbouring middle-aged couple, who turned out to be actors from Santa Monica, California, although the woman had since diversified into the apparently lucrative field of bar mitzvah photography. On hearing that I was from New Zealand, they enthused about the Flight of the Conchords' HBO series, which they and their Californian friends had been lapping up. The inflight entertainment on offer was below par (three episodes of 'House', no thank you) so I read my copies of the Times and Private Eye, and Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show.
My first sight of North America was the curving scythe of Cape Cod. As we cruised in to land at Newark, New Jersey, the hot brown industrial air was obvious on the horizon. Newark Liberty International Airport is like LAX in Los Angeles in that it follows that curiously uniform early-80s motif in which everything is grey or black. Probably not a place you'd want to spend five hours in, but I had to, because my already generous connection time for my American Airlines flight to Raleigh, NC, was blown out by a two-hour delay. By the time it was due to leave Newark the plane hadn't even left Raleigh!
I ambled around the airport to pass the time; ate a Hershey's bar; observed the unusual prevalence of signs for emergency defibrilators (surely a sign of rampant heart disease in America?); and puzzled momentarily at the catch-phrase for the Dick Clark Restaurant: 'Food, Spirits, Fun'. What, not 'Drinks' but specifically 'Spirits'? Is the underlying theme 'come to Dick Clark's and get smashed before your flight'? Thus possibly necessitating an emergency defibrilation before boarding? Despite all the waiting around, Newark airport did afford me with the opportunity of overhearing one of my fellow delayed passengers using the word 'dang' in a non-ironic sense. Now that was a real treat.
The 50-seater jet finally flew south at dusk, by which time I was wracked with fatigue. This was not assisted by the squealing tots a few rows back. By the time we were about to land I must've looked a sight - fingers in ears and head lolling on the back of the seat in front. The steward presumably thought I was a complete loon, until I explained in my most piteous voice that I was merely dog tired. But things perked up soon when I met Ruth & Phil at Arrivals and headed back to their new digs in Raleigh. It was great to see them both again, four years after they left Wellington, where Ruth temped in the Select Committee Office. On the way back to their place, we drove around downtown Raleigh to see the sights, including a visit to the Wrong (i.e. Other) Side of the Tracks. Not much going on, but perhaps everyone was at the free Warrant gig in the middle of town.
Then bed. The ceiling fan soothed the air. Slept 11 hours. Ahh.
26 August – Rock & roll is king
We started with a quiet morning talking and catching up over omelettes at Ruth & Phil's place, a spacious 3-bedroom bungalow in north Raleigh. By 11.30am we drove into town, which was hotting up as only the South can. R & P are new to town too, so our first stop was the impressive North Carolina Museum of History. I enjoyed the collection of Margaret Morley's Carolina mountains photography from the first decade of the 20th century, the copious Civil War collections, and marvelled at the generosity of spirit of the local WW2 poster that proclaims social activities for returned soldiers:
Raleigh welcomes all service men! You'll find a place to hang your hats at 139 South Salisbury Str for white men, 126 1/2 East Hargett for negro men.
What a homecoming for the boys. Elsewhere in the museum, the section devoted to American attire gave pride of place to the outfit of American Idol runner-up and local lad Clay Aiken. Two cheers for that.
After the museum we strolled through the old antebellum mansions of downtown Raleigh, before the keen sunblast drove us into the arms of a local bar for lunch, which was characteristically huge. I was intrigued by Ruth’s choice of North Carolina barbecue, which resembled nothing barbecuey I’d ever seen; it appeared to have emerged from the kitchens conveniently pre-chewed. The meal was also accompanied by gigantic vats of soft drink. I just managed to finish one drink only to find the waitress whisking in another full bucket of pop next to my plate. I wisely gave up, for fear of bursting any vital internal organs from overwork, and we half-watched a lacrosse game on the TVs above the bar while we talked and digested.
Taking in a little more culture, we drove to the outskirts of town, where the state Museum of Art sits in what looks like a bombsite of wire fences, open trenches and earthmoving equipment. A roadsign exclaiming “yes, museum open” reassures passersby that it’s not actually a war-zone. Inside, the collection proves to be impressive, particularly the subterranean fastnesses containing numerous Dutch masters, including a Rubens featuring the portliest baby Jesus ever painted.
To prepare for our upcoming evening on the town, we basked in the warmth and sat on Ruth & Phil’s porch to watch the rain (the only precipitation of my fortnight’s holiday) and drink some nice wine.
Then we piled in the car again and headed to neighbouring Chapel Hill, NC, where the local music venue, the Cat’s Cradle, was hosting a five-band billing for $15 on the door. Hundreds of students packed the place, and I felt distinctly old. As in, the oldest person in the entire building! And when I ventured to the bar and asked hopefully if they had any wine, the kid behind bar replied with the not-too-encouraging, “well, we have something like wine”. Something like wine? And you know, I tried it, and he was right. It was wet and it was kind of like wine, but whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t actual wine.
The bands on display provided a popular mix of choppy guitar rock with singalong choruses that the youthful audience seemed to have memorised from MySpace. Piebald were pretty good, although they had a daft name and their lead singer boasted frighteningly bright teeth. One band’s drummer (I forget which) sported a Nasa muscle-vest for that himbo-geek look. Another lead guitarist played a solo atop the shoulders of his bassist. My highlights of the evening were New Jersey band Steel Train, all corkscrew perms and Thin Lizzy moves (I ordered their next EP from their “merch-girl” – we’ll see if it turns up), and the stars of the evening, Arizona should-be-legends The Format, who had and fully deserved top billing. Their charismatic frontman displayed note-perfect vocals and worked the room like a pro, like the Rolling Stones playing a club gig. It got very sweaty in there. Definitely ones to watch out for.
27 August – Carolina in my mind
As another Raleigh morning heated up, we packed up Ruth & Phil’s Ford and hit the road for a proper mini-Kerouac adventure, albeit with more organisation and markedly less drug abuse. We paused at a local Krispy Kreme doughnut place to stock up with warm and decidedly unhealthy supplies for the road, which we augmented later with a supermarket stop. I detoured to buy an extra memory card for my camera, and when the sales attendant saw my drivers licence, he observed that the only two things he knew about New Zealand was that the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, and that its Stock Exchange is the first in the world to open each day.
We drove eastwards through Carolina farmlands, spotting soaring town water-towers and an ‘inmates working’ sign at one point, although perhaps they’d made a break for it, as there was no other evidence of their presence. I gave up photographing every water tower out of the car window as soon as I realised that they may be iconic but they were also bloody everywhere. I also got to try a local delicacy when Phil spotted a peanut farm shop selling fresh boiled peanuts. Boiled peanuts must be something of an acquired taste, because for all I could tell the boiling process turns them into hot mush, but the Carolinans seem to like them that way.
Stopping for an Italian sub lunch at Plymouth, NC - the site of a Civil War victory for the Confederates in 1864 - we explored the roadside discount stores for random low-rent riches: (crappy) ‘DVDs, $5 and up!’, (crappier) ‘Videos, 2 for $5, Awesome Value!’, and browsed the aisles of the South’s favourite supermarket chain, the marvellously-named Piggly Wiggly. The supermarket’s logo bore a striking resemblance to Porky Pig, but presumably his jaunty supermarket-attendant hat was sufficiently distinctive to avoid the mighty wrath of the Warner Bros. legal department, which doubtless despatches lawsuits disguised as plummeting 16-ton Acme anvils. And just think - wouldn’t it be great to have an employer with a classy name like ‘Piggly Wiggly’ on your CV?
Reaching the Carolina coast, we crossed the Croatan Sound and turned north onto slender Roanoke Island, site of the abandoned 16th-century colony of Sir Walter Raleigh, which was the first attempted English settlement in what would become the United States. Established in 1585, the site on Roanoke was chosen for its sheltered location behind the tall sandbanks of the Outer Banks, which would hide the settlement from passing Spanish warships. But Roanoke struggled due to a lack of food and poor relations with the local Native Americans. Within a few years the colony was cut adrift from England, and although a better-late-than-never rescue party searched for any survivors three years later, by then they had either died of hunger or been slain or enslaved by Native Americans. (For an intriguing account of this time, read Giles Milton’s excellent Big Chief Elizabeth). Nowadays there’s almost nothing to indicate a handful of doomed pioneers tried to scratch out a living here – a tiny earth mound has been re-erected where the original stood. In 1587 somewhere close by, Ananias Dare and his wife Eleanor had a daughter, who was named Virginia after the young colony (for although now part of North Carolina, at the time the whole minuscule English colony was so called). Virginia was the first child born of English parents in North America.
As we listened to Loretta Lynn sing ‘Van Lear Rose’ the car took us seawards once more, to nearby Kill Devil Hills and the Wright Brothers memorial. Here on 17 December 1903 Orville and Wilbur flew the Wright flyer for the grand distance of 120 feet in 12 seconds of powered, controlled flight.
The flight lasted only 12 seconds, but nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it had started (Orville Wright, 1903)
(Kitty Hawk, the better known name for the site, is actually about 12km north, but it’s where the local Western Union telegraph office was situated. The Wrights sent their father a telegram with news of the first flight, and the name ‘Kitty Hawk’ soon rang out across the world’s newspapers. It was also rather less Gothic-sounding than mysterious Kill Devil Hills).
We walked the length of the first day’s flights, which grew steadily longer so that by the end of the day the brothers had managed a flight of 284 yards (258 metres), and strode up a nearby hillock, where a splendid stone memorial to the brothers surveys the whole of the Outer Banks.
As the sun floated gently towards the western horizon, we explored the beautiful rolling sand dunes at Nags Head, which is short on apostrophes but long on sweeping vistas and kite-boosting updrafts. After a short drive northwards we stopped in at a seaside restaurant, the Black Pelican, which was located in a rambling old building that turned out to have been the old telegraph office from which the Wrights sent their famous telegram 104 years ago.
Then came the long night drive north to Williamsburg, Virginia, and the welcome embrace of a roadside motel.
28 August – Yes, Virginia
Another day of powerful, near-blinding sunshine was soon upon us, and we stopped in at the local information centre. We decided to drive to nearby Jamestown before coming back to see historic Williamsburg in the afternoon, skipping the ever-so-slightly touristy restaurant at the centre boasting the name ‘Huzzah!’ (with an exclamation mark).
In May 1607 English colonists ventured up the James River in search of a settlement site, hoping to found a permanent presence in North America and reap the riches of new lands. The river curves sinuously, exposing ample mangrove shallows beside the lapping banks, with top-heavy dragonflies swaying drunkenly in search of a meal. The English felt these curves, like the Outer Banks at Roanoke, would hide their presence from the powerful Spanish ships, and provide ample warning of attackers coming from upstream or down. So a fort was erected, and after many lean years of starvation, mismanagement and cruelty to the local Native Americans, this fort would spawn a town, and the town would become a focal point of the Thirteen Colonies, setting the scene for the United States as we know it today. (For an evocative tale of this period and the life of Pocahontas, see Terence Malick’s film The New World).
Nowadays there’s almost nothing left of the original settlement above ground, although the impressive red-brick church is a late-17th-century construction. There’s a reconstruction of the fort’s barracks, but most of the action is below ground, where archaeologists are unearthing relics of the earliest days of European settlement in Virginia. An impressive interpretation centre highlights some of the finds, and a nearby glassblowing workshop on a quiet point of land recreates the skills of the first European attempt at industry in North America (and also provides sundry glassware knickknacks – square bottles and the like – for tourist consumption).
Driving back into Williamsburg, which came to prominence when the capital of the Virginia Colony was moved there from Jamestown in 1698, we strolled around the historic town centre. The 18th-century shops and houses of the town have been preserved and turned into a relatively authentic tourist attraction, brimming with actors and costumed staff. Luckily by coming later in the afternoon we could avoid all this (and the seemingly exorbitant ticket price) and just walk around the town’s broad tree-lined streets, enjoying the old buildings and the sounds of horse-drawn carriages with their tall red-spoked wheels, coopers hammering barrels into shape, and milk-maids ferrying their wares to the grand houses.
Swinging back towards North Carolina, we called in to Richmond, Ruth’s hometown for a quick tour of the downtown area and to see Ruth’s parents at the Collins family seat, a much-loved old rambling bungalow with a long back garden extending into the distance. It was lovely to meet the Collinses, and their Bulgarian-immigrant little cat, Snyder – who despite the masculine and distinctly non-Bulgarian name, is a girl.
As the night drew on we feasted at a Mexican restaurant, topped it off with delicious gelati, and drove south playing ‘the letter game’ to stay awake as the freeway signs counted down the miles to Raleigh.
29 August – Ridin’ the rails
In the morning Ruth & Phil dropped me at Raleigh’s train station for my onward trip to Washington DC. As the station is by definition actually on the tracks I wasn’t quite sure whether this was the wrong side of the tracks or the right side. I didn’t have long to ponder this notion, as the Amtrak train arrived from Charleston only 10 minutes late. The train carriages were streamlined silver ghosts straight from one of those hi-tech science fiction comics of the 1930s. Looming high above the rails on stork-like rolling gear, the carriages were almost unreachable to anyone without seven league boots. The leather-gloved train attendants (very Village People) spent 10 minutes or more helping the elderly and infirm up the three steps. Inside there’s plenty of room and even power sockets for laptops, but all the passengers from further south make a point of spreading out over two seats each. In the end I asked an elderly black guy if he’d mind me sitting next to him. He didn’t say a word for the two hours I sit next to him.
The advantage of travelling by Amtrak is the chance to see rural American scenery: the train passed through endless pine forests with bottlebrush branches and flitting deer. The disadvantages are that it’s more expensive than the Greyhound – my one-way ticket cost US$72 – and that it doesn’t have a show in hell of being anywhere on time, at least if my trip is anything to go by. All the 10 to 15 minute station stops quickly added up to a mounting lateness. Then I registered the tannoy announcement that the train would be halted in the forests north of Richmond (for half an hour, it turned out) because up ahead on the track there was not only a derailment, but also a brushfire. A combo! I passed the time consuming concentrated grease from the cafeteria car, where I also found the traditional American delicacy known as the quarter-pounder cookie, which sounds rather more coronary-inducing that it actually was. When the train finally got moving again, I felt sorry for the southbound souls on the trains caught behind the derailed freight train: there were four Amtrak passenger trains caught in limbo. For all I know they might still be there.
As the train finally edged towards DC, I involuntarily overheard the entire life stories of the two 50-something black ladies seated in front of me. Sundry tales of deadbeat menfolk and ungrateful employers washed over me as we passed the crew-cut suburbs of Quantico Marine Station, decked out with Blackhawks, C-17s and industrial quantities of US flags. Finally we drew into Washington’s Union Station, more than two hours late. The capital of the nation, the focus of authority, the hand of government.
Three stops westwards on the metro and a few blocks north, I found the HI hostel, which has a bizarre sleeping-bag ban (there’s a sign threatening a $5 fine if they discover an evil s.b. on your bed or even in your possession!). Then, starving, I pounded the sidewalks of downtown looking for a cheap meal, which is just about impossible to find, I soon discovered. Strolling through the balmy night air, I saw a dozen or more homeless people staking out positions in the inner-city parks, and I walked past a stylish nightclub with pumping music and an all-black clientele. Eventually I tracked down a late-night pizza store amidst all the closed boutiques and largely deserted streets of the capital and was able to eat my fill.
Taken at the north side of Leicester Square, last Sunday, 5 August 2007. The chap on the right is playing bongos for Jesus. He was quite good, actually.
