I tend to keep
a diary when I'm on the road. In
recent years I've circulated them to friends, who've encouraged me to
make them
more widely available. So here is are a few recent ones - a
trip to
India, my odd mid-life crisis decision to become a snowboard
instructor, and a couple of accounts of my shuttling to and from
North America in 2004. For some reason my trips there this year
have fallen below the radar.
Over the next few months I'll be adding the others, including if I can
find it an account of a trip through Southern USA in 1970.
BOB AND THE VOLCANO
UNITED STATES OF MIND - The US 2004 Part One
APPALACHIAN TRIAL - The US 2004 Part Two
I’m looking at a photograph of myself and Paul on a beach. Our
back is to
the sea and on one side there is a glimpse of a fishing boat.
It’s one of
those colourful nib-tipped boats you see all over Asia. There’s
nothing
remarkable about this photograph, we all have them in our collections
somewhere. Except that the beach and in all probability the boat
don’t
exist any more. This beach is the seafront in Chennai – Madras –
five
days before Christmas. Which means six days before the
tsunami hit
this south eastern coast of India killing at least 10,000 people, 200
on this
beach alone. The first wave arrived right behind where we are
standing
around 9am on a Sunday morning. It would have been the cool part
of a day
that would, even in winter, move towards 30degrees. So the beach
would
have been packed with people – it is at least 500 metres wide and one
of the
longest continuous beaches in the world. The freshly painted and
restored
sea edge cathedral of St Thomas, built above the tomb of the disciple,
would
have been packed with worshippers. The fishing tenements of
Santhome just
sitting there beside it …..
There is a disturbingly mixed emotion of just missing an event of such
magnitude. The photograph was taken as a farewell to Chennai – we
were
about to spend 36 hours on a train to Delhi. We received the
first text
messages about the tsunami just out of Jaipur. On the one hand I
felt
utter relief of being safe - far to the north and hundreds of
kilometres
inland. On the other, a strange sense of being cheated being
there by
such a narrow margin of time and space. Above all I’ve a need to
know and
see. We spent a puzzling day in Pondicherry, an affluent, smug
(if
anything in India could ever be called smug), contradictory and
confusing
ex-French colony a couple of hundred kilometres south of Chennai. At
the time,
the juxtaposition of the hot, mad, dense, congested Indian part of
town, and
the deserted, spacious, elegant, cool French quarter – both saturated
by the
economic, social and physical dominance of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
intrigued
and appalled. But now I spend time imagining the scene, or
even
just trying to imagine the scene. I know the body count, and I
also know
that the foreshore rocks where I stood watching local people catching
crabs were
high enough to protect the town somewhat. But after hours of
searching the
net I’ve failed to find any visual account. In the end that is
the most
difficult part – imagining with only imagination to go on.
India was never on the list. The idea of India had of course
lodged in my
imagination. After all I was a teenager in the 60’s, saturated
with sitar
and tabla. In the 70’s and 80’s I read all the books by Paul
Scott, VS
Naipaul and Salmon Rushdie. The films of Satyajit Ray, Pathur
Panchalli,
Distant Thunder and Shakespeare Wallah were part of my British Film
Institute
experience. And then of course there’s the Lady Diana at the Taj
photograph. But the reality had never really surfaced. It
was all
too big, too exotic, too damned hard even for my curious travelling
mind.
So no-one could have been more surprised than I to be standing in the
scruffy
arrival hall of Chennai Airport one Friday midnight. I certainly
felt a
long way from home. It even felt a long way from Changi Airport
just four
hours behind us. The prim corporate order and scale of Singapore
was
replaced by the strong sense that everything needed a good scrub and a
paint
job. Many things changed for me during a month in India, but that
feeling
never left me. It was a big unresolved puzzle for me that clearly
puzzles
many Indians too. Why is it that a people who personally
demonstrate
incredible personal and private cleanliness tolerate so much public
squalor
? Everyone has their theory it seems; the individualism of the
Hindu
religion, the recent movements from village to cities, the hot dry
climate, the
failure of governance at all levels, the squatter nature of Indian
habitation. [It came as some surprise to me on a visit to a
large, long
established, upper-middle class neighbourhood in south Delhi to
discover that
its formal status was, shall we say, ambiguous. Apart from the
elegance and size of
the homes,
their legality little different from the slums up in the north of
the city.]
And so we shouldered our rucksacs through the crowds in the baking heat
of a
Chennai winter’s night and into our waiting Ambassador taxi. A
pause here
to allow the three of you who have no idea what an Ambassador is to
catch
up. The Ambassador is a heavily modified 1950’s Morris Oxford and
was the
national car, until recently replaced by a Japanese sewing
machine. Like
the Model T, the Ambassador comes in only one colour – white, although
you will
see a black and yellow version occasionally. If it has a blue
lamp
on top
it is a police car, if it has a short pole sticking out of the bonnet
it is a
government car. If it has a Porche badge on it then the owner has
an Indian sense of humour. In those cities, such
as
Chennai, where
still commonplace Ambassadors'
constant battle for ownership of the road reminded me of some demented
Errol
Morris documentary – hundreds of white mice, running around fast, loose
and out
of control. From the back seat it is like riding in some 20th
century
palanquin. You ride high, bolt upright, and overlooking the
shoulder of
the driver. The unique suspension fires you up to the
thoughtfully padded
ceiling over every bump. Of which there are many. Thus
shaken and
stirred we arrive in the apparent chaos that is urban Chennai.
So Chennai ? It’s a mad mess of a city with little shape and
certainly no
form. In other words a classic merchants’ city like Auckland, or
Los
Angeles. Money-making cities without the great patrons or
vision that
would make any of them Chicago or Toronto. This was a
shock. I’d tried
to
avoid too many preconceptions, but I think I had expected grandeur and
perhaps
even beauty. You find it now and again in great public buildings
– the
Railway Station, the High Court, the Fort, in the Georgian style church
of St
George with banyan trees growing eerily out of the skull-and-crossboned
graves. And in the occasional faded private establishment like
the quaint
out-of-place
Oxford architecture of Higginbotham’s bookshop. The elegant
Brahman
enclave of Luz with its bungalows and villas is a rarity. Yet the
odd
thing is if you stop for a while, ignore the swirling mass of
auto-rickshaws
honking around you, see through the trio of cows in the middle of the
road,
peer over the top of the wattle and daub squatter cottages that appear
at every
other street corner like some Constable influenced billboard, imagine a
scene
without the coal dust from the port tracing a black smudge under every
lintel,
slap on a bit of paint here and there, and you can’t fail to notice
that
Chennai has an absolutely fabulous collection of 1950’s Modernist
architecture.
But as we were told time and time again, nobody cares. In a
country
steeped in its great historical myths, underpinned by historical social
structures, and driven by claimed historical wrongs, India appears
remarkably
disinterested in preserving or even conserving its built history.
Everything put together really is falling apart. Not only in Chennai
but pretty
much everywhere.
But even this disinterest in the past, or the respect of the built
environment
can’t explain Indian cities. Take Delhi for example. This
is a magnificent
city and I can take it any time, but how can you explain the
astonishing
expansiveness of Lutyen’s New Delhi with the mess that is Cumberland
Place, the
spaciousness of the Civil Lines, the illegally gated middle-class
enclaves of
the South Extension and the medieval intensity and mystery of
Shahjahanabad –
Old Delhi. Loved it, but never made sense of it. I don’t think
this is
unusual. For a Christmas present one of our hosts gave us Maximum
City,
Suketu Mehta’s currently hot book about Bombay (he refuses to call it
Mumbai). Spread over 300 pages is a super rich picture that fails
to come
into focus. [As an aside why is it that middle aged men find it
necessary
to drag their families back to important places of their youth in order
to
write about finding themselves again. Adam Gopnick did this with
Paris
and Bill Bryson with the entire United States. At least they
found
something - Mehta only gets more lost.
I have little sympathy]. Or take a small place like
Pondicherry,
with the mad compact bustle of the old town, the Mediterranean cool,
empty self
assured elegance of the French Quarter and everywhere the hidden hand
of the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram. These urban components are not your usual two
dimensional
mapping of social and historical strata where the rich live here, the
poor live
there, the new bits are here and the old crumbling bits there.
Instead,
these are great tectonic plates of utterly different conceptions of
what cities
are and could be grinding up against each other. Maybe that’s why
Indian cities
feel like a huge wound-up clockwork spring, ready to release the
potential
energy when the strain becomes too much.
So India ? Somewhere I read that Indians had three Gods; their
mother,
their son and their guest. The moment we stepped into the country
we were
enclosed by a protective shield of middle class India and its
servants.
Mehta acutely observes that in India you don’t acquire an apartment,
you
acquire a small business; a cook, a maid, a driver, a cleaner, a
concierge. By the time we left I’d forgotten how to make
breakfast, and
certainly had trouble remembering how to open a car door. My
clothes have
never been so well ironed – well ironed at all actually. Train
tickets
appeared from apparently nowhere, acquired by hidden hands on
mopeds. We
were passed with detailed attention from friend to friend, each
smoothing our
path in
shops, cafés, hotels and sightseeing. The care was welcome.
Every so often the chain
would
break and we would be alone, exposed, frozen possum-like in the
headlights of
the real raw India.
Fortunately, for me at least, travel is essentially less about place
and more
about people. For a month we were given eyes lent to us by the
kindness of
strangers. Through these eyes we were able to view the country
from far
more perspectives than we could ever hope. A business consultant
showed
us the marketing conservatism of Indian commerce, an injured dancer
gave us
entrée into the complex and demanding world of Bahratanatyam, a
broadcasting
bureaucrat shared with us his dream of Indian community radio and why
he is
planning to hire a ship and go pirate off the shores of Karnataka, a
movie set-designer
a perspective on the Chennai male hustlers, journalists introduced us
to the
complex weave of the intellectual élite and Indian politics, a concrete
company
accountant helped us shop for souvenirs (“you may know the language but
you do
not know the starting price”), the returned scientist couple who gave
us new
ways of seeing Delhi. Above all the unlikely collection of ex-pat
Indians
and Kiwis in whose company we toured and puzzled ourselves around
Rajasthan.
But the journey starts that first morning in Chennai. “Do you
want a
Western breakfast or an Indian breakfast ?” So began our voyage
into the
most surprising part of India. Its food. Sure trendy young
things
hang out in coffee bars that would fit comfortably in downtown
Wellington or
Seattle, and the even younger things pack any branch of MacDonalds you
can
find. But the coffee in those cafés is simply the best; thick and
rich in
the South, strong and spicy in the North, and give me a Mac Aloo Tiki
Burger
over a Big Mac anytime. In the entire month we never had anything
approaching
a mediocre meal – except perhaps some dull English and American
copies. It didn’t seem to matter what you paid – 4 rupees
for a cup
of rich bittersweet chai from a street stall, 45 rupees for 3 cups of
coffee, a
Masala Dosa and two slices of toast and jam in the Indian Coffee House
in
Pondicherry, 150 rupees for feast of liver and kidneys in the
labyrinthine Karim’s deep in Old Delhi or 500 rupees for a thali in the
upmarket Maidens hotel in the colonial part of Delhi, the result was
never
short of delicious. In some cases it was inspired. If you
are ever
down Jaipur way then a visit to LMB’s for their thali, kulfi and sweets
is
essential. Or for that matter the Natraj in Udiapur; scruffy it
may be,
but the meal was perfect. Even the train food had its moments –
especially the yogurts in their little disposable clay pots, the
remains of
which litter the railway lines in amongst the faeces of travellers and
slum
dwellers.
Ah yes trains. We spent a lot of time on trains.
Days. These
half-mile long strands are the lifeblood of India. Just as the guide
books tell
you, the choice is confusing and complex. First you have to
decide what
kind of travelling concession you qualify for - “circus performer” was
my
favourite. Then you have to chose the class. There’s first
class,
second class and third class. Within some of these classes there
may or
may not be a choice between air-conditioned and non-air conditioned –
which is
essentially a choice between being unable to see out of the sealed
window or
being blasted by the almost continuous noise of the train whistle.
Third class
was essentially wooden bus seats. We were told that to understand India
fully
you had to travel third class, and one look at the meat market of
those
carriages with their hard backed solid wooden seats convinced me
that you
can learn too much about a place. Yet people were
prepared to
sit on 36 hour journeys in such carriages. By comparison our
spare, vinyl
cells were luxury, even though clearly designed for a culture used to
sitting
crossed legged and sitting bolt upright.
We’d been warned about biscuit bandits who ply you with drugged
biscuits and
steal your luggage, and other horrors. We were told to chain our
luggage
to the seats. But the reality was more mundane and
friendly. In a
day and a half you get to know your fellow travellers and share their
hopes and
concerns. It’s a nice way to meet aspiring middle class Indians – our
Air
Conditioned Second Class companions were software engineers and
pharmacists heading home for the Christmas break.
At night the seats folded down and became reasonably comfortable beds. On the second class journey from Chennai we were given blankets and sheets. From Udiapur we nearly froze to death in our first class compartment without them, surviving covered in our newly purchased shawls. You learn another Indian paradox - travelling first class can be worse than travelling second.
Food arrives at arbitrary intervals, presumably depending on stops, and its unclear from where. Little packages of rice, dhal, sweets wrapped in paper and tin foil.
Stops are rare, and lengthy – ample time for instance to talk to the telecom executive who couldn’t get a flight home. Even though the stops are longer than your average New Zealand train journey, you have to keep your wits about you and be quick. The arrival of another train results in the mass departure of the food source. Just when the train is due to leave is guesswork. If you are at the back of the train the warning signs are few. They tend to sneak out slowly, gracefully and almost without a sound. Surfers never turn their back on the sea, Indian travellers never turn their back to the carriage.
During winter, timetables are essentially statements of intent. Much of north western India gets fogged in over December and January adding hours and occasionally days to train journeys. Being three hours late in Delhi from Chennai was wasn’t even commented on by the driver sent to us by our hotel.
Trains are one thing, stations are life forms of their own. I’ve watched dozens of movies featuring railways stations. Over the years I’ve concluded that these scenes are shot by people who travel by plane. But Indian stations are just like the movies; hawkers selling food, porters in red kurtas balancing improbable loads on their heads, piles of boxes overflowing carts, anxious people peering at the seat allocation boards, people asleep on the chairs, floors and stairs, auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers hustling for fares. And always someone pissing in the corner. You just watch and wait for the Director to shout “cut”.
But above all trains give you an idea of the scale of India. You travel for hours overlooking an unbroken landscape. India may be rich in diverse cultures and histories, but the scenery barely changes – endless fields of bright yellow rape, rich brown soil and the occasional knoll. It’s as if you had spent hours going around in a circles to arrive at the same station, with just a shift change in the food hawkers. We arrive in some anonymous place, exactly the same as the anonymous place four hours before. I’ve never heard of it. It barely exists on our map. The guide book has to say is that it is famous for its oranges. And it is bigger than Auckland.
The
oranges incidentally are delicious.
Two days stuck inside a carriage with two others travellers highlighted
a
feature of Indian culture that intrigued me greatly. Men,
generally young
men, are to Western eyes disconcertingly intimate. By the time of
our
first train journey we were quite used to seeing men with their arms
around
another’s shoulder. It’s a sensible way of keeping in touch
in the
typically crowded streets. I’d also got used also to the sight of men
facing
each other looking directly into each others eyes and holding
hand. But
up close in a railway compartment the real intimacy emerges. Our fellow
passengers, stridently heterosexual believe me, would spend long
minutes
talking with their fingers intertwining in and out of each other’s
hands.
The whole issue of Indian male sexuality is utterly confusing. On
the one
hand you hear how intolerant Indian culture is of men having sex with
men, and
on the other there are entire Hindu festivals dominated by
transvestites,
transsexuals and gay men. We spent a couple of hours visiting an
HIV/AIDS
project that is essentially a support group for male prostitutes who
ply a
profitable local trade on the beaches, trains and parks. The
planned reform
of the (British) sodomy laws is fairly regular newspaper fare.
And then
there’s the semi-official role of the eunuchs in the blessing of
weddings.
Although it was easy to get views on individual bits of the story, we
never
found anyone who seemed to have their head around the whole
story. Maybe,
like so many other aspects of Indian life, there is no whole story –
just lots
of bits.
The only certainty about Indian train journeys is that they end with a
mass of
human traffic, and a mad auto-rickshaw ride. Traffic. We
were
warned about the traffic. Driving in India is scary we were told.
Indian
drivers are crazy, people said. Yup, the experience of road
travel in
India is certainly different. I don’t recall sharing any LA
freeway with
camels, two-stroke auto-rickshaws, bicycles and trucks decked out like
fairground carousels. Nor do you meet bullock carts being driven
the
wrong way up the fast lane heading across the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
I don’t think
I’ve ever negotiated a complete grid-locked jam of very big trucks in
an
equally sized tourist coach quite like the intricate threading carried
out by
our driver in Rajasthan. Or for that matter seen so many people
peeing in
the middle of traffic mayhem. Indians share with the French an
almost
occupationally strong will to piss. In both countries, wherever you
are, on a
roadside there is always some bloke peeing. Frenchmen tend to
urinate on
their tyres, something I’ve always found rather endearing, but Indians
will aim
anywhere. In Chennai I even saw someone peeing against the
outside of a
urinal. But I digress. Indian driving. Against all
predictions, I felt very safe on Indian roads. There is a
difference
between being mad and bad. I felt OK hurtling along the wrong
side of the
road between Pondicherry and Chennai in a glorified sewing machine with
a
driver clearly used to at least two extra gears. If this trip had
been
from Wellington to Wanganui I’d have been terrified. New Zealand
drivers
are bad, Indian drivers are not. And it is worth pondering why. An awful lot of people have to cram
onto Indian roads, and they have to get from A to B. So what
seems to
have evolved is a unique set of rules that bear as much resemblance to
the New
Zealand Highway Code as a does a nail file to a species of South
American ragwort.
A colleague of mine who specialises in complexity theory has this
notion that
systems adapt to their environment by following deeply embedded
universal
rules. After a few days of roaring around like demented wasps in
auto-rickshaws, ancient Ambassadors, and nifty Marutis the rules slowly
revealed themselves. Keep moving at all costs, occupy any
available space
whatever your desired direction, give way only to things bigger than
you, and make
as much noise as possible. If these applied in New Zealand then there
would be
no morning hold up on the Hutt Motorway. A friend pointed out
that the
same rules applied to Indian conversation – perhaps for the same
reason.
Maybe we have hit on a deep Indian cultural trait - big country, lots
of
people, make your presence felt, keep pushing forward and finish
without
getting hurt.
Indian rules might unbung the Hutt Motorway but I seriously doubt we
have the
skill. And one thing that India’s size, caste structure and
diversity
means it that people spend their whole working life refining a single
skill. None of this clunky New Zealand generalism. The
drivers are
good because that’s all they do. All day they drive everyone else
around. This specialism is everywhere. India has absolutely
the
most professional waiters I’ve experienced. They pour a bottle of
water
with the same care and attention that a sommelier in New York would
give a
bottle of Chateau Yquem.
It is fashionable in these post post-Colonial times to say the only
things that
the British gave India was a common language, a common sport and
bureaucracy. Certainly you hear English in the most obscure
places and
cricket is played in the most unlikely settings. I saw one game
in the
Rajasthan highlands being played in three separate fields, and on the
outskirts
of Delhi in-between the cows, faeces and washing of a slum
backyard. But
perhaps the greatest tradition, perhaps the culmination of all the
other three,
is the Club. They come in many shapes and sizes. Lutyen’s New
Delhi must
be one of the world’s most elegant and gentle cityscapes, but deep in
the
bungalow-land immediately surrounding the expansive grandeur of the
government
buildings, the Delhi Press Club stands witness to the alleged seediness
of that
profession. God it was a shambles, with an alarming rogues’
gallery of
bar debts. Somehow someone had accrued 30,000 rupees of
tab. Even
at inflated New Zealand prices that’s an awful lot of Scotch on the
rocks.
By comparison the Women’s Press Club down the road was genteel, ordered
and
Spartan. We had tea on the lawn.
In many ways the clubs reflect the faded myth and self-referential
snobbery of
the Empire itself. The Madras Club didn’t admit Indians until the
early
60’s, nearly 20 years after independence. But for the full
force of
Indian bureaucracy and snobbery you had to be at the Chennai Gymkhana
Club. We stayed at the Club for three days, technically as a
guest of a
local journalist who jumped the long waiting list for membership
because of her
status as an “independent woman”. The Club is situated on an
island
between the old and new Chennai and is an island of small rituals and
large
rules. Paul and I couldn’t eat there one night because we were
not
wearing a lounge suit, even thought the temperature must have been in
the early
30’s. There were areas where you must wear shoes not
sandals.
Despite these rules there was a delicate shabbiness amongst the
otherwise
excellent facilities. The waiters uniforms were scruffy, too
large and
old. And mostly so were the waiters. Crows settled on the
ceiling
fans and looked disdainfully down at all this pretension. Oh and
the
bureaucracy. Saturday night’s conversation went something like
this :
“What time is dinner served in the club ?”
“8pm but you won’t be able to eat there”
“Why ?”
“Because you are not members”
“But we are here as guests of a member”
“Yes, but she has to sign you in for each meal”
“So what can we do, we are hungry ?”
“You could become temporary members”
“Good we’ll join as temporary members”
“You can’t because the office is closed on Saturdays”
“##@*”
“I’ll see what we can do, follow me”
So I follow the guest house manager across a lawn packed with the
children’s
annual Christmas party to the Club reception desk. There is an
animated
conversation while I wait. Arms fly around. Fingers are
pointed. “Come with me”. I follow out of the Club house,
across the
car park, down the drive to the Office. Which is not at all
closed. Very
open in fact. More conversations, more arm waving and finally two
pieces of
paper appear. We walk back to the guest house, fill out the
application
forms and hand over our 800 rupees. Dinner and drinks on the
terrace are
now only a few minutes away. But it is unwise in India to think
too far
ahead.
“Sorry they won’t accept the money until tomorrow morning”
“Why not”
“They can’t store it”
“Can we pay by credit card ?”
“No”
“But can we use the facilities as temporary members ?”
“No not until you pay the money. You can become members tomorrow”
“But we are leaving tomorrow. We want to eat now.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t persuade them. Here’s the money and form,
see if
you can do it”
At this point we committed a gross cultural faux-pas. We gave
up.
We were hungry and angry and not inclined to play the game any
further.
But in India transactions are expected to be long tortuous and
complex.
The torch is passed down the line until some form of resolution
occurs.
It is not the done thing to pack it in half way through. By doing
so up
we were essentially insulting the previous efforts of the
manager. So our
final task was to reinstate the poor man’s mana.
“Can we get the food brought here to the guest house ?”
“Oh yes, of course”
So we ate on the veranda of the guest house, maybe a hundred feet from
the Club
house. With the same food and the same waiters. Puzzling
the “why”
of all this. While our blood sugar levels returned to normal we
considered
whether the same thing would happen at, say, the Hutt Golf club, where
only the
groundsmen are Maori, and Jews were only allowed membership in recent
years. Or the Wellington Club. Probably, we
concluded.
Probably.
There were other neo-Colonial hangovers. At an upper-middle class
party
over New Year everyone except Paul and I drank whiskey. There was
the
Sunday morning book club meeting – a genteel and formal gathering of
the
Chennai literati. Teacups balanced on plates, polite
introduction of the speaker, the respectful questions, the vote of
thanks, the
gift.. Take away the bhajis from the plate and the saris from the
women
and you could have been in Rickmansworth. Oh
and the Panto. How do I describe the cultural
disorientation of sitting in a theatre in downtown Chennai, with
hundreds of
school-kids, watching a unique English tradition transferred roots and
all to
the heart of Tamil Nadu ? It was all there, the principal
boy/girl,
(Hercules with his ineffectual weapons of mass destruction), sluts
(Pickle,
Fickle and Tickle), the satire (CIA agents Pain, Panic and Fear), the
dim
witted villain Amerigon (hiss, boo), frightful cross-dressed Dame Deli
with
rather different weapons of mass destruction, Father Christmas, bad
acting,
even worse puns and fantastical musical interludes. But as always
India found
ways of intruding. The musical numbers came from Tamil movies,
the mince
pies were rosewater flavoured, and the Dame’s fake breasts were “shaped
like
idlies”.
And then there were the graves. Sometimes it seemed that the
English came
to India just to die. And died they did in their droves, often
quite
young, and invariably in a very English kind of way.
Captain Thomas Sewell 32 “after a short but honourable career in the
indefatigable discharge of his duty. Fell victim to the climate
of
Goomstor”. George Frederick Dager 29 “cut off in his prime of
life after
enduring a long and painful illness with that fortitude and self
denying
patience that characterised all his actions.” Henry Valentine
Connolly
Esq. 49 of Madras Civil Service Collector and Magistrate of Malabar who
“after
nearly 12 years devoted to the improvement of the province committed to
his
charge, fell at the hands of a band of fanatics.” Justice Oliver Denman
Hardy
“wantonly murdered on the steps of his court.” John Hart Collie
33
“premature and sudden dissolution in a distant clime.” I’m not
making
this up. Distant ? Distant
from where ?
The English weren’t the only ones to stamp their impression. The
Portugese had their Goa, and the French created Pondicherry’s elegant
quarter. Surrounding the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Chennai are
the
firms of Pais, Lobo and Alvares; the local school is a “Don Bosco
Institution”. The fine Armenian church testifies to the relic of
an
imported culture that virtually invented Chennai as a commercial centre.
Rajasthan. A coach load of mostly ex-pat Indians, partners and
kids.
And us. Given the huge distances between towns we spent a lot of
time
together in that coach, staring out at the traffic and landscape.
My
notes of the trip from Agra to Jaipur are mostly just short phrases;
great three
lane highways (we are on the road to Pakistan after all), bad roads,
bicycles,
camels, brickworks, yellow oil-seed rape, roadside barbers, road-side
truck
repairers, rocky outcrops with forts on top, beautiful looking
vegetables,
whirls of circular cow-dung patties left out to dry, women carrying
firewood on
their heads, tyres hanging from buildings to avoid them being too
beautiful,
Christmas dinner thali, fairground decorated trucks, bullock carts,
mosque guide
with iridescently blue eyes, puppet show, men peeing, people sitting
around
doing nothing, aluminium smelter. My notes for our evening in
Jaipur say
stalls, lights, bicycles, redbrick buildings, camels, elephants,
ordered mayhem
and unreal. Like Mos Eisley. My notes on the hotels; Maharajah’s
hunting
lodge, fountain in bedroom, puppet show in interior courtyard,
Thunderer beer,
toast and custard dessert, dreary impolite Western style hotel, a
nightmare
live version of Boney M doing the hokey cokey, power cuts, mice in the
air
conditioning vent, converted stables, guest house of a concrete works,
betel
nut wooziness.
Each of those contains an image and a story. I leave them to your
imagination – mine couldn’t be passed on. But I do have to say
something
about camels. Not much but it has to be said. There’s something
about the
fallen aristocrat about them. Beasts of burden, carrying big
loads,
pulling big carts, a priestly languidness about the walk and a rather
campy
distain that flows down that highly held nose. I could never
connect the
lope, the look and that load.
Oh yes the Taj Mahal. We went there on Christmas Day.
Despite the
huge crowds it seemed empty. The passion had left with the
jewels,
carpets and paintings. I’d long rehearsed my “nothing prepares you for
the real
things” speech. But it does. It was foggy. The Taj is
off-white. The edge between solid and gas blurred. It
was unreal. Which is what it
had always seemed to me. The Taj, like nearly all the palaces,
forts and
mausoleums we visited reminded me of the great houses and fortified
towns of Europe.
Vast, empty, a little sad, yet a testament to the driven-ness of the
human
conditions. There is no simple answer to the question “why
?” Only
“what” and “how” remain to be seen. Perhaps that’s why the palace
at
Udiapur made sense to me - it is still lived in. It has an
existence
beyond structure. The comparison between Udiapur and the vast
vacant ancient
real estate that dominated our time in India confronted me with a
question
about what, exactly, are we preserving. The idea of history
? The
idea of India ? Can the idea of anywhere be reflected in
crumbling walls
?
In the late 60’s, a young journalist, William Least Heat Moon spent a year circumnavigating America. Keeping only to the blue highways, visiting places whose names intrigued him; places like Heaven, and Hell. He even went to Nowhere. He did it to understand America, but ended up understanding only himself. Fifteen years later he repeated the exercise, only this time he ventured no further than 10 miles from his home in Tennessee.
I’ve written much about my travels around the world from the first time I headed to the US – around the same time as the young Moon finished his own orbit. In more recent years I’ve inflicted these reflections on others. But I’m not a natural diarist. I’ve never recorded stasis. Until now. For the past two months I’ve ventured much less than 10 miles. As I sit here in a lodge on a volcano, I can almost spit the distance I’ve travelled, although right now that particular activity would be risky because of the 120kph winds. I’ve left this mountain twice – once for a staff piss-up and once because our car threw its fan belt on the mountain road. Two months on a mountain ? Have I mountain madness ? Possibly. I seem to open the fridge instead of the crockery cabinet with disturbing regularity, and often wander into the larder without the faintest idea why, saving my honour by randomly grabbing a banana or a packet of Yoghurt mix so no-one will ask why I’m emerging empty handed.
Hang on a minute, you say. Staff piss-up ? What staff piss-up ? Bob’s been self-employed for nigh on a decade and a half.
To get close to that answer you have to wind time back almost a year. Well four years actually, when I took up snowboarding. Three years later at the rather unfashionable age of 52 I qualified as a snowboard instructor. With the questionable exception of my New Zealand drivers’ licence, it was my first formal qualification in over 30 years. So it seemed a shame to nail the certificate to my office wall and merely let it fade under the harsh light of Godzone. In any case, passing the exam was the hardest thing I’d done in years, so what better way to heal the mental scars and physical bruises than to actually do the business. A few months ago, I peered at my bank account, did a few mental calculations, put the cat into therapy, looked deep into my boyfriend’s eyes and applied for the worst paying job I’ve have since my late teen stint washing boats in Florida.
So it is that every morning at 8.30am you won’t see me nursing a cup of coffee at Revive or Rise, but cruising down a cat-track, dressed in a Santa coloured uniform with a snowboard clamped to my feet. Riding to work has taken on a new and occasionally jittery perspective. In job terms, it has been surprisingly seductive passage through the veil from self-employment to the world of supervisors, timesheets, days off, payslips and the ski field equivalent of smoko room gossip. There is a sense of strange security in the notion that someone else is responsible for whatever goes wrong. I can now understand why the industrial democracy movement failed so dismally in the 80’s and 90’s. It wasn’t intransigent management, nor overheated ambitions of Unions, but the simple fact that when someone is better paid than you are then why the Hell should you do their work for them ?
I absolutely adore this job. Even now, two months on, when much that was strange frightening and challenging has become familiar routine. I also am beginning to think I might also be quite good, although I reckon I learn more from my students than they do from me. I reserve great respect, bordering on awe, for those who are clearly much better than I. I’m not too proud to admit that this is the vast majority of the other instructors.
One thing I find particularly attractive is the spirit of the workplace. Sure there tensions, backbiting and grumbles – but what impresses is the way that things are chaotic yet tied together. It is a real community of practice whose origins and drivers difficult to pin down. There aren’t many cushy numbers. Some of the jobs look cool, but many are nasty, brutal and dangerous. Do you really want to be running down a mountain at 3am hitting metal towers with an oversized baseball bat ? Not me either. Or try standing around all day lifting four year old kids on to swinging chair lifts. By comparison being in a red Santa suit with Whakapapa Snow School plastered all over it is a pushover, even on a day where you can’t see the end of your snowboard. But despite these great differences in roles and responsibilities, there is a sense of collective endeavour seems to engender a sense of whanaungatanga. Of course it means that nothing you do is anonymous. There is always someone looking out for you or at you. Guiding a student down a tricky slope I rode found myself encased in plastic netting. I had slid backwards into a slow sign. Embarrassed but hopefully unseen I picked myself up and rode towards the lift line. Unseen ? Not a chance. Walls may have ears in wartime, but mountains have eyes in winter.
Ski and snowboard instructors are an intriguing bunch. It’s easy to fit them conveniently into the young, drunken, itinerant category of humanity. Yup there are plenty of green faces on Fridays after payday, but there are also the sober-headed careerists. And what an odd career. Getting badly paid in three continents defies economic rationalist argument. Challenging most motivational arguments is the fact that instructors come back to this impossible, unpredictable mountain year after year knowing that 90% of those they instruct will only spend a day on the mountain and rarely benefit from their particular skills. Gareth Morgan just wouldn’t understand. Nor would Robert Kyosaki. I pity them their poverty of insight – instructors live for the delight of the individual lesson and the individual challenge of the moment.
Money barely comes into the equation. Instructors work hard to be able to afford to be here. Some spent the summer working for the Department of Conservation pulling out weeds, others drove fork-lifts in timber yards, one ran a surf school. The favoured sons and daughters earn real money in the States or Europe. They go to Colorado and Tahoe, where the snow schools up to 800 strong are strongly Kiwi, pay a respectable wage, good commission and substantial tips.
The teaching ? It will come as little surprise that much of the stuff you learn to get the qualification seems no use whatsoever when you are faced with nine paying punters and ninety minutes to do something with them. This is less knowledge transfer and skill development and more show business. I’ve realised that I’m primarily in the entertainment industry not the sports development industry. Evidence ? I always ask at the beginning of each lesson how many are here just for one day. It’s around 70%. It doesn’t take long to realise your basic job is to teach people enough to stay safe and go home without creating an ACC claim. Many North American and European instructors just can’t get their heads around this lack of emphasis on skill development. In fact, one called me “unprofessional” when I said my primary job related to safety and not technical skills. The reality (as all Kiwis reading this will understand viscerally) is that New Zealanders enjoy trying things out, having a go. If they have fun doing so will return. Actually getting good at something is secondary, and attractive to a select few.
Challenges, that is what this game is all about. Challenges to your assumptions. You can never risk making assumptions about anyone. Instructors are one thing, but take the students. You meet maybe 30 people in the course of a day for an hour to ninety minutes. You look at them and immediately start working out how they are going to be to teach, what they are likely to learn. Five minutes later you have changed your mind, ten minutes after that and you are somewhere else with them. In the end, what you have to do is engage with them. Engagement is the critical skill in instruction. And that is the difficult thing - you make an initial judgement about who you are able to engage with most, but darned me it often turns out to be someone else.
At first I crammed in as much as possible in the ninety minutes. Now I'm now convinced that the real skill is knowing what to leave out of lessons, not what to put in. You can see that in the really skilled and highly qualified instructors - they seem to do almost nothing. It's a bit like watching Michael Caine act.
There are still some challenges though. I seem to have a particular problem with adolescent girls who are soooo "cool", large unfit students, and men in their early twenties who get bored if they are not throwing backside 360's within twenty minutes of putting on a board.
But the big problem for me is drama queens. It’s terribly dangerous to stereotype people but my goodness there are some archetypes. Drama queens are either young Fijian Indian boys or Pakeha girls from Auckland or Tauranga. The boys are recognisable by the close proximity of their parents with a video camera. I have learned to politely shoo them away. Things usually improve after that. The kids ski school which is tucked in a corner of the beginners' area actually erects barriers. Ostensibly they are to keep the kids in, but their primary purpose is to keep parents out. [I recall when working for the Department of Corrections I was told that the main purpose of prison walls is to keep things out rather than prisoners in]
The girls are instantly spotted. They are usually dressed in pastel colours (pinks and blues) and always wearing those wide necked Acrylic turtle necked sweaters or scarves. What the DC's don't know is that their attention seeking tactics are universal, limited and entirely predictable. I can set my watch to them. In the first five minutes they wallow around pleading helplessness. I explain how they can get up or sort out their problem and turn my attention to other students. After a few minutes they realise that I'm not going to help them any more and usually get up and grumpily rejoin the lesson. Within the next five minutes they are saying something like "Oh I can't do this snowboarding thing, I'm giving up". I smile and say "That's fine. It's entirely your choice whether you stay in this lesson or not." I turn my attention to the other students, leaving them standing (or usually sitting there). They usually sit on the ground for a bit longer this time, whilst the grey matter sloshes around the memory banks working out what to do next. The collective consciousness clangs into gear around ten minutes later and you get something like "My feet/calves/toes hurt". At which point I say "If you feet/calves/toes hurt you have the wrong sized boots. That's no good, wrong sized boots really hurt and this will really affect your ability to continue this lesson. There is nothing I can do about it. I suggest you return to rentals and get some new boots. It will take you ten minutes or so and since you will be missing an important part of the lesson I recommend you explain this to the supervisor who will arrange for you to go to the next lesson." Usually they leave the lesson at this point and give up. Occasionally they join the next lesson, and try to find another sucker. I always own up and apologise to the poor instructor who then is lumbered with them. The conversation today went "I'm sorry I gave you the drama queen Steven". "That's OK Bob" "Did you manage to do anything with her ?". "No". "Did she listen to a single thing you said ?" "Not a word, Bob. Not a word."
I've also learned much about kids. To my surprise I really like teaching kids. There's an energy and spontaneousness about them that means you are always making things up as you go along. I'm not a "play games and make them have fun" kind of teacher. I'm much more technique focused. And despite what the general view is - you can actually treat kids as seriously as adults and keep their attention. The one thing you do have to do is constantly check their understanding. They are adept at saying "yes" to adults just to shut us up, and not saying they don't understand something. I guess because there is so much they don't understand, that they don't think of telling you about some specific idea that they don't quite get.
I've also learned much about fathers. Fathers are so proud of their kids - much more than mothers. There are three kinds of dads. There's the close-up dad, the hidden dad and the café dad.
Mostly dads stay away so the close-up dads are usually father/son lesson combinations. The interaction is fascinating - either competitive or "listen to the instructor" kind. I had the latter combination this afternoon with a late teenager and his father. Father constantly lecturing son, who of course completely ignored him - largely to his advantage. The exception to this are generally Indian fathers who hang around with a video cameras.
The hidden dad knows that hanging around is a bad idea, but also likes to see how things are going. It is a cat and mouse exercise whereby he is trying to stay out of sight, but still observe. Every so often I'll catch sight of him wandering innocently around the field. Kids are generally so focused that they fail to notice him. You and him exchange distant smiles and nods.
The café dad stays way out the way, but mysteriously reappears just as the lesson ends. You give these guys a full debrief since they know little about boarding but really want to hear how it went. The exception is the skiing dad who hang around for hours waiting for them to reappear to collect their charge.
If I had to squash all I’ve learned in the past six weeks to a sound bite, I’d say that there are three critical T's in snowboard instructing; tools, timing and terrain. Initially I'd imagined that tools were important - the so-called tricks of the trade. Hence you saw me in the first month rushing around trying out people's ideas, and borrowing various instruction books. In the past weeks I've begun to realise that actually you don't need very many tools - the really critical factors are timing those tools, and doing so on the right terrain.
One of the key things about terrain is the snow. With the variable weather conditions; snow, rain, warmth, cool I'm getting Smilla's Sense of Snow. I can tell now by looking what kind of things I can do on what kinds of slopes. There's porridge where you can do very little but teach people to go sideways. It has a slightly grey look. Then there's soft - which is very good for teaching people to make subtle gentle movements, although it does have invisible hands that grab the board and let it go unexpectedly. It has a slightly hazy look to it. There's the confusing - light snow on top of soft. Then there's the fantastic stuff which looks pure white and you can do anything on. Then there is crispy which gets super slippery and fast - very good for teaching people more aggressive moves. It looks very white but has a serrated edge. It usually arrives very quickly around 2.30pm and spreads around the whole field like gravy on a tablecloth. And then there is the morning rock hard. Very deceitful it beckons you saying "look here I'm perfect and just like yesterday afternoon" Below you it sounds like cycling along a gravel road.
The “adaptive” skiing and riding scene here is quite big. I’m intrigued by the challenge of instructing deaf, blind, and disabled students, and have signed up for a training program on my days off. Consequently, I volunteered to help with the Special Olympics Week during one of the worst weather weeks of the season so far. Pouring, cold rain and zero visibility. It was hard work with students, mentally and physically. Nothing much goes in, and what does rattles around for a short time before falling out again. You hold people up to prevent them falling, and then haul them up again when they inevitably do. You want someone on a heel edge. You try to tell them to lean back on their heels and they fall over. So you try another tack. Sit down like you are on a chair. So they sit down in the snow. Now you tell them to pull up their toes - and they lean forward and fall face down. So you abandon the “telling” approach and try the "feeling" approach. To get them to feel what an edge is like by placing your hand under the board. They topple backwards. So you try the visual approach. "Look do you see the gap between the board and the snow. They lean forward and your hand is trapped. Eventually in the driving rain you make it down to the chair. I'm exhausted and wondering what the Hell I'm doing. They are wet through and having a ball. At this point you realise what the Hell you are actually doing. I was a great time, but after two afternoons I was exhausted. The other guys kept it up for four whole days; my admiration is boundless.
Apart from adoring the job, I adore this mountain.
I've never regarded myself as an emotional man. Passionate perhaps, but lachrymose no. But there is something about this mountain that keeps me close to tears almost every time I look at it or hear about it. I wish I knew the emotional attachment I have with this area, but I hope I never lose that sense of turangawaewae. Visually of course the area is without parallel. The way in which the pure white of the mountain cuts across the deep blue of the sky looks like a piece of gigantic origami. The visual drama of the Te Heu Heu shark tooth ridge, Ngaruahoe’s pure white puffer cone, the silky Lake Taupo, and Mount Taranaki pining in the distance like a castle in the air; a million dollar view for free at the café on the Far West. The sunsets reflect the tones and drama that you tend to see on the covers of 1960's paperback science fiction. I just cannot describe the shades of red, or the way the mountain goes salmon pink for just five minutes before the sun disappears in the evening. I just lean on the balcony window with my mouth open in amazement, and hope the lodge web cam captures just a shadow of the grandeur and wonder.
Ah yes, the lodge. I’m staying at my ski club’s lodge, just a dwarf’s throw from Mordor. Back in the late 40’s and early 50’s various outdoor organisations were allowed to build lodges up here. There are now 50 or so, clinging limpet-like to the volcanic pumice in a pattern so random that they could be eruption debris. This particular lodge is set slightly away from most, nestled in a small basin rather than the ridge lines favoured by many. This gives us at least the illusion of security, although in one particular gale one of our lodge custodians expected to wake in the morning and find she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The lodge is shaking as I type this.
The lodge was developed in parts over the past fifty years, mostly by enthusiastic amateurs. Consequently everything is over-designed and idiosyncratic. The plumbing, electrics and carpentry reflects more the passions and fascinations of long forgotten club members than utility and purposefulness. As I type, two members are under the lodge in minus 5 degrees temperatures and 120kph winds trying to work out why the heating system for the drainage systems has failed, allowing the waste water to freeze and thus shower water flowing out of the women’s washroom. We also have telephones that don’t ring because of some quirk in the wiring. There’s a baffling but highly effective means of altering the quantity of hot water available that would bring distinction to a Roman Bath house. The web cam is powered by a computer running Linux, which means when things go wrong you find me on a ladder with a cellphone clamped to my ear being talked through machine code. With such serious complexity something fails almost all the time, so at any one time part of the switchboard or water system is usually scattered around the lodge in various states of repair.
Repairs beget repairs. A minor problem with the thermostat in the women’s washroom led to boiling steam out of the kitchen tap and has led to an interesting chain of events that ironically allowed the women’s water outlet to freeze. I’m strongly reminded of the Flanders and Swann song about the gas man’s error requiring a carpenter to fix, whose error then required an electrician to fix, which then required a glazier to fix, which then required painter to fix. The painter subsequently painted over the gas tap which meant the meant that the gas man cometh once more.
This is all men’s stuff of course. But such obsessiveness to mind numbing detail is not just for the guys. There are two women who every time they arrive reorganise the crockery, cutlery and cooking gear. Unfortunately they have different systems, so spend time rearranging each others’ work. [It’s infectious - earlier today I was to be found matching up the cereal bowls]. We have a perfectly good industrial dishwasher that cleans just about everything in three minutes. But no, according to a couple of other women "its much quicker to do it by hand", so they wash and scrub every pan and meat tray within an inch of its life. It takes them hours when the washer would do the basics in minutes. Three weekends ago I overheard another woman tut-tutting that we don't colour code our cleaning cloths; blue for toilets, pink for bathrooms and yellow for kitchen. My God we have enough trouble getting people to do kindergarten stuff like closing doors and turning off lights. Colour coded wiping cloths sounds like postgraduate lodge keeping to me.
Yes the club has character and characters. Perhaps that’s inevitable when you think that the club runs three multi-million dollar sports accommodation facilities on different sides of the mountain. You have to be a bit odd to be part of that. Most of the work is done by volunteers spread around an island the size of the UK who shuttle unseen and unheralded back and forth each weekend. This is a Pakeha marae – no question.
Over the five or six years I’ve been a member I’ve got to know most of these characters, and there are stories for each one I’d love to tell. I’d like to say that the ethics of my trade prevent me from dishing up the stories, but I’m less worried about ethics than my continued good favour in the club. No matter who this note goes to, it will eventually get back to the people themselves. So I’ll talk only about the oldies. The oldies literally built this club. They are now in their 70’s and 80’s. They are beautiful skiers and inspiring company. In a club that is wall to wall with tradition the oldies are often the least hidebound. Indeed as us merely middle aged struggle with blinking oven lights and text messaging, the oldie conversations are full of talk about broadband speeds, cell phones options, digital camera pixels and computers infrastructure. Last week I heard a detailed discussion about the latest earthquake research. The oldies have also taken to the new dishwasher with gusto. No doubt about it, the old fogies are less fogish than the middle aged members of this club. Why ? I think they all know their limits and enjoy every moment leaning against them to see if they move. But then you hear comments like "Oh I've run out of brothers-in-law and you realise that everything they do they know is time limited. Despite this sense of mortality, if belonging to a club is going to keep me in that frame of mind until my late 70's then I'll take out life membership right now.
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Nearly 25 years ago, a Greyhound bus pulled into an attractive little mountain town in the middle of the Canadian Rockies. It was a stunningly beautiful day, somewhere between late spring and early summer. I was on my way home to London from Vancouver, and the trip through the Rockies was the icing - as it were - on an already rich experience. I hadn't known what to see, or even to feel, but the grandeur of the huge blocks of stone that stood sentry on either side of the main street kept me curious. And of course that remarkable image of the Banff Springs Hotel; part Scottish baronial fantasy and part cake decoration. Neuschwanstein minus the camp. As I see it, the Canadian Rockies are less of a mountain range and more huge vast slabs of rock jutting out of the ground. Ramps of the Gods, launching pads from some unknowable Valhalla pastime. I promised to return. Some promises take a while.
So it was nice to be back in Banff. In fact, it was nice to be back in Canada. Canada is so nice. Canadians are so nice. Even the accent is gentle. Nooo, ooot; they sometimes sound like the trains running along the edge of the town. Peter Ustinov once described Toronto as "New York run by the Swiss." Banff feels like the Queenstown equivalent.
I was brought up in a tourist town and I understand them well. I understand the diluted cynicism resigned to transiency. I can detect the layers of commitment; the weekly tourist, the seasonal worker and the temporary resident - all going though the cycles determined for them. I notice the pristine stand-up-straight main street, and the cracks, potholes and shanties one row back. Having seen both sides, I'm also a pretty good tourist myself - being able to read both sides of the narrative. However, one aspect of being a tourist in this town really destabilised me. The place is full of British. I don't mean the odd isolated Scouse, I mean entire hotels full of them. Busloads of guttural Geordie, hooting Scot, nasal London and clanging Yorkshire are disgorged daily, spewing out into the nearby hotels. The effect on me emotionally was unexpected and strong. The most common feeling when surrounded by travelling Brits is usually embarrassment and shame; UK tourists have a terrible reputation for mayhem. But these were nice, neat, friendly people; the gentle affluent classless society that Tony Blair has wet dreams about. No I didn't feel in the slightest embarrassed, but I felt mighty claustrophobic; at times needing to take great gulps of Canadian air to settle myself. Fortunately there is a lot of it around to salve my rattled nerves.
This is a beautiful place to ski and board - even though for much of the time the much fabled powder was a bit illusive. Every place I go these days seems to be unseasonably something - too warm, too wet, too cold. Is it just me getting older and able to spot exceptions to well established pattern, or is the great temperate clock needing a dose of oil ? On one day it was so warm that my snowboard sank in the slush, sticking me in the snow at an alarming angle. But when the snow arrived the sense of flying with your feet on the ground once more returned.
Some weeks ago, a few of us were swapping travel irritants. Plane tales from abroad. We canvassed familiar terrain; screaming babies, shouters, video screen blockers, very large occupants of aisle seats, and of course the 30 minute make-up job in the only working lavatory. However, I hadn't heard of the Nevada shuffle. I was told you get these en route to Reno or Las Vagas - expectant gamblers rehearsing their card skills. Not playing but shuffling. Endlessly shuffling. You just can't imagine how irritating the noise is, said our informant. We clucked and tutted sympathetically, but frankly I thought it a bit prissy. Well, eat your thoughts Mr Williams, because I've now sat in front of two clearly Nevada bound guys and the noise is **@^^ing maddening. Of course as a true Kiwi I sat there fuming. Not at the shufflers. Hell if they need to get a life, then who am I to intervene. No not them but the person who told me about the habit. Without that knowledge I doubt if I'd even have heard the noise let alone be driven to distraction by it.
I've long separated out people into travellers and arrivers; those for whom the journey itself has interest and those for whom the destination is the prize. Over the years Paul and I have slowly and painfully managed to accommodate our conflicting ways of engaging with the process of moving around the world. These days I'm pretty much allowed to wander the highways and byways as much as I wish as long as the route takes in the places that Paul wants to see and gives us adequate time to do the things that Paul wants to do once we get there. So it is we find ourselves driving up the long way from San José to Healdsburg through the Napa Valley vineyards and the wealth of the American middle class. So too we find ourselves a few days later ambling around the back roads of the Russian River en route to Point Reyes. The tatty holiday towns of the Russian River contrast strongly with the affluent confidence of Healdsburg and the wine country. We stop off at Guerneville - known locally as Gonadville because of its historical gay community. The gayness emerges strongly as we sit in a local Deli, but the abundence of physical frailty comes as a shock. Guerneville is town full of prematurely aged; this is where post AIDS=Death gay men moved when the insurance ran out.
We head down the coast to Point Reyes, periodically and without success attempting to release Mahinarangi Tocker from the prison of the car's CD player. We pass rich new cliff top settlements; suburbs miles from the city. Why in God's name are they there ? Unanswerable questions. Point Reyes is an astonishing set of landscapes, from salt marsh to forest towering above the valley floor to butter coloured cliff tops, under which Sir Frances Drake repaired the Golden Hind half a millennium ago. This is a place of action geological speaking. Five million years ago the view from the lounge of our motel would have been the surfers at Santa Cruz rather than the grebes of the salt-marsh. The modest motel has an immodest view and equally immodest lounge from which to view it; vast with comfortable used leather couches, big open fires, large windows, and outside a boardwalk across the salt marsh. I walk out over the planks in the early morning, across the sandfire. I wonder idly if you can still get sandfire in Norwich market - it makes such delicious eating in the spring when still bottle green and before it turns brick summer red. I recall my earlier career as an ecologist, and how such landscapes were once a familiar part of my life. And wonder at the cycles that occasionally allow your present to rhyme with your past.
I bump into a fellow New Zealander on the boardwalk, and we talk of Michael King. So far away a mighty totara had fallen. I met him only a couple of times, but his writings were an important introduction to my life in New Zealand. His respect for Paul and support for his work was just one of his many acts of generosity. How ironic that a man who fundamentally understood what New Zealanders were, are and really could be, dies at the very moment when we need that kind of vision and wisdom. Maybe the passing of such a man might jolt our little country back into something resembling a sense of proportion. But then I ask another New Zealand friend what he thought of Michael King's death. "Who ?"
And so to San Francisco. My other city by the bay.
I get off the Muni at the hospital stop and walk down the hill. Soon I'm in Golden Gate Park - a place that links the city to the Pacific and by association me to home. As I get lost in the tangle of paths and alternating scents of bitter pungent garlic and sweet fragrantissima, I'm reminded of one of the Park's striking features. In contrast with the Cubist angularity of the city's street layout, the park hasn't a single straight line. From above you can see how San Francisco comprises three vast grids that crash together like great tectonic plates, buckling the topology that the streets almost completely ignore. Yes the roads go off in strange directions at times, but always in straight directions. Not so the park; the paths twist and wind around the hills and valleys forming a confusing knot of possibilities. Once the fog rolls in, as it did today, any sense of direction is an illusion. I recall once walking from the shoreline towards the city only to find myself back an hour later under the shade of the Ocean Beach windmill. Maybe the genius who imagined this place understood the need for San Franciscans to unwind the clockwork spring so tightly drawn by their daily circuit of the City's rigid geometry. Watching the kids' parties and strides of the walkers today there was indeed a looseness that I don't see elsewhere in the city.
The phenomenon of places like Golden Gate Park always astounds me and depresses me. In today's mean spirited public discourse would a Willy Brown, or a Kerry Prendergast have even the imagination let alone the courage to put aside immeasurable tracts of valuable real estate just for growing a few trees and azaleas ?
Back in Britain weddings happen in two places; churches and registry offices. They are, by and large, cold distant affairs with neither venue having significance to most of those I've witnessed getting wed. In New Zealand the tradition of marriage celebrant allows for weddings to be held pretty much anywhere. Over the past fifteen years, I've observed solemn vows being taken in back yards, hotel gardens, the odd beach or two, and most recently in the middle of a field with the happy couple arriving dressed as dwarves on the back of a tractor. But an Iranian/German wedding in a Californian Art Gallery was something else - a joyful and enjoyed combination of Persian and German traditions; of the sacred and the profane; of poetry and prose of two great intellectual traditions; speeches of love and affection; and Iranian rock and roll.
By a delightful coincidence the wedding coincided with a large and mostly hilarious exhibition in the Art Gallery that parodied images of domesticity; vast centipede sofas devouring other furniture, bookcases sawn into hundreds of slices and sliding Dali clock-like down the walls, sequined kitchens, stuffed deer as laundry baskets, and ovens that opened up to reveal tiny model kitchens inside. Then a shock set of photographs that were truly frightening - women wearing the chador their faces replaced by household items such as irons, saucepans and cheese graters. The image of a woman with an iron where a face should be haunts me. And here I am at an Islamic wedding where not a single woman is wearing a scarf let alone a veil. Life is rich with irons and ironies.
Almost exactly a week later Paul and I are in an old people's home just off Folsom and 4th. I'm observing a child looking up at an unseen pair of adults; an elderly couple with their foreheads touching; a pair of twentysomething men in a queue with babies slung around their necks; a long line of umbrellas in the rain. I have tears in my eyes. These are unexceptional photographs with exceptional power. Context is all. For three mad wonderful weeks in February, San Francisco allowed gay and lesbian lovers and partners to do something as ordinary as getting married. With that knowledge, this small exhibition of maybe 30 photographs is transformed from a collection of interesting images into a remarkable document of events whose meaning is multilayered. It is the power of passion - of people declaring publicly how they are and what matters to them. But it is also the city of San Francisco doing the same.
The US is popularly supposed to be the most deregulated country in the world. A world where the market reigns supreme. Well like all "free" markets there is a boundary to the freedom, and the US pulls that boundary pretty tight at times. I'm filling out a form right now. Down in the bottom right hand corner lies something that catches my eye and humour. Apparently, by regulation, all federal documents have to have an estimate of the time taken to complete whatever tasks they refer to. I'm alarmed by the statement that this little two page form has a 5 hour estimate. Five hours ! Surely not. But ……
A contract in the US seemed like a good idea initially. After all, the prospect of earning $US and spending $NZ seems an attractive deal. That's before I entered the netherworld of international tax laws. So I spend the flight from Detroit to Denver trying to complete W-8BEN. Here's a sample :-
"If you check this box, you must provide the withholding agent with the required statement for income from a notional principal contract that is to be treated as income not effectively connected with the conduct of a trade or business in the United States …"
or this
"A flow through entity is a foreign partnership (other than a withholding foreign partnership) a foreign simple, or foreign grantor trust (other than a withholding foreign trust), or, for payment for which a reduced rate of withholding is claimed under an income tax treaty, any entity to the extent the entity is considered to be fiscally transparent (see below) with respect to the payment by an interest holder's jurisdiction."
I won't bore you with the topology of fiscal transparency, but the explanation - a travesty of the word - runs to a single sentence of 68 words.
Having ploughed through all this and signed on the dotted line. I now discover that I have to fill out form W-7. I need a US tax identity. The good news ? I have a copy of the form on my computer. Ah yes, the bad news … just the form isn't enough, I have to confirm my non-resident alien sub-species by providing the US tax office with my passport (like what ?), or with a copy of said passport certified as a copy by the "issuing authority" (which I think the NZ passport office doesn't do) or by a US notary public. Given that the form is expressly intended for people who are earning cash for services performed outside the US of A by US non-residents, I wonder which bozo came across the US notary public idea. I gather they are pretty common in Ashburton. So it's the original passport or … wait, there is an alternative. I can send two copies of other forms of documentation …. oh only one of them exist in New Zealand. Ever had the feeling that there's a possibility you are about to work for nothing ?
But right now I have to take some dogs for a walk. Long story.
“Do you want to take me home ?”. A man is staring at me, face ebony black and polished like the legs of a Victorian piano. “I’ve a dick as big as this” spreading his hands wider than a keen fisherman. I was in SoMa just below Mission. The soup kitchens are still around, and nearby a circling chant of banner waving Latinos are protesting against the non-Union activity of a local hotel. But this is juxtaposed with flash new townhouses, aluminium fronted whole food stores and Prius cars. It’s an area where the rules are fluid, changing gears from one era to another. I wasn’t cruising him, just waiting at the lights to cross the road. “Not my thing” I lied. “Good” he replied “cos it’s only a big as this” narrowing his hands to something bordering on self-deprecation. We laughed and crossed the road together.
Every time I try to walk the length of Golden Gate Parks something goes awry. Last time I ended up back at the beginning, this time I found myself trapped in the nature reserve, wandering around the perimeter like some frantic lion in a small time circus. Some thirty years ago I was captured by the Chinese Tea Garden, where I had my first fortune cookie. “You will be married within a year” was written on a thin sliver of paper hidden by the folded candy. I guess it didn’t say which year. I’ve never quite worked out what draws me here time after time to the Park. It’s a mess of woodland and pasture, irritatingly broken by noisy busy roads. There are many more beautiful places in the world, in San Francisco even. Perhaps I’m just impressed by the impossible dream of creating this wonder out of sand dunes. Perhaps. I think it’s the smell; that irresistibly masculine scent of Monterey Pine oozing into the in the early winter air. It hits you as soon as you walk into the park and leaves you the moment you leave. It’s an olfactory tag, a visitors badge that you only wear here, right now and nowhere else in the city. Or anywhere else.
One of the great unwritten dilemmas of train travel is which carriage to chose. Do you walk to the end of the platform to find an emptier carriage ? Do you panic and pick the next to the next to last one, just so you don’t reach the end and have to go back under the smirk of later passengers who got in earlier carriages later ? In my days in London it was simple, you knew intuitively which carriage doors opened next to which exit. But on a strange station, with an unknown destination how do you cope with a completely empty train ? And especially the two-tiered CalTrains. Being brought up in the UK, I’ve never quite got used to the double or triple storied monsters that cruise the tracks of France, Australia, Canada and the US. Double decked busses – yup always head to the top, but I find myself always opting for the bottom of double decked trains.
The last time I travelled on CalTrain I knew less about San Francisco than I do now. I was coming back from Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto and noticed that there was a station on 22nd St. I was staying near 22nd St. So it seemed a much better idea to get out early rather than ride all the way to Downtown to go all the way out again. In those days I didn’t realise that the streets run almost the entire length of the city. So I found myself miles from my final destination at the bottom of Potrero Hill in the days when the Bay side of the Hill was a deserted industrial area. A bus eventually rattled into view and took me the most circuitous route imaginable – it took me two hours to do what might have taken forty minutes had I hung on less impatiently.
Some years ago I produced my list of favourite places in the world and mused what they generally had in common. It was depressingly clear; not great views, or deep sources of knowledge, nor sites of impressive human endeavour. Crawling up to about level three of Mazlow it was all about food and drink. So if you want to find me after 9pm on any night in Chicago, then I’d strongly recommend you pay the door charge and head to the front booths of the Green Mill (http://www.centerstage.net/music/clubs/green-mill.html) Possibly, no probably, the best place outside of Ronnie Scott’s in London to hear jazz as it should be played. In small, cheap, enthusiastic environments. Indeed it is probably cheaper to fly to Chicago than pay the door charge at Ronnie Scott’s. The Green Mill is part of Chicago’s gangster heritage, Al Capone was once a co-owner, yet somehow it has managed to avoid becoming a tourist attraction. It still looks like a cross between French brothel, sixties nightclub and Gainsborough painting. The toilets locate you somewhere within the Glastonbury Festival and a First World War trench. My companion came back reeling from the ladies, and the gents is a place where those unspoken rules about the delicate business of selecting which stall to choose are suspended for whichever presents the least hazard to heath and well being. I also broke another rule. I actually spoke to the guy next to me. He was the drummer in the band and skilled to the point of making everyone else in the band look good. He was also impossibly cute. Sadly what came out of this hunky guy was a thin reedy nasally whine that made him sound like an out of tune clarinet. Another illusion shattered. Rules are made not to be broken.
In a warm claustrophobic half light, I turn this way and that, a bit confused and lost. I pass a representation of an Hawaiian lava flow, around reconstructed Tahitian grocery stores, though some strange stuffed animals in jungles and suddenly in the gloom there she is. Lonely, isolated, utterly out of context. Ruatepupuke. Not many know this but there is a Maori meeting house deep within the vastness of Chicago’s Field Museum. Built in the 1880’s, bought a few years later by a German entrepreneur, sometime thief and collector of things Maori. It arrived at the Museum a couple of years later and spent the best part of a century in pieces in the Museum’s storeroom before being exhumed and later restored by the tangata whenua of Tokomaru in the 1990’s.
As wharenui go Ruatepupuke is an insignificant affair. Even contemporary photographs of Tokomaru Bay fail to identify it. There is however a strange and possibly unique aspect of it, that makes me wonder if it was actually constructed for the tourist market. Built for export as it were. The front is unpainted, bare wood inlaid with paua shells. It’s astonishingly effective, and makes me ache to see the house in the outside world where the eyes could flash and sparkle in the sunlight. http://www.duffdoeschicago.com/archives/000047.html I recall once seeing a poor kowhai struggling to survive in an isolated corner of an Oxford garden. It all looked lonely and wrongly placed. So I paid my respects to Ruatepupuke as all Kiwi visitors to Chicago should, and left with tears in my eyes. Not because it should be in Aotearoa – the local hapu wish it to remain where it has been for most of its life – but because houses shouldn’t be in gloomy glorified cupboards. Or if they are, then they should be surrounded by friends and not sit on their own waiting for someone to wind their way through the maze.
Last time I bowled up to Kathy and Mike’s near perfect B&B (http://www.firststreetgardeninn.com) I ended up ten-pin bowling. This time it was draped in a toga and trick-or-treated their son’s house. Halloween is one of those distinctive American traditions that are part-myth and unsuccessfully transferred to New Zealand and other cultures. Last year I was in San Francisco crushed in a pack of the bizarre feeling both over and under-dressed. Other times I’ve waited in vain for kids to knock on the door to eat the vast array of candy in the bowl by the door. Perfectly sane adults don pink wigs (and togas) to greet people at the door. Pumpkin carved ghouls grin orangey out along the stoops. Skeletons are placed in windows. And everyone eagerly awaits the knock on the door.
“Diet coke please.” Diet Coke ? Did I really ask for a Diet Coke ? I hate Diet Coke. I did it without thinking. It was a reflex response when the flight attendant asked me. I’ve been here too long already. I’ve started drinking the coffee too. Far too long.
The US is not a place I note for its ability to observe the world sideways. In fact there are time when I suspect an irony by-pass. But of course I know white America. African America could not have endured slavery or especially its aftermath without deep veins of irony carrying the lifeblood of survival. So African America is the country’s irony’s bank. I purchase a sandwich from a Starbucks at Detroit Airport. My flight is being called and there is a long queue at the make-up bar. A lonely dreary roll of cellophane tucked in between the juices and chips was on offer ready made at $6.95. “Sandwich ?” said the big man as he unlocked the cash register with some difficulty. “Sandwich !? You wanna sandwich !?” he repeated somewhere between a question and an answer. “You come to the right place. Starbuck’s are famous for their sandwiches”. I must have looked at him strangely because he then added “You really don’t wanna know.” Close behind in the irony stakes are America’s Jew’s. I remember once being invited to a Purim celebration. I asked what it was about. “Oh the usual” my guide said “They tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat”. Walking down a Chicago street a local Jewish theatre is advertising its Jewish Christmas event – Shalom Santa. You turn up on Christmas day and are treated to a present and meal from the local Chinese Restaurant.
I was due into Atlanta near midnight. I phoned the hotel to ask for travel options from the airport and was told that taking the metro at night was fine, the streets were fine. “Just turn left outside the exit and it is three blocks. Can't miss it.” Left out of which exit ? “Oh there’s only one entrance.” There were four. I picked one, started walking but it didn't feel right. Out of nowhere a thin African-American guy in a flower patterned shirt and a loose gait bounded up to me and said - "You looking for somewhere ? Let me show you the way" It was nearly one in the morning. Nothing flashed through my mind at all. Out of instinct I just decided to trust him. Darren. A hairdresser from Chicago living in the shelter, waiting for a public housing allocation to turn up. Or anyway that was his story. A good sign - we passed a cop who shook his head as we passed, but he did nothing. I told my new friend Darren about the cop. "Oh yes they know me alright. They don't like what I do, but they know I'm harmless." He said that he was doing this for free but if I had any money he'd not turn it down. It was a good line, and one I heard many times that week. The local homeless had this soulless Downtown conference magnet sussed and very well organised. One slight pause, maybe to look at your watch and they were there. Friendly, polite to the edge of caution, and most insistent.
Downtown Atlanta is a concrete zero. From my hotel I walk the six blocks to Martin Luther King’s birthplace and grave. As you walk down the hill through Sweet Auburn the income level drops dramatically. It is election day 2004 and kids are selling huge “Vote or Die” T shirts to anyone passing by. Men sit on chairs outside drab stores trying to grab the attention of any passing stranger. The proffered hand and friendly advice is genuine, as is the grip and request for money. By the time I reach my destination I begin to wonder just how much of King’s legacy has survived. If Atlanta is an example of the “new” South then I’m glad I was never confronted with the “old” one. Michael Moore is correct when he says that you cannot understand the United States today until you understand slavery. I suddenly feel woefully unbriefed. Sweet Auburn was once the most affluent black suburb in the US, and some of the impressive houses are being rescued from their 60’s decline to something of their previous grandeur. It is a national historic site, but the information centre is closed for fumigation. Yes I did appreciate the irony. http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/atlanta/aub.htm King’s grave is grand and drab at the same time – a raised dais surrounded by green murky water. I have no idea what it is supposed to signify. King’s birthplace is a contrast. He had a solidly middle class upbringing, and the house is brought to life by the attention to period detail and narrative, mostly supplied by King’s sister. My visit is also enlivened by the guide camping things up to the eye rolling max – “Well, would you like your life told by your sister ?”. I go back to my hotel the long way around, guiltily missing the men and their outstretched hands. Later in the week, I discover fine, gentle and impressive parts of Atlanta, but Downtown and Sweet Auburn will remain in my mind long after those memories have faded.
So I go on the road for a few days. I love being on the road again in the States. But this time I’d made two mistakes, and broken two rules. Firstly never go to a restaurant in a guide book – they are often closed or terrible. Secondly never try to find a restaurant among strip malls after dark. Wandering hopelessly around the back blocks and seedy motels of Asheville I eventually asked a petrol pump attendant. Completely stoned and undoubtedly unaware just how wrong information his information was. I guess if you are a doped up gas monkey then you are probably past caring anyway. In fact, the place I was looking for no longer existed, so I just headed for somewhere at random. I ended up at one of those "family" restaurants, all fake colonial furniture and menus that have big coloured pictures of something resembling a meal. “You need beer don’t you ?”, the waiter asked. After 8 hours or so behind the wheel and another two wandering around suburban America he was dead right. Not a stoner, nor even a good waiter but quick but with the wisecracks. In 8 minutes or so he managed to bring me the wrong beer (“I’m a bit new around here”), a fork instead of a spoon for my soup (“I hear soup is this year’s finger food”), and “I like serving single diners cos I can give them better attention”. The food looked ugly but was good. The waiter looked good but the service was ugly. Bad service is America’s great legacy to the world. I've had soup like wallpaper paste toe clippings and bleached flour, overcooked broccoli and dry trout - all in one meal. On another night I had under-cooked salmon and wine that tasted like nail varnish. I’ve grumbled about this before in my posts. I can’t believe that Americans don’t want to serve you well, and I know they don’t tolerate bad service themselves. So what gives ? Over the years I’ve concluded that the continuous improvement culture, so deeply embedded in the national psyche, means in practice that American’s tend to get things right the second time. In fact, I once read a book about this called “Incredibly American”. So the bad/complain/good cycle is in fact a deeply ingrained cultural icon. Oh the beer was superb. Eventually.
I’d come all the way from Atlanta to deep in the Great Smoky Mountains. Mountains ? A bit like the Rimutakas with nicer trees (most of which are dying from an imported fungal disease). But I got to see the Appalachian Trail and more insights into middle America. I was particularly intrigued by the continuous stream of roadside churches that look for all the world as if they were three motel units joined at the hip. There’s also the intriguing American habit of having specialist suppliers in the middle of nowhere. Like would we put a furniture store somewhere between Te Marua and Kaitoke ? And on the border of Georgia and Virginia mile after mile of brick-a-brack markets. They all have the same distinctive layout – essentially a covered area, maybe a hundred feet long, with a plastic covered table that runs the entire length, piled high with old china and metal ware. It reminded me in an odd way of the markets in the non-tourist areas of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. At the foot of the Smokeys I rather guiltily ducked out of visiting the Cherokee museum. The Cherokee history is awful, and shameful. (http://www.cherokee.org) Given $5,000,000 for their land here in 1830 (a big sum I guess those days), given land in Oklahoma and forced at gun point to walk from here to there. Out of 15,000 who started only 4,000 finished. But I did stop at the Smoky Mountain Information Centre, where a notice in the middle of the car park stated “First Amendment Expression Area. This area has been set aside for individuals or groups exercising their constitutional first amendment rights The National Park Service neither encourages nor discourages, or otherwise endorses, these activities. Permit required.” Dare I comment ?
My father always said that road signs should never been done by locals. I’ve always considered a career as a professional lost tourist – giving advice to route signers in airports and city halls. Some of the examples on my 700 mile drive north were shockers. During the three days it took me to go north through Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania I met a whole stream of signs tucked behind trees and corners. I was nearly rear ended on the I85 just outside Atlanta, when I slammed on the breaks to sort out why the road lurched sideways to Alabama when I wanted to go north. The signage at the Atlanta MARTA is actually dangerously misleading – abandoning you just as you leave the hole in the ground.
And then there is the odd exception to Rule #3 (locals always know best) that operates here. Look, I'll forgive anyone with an accent that sounds as if they are gargling a peanut while sucking a toffee; it sounds just so cute. But I do draw the line when they know jack shit about something five miles down the road. Add this to the road sign problem and instead of being a good two hours into a 250 mile journey by 10am, I was a mere 40 miles down the road, shuttling to and fro between questions that placed me somewhere between the map and the territory.
Once I'd found the bits of the Blue Ridge Parkway (http://www.blueridgeparkway.org) that were actually open, the effort was both a geography and history lesson. The Appalachian range is old. Like really granddaddy old. The landscape is kind-of lumpy but runs pretty much north-east in a long line of humps. So you have a series of long ridges. Long as in hundreds of miles long. Mostly around 2 -3 thousand feet. Which means that when headed north east everything was fine. But any other direction it was up and down like a Coney Island ride. Now the history lesson. It’s in two parts. First, the Depression. Roads were built in the Depression - lots of roads that had little point but to be roads. Including the Blue Ridge Parkway – a four hundred mile strip of road that starts nowhere and goes nowhere, it just goes. Mile after mile of ridge road with no billboards, no junctions, no towns and almost no traffic. Just fantastic views and solid yellow lines. And absolutely no places to eat or get food. Even a candy bar. Was this really America ?
The few stores in the settlements either side of the highway had closed two weeks ago. Around 1.30pm I was getting very hungry and stopped at a lodge to see if they had anything to eat. There was an empty Coke machine, and an even emptier food dispenser. A man emerged from the office and took pity on me. He gave me a bottle of water, but seemed not to notice me eagerly eyeing a bag of chips in the hall. He informed me, wrongly (again), that there was no food on or near the route. So it was nice that about ten miles further on the road soared over the small village of Fancy Gap with lots of eating places along with the inevitable gas station and antique store. I slammed on the brakes, swung a fast right to get down off the Parkway, parked the car in a gas station yard and wandered into a small unattractive building thinking of having a take-away sandwich. I was suddenly in the world of road movies.
This was the ultimate American diner. Gingham table cloths, little nooks, old Coke ads on the wall, bluegrass CDs on the counter, folk art on the shelves, red plastic padded round stools fixed to the floor, working class women with voices like fog horns and the most appetising display of pies I've ever seen, most with three inches of meringue piled on top. There was coconut cream pie, chocolate pie, pumpkin pie, rhubarb and plum cobbler, berry cobbler, lemon pie ... My planned sandwich turned into a feast. I had fried chicken livers, gravy, rice, and collard greens. I was asked what I wanted together and what separately - I decided to have the livers separated from the gravy and rice. So what I got was a little pot of rice and gravy. I'd forgotten that peculiarly American habit. I was offered bread, corn cakes or hush puppies. I'd no idea what hush puppies were other than shoe-ware, so I asked for them out of interest. Delicious, savory fried balls of mashed corn. (http://www.foodreference.com/html/fhushpuppies.html) So was everything actually. And I had the most divine Pecan Pie ever. Ever. The whole shebang cost me $8 (a dollar extra for "a la mode" on the pie), and the waitress tried very hard to give me my tip back. It was mere serendipity, but that's what I travel for - a place I'll never return to that I will always wish I can.
And then there’s the real history lesson. I’m talking now about the Civil War. I’ve never quite got this North South thing geographically right. To me the North is anything above Texas, but the South politically extends much further up than that. As you twist and turn up and down the valleys and ridges in the Shenandoah it is clear the Civil War past is alive and well. Every three or four miles there will be a memorial to some endeavour of Stonewall Jackson, or a name familiar from high school or Saturday morning movies. The Confederate flag still makes the occasional appearance on car bumpers and buildings. This is deeply rural, deeply conservative heartland America. But these hearts and minds are clothed in many different threads. The Virginia upland clearly is rich, the houses are neat and old, the cars are large and late model. Flags fly out from lampposts and power-poles. One early morning I walk around the deserted Georgian streets of Staunton. This is a wealthy, sit-up-right-and-put-you-collar-on-straight town. For some reason I’m reminded of a Christmas eve many years ago in Saffron Waldon, where there was something maternally ancient and deep around 5pm as the shops shut and the cold began to stiffen the hairs in your nose. I could imagine Christmas Eve feeling the same here deep in the Virginia hills.
Once in West Virginia things change subtly but sharply. The buildings get smaller, paint starts to peel off them, and you follow cars full of rust. The landscape becomes wild and unpredictable with dense bushed valleys and busy streams. Time slows frustratingly. No-one seems especially in a hurry in West Virginia. In Virginia people drive about 10mph above the speed limit. A car with West Virginia plates will be driven at least 20mph below the speed limit. I drive through Elkins, the next large town after Virginia’s Staunton and the contrast couldn’t be sharper. Historic Staunton stretches block after block, here in West Virginia historic means a neo-Classical bank.
On my drive through West Virginia I twiddle the dial of the radio. I find National Public Radio. I listen to Jayna Davies talking about some bizarre conspiracy between Timothy McVey, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I hear how she spent years investigating this, and how the Washington bureaucracy would say one thing in private but would never formally return her calls. The two interviewers are bowling her patsy after patsy question. She is in full flood. Then suddenly she breaks off and thanks Jesus Christ our Lord for giving her the strength to bring this story to the world, and oh by the way the book is available in bookstores on my website (http://www.jaynadavis.com) . I’d actually tuned not to NPR but AFR – American Family Radio. I listen transfixed as the early winter brown of West Virginia swings past. I finally take mild solace in the realisation that the god-fearing folk of Jesusland are just as paranoid as the liberals I’d been with for the past two weeks. This is a scared sacred country I tell you.
Maryland arrives with a bump. The road surface loses the patchwork quality and presents a smooth expensive surface. It’s a disconcerting but oddly restful shade of pink. Around you is high, rich farming plateau with big barns, angular houses, lush pastures and woods rather than forests. I’m in a hurry but passing a school playground something odd catches my eye. Girls playing baseball in Victorian dresses and lace. Did I really see that ? A mile down the road my curiosity overtakes my momentum and I swing around and drive back. I feel a bit like the proverbial stalker. The sight is riveting and anachronistic. It’s lunchtime and the kids from the school are outside. And yes they are playing baseball. The boys are in woollen trousers held up by braces with bright single colour shirts rolled up at the sleeves. The girls are in drabber greens and browns that stretch to the ends of their arms and within an inch or so of their white socked boots. On their heads are tiny pure white bonnets. They nevertheless swing a mean bat. The school bell rings and they drop everything and run back to the little brick school.
I discover I’m parked next to a furniture factory and the penny drops. I’m in Amish country. I’m told later that the dress distinctions between the various Mennonite and Amish sects help you – and especially them - locate where you come from. It will help you understand whether they use a car with all the chrome and decoration painted over or removed entirely. Or whether they eschew internal combustion for horse and buggy. You will know whether the clothes are held together with zips and buttons, or kept together with pins and bows. That this country can handle that life style almost without comment, and that these communities are some of the richest most affluent, and most efficient farms in the nation says something. I’m not sure what, and I’m not entirely sure I like some of the possible answers.
Everyone must go to Fallingwater before they die (http://www.wpconline.org/fallingwaterhome.htm). Frank Lloyd Wright’s plaything is the biggest small house I’ve ever visited. The man was a genius of scale. I’m really lost for words. It is reassuring to see another house of metal windows, glass and concrete like ours. Nice to know that it suffered from leaks and movement – like our house back on the hill in Wellington. Nice to know that the architect regarded these imperfections as mere details. Like ours. It’s even got Spanish white plasterwork and Cherokee red window frames. I wonder if Ian Athfield was a Wright fan. What our little house on the hill doesn’t have is Diego Rivera, Audubon, Velesco, Lipchitz and Picasso on the walls and floors, or million dollar Tiffany lamps. I did a mental note as I went through this large but small house. I’d guess the artwork was worth around $50million. One tiny room – a mere passage really – had $20million of art pinned to the wall. And in the end, that is what makes Fallingwater so impressive. It’s just like the owners have gone away for the day. Yesterday, not thirty years ago.
I’m woefully unprepared for Pittsburgh and its environs. This is the American equivalent of the Manchester, Sheffield, Bradford triangle. Dead steel mills, half alive rivers, run down terrace cottages and nuclear power plants, alongside deep wooded valleys, affluence and academia.
After hurtling through a midnight dark sequence of interstates with just the numbers written on my hand, I find myself at a high school male beauty contest, deep in the West Pennsylvania farmland. Conservative, doggedly blue collar. Part of a senior students’ community project the event was both unique and commonplace; familiar dynamics in an unfamiliar setting. It was also hilarious. The guys threw themselves into the event without a hint of irony each donning a swimsuit that covered a variety of ills and beauties, a routine (consuming an entire pizza to Al Yankovic's anthem "Eat It", leaping around on a pogo stick, an earnest note-for-note copy of Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, several rap covers, a really really bad attempt at Chinese flag dancing) and answering questions such as "If you were president for a day what you do" (Extract oil from Alaska), “which person would you most want to emulate” (Miss XXX because for her every day is a field trip). It was clear from the disarray at the end that the guys took the whole event a lot more seriously than they wanted us to believe. Class clowns they may be, but its important to remember that the clown’s smile is painted on.
I’m staying in the small riverside town of Ambridge. Between the town and the river are deserted steel mills and other bits of smoke stack left-overs that once brought affluence to the town. I can’t but help make the comparison between the ordered pristine imagined Ambridge of the English radio serial and this seen better days town on the Ohio River.
I catch a bus to Pittsburgh. The trip alternated between the dreary industrial run-down strips of steel works, to the very posh and neat; one down by the river and the other up on the hills above. In the grey cold late Fall, Pittsburgh looks tired. Both affluent and poor, it presents a stridently urban esoteric. I mean what other town would boast proudly 3000 bridges ? But it’s an appropriate statistic, it implies a lot. Hills – lots of them. Rivers – three already big that flow relentlessly towards the Mississippi and not the Atlantic as I'd imagined. Industry. Traffic – why else built all those bridges ? Money - to build them. Remember this is the home town of Carnegie, Frick and Heinz.
Downtown Pittsburgh was empty, cold and inhuman, although just across one river huddled under the valley cliff, East Carson Street is funky and rapidly gentrifying. I decided to walk the two miles to Oakland where the universities and robber baron galleries are based. I thought the walk would be an extension of Downtown - a few interesting fringe shops here and there. However, I quickly, very quickly, found myself in an environment reminiscent of the unfashionable end of Sheffield or a Welsh mining valley after the pits had closed. Cracked uneven pavements, boarded up corner stores, long grassy gaps where terraced houses had once been - all just a few hundred yards from Kauffman's department store and Saks 5th Avenue. And then up the hill and around the bend into the affluent again. It all happens so suddenly in the States. With the exception of the dinosaurs, the Carnegie Natural History Museum was dull. The Carnegie Art Gallery was mostly minor work by major artists, but there were some exquisite English Arts and Crafts tableware, and an astonishing metal bass relief salvaged from the SS Normandie - perhaps one of the most luxurious Atlantic liners ever built. The sometimes infamous Carnegie Biennial art exhibition was on, and I'd hoped for some fun there. But with a few exceptions (notably a huge retrospective collection of near-obscene Robert Crumb, some oddly moving Japanese video, and the exquisite constructions of Lee Bontecou) it was the usual opaque self indulgence that I’d thought the art world had finally got over.
And then there was Thanksgiving. A week or so early maybe, but the full works. It was Irene’s idea to extend her Polish hospitality to a gathering of neighbours. And as always on this trip, a table full of opinionated locals provided more fodder for thought, entertainment and insights into the American Way than ten gallery visits and inch think guide books. I’m still trying to make sense of it all.
And of course everyone is making their own sense of the election. OK so everyone want to know what a New Zealander made of being in the States during what was billed as one of the most important Presidential elections ever. Here’s something I wrote about a week out from the actual election day whilst in San Francisco :
“There is an unsettling feature of the forthcoming Presidential election. We are seven days out from what is supposed to be a tight hard fought race; right? Yet I’ve seen no poster, nothing in the papers, no buttons and only one car bumper sticker. In fact the main topic this morning seems to be the Red Socks' win last night. And that’s a Boston team. Earlier this year it dawned on me that the Electoral College system effectively means there are 50 elections not one. Kelly won the California Presidential election decades ago, so there is no campaign. What’s the point ? This is a strange strange democracy.”
Reading this three weeks later I would change only a single word. It wasn’t fifty elections it was one – Ohio. In the end it all came down to Ohio. Of the eight or nine States I travelled through during this particular trip, Michigan mattered at bit and Pennsylvania mattered rather more, but Georgia, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas like California were all over before any chad hung or button pushed. All I saw in Georgia were a few bumper stickers and some kids aggressively selling those “Vote or Die” T-shirts. By now the whole world has seen the Jesusland cartoons that first started to appear on the Wednesday morning after the election. It implies a country divided along the Godless north and the God-fearing south. Unfortunately real life is a bit more complex. You have to explain Ohio. You also have to see how relatively close the vote was throughout all the States, and even within States.
Nevertheless God did matter – in fact I think most Americans truly fail to understand how close they are in religious fervour to the very countries their government demonise. Certainly, Bush’s brilliant strategist Karl Roeg pushed all the right buttons when he ensured that “gay marriage” issues were on the ballot of the States that use the election also for constitutional amendments. These were the people willing to wait in line for up to 10 hours to vote. But on its own that isn’t enough, as some of the deeper post-election analysis has explored. Kerry is a deeply religious man, perhaps more so than Bush – yet Bush pulled in the votes of many of the more fundamental Christians. The argument continues, yet in the end it’s not the aspect of the election that I found most troublesome.
In democracies the person you vote for doesn’t always win. You win some you lose some. What I guess scared me most about this election was not the impact of a “lame duck” President who has to pay back favours to the businesses and churches that poured 60 or 70 billion dollars (read that again – billion) into getting him elected. Nor the significant international and much less understood domestic implications. Nor the unprecedented levels of American exceptionalism. All that has happened before and we have survived them. What really shocked me is that a nation which clearly seeks to export its form of democracy to the rest of the world has such broken down democratic values, structures and processes. Waiting in line for 10 hours to vote because there are not enough voting booths is third world stuff. Actively discouraging or preventing people from exercising their vote is profoundly undemocratic. So I just cannot believe that it was deemed legal to shred voter registration papers, thus preventing them from voting. But a judge ruled it was. Residents of Pittsburgh were sent notices telling them that Democrat voters should vote on Wednesday 3rd and not on Tuesday 2nd – yet no one was prosecuted for this blatent lie. And as for election results of eastern States being released while poll booths were still open in California and Alaska - that renders me speechless. Don’t get me on to the bizarreness of the Electoral College, where 48 States vote on a winner takes all and 2 on a proportional basis. In the end the people spoke, but whether their voices were heard is another matter entirely.
A coda
There are times when space seems solid and motion seems still. It’s as if a lost sliver of unseen dimension found its way into our universe of senses. Brancusi visualised that moment and captured it in his serene and seductive sculptures. My response to his work is visceral. So with a punch in the stomach I walk into a room in a small gallery in Pasadena and find myself in front of one of his works. The Norton Simon Museum may be small but the collection is irreplaceable. Unlike Pittsburgh’s Carnegie these are major works by major artists, with a strong focus on Impressionists and various post-Impressionists. Rooms full of Degas, Lautrec, Renoir, Bonnard, Braque, Pissarro, Manet, Monet, Picasso, four Van Goughs, even a Sidley or two. Plus several Rembrandts, Outside in the quiet oasis of a garden are Moores and Hepworths. These were collected in the last forty years, so someone paid real money for this stuff. It’s yet another reminder in the final few hours before climbing on the big bird home of how much money spins around America. And how much time I’d spent looking at what spins off. And how much of America lies beyond the circumference of all that cash.