And what wonders they were. Here was the world’s classiest vertical city. Confident and elegant, its buildings spiked the sky in shards of steel and glass in unexpected nobility. Stone structures came first following the great fire of 1871 when on 7th October and the subsequent three days, 17,000 buildings were destroyed and 100,000 inhabitants were made homeless. Myth has famously attributed the cause to Mrs O’Leary’s cow that kicked over a kerosene lantern but history has recognised the anti-Irish sentiment of the time and the principal concern of newspapers to sensationalise. The facts were mundane and dreadful. The whole city including pavements and roofs was constructed of wood; in the better parts of the city even the streets were of wooden blocks and insulation was generally of horsehair. The previous month was the driest on record and on the previous day, a fire in a suburb had left the fire crews exhausted. After the fire started, the wind got up and blew the embers towards the gasworks which exploded and rendered any effort at containment useless. In circumstances that reflected London’s Great Fire of 1666, a charred but clean scar presented itself and before the embers had cooled, rebuilding began but only, by ordinance, in stone. A few of these early buildings remain and are largely churches and institutions, but now there stands a textbook for architectural historians and students. The brightest and the best are there; Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, Renzo Piano, Alan Johnson, Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Ralph Johnson and a whole galaxy of architects employed by their corporate clients to build higher than the last, assisted by technology that saw iron replaced by steel and air conditioning that chilled the consequences of vertical acres of glass. All these trophy structures culminated with Sears Tower, where Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in 1973 built the tallest building in America; at 1,450 ft (442m), it held this title for 25 years. (Smith famously went on to design the world’s tallest building, the 2,716 ft (828m) Burj Khalifa in Dubai.)
At the concierge desk of the Sofitel Hotel, I teamed up with a diminutive grandmother to share a taxi to The Museum of Science and Industry. On her head was a knitted beret (she had bought the wool from a hospice bring-and-buy) and around her shoulders she had what appeared to be a colony of weasels with long flapping tails and several pointed noses. Her head was so sunk into this furry miscellany of a trapper’s livelihood that only the beret showed. On the twenty minute ride she crammed in a generous slice of her life which included a law professorship, eight grandchildren, a passion for Wagner and a love of Bob Dylan. She was on her third visit from Texas to explore the museum and in particular, the captured German submarine U-505, which was preserved intact in a subterranean tomb and above which flew a Spitfire and a Heinkel. On the way we passed Soldiers’ Field, whose classical pastiche would have been more at home on the set of Spartacus than as the stadium of the Chicago Bears. This anomaly was compounded by additional seating that floated above the façade of ionic columns and was known locally as ‘The Toilet Seat’. The museum was also fashioned in a classical idiom. The eclectic mix of all these images may be the cultural meat of Chicagoans but it gave me a headache.
An Amtrak Superliner does not ride on the ocean but sometimes the irregular condition of the railway tracks so sways the coaches that nervous passengers might well reach for a lifebelt. Nevertheless, my bedroom on the upper deck was a model of compact design and comfort. Instead of a stubble-chinned, black, elderly car attendant, Kiesha was thirtyish, pretty and efficient. The City of New Orleans pulled out of Union Station at eight in the evening from a bare and bleak platform that contrasted with the magnificence of the porticoed station entrance and the Grand Hall with its classical motifs of torcheres, dentil cornicing and vaulted roof. At the time of its completion in 1909, Chicago was pre-eminent in east/west rail traffic and it ensured it retained this position. I had dinner with an articulate architect, a jolly nun and a silent pharmacist with a red chiselled beard. Breakfast was in the company of three college graduates on their first train trip who were going to New Orleans, “To get away, get hammered and get laid.”; presumably in that order.
Memphis, the home of The Blues, The King, Muddy Waters, Casey Jones, Johnny Cash and other folk legends, was passed at dawn and beyond the Tennessee/Mississippi state line swamp cypress, greening willow and dispirited, dreary stubbled fields combined to an indifferent landscape. Crumbling shacks, the detritus of abandoned machinery and deprived humanity lay in sad and squalid communities. Here was the begetter of the tales of Twain, Steinbeck, Faulkner and Williams but then Yazoo went by and cherry trees were in bloom along with azaleas, camellias and magnolias. The Louisiana bayou followed, sinister with rotting logs, alligators and stagnant water occasionally enlivened with Cajun or Creole clapboarded settlements. And then, New Orleans itself, the prize of Generals Jackson and Sherman; the backdrops of Mississippi Burning, Easy Rider, A Streetcar Named Desire, Steel Magnolias and Dead Man Walking. My stomach called for jambalaya and gumbo but the streets of the French Quarter were clogged with fans of The Southern Basketball Championships universally clad in blue. They choked Bourbon Street where traditional jazz had been elbowed out by blaring pop. The Hustler Club and its ilk, with long-legged and slim-hipped temptresses, dazzled the street with neon signs but tradition survived at classy Galatoire’s which kept the blue shirts at bay with a jacket-only policy, although Arnaud’s had succumbed to allowing its sneering, black tied waiters to serve a jacketless visitor such as me. Breakfast at Antoine’s was one of my mother’s favourite books and in a loving and nostalgic spirit I knocked at its doors at 8 am but no one came. But at Brennan’s, another local foodie institution, the queue was into the street waiting for their breakfast of five courses, each with a different wine and kick started with an absinthe cocktail. Seventy three million visitors swamp the French Quarter each year; it seemed that half of them had come early. I escaped on a tram whose final stop was in the Garden District and wandered the neat and tidy streets and admired the white, porticoed mansions of the city’s old established families. Here, on high ground in August 2005, their owners could have looked down on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that broke the levies and swept inland for 40 miles (64 kms) in the worst natural disaster in American recorded history. The single-storey timber homes in the Ninth Ward were under 20 ft (6m) of sea water and today the area remains derelict and abandoned.
The swamps of the bayou are only a short ride from the city centre and on one of them, I stepped aboard a perilously frail craft with a huge and deafening aft propeller which shot across the water, the reeds and hyacinths with exhilarating speed. I shared this flat bottomed craft with a raucous but good-natured group of eight young men on a stag weekend. They brought with them a crate of beer which was so soon finished that a detour was made to purchase another. This too went as quickly as the first so whenever an alligator was spotted, it was greeted with boozy yells of salutation. This did not deter the beasts in any way since bizarrely, they were more concerned with snapping up the white marshmallows that were scattered on the water to attract them. Back on Bourbon Street in the early evening I was heartened to find a group of hobos, either penniless or artfully distressed, plucking at guitars and banjos, scratching a washboard, scraping a violin and blowing a battered clarinet. They were first class. On another corner, four young black people made good music from dented cornets and a squeaky trombone.
The long haul north on The Crescent first passed by 100-year-old Cypress Grove Cemetery where 14,000 bodies are encased in tombs of granite, marble and cast iron. Since these are all intentionally above ground, they have escaped all the floods; the living may have drowned but the dead have endured. In the dining car, a southern breakfast of crab cakes, grits and cinnamon bread was shared with Sallie and Vincent who were on the last lap of a 19-day train journey of which only six nights had been spent in a hotel; they were planning to do it again. The swamps of Mississippi gave way to the gentle slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Appalachians. Aberdeen Angus cattle were scattered through undulating pasture an
d stands of shagbark hickories and pecans. Sometimes the sun caught a group of dogwoods whose upturned flowers covered long drooping branches, like an extravagant serving of fried bantam eggs. Up through Maryland and West Virginia the fields became neatly fenced, the grass greener and peeling paint was a source of neighbourly disapproval. By the time The Potomac was crossed, affluence flourished to the edge of the tracks.
On a morning that sparkled much like that dreadful day in 2001, the 9/11 Memorial was crowded and long lines snacked around the hoardings of the surrounding building sites. The police presence was overwhelming with command cars, chase cars, patrol cars, cameras, X-ray checks and a burly, surly cop at every corner. No chances were being taken although it seemed unclear what assault could be mounted on the two immense, square pits that mark the sites of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. The four walls of each pit (collectively named Reflecting Absence) cascaded with a perpetual torrent of water that vanished into a central void. Lost friends and lost hopes? It was simple, dignified and monumental. As the sun dipped behind the crenellated sky high roofscape, I walked The High Line. Here a railway, raised above the street and constructed to serve the wholesale warehouses of meat and vegetables, fell into disuse and disrepair following its commercial submergence to truck deliveries. Nature claimed the tracks for a while but then spawned an imaginative idea of a second-storey parkway that would twist along the unproductive rails in a three kilometre walk. Piet Oudolf was commissioned to spread his prairie planting in linear appeal and birch, willow, daphne, aralia and hazel supplied structure. Benches, chairs and picnic tables completed an urban felicitation that was being appreciated by many strollers on a barmy evening.
With an appetite honed by a day of walking, I tried to reserve a table at the legendary steakhouse of Peter Luger in Brooklyn and was offered the last remaining place of the day at 4.45 pm. Unwilling to indulge in a teatime slab of meat, I went later to The Strip House, having been assured by my hotel that the flesh on offer was for the peckish rather than the prurient. In spite of the heads of the waiters being covered in black skull caps that suggested that a pigtail should hang down their back, a prime, corn-fed, thirty-day aged, USDA-certified, 14-ounce filet mignon, seared at an industrial 1,800 degrees was brought to the table with the reverence it deserved. Taste and texture merged in juicy heaven.
While New Orleans was packed with basket ballers, New York suffered an onslaught from the school Spring Break. Most of these holidaying students disappeared into the Apple Store and I went to MoMA – the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Here are gathered a representative collection of the world’s greatest confidence tricks, also known as contemporary art. White on White, Scribbles on White, Heavier Scribbles on White, A Wall Pitted by a Single Rifle Shot. Since they are all worth countless millions my judgement seems to be awry.
The last leg of this rail journey started at New York’s Pennsylvania Station where even at 6.30 am commuter trains were rattling in from the suburbs. The Maple Leaf was not a sleeper train but there were comfortable seats. The track ran beside the Hudson River and on its high, steep banks, houses were perched on tall concrete columns. Across the aisle, a middle-aged far eastern couple gabbled away incessantly. The man was smart in a grey silk suit and new white trainers while his wife had amber rings threaded through her long hair. I asked them where they came from but was met by wide smiles and wider arm waving. Curious I asked, “Passport?” and was shown a pair of brand new Canadian passports. They had not even enough English to say, “No speak English.” Two rows up were a couple of Tibetans in national costume. The formalities at the border required all the passengers to disembark and on re-joining the train, Mr and Mrs Silk Suit were absent.
The scenery became wild and open with great wet areas bordered by reeds and populated by ducks, geese and an occasional swan. Further north near the towns of Amsterdam, Utica, Rome and Syracuse there were areas of deserted and disorderly industrial land and abandoned factories. In contrast, having crossed the border into Canada at Niagara, for many miles the landscape was precision planted with orchards and occasional vineyards. There were greenhouses too, very tall and covering many acres. In Toronto at the formidable Fairmont Royal York, there were reassuring portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip in the cavernous lobby. This huge, stone-built establishment is the grandmother of the city’s hotels and her arms enfold a thousand bedrooms, measureless corridors of flock wallpaper, chandeliers to rival Versailles, 20 lifts of elaborate brass work and several acres of Axminster in colours of mud and gold. Anxious to escape this stygian labyrinth, I enquired of the concierge about a trip to Niagara Falls and he regarded me for a while before suggesting I would be best served by a private car and driver; the round trip would be $480. The next morning I took a Megabus for $22. One fifth of the world’s fresh water pours over the Falls and it seemed that half of that fell in spray over the land beside the gorge. In spite of a bright, cloudless sky, the air was as saturated as a Braemar mist. The rush of water was undoubtedly impressive and emphasized the stupidity of falling over it in a barrel.
The next day I was to fly home and as always the anticipation was heart-warming. I reflected on the trip: Chicago, the epitome of a skyscraper city – stylish but with panache, grand, dignified and even noble. New Orleans’ French quarter with the vulgarity of Bourbon Street but fringed by back streets of charm and personality. New York, brash, demanding, part overpowering, part empathetic. Toronto, cosmopolitan, polished, thrusting, with high-rise glass and high living. Amtrak, utilitarian, slow and scenic. I do not expect to return to any of these but they will linger long in my thoughts.
Postcard Home
I’m riding the rails of the US of A
From Windy City and all the way
Past Nashville, Yazoo and Memphis music,
The blues, The King and all that’s rhythmic.
Through the land of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Twain
To voodoo, Big Easy and bayou’s wet plain.
Jambalaya and jazz feed body and soul
Then Amtrak speeds North to its final goal
Through eleven states and The Appalachians
To bite the Big Apple. But the journey still runs
To Canadian Niagara and its frozen fall.
Then, odyssey over, I reach Montreal.
Guyana, Tobago and Panama
November 2013
‘For day wear, drill or palm beach shirts or light suits are general. Revolvers are not usually necessary’ – South American Handbook, 1947
On Halloween there was only a single sandpiper on the mile long beach of silver sand. As it tried to scale the sandbar we both dodged the froth of the incoming tide; she scurried, I plodded. Barbados seemed to be half built bungalows with paint in short supply but an airport’s edge is never prime and I had to leave early the next morning.
Guyana yields only to its neighbour Surinam in claiming to be South America’s smallest country but it punches far above its weight. Area aside, everything is big or biggest: giant otters, giant anteaters, the giant armadillo and the giant river turtle; here lives the world’s largest rodent, the capybara; the largest snake, the anaconda; the largest bat, the false vampire; the Americas’ largest eagle, the harpie; its largest cat, the jaguar, and the world’s largest water lily, victoria amazonica (three feet across). Some countries have some of these but no other country has all of these. Added to these are 1000 species of trees, 815 different birds, 420 different fish, 300 reptiles and amphibians and 225 species of mammals. I have always been seduced by the colourful splendour of tropical birds and their evocative names. How could anyone resist these local residents:
Bronzy Jacamar, Zig-Zag Heron,
Golden Sided Euphonia
Guinian Puffbird, Crimson Fruitcow,
Rufus Crowned Elaenia.
Violaceous Trogon, Dusky Purple Tuft,
Spangled Cotina, Painted Parakeet.
They may defy scansion, but they did not defy a glimpse of all these and there a
re 800 others.
There are also 1,400 rivers, including the Essequibo, South America’s third largest and the Kaieteur Falls, the world’s highest single drop waterfall at 817 feet (250m). This staggering biodiversity is spread over a country the size of the UK but it has only one road; with a gravel surface it runs 400 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Brazilian border in the south. The three historical Guyanas (British, Dutch and French) are the only part of South America that are neither Spanish nor Portuguese. Of its three million English speaking inhabitants, 95 percent live in the capital, Georgetown. There is no natural harbour on its 900 mile muddy coast and 80 percent of the country is covered by forest. All this makes for an explosion of life, lushness and fecundity. With this agglomeration, it would seem that there was no room for a traveller but this country is big on space too. The population density is 3.4 persons per sq kms – the UK’s is 388. Guyana attracts 2,500 tourists a year; Machu Picchu matches that every day. All these superlatives and numbers can be exhausting before one has even landed.
In 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh came this way believing it to be the fabled El Dorado, city of gold and wrote it up as The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana. Robert Schomburgk in Riesen in British Guiana wrote, ‘We stood on the borders of an enchanted land’ but by1882 a visiting English yachtsman described it as ‘… a hopeless land of slime and fever’ and James Rodway in his book Guiana says, ‘Formerly a land of mud and money, it is now a wilderness of mud and mosquitoes’. In between, the country changed hands nine times and its borders, particularly those with Venezuela to the north, are still in dispute. V.S. Naipaul and Evelyn Waugh came and went dispirited and fractious. Waugh in particular had nothing good to say about any part of the country but then he had journeyed 100 miles on a horse and no doubt was a mess of saddle sores, ticks, bites and boils. In 1970, the country was granted independence and became The Co-operative Republic of Guyana.
The Last Blue Mountain Page 37
