All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  It still takes me a good five minutes to walk to the stadium – just across the car park, which must hold at least 15,000 vehicles, though it is probably more full during Home Depot shopping hours than for games. I look at my watch and reckon there can’t be more than 15 minutes at most left to play, but no one seems surprised to see a fan turn up near the end. There’s a complication when the security check – we don’t have those usually despite the English game’s bad reputation in the old days – uncovers my Swiss Army knife: ‘You can’t take a weapon in, sir.’ A what? Oh hell, never mind, I’ve had this happen at airports before. I reluctantly hand it over. ‘Oh no, it’s okay, sir,’ he says nodding over my shoulder towards the acres of parking space, ‘you can leave it in your car.’ I tell him I don’t have a car, and he looks hugely relieved to have taken the knife off me. I resign myself to its loss and go into the stadium.

  And then there is – after all – the football. Down there on the floodlit pitch, the familiar sight of 22 lads in their team strip engaged in mortal combat. And suddenly it all seems surreal. The stadium is strange, as if the floodlights are directed as much at the people in the stands as on the pitch, which they are because there are people wandering up and down trying to sell stuff – baby blue and pink candy floss – or beers to people sitting in their seats (unheard of in English football grounds for decades). All this is incorrigibly alien, and yet somehow familiar: it reminds me of something I can’t quite put my finger on. And then immediately, I can: the baseball game at Shea Stadium.

  But this isn’t baseball – or cricket – one of those drawn-out all-day rituals, that are more about being there than watching the game. This isn’t an occasion to share a glass and a chit-chat with chums, grabbing something to eat and occasionally glancing down at the pitch to applaud a particularly good shot or up at the scoreboard to check some statistics. This is football, for God’s sake – even soccer if you must – the ‘beautiful game’, a taut, nerve-straining 90-minute conflation of chess, ballet and gladiatorial combat of which the great Bill Shankly once said, it isn’t a matter of life or death: ‘it’s far more important than that’. Except that hardly anyone seems to notice it. True there’s a Hispanic-looking bloke sitting near me, not next to – there are far too many empty seats for that – with his son, who both appear to be paying a fair bit of attention to the game, and even to understand the offside rule, as they alone don’t boo incredulously when the ref halts the game after some Red Bull clodhopper lobs a pass to a forward who’s so close to the Galaxy goalie he can probably share his deodorant. To make matters worse, Becks isn’t even playing. I can just make him out kicking his heels on the subs’ bench.

  What sort of manager is this who doesn’t bring his best player on – the one they pay a daily wage enough to run a fleet of Hummers for a year – when the score’s 1–1 and there’s only a few minutes left to play. Isn’t there? And suddenly it dawns on me that the electronic timer which I thought had been counting the halves separately really does mean we’re just coming up to the 44th minute. I ask my nearest neighbour and he confirms the incredible, delicious truth – that the time on my ticket wasn’t kick-off but the time the stadium doors opened and we are indeed just approaching the end of the first half. I’ve got a full 45 minutes to go. The referee blows his whistle and I could almost sing for joy. Instead I celebrate by doing something totally unimaginable in England: I nip out to the concourse, negotiate the incredible number of fast-food and drink franchises touting for business – rather than just one overcrowded bar selling bad beer and Balti pies – and fetch myself a huge plastic beaker containing a pint, yes a full – well, full by American standards – pint of frozen margarita. And take it back to my seat.

  Okay, so I’ve sold out already. But I haven’t. Not really. Because by instinct I’ve already swigged it down before the second half starts – can’t let anything spoil your focus on the game. To the extent that I’m still more tempted to stuff the candy floss down the vendor’s throat than buy one when he waves his noxious wares in front of my face five minutes after Becks has at last come on and is preparing to take his first corner. ‘Are you f***ing insane,’ I scream at him instead, causing a burst of near panic as he scuttles off. Becks hasn’t lost his touch. It’s a perfect cross but nobody has a clue what to do with it, on either side. It neither gets knocked decisively into the net, nor deftly cleared upfield; instead they sort of play keepie-uppie with it for a few minutes, before somehow or other it bobbles out of their midst and we’re back to the stages where they all look at each other wondering whose turn it is to kick it and to whom.

  I’m sorry, but this is the state of American ‘soccer’: woeful! I can see why nobody watches it. It’s no bloody good. Not that we don’t get games like this in England too. I’m painfully reminded of watching Charlton, losing to Wycombe Wanderers, a team two divisions lower while the away supporters gleefully chanted in our faces: ‘Premiership? You’re having a laugh!’

  But that is what is missing here. Not only is there no segregation of home and away fans – a move some fans of the English game regret – but there are no away fans at all that I can see. It’s a long way from New York after all. There’s no feeling of tribal loyalty and camaraderie, emotions that in the cauldron of a British football stadium provide twenty-first century British men – and women – with the closest equivalent, I hope, they’ll ever get to the spirit of a Napoleonic army, that sentiment of which the Duke of Wellington said: ‘I don’t know what effect they have on the enemy but they scare the hell out of me’.

  If even an iota of that atmosphere had evolved in this big, over-lit, under-populated stadium then it would have been dispelled in an instant by the message that appears on the big neon scoreboard: ‘Keep the game clean,’ – wellllllll, yes, maybe, we’re used to slogans against racism and about respecting referees, so I can just about take that, except that it’s spoken OUT LOUD, while the team are playing, in fact just as Becks is about to take another – well-placed but futile – corner. Talk about putting a man off his stride! And as if that’s not bad enough, here comes the punchline: ‘And keep your weekly wash clean with Tide!’ It’s a bloody advert, on screen and in our ears in the middle of a game. Does nobody understand? This isn’t just ‘not done’, it’s tantamount to heresy. Sacrilege even.

  Maybe the American game’s too nice – maybe Americans are too nice – maybe the concept of sports teams as mobile franchises rather than rooted in local communities (which is something I fear could yet happen to our increasingly foreign-owned Premiership stuffed with foreign players) means they just don’t care. But until they do, and until their players play with passion because they know their fans live for it, and until they understand the exquisite agony of a 0–0 draw in which both teams had chances, or the untrammelled joy of a fightback from 3–0 down to win 4–3 in a goalfest, then ‘soccer’ hasn’t a golf ball’s hope in a bunker.

  And then all of a sudden, from a far corner of the pitch, where a solid group of fans, all in LA Galaxy shirts are standing – against modern English rules but according to old football tradition – I make out the strains of a familiar chant that is pure music to my ears. Can it be true? Can those really be Americans? Yes, it is and they are. With almost a tear in my eye, I make my way round towards them – unthinkable in a tight-packed, seating-only European ground, but here there are people wandering all over the place – and watch with genuine warmth in my heart as the stewards gather with consternation and bemusement on their faces this deliriously joyful, increasingly drunk, beer-clutching crowd emulate scenes they can only have witnessed on European television, howling for blood in time-honoured fashion, bellowing at the top of their lungs, in chorus, the hallowed refrain beloved of every English football crowd: ‘The referee’s a wanker!’

  Maybe there’s hope yet.

  Which leaves me with just the slight matter of getting ‘home’. And preferably not by the route I came. There’s a bus stop outside the stadium – by which I mean
just over half a mile from it, i.e. beyond the car park – but the timetable is less than encouraging: one bus an hour, and the last one left just before the game ended. Am I missing something here? I mean, this isn’t baseball; we know what time it’ll be over at. And it may not match the Home Depot on sale day, but there’s at least 15,000 people here. And nearly, as I look around me at the building jam at the car park exit, 15,000 cars!

  I’m reluctant to hang around here for an hour but I don’t see much alternative.

  Nor do the three other people – just three out of a crowd of 15,000 – who within the next 10 minutes join me. And two of them are Scottish. Out of the fairly large crowd that has made its way to this football ground (soccer stadium) tonight, only one Angelino did so by public transport! His name is Ivan, he comes from Seattle, and he apparently makes a habit of it: ‘My friends think it’s kinda weird. But like, you know, it’s a green thing too.’

  It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone in the US apparently take the green/global warming agenda seriously. I know lots of people do, or at least say they do, including both presidential candidates, but I’ve never come across anyone who actually lets it affect their way of life. Ivan, however, does. He’s – fairly obviously – a Democrat, and also the first person I’ve met who actively wants to talk politics. He is campaigning enthusiastically for Barack Obama, though he thinks John Edwards would have been a better candidate; he has serious reservations about the willingness of middle America to elect their first black president.

  ‘Aye, ah dinnae know about that either,’ says Mark, the rangy tall Scotsman who’s over here visiting his sister and just came to the football, ‘because I hadne seen a game for a while.’ Ivan asks us a genuinely interested question about British politics – this is a first too – as in whether we think ‘the new guy’ – well, come on, you would hardly expect even him to know Gordon Brown’s name – is a good successor to Tony Blair, who remains something of an icon for Americans, even on the left.

  ‘Blair was a right wanker,’ says Mark, which seems to me as fair a way of putting it as possible. But we stay clear of discussing Brown. Maybe because we just can’t be bothered.

  Eventually – though unfortunately not before its timetabled hour – the bus arrives and we join the now thinned throng of northbound traffic. I tell Ivan how impressed I am by the sea of change in downtown Los Angeles. He beams back, ‘Yeah, it’s been a real revolution. People like me, young professionals, are moving back, converting lofts and stuff, it used to be dangerous but now it’s a pretty cool scene. I got lucky too; I bought a condo near the Staples Centre.’ Ivan credits the recent multi-million dollar sports venue and concert arena, financed by the eponymous office supplies company, as being a crucial element in restoring respectability to the downtown area.

  Ivan wants to know what I’m going to call a book about train travel round America, so I toss out a few options: partly inspired by memories of Colorado: Iron Horse Rodeo, or in reference to my scant funds: Iron Horse Bareback. And he smiles and says, ‘Well, that’s certainly an arresting title,’ and adds that this is his stop. As he leaves I pick up a leaflet lying on the seat opposite advertising LA’s Midtowne Spa: a ‘place for the gay and bisexual community to play safely: no drugs, no alcohol, condoms provided – no bareback.’ Whoops. A bible for unprotected sex wasn’t exactly what I had in mind…

  1 I subsequently discovered that despite having achieved fame in the First World War and being promoted to the rank of General of the Armies, only held by one other person, George Washington – and that was a posthumous promotion – Pershing belonged to almost the same era as Custer, having started out in the US cavalry, and taken part in the controversial Massacre at Wounded Knee.

  LOS ANGELES TO NEW ORLEANS

  TRAIN: Sunset Limited

  FREQUENCY: 3 a week

  DEPART LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: 2:30 p.m. (Pacific Time)

  via

  Pomona, CA Alpine, TX

  Ontario, CA Sanderson, TX

  Palm Springs, CA Del Rio, TX

  Yuma, AZ San Antonio, TX

  Maricopa, AZ Houston, TX

  Tucson, AZ Beaumont, TX

  Benson, AZ Lake Charles, LA

  Lordsburg, NM Lafayette, LA

  Deming, NM New Iberia, LA

  El Paso, TX Schriever, LA

  ARRIVE NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA: 4:00 p.m. (Central Time)

  DURATION: approx: 51 hours, 30 minutes

  DISTANCE: 1,995 miles

  19

  N’Awlins

  I HAD NO IDEA. Absolutely no idea. Nothing in America prepares you for New Orleans. I’m standing like an overdressed man in a Turkish bath on the rotting wood of the balcony tilted at a precarious angle towards the street below, running my fingers over the thick layers of paint on the wrought iron as I watch the gas lamps flicker in the onset of a tropical dusk. Exotic, romantic, and just slightly forlorn. I could be in Abidjan, Réunion or Martinique. But surely, surely, not in the United States.

  Most striking of all is the quiet. No roar of traffic, no parping of horns, just the quiet drip of condensation forming on metal and falling onto wood, and maybe the occasional creak from an opening shutter. There are ‘for sale’ signs on railings down the street, past the little neighbourhood convenience store that sells fresh watermelon and wine and cold beer. You could sit here, and watch the sun set, maybe forever. And then I remember, this is New Orleans: there’s no such thing as forever.

  My mind had been convulsed between anticipation and apprehension as we rolled across the vast waterways of the Mississippi Delta, yawning mouth of one of the greatest river systems on earth, and looked out at the docks that stretched for miles upriver, at the heavy freighters moored at them, resting low in the swollen tides, and at the freeway systems improbably suspended above the lake water and the low-lying retail parks defended only by patched-up levees. In LA a cab driver downtown had asked me where I was heading next and when I said New Orleans, he just gave me a rueful smile and shook his head and said, ‘Man, they got nuttin’ down there. I know folks left there and they ain’t never goin’ back.’

  As we pulled out of LA across the deserts of southern California, past the veritable Golgotha of wind farms on the hills outside dry-as-dust Palm Springs, the flooding that swamped the fabled ‘crescent city’ on the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, seemed almost unimaginable. I would like to tell you I gloried at the magnificent Texan landscape as the train rushed through it on the longest of my individual routes, but I would be lying: the fact is that Texas is not only vast, it is mostly extremely dull – not so much cowboy country, as cow country. And not very many cows per square acre either. Rancher Mike’s old joke about the vast size of Texan farms, told as we rumbled through Montana, now came home as achingly true. Out here 25,000 acres is nothing. Literally nothing. Look out the window once every hour and you’ll be lucky if the landscape has changed. I had thought of making a stop or two in Texas, but with a train service that only came by every other day at best, decided against it, and booked – for the first and only time on my journey – a sleeper instead. Ladies and gentlemen, I take my hat off and admit it: I mostly slept through Texas. And why not, with Louisiana and the Big Easy on the horizon?

  Prior to Katrina, my only real awareness of New Orleans was Paul Simon praying for someone to take him to the Mardi Gras in the city of his dreams in a pronunciation which I have already learned is much-mocked: ‘It ain’t Noo Or-LEENS, honey, it’s N’Awlins,’ said the female conductor when I showed her my ticket. Over dinner as we trundled across the dry, dull endless scrub that makes up most of Texas I met Clarence who came from there but was going back. Not without regrets: ‘I lost plenty. Folks, mostly. My grandmother. She died. She was in her nineties, she wouldn’t leave. She didn’t have no means to anyhow. Lots of poor black folks didn’t. The government just didn’t care.’

  Other people did, though, like Harrison and Joanne, a stocky middle-aged couple dressed in w
hat I at first take for a uniform: a dark maroon shirt and trousers on the man and a dress the same colour for his wife, who is also wearing an old-fashioned bonnet-style hat. And then I’m struck by the resemblance to the travelling Amish. I’m not far wrong. I get talking to them and Harrison explains that they’re Mennonites, a religious grouping closely related to the Amish. The both live in Kentucky but have been travelling down to New Orleans for three weeks out of four for the last two years, to help with reconstruction work. They live in a hostel and work as carpenters. Both of them. Helping out after natural disasters, he told me with one of those surreal gentle smiles that religious people sometimes spook me with, is something the Mennonite community considers a social obligation.

  Arriving in New Orleans even years after the 2005 cataclysm that was Hurricane Katrina it’s not hard to see why people here still think that central government doesn’t give a damn, and why volunteer workers are so needed and appreciated. The little wooden houses alongside Louis Armstrong International Airport are poignant testimony to the essential fragility of so much of the globally envied American way of life. These are homes that would have had refrigerators, colour TVs, heating and air-conditioning, but in the wake of a hurricane – three years on – look like the hovels on the edge of Harare, Zimbabwe, trashed and looted, where they have not been plain blown away.

  Three-storey brick houses along the railway line still lie derelict, without doors or windows, skips piled high with rubbish lined up outside. On the left is the great bulk of the newly restored and refurbished Superdome, the sports arena that was turned into emergency housing for 30,000 residents unable to flee the hurricane. On the right, the damaged buildings of a furniture warehouse and a depot for a dairy company based in Houma, a small town further out into the Gulf swamps and even more vulnerable. The adverts painted on the brickwork are for ‘creamery butter’: ‘American Beauty since 1892’. The windows are smashed, broken air-conditioning units lie on the ground next to an old school bus, its distinctive yellow smeared with graffiti, mattresses piled on its roof, ripped blue plastic tarpaulins strewn across the ground next to a tiny two-man tent. Obviously still in use. It is not an optimistic arrival.