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The moment we were out of Guadalajara the land became steeper and greener. Was Guadalajara intentionally founded in an unspectacular pan of land, or has it just buried all the prettiness beneath car parks and cine centres? Who cares; all the prettiness you could need is scattered just beyond the city limits. All you need is a car…
My first weekend out of Guadalajara, dashing off after school, stuffing a pack with things I wouldn’t need, and volvoing off into the lush coconut groves that separate the city from the beaches.
We the mandatory, token English teachers among the many international students and multilingual Mexicans. A pristine house of many rooms and terraces had been rented on the peninsula that interjects between Manzanillo’s two long arcs of beach. Manzanillo, the country’s busiest port and a prominent notch in the belt of expat-retiree-friendly destinations that wraps around Mexico. The downtown streets swell with American franchises. Close to the water piles of green coconuts await consumption, their husks scatter throughout the city. The jungle and the green encroaches everywhere upon the city, reclaiming unwanted shells of hotels and gas stations.
On the first night lightning splintered the sky sending us scampering from the pool. The weekenders washed up at the house in waves, and when the house overflowed we surged on to occupy a dingy hotel and a spectacular apartment-owned-by-someone’s-parents.
There were too many people, we couldn’t stay cohesive. We took our respective beers or someone else’s and dispersed along the beaches. The Pacific coast is where the surf is at in Mexico; the Caribbean is for flat, immaculate beaches. The Manzanillo beaches roiled up waves that broke right onto the sand, spitting out limp bodysufers.
We took a boat to the rocky outcrops where austere pelicans watch over the mouth of the bay. They sat alone, their long beaks in their chests, one eye half-ignoring us, the heaps of guano attesting to the long centuries of their vigils.
We snorkelled among the same fish we snorkel among in Australia, and I was surprised to see them here.
On the beach below the spectacular apartment the stones were scuttling and cracking because every second one of them was a hermit crab. More crabs had climbed the stairs to, for some reason, live in the swimming pool. At night the lawns rippled with fireflies and it seemed unfair that all this pretty animalness was confined to the deluxe condo part of the city. But everywhere in the city there were lizards and the silhouettes of sea birds, and scorpions too, as it turns out.
The kind of weekend at the end of which you realise you have not even had time to change your underwear of take a shower. There was only time to fall asleep on the beach or on the terrace, or to bolt from the car to pick up more Doritos and beer and Gatorade. There was no time for food. The kind of weekend in which it takes hours to get out of the pool and seconds to get dressed because you’d only be disrobing again anyway. The kind of weekend in which you lay on the bed in the early morning feeling individual beads of sweat lacing their way down your skin until you realise you could be in the pool but wait longer anyway because the sweat is actually quite enjoyable. The kind of unfair weekend that spits you back up among the weekdays mere minutes after you left them behind to go Manzanillo.
Cleveland, Ohio
Saturday 14 April 2007
1am and the neon lights of this truck stop in Pennsylvania are dazzling. All around the greyhound and the shop is highway and forest. Creaking cracking legs and frosty breath, and a moment of splendid realisation; I am on the road again. The sensation is unmistakable and exhilarating. Back on the bus and off to sleep.
Morbid curiosity is the best explanation i can give for the logic behind this trip. The Greyhound bus happens to be one of those great American institutions, an insight into the ‘real America’, whatever that is. A woman takes her job interview by phone as the Midwestern farmlands fly past. Across the aisle a man who just slung an entire drum kit under the bus is discussing venues across Michigan. Impromptu conversations flare up everywhere; Americans love to talk and they love to do it loud. It’s not eavesdropping if you can’t help but hear the conversation, and pretty soon you don’t want to miss a word anyway. An entire world absorbed through your ears. This has to be one of the most aurally rich countries on earth.
The destination is Cleveland, on the banks of the immense Lake Erie. Cleveland that was, in former times when the American Midwest was still at the height of its manufacturing and industrial power, a worthy halfway point between Chicago and New York. The river still bears the marks of this rich and stupid past, hemmed in by steel steel steel. In more recent times, though, the Midwest has been in decline, some areas more steeply than others. Cleveland, as its inhabitants are acutely aware, is one of the poorest cities in America. In recent times the once-great city has been re-dubbed the mistake on the lake. And then the river caught fire, and any remaining afterimages of the old Midwest were well and truly shattered.
Why Cleveland? the people from every state but Ohio ask me. The city’s one claim to fame is the Rock and Roll Music Hall of Fame, an immaculately curated museum. In Australia the city would be most definitely on the map, and would be a major player, but squashed into the Midwest of America it must bicker with its near neighbours for any scrap of acknowledgment. All of these cities have their one claim to fame; for me it came down to Cleveland vs Pittsburgh, or Rock Hall vs Warhol Museum. Both museums are of course brilliant – the cities cannot afford them to be otherwise. It is a phenomenon observable right across the US. In this monster of a nation, once you remove California, New York, and perhaps Florida, you are left with very few major drawcards. I am fascinated by the license plate art you see from the greyhound; it is indicative of the situation. While Arizona can play up the Grand Canyon and its desert setting, many other states are forced into generality and poetic leaps. New Jersey the garden state, also known as the armpit of America. Stars fell on Alabama, a lovely and meaningless idea. Even so the bickering over minor merits continues. Ohio is the birthplace of aviation, but North Carolina is first in flight. In a country that prizes individuality so highly, it proves a difficult commodity to come by. Unless your lake has caught fire, and then individuality becomes a heavy heavy mantle that is carried with shame.
The Rock Hall, though, remains the gleaming jewel, a grand contributor to the aural wealth of the country. On the shore of the no-longer-ablaze lake Erie, a dazzling, glamourous labyrinth of smashed guitars and pimped cars, of leather pants and ponchos and moomoos and cowboy boots, John Lennon’s school report cards, Michael Jackson’s lonely glittering glove, David Bowie’s fanatical fanmail, the Rolling Stones’ everything. It is a fabulous collection; Cleveland can’t afford it to be otherwise.
My experience of Cleveland was characterised by a return to the wonderfully serendipitous world of couchsurfing. There is still some stigma attached, as least in my mind, to the business of answering the question ’so how do you two know each other’, with, sheepishly, ‘the internet’. But the awkward moments are quickly forgotten before the many doors opened and people met.
Megan was my host in Cleveland. If the reinvention of Cleveland is to meet with any success, it will be through Megan and her sleepy neighbourhood of Ohio City. Here, within and among the wooden, cottagey houses and american flags, community programs are conceived of and hatched. Food cooperatives and community spaces, lectures and protests, all going to work to bring hope to disconsolate Cleveland. My first stop in the neighbourhood was a community theatre where i was put to work on preparing the lighting for the upcoming production of Urine Town (which, despite the name, is a satire that has more to do with water conservation and American treatment of natural resources than anything else). Its an all hands on deck kind of place, the sort of pragmatism that made the Midwest what it was/is.
Megan was/is an exquisite host; my every venture was accompanied by a hand-drawn map, which lead me, for instance, to the monument to assassinated president Garfield, the most serene and pleasant spot in all greater Cleveland. The same maps, when misread by me, took me on a bus headed right out of the city. The outskirts of the American city are a disorienting place, with the same landmarks repeating endlessly: McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King. It wasn’t until i saw road signs for Cleveland turn right, Columbus turn left that i knew with certainty that something was amiss.
I arrived in Cleveland at 7am on a Saturday. It was a cold and desolate place. The Easter snow has been ploughed into out of the way places and sat in grubby, brooding lumps. Three days later i was impressed by a city of daily struggles, striving to overturn an entire history by tiny, incremental advances. The old steel yards rust and creak by the river and lakefront. They are monuments to their own disintegration, sculptures signifying America the amorphous, the land of possibility and new beginnings.
Kent, Ohio
Saturday 07 April 2007
My time in New York was broken by a seven-hour-each-way sojourn from New York to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Ohio and back again. It was the easter weekend, and rather than spend it alone on the frosty streets of NYC, I took up the offer of surrogacy, and became an honorary Barrett.
The Barrett family easter is properly an occassion for Bs and established and accepted partners-of-Bs. I, as a friend of a partner of a B (and of course a friend of a B also) had absolutely no business in that house or at its laden tables. Yet welcomed I was, most warmly. I don’t yet have any great insight into the USofA, and I don’t know whether the kindness and hospitality shown to me was characteristic of American, Ohioan or Barrettian generosity. I suspect it is all three, but on an increasing scale of magnitude. On Easter Sunday the Easter bunny (a sly fellow who evaded all five Barrett children, three partners-of, one friend of partner-of and the household cat) left me, as well as every other more rightful guest, a burgeoning easter package.
It snowed, and it snowed quite a bit. The monster pickups came out wearing their snow ploughs and growled over the buried roads. Black strips in the white world. The snow added something special to the weekend, unseasonal though I think it was. Kent beneath the white is not, I imagine, a particularly picturesque town, but the Kent of my experience is a winter wonderland of icicles and deep drifts and spontaneous flurries.
The snow also provided as good a reason as any to spend as much time as possible in the elegant Casa de Barrett. The Barretts run an antique shop in downtown Kent, full of fabulous bric-a-brac. Plenty of these wares find their way to the house, and it is full of lovely old furniture, and clocks ticking to their own discreet time and rhythm. Andy and I were accommodated on the third, attic floor. A few steep flights of stairs down brought us to the Barrett kitchen, the warm heart of the house and location of the primary pasttime of the weekend; feeding. Feed we did, heartily and constantly, the kitchen a constant flurry of activity as one meal was completed and the next was planned. Board and card games were deployed to aid digestion and prevent the house falling into a contented and probably endless sleep.
On occassion we braved the white and ventured forth. We went Amish-hunting in the towns and countryside of Ohio. A rigid-postured man dressed all in black should stand out sharply against a world of blurred white. It was not so. We didn’t reach the Amish communities and their mystique for me was much increased. At the moment of our despair, after executing a u-turn, though, a point of consolation; one of the bearded beauties driving his buggy hard through the frozen town (where the easter egg hunt was cancelled due to weather – a despondent town) and out into the countryside. A brief, tantalising glimpse, and then the white closed over him, and began to devouor the straight black roads. That was all the hunting we would do.
The weekend ended, and on cue the snow began to melt away to reveal the battered spring flowers and soggy lawns beneath. One our way home, a perfectly crystallised insight into small-town USA; we stopped off a Mike’s Place, a diner festooned with license plates and gas station paraphenalia. We stopped off and we ordered the Big Big Slop Bucket of Gold, a huge greasey pan full of mozzarella sticks, onion rings, fried mushrooms, curly fries, tater tots, etc. The typicality of the moment lay not in the dish’s existence, but in the fact that we polished off the lot, and went off to find thickshakes afterwards.
New York, New York
Tuesday 03 April 2007
For a few minutes I thought no one was going to meet me at the airport. A 9pm Monday in New York, cold and lonely, with no contact numbers or addresses, no map or guidebook, no internet access or mobile phone or transport. Nothing. It is, i suppose, a quintessential NYC experience, in this the city where no one is ever truly local. Everyone gets lost and jumps the wrong tube train. Everyone narrowly avoids being hit by a taxi. Everyone stands in the wrong queue. Everyone is given the wrong order. Everyone is tiny and anonymous. But then Andy turned up and i was re-acquainted with my New York, all happy memories and amazing people.
Driving hard back to Yonkers, and the poets of Sarah Lawrence, I was flooded with reminiscences. A year and a half ago this city had been unexpectedly captivating. Now i was back among the poets, the same world but different. A year and a half on and they had theses to finalise and submit. There was a fair sense of exhaustion with the glamour and novelty of the city proper. Some had already left NY behind and moved on. Last time i was led from place to place, and consequently had almost no understanding of the workings of the city. Drop me down in the middle of it (as United Airlines had) and i would absolutely and irredeemably lost. This time i would be free and aware in my grappling with the impossible city.
Andy and Mel had their own plans, involving neither NY nor theses. On my first day in the USofA we roadtripped down to Philadelphia for the day. Philly a town of curious symbols; traditionally the liberty bell, the constitution and the declaration of independence. The liberty bell, though, is just some old town hall bell that cracked early. The dec of ind isn’t even in Philly. A similar thing is happening at the Betsy Ross house-museum. She who stitched the first American flag. What is this? A curious symbol; a mundane matter mythologised into a cult object. I wanted to interject the liberty bell is CRACKED! What kind of symbol is this for your country? It is, I will posit now, a peculiarly American trait; this ability to take the most mundane details of history and soberly and earnestly make them into grand symbols of the republic.
Two more Philly icons. The great Philadelphia cheesesteak; for some reason it’s not an authentic cheesesteak (assuming that is a desirable trait) unless it’s in the Philly style. Mel and I found great vego hoagies (it’s a sandwich I guess, and the vehicle for the cheesesteak), but Andy got sick from his authentic Philly cheesesteak hoagie thing. The other icon is the great flight of stairs that Sly Stallone aka Rocky Balboa ran up to the sound of his own theme music. Andy ran the stairs, dodging busloads of tourists, and the odd lycra-clad serious jogger. The event-moment is immortalized in a great bronze statue of Rocky himself, and in the crowds of breathless fans and pretenders.
To NYC; but where does one begin? Its eight million inhabitants bustling about could have been the 6 billion of earth, the effect is all the same. From the window of the trains, the endless neighbourhoods sprawling away into winter grey, the endless crowds boarding and alighting without so much as a blink of acknowledgement of the other members of the horde. That the city should end at all and the train ever reach outlying Yonkers feels like its own miracle.
I mostly confined myself to the East Village, st. Marks on the Bowery and Union and Washington squares, the Strand bookstore (for those for whom NYC name mean anything). What is special about this place? I guess some poets hung around there once, the odd novelist. But something about these streets, running in dissident diagonals to NY’s indomitable grid, gave me that rare but familiar feeling of ‘I could live here. I WANT to live here’. It was more than just the possibility of $1 paperbacks and considerably more expensive bagels. It was the sense of earnest energy filling the streets. The absolute belief in X, where X is art or God or love or whatever (as opposed to the X of even-lower Manhattan, that being money or prestige or apartments on very high floors).
I did leave the village; to take the Staten Island ferry past the statue of liberty, to visit El Museo del Barrio in uptown Manhattan (uptown referring to its northerness and not the wealth of its inhabitants) and a frosty Central Park alive with bounding squirrels, to wander the grandeur of the library, the extravagance of Time Square and the opulence of 5th avenue. Over all these soared the Chrysler building, surely one of the most elegant modern buildings in the world with its shear, sleek facades. But but but, all these wanderings inspired only the need for more wanderings, and this is the impossibility and alienating power of NYC. How does one ever get to grips with it? How does one come to know it? When has one exhausted its infinite sights and sites? Its secrets are innumerable and unknowable.
Mostly I wandered NYC alone; one rainy day with Andy, one cold day with Odette (who is again an international mooting champion – don’t ask me what a moot is). The best of my time in NY, though, came when I relinquished my desperate plans for mastery of the city, and allowed myself to enjoy the warmth of Andy, Mel and the poets of Yonkers. Dinner at the Outback Steakhouse, a curious American Australian American themes joint; free brownies from the brownie factory; a trip into deepest darkest Connecticut to visit Bloodroot, which is, surprisingly unsurprisingly, a rather excellent feminist vegetarian joint; a poetry reading where the number of pizza boxes exceeded the number of attendees. It is this sense of hospitality, humour and hope which brought me back to NYC, and which will soon be gone as the Poets spread back across the USofA. It was my privilege to live among them and sponge off of them again.
Andy and I were to leave NY on the same day, but on the morning of our scheduled departures he decided to stay on, another romantic chapter in that trans-continental love story. I, however, shouldered pack and took to the tube again, heading off, and leaving behind something that Andy couldn’t bear to. Laughter echoes through that house in Yonkers, and in my ears and out onto the road.
The first national holiday wheeled around, landing on a Wednesday, breaking up school as it broke up the thunderstorms that had been skulking about for days.
September 16 is Independence Day in Mexico. On the preceding day at school we had corralled the kids into the central patio for a flag ceremony, involving marching and saluting and the withering eye of the school director. Long strips of the Mexican red and white and green covered the city. Sombrero pedlars had been dragging their carts about the city for weeks.
On the eve of the 16th people gather in plazas all over Mexico, and at 11pm commemorate the cry of liberty. In Mexico City’s monster Zocalo the president leads the cry, and is echoed by cries of Viva! from thousands and thousands of throats. He vivas liberty, he vivas the heroes and martyrs of Mexican independence, and last and most emphatically he vivas Mexico itself, again and again, accompanied by the roar of his people. Then the bell ringing and fireworks commence.
All that shouting and bellringing is intended as a kind of grand re-enactment of Miguel Hidalgo’s first cry of liberty. In 1810 on the night of the 15th Hidalgo stood outside his parish church and decried the colonial Spanish government, declaring death to the Spaniards and the birth of a new and egalitarian Mexico.
Less than a year later, though, Hidalgo had been captured, executed, dismembered and exhibited. Independence from Spain was still ten years away for Mexico. A number of other figureheads for the revolution arose; virtually all of them were at some point exiled from Mexico. Many were executed during or after the war.
So why Hidalgo? Why celebrate the beginning of the war of independence and not the end of it? Next year Mexico will celebrate its bicentenary, again basing the date on Hidalgo’s cry for freedom and not on the actual advent of Mexican independence. Bolivia did the same thing earlier this year, leapfrogging all its neighbours by counting its anniversary from the beginning of its struggle, not the end of it.
Perhaps the reason is that Agustin de Iturbide, who you could say ended the war of independence, was not the radical that Hidalgo was; he became the first emperor of Mexico, his new country representing little of the equality that Hidalgo had envisioned (Iturbide was also executed).
Perhaps by dying early in the struggle Hidalgo evaded the fate of Iturbide, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Porfirio Diaz, all of whom started as military heroes and ended up as deposed tyrants. Hidalgo started the war but didn’t have to finish it, didn’t have to stitch together an awkward harmony out of the disparate elements of the independence movement. He didn’t have to govern; he was already dead and popular.
Perhaps Hidalgo’s charisma and personality are what have immortalised him. An errant priest who read French enlightenment texts, spoke indigenous languages and fathered two children, Hidalgo exemplified all of the quirks that a hero of the people could need.
Whatever the reason, the hero has been chosen, and his cry has been immortalised with a national holiday. The holiday should fall on the 15th, but the date too has been chosen; the 15th was already booked for the aforementioned Porfirio Diaz’s birthday (which is no longer significant). Figures like Diaz rise and fall but Hidalgo remains forever the hero of the independence he never knew.
