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This week couchsurfing.com celebrated the registration of its one millionth member. This represents quite an achievement for a site that depends for its success upon the goodwill and good faith of people. The success and spread of couchsurfing across the globe (its million members and their couches are scattered across over two hundred countries. It is even possible to, for example, find a couch to stay on in Antarctica) seems to me to be a wonderful tonic to the general spread of consumptive, self-focused tourism.
I joined couchsurfing in 2006, as it was recovering from a near-fatal site crash, and as it was starting to enter the mainstream backpacker parlance. Now, two and a half years later, I almost never need to explain what couchsurfing is; I only need to drop the name and people understand what I am talking about.
Originally I had been sceptical of the project; when I first considered joining up I couldn’t see that anyway would want me in their home, and I wondered what nefarious purposes people might use the site for. I didn’t really begin to embrace the project until it occurred to me that most hostels were also full of people with un-hospitable and quite nefarious designs. A bathroom in a house is always cleaner than a hostel bathroom. I also had a few wonderful experiences getting started with CS in the Balkans. Although the concept of vegetarianism raised a few issues – and continues to do so quite often – I was met with overwhelming warmth and hospitality.
I really began to embrace CS when I travelled across the US. Between the nights on the greyhound and the nights on peoples’ couches, floors, spare beds and air mattresses I was able to experience a far broader spectrum of American life than I had anticipated. I knew what to expect in New York and California, but my favourite experiences came courtesy of the hospitality of friends and couchsurfers in such places as Ohio, Michigan, Alabama and Texas. There was no way I could have crossed the country on my budget, nor could I have seen half of what I had wanted to see if it hadn’t been for CS.
Thereafter I was well and truly hooked. During my year in Korea almost everyone I knew was a couchsurfer – either because I met them through CS or because I brought them into the CS fold. There have been occasions where things didn’t quite go as wanted; when, for example, a steak ended up on the plate before me, or a host became a little over-amorous, but these have been only the tiniest setbacks, and are a small price to pay for being given the opportunity to enter into the lives and homes of people all over the world, to see how they live, and to share with them food and tales.
Couchsurfing will no doubt continue to grow, as more of its million members start to try their luck with the kindness of strangers (currently although there are a million members of CS, there have only been some million and a half successful hostings. Given that I have stay with perhaps fifty people, and others have stayed with a lot more than me, it is clear that many CS members haven’t yet had then chance to stay with or to host people). It is an addictive thing, this meeting of and sharing with strangers, and it has utterly changed the way I travel. I’ve barely stayed in a dorm since signing up, and I see little reason ever to return to them. There are plenty of remote corners of the world that CS is yet to reach – there are not as many CSers in Bolivia as in its neighbouring countries, for example – but given its general purpose of connecting the people and fostering exchange, it seems inevitable that sooner or later there will be couches or floors or hammocks available pretty much anywhere that people care to visit.
I arrived back in Sucre a few days before Carnival was due to start. As i had blogged about earlier, the informal festivities had started months ago, with the hurling of water balloons and the dumping of buckets of water from balconies onto unsuspecting passers-by. this had crescendoed in the ensuing weeks, until every second bus had the barrel of a water pistol poking ominously from one of its windows, and every public plaza was lined with old ladies selling water balloons, and young men throwing them at whichever girl they most fancied.
In Bolivia Carnival is celebrated most vibrantly in Oruro, a town otherwise famous for bad food, high altitude, pickpockets, and for being a gritty industrial town with absolutely no tourist appeal. Except during Carnival.
Oruro is only 8 to 10 hours from Sucre by bus – a tiny distance compared to most in Bolivia - but i found myself utterly unenthused about the prospect of spending more time away from my pokey little room in Sucre. The spirit of adventure was ebbing low in me; apparently it does happen from time and time. I assume it is a temporary situation.
Anyway, i celebrated Carnival in Sucre. Carnival, which is essentially one great and frantic spasm of exuberance before the (theoretical) sobriety of the 40 days of Lent begins.
On the Friday every school and college in the city took the streets, the students dancing to the repetitive strains of their marching bands. They were greeted by a barrage of water balloons, by hoses and buckets and cans of foam, but they danced on through the street, unperturbed and heroic.
Being a more reserved gringo, i had my criticisms of all the frivolity; in a country where a great number of people fetch their own water from rivers, and where a great number of houses have no plumbing, and no reliable piped water, how responsible was it to be dashing hundreds of litres of water against the streets, and against other people? The infectious fun of the parades permitted few questions or concerns; it was impossible not to get caught up in the immense water war in the central plaza. At any one moment tens of brightly coloured globes hung suspended in the air, about to crash down on some reveller, or unfortunate vendor.
Each day after the Friday was quieter than the last, as family barbecues became the predominant form of celebration. Marching bands still played through the streets, but more intermittently. The barrages of balloons became more furious as the tipsy, horny youths in the main plaza had no one to take their festive spirit out upon. The central market became the dominant warzone, as the children of all the market ladies turned their water gun on each other and anyone who happened to need to buy food, drink, pirate DVDs or their own water weapons.
I was joined by a trio of couchsurfers, who were the most hospitable guests i have ever had (yes, take note: guests can be hospitable too). The fun of Carnival was greatly amplified by having the ever-enthusiastic Cory, Nick and Laina with me. With them i launched myself into the water war, and found how different an experience walking the streets could be. instead of paranoia, and wondering where the inevitable balloon of water would come flying from, i found myself an arbiter of pseudo-justice, punishing those boys who targeted unarmed girls, and flinging balloons at anyone who looked set to fling them at me. Deterrence, i called it, but what else was it but the inescapable spirit of Carnival?
On the Tuesday the streets went properly quiet and began to dry out. Blackened braziers appeared outside businesses, and piles of charcoal wafted their acrid smoke into the air. This, the final day of Carnival was greeted with more solemnity and ceremony, as these little offerings were made and the city renewed. Fire crackers echoed and reported all day through the city, and cars and homes were bedecked in streamers and balloons. hours upon hours of meat were charred on barbecues, and libations of beers were poured out to Pachamama (the earth goddess) in every street. This was a day of fire, to complete four days (and several preceding months) of water, and with it Carnival came to an end.
Rainclouds descended over the city that would linger for days, and the streets on Wednesday morning were eerily quiet. There was no risk of being pelted by balloons, the open windows of buses and the revving of passing motorbikes no longer elicited concern and fear of falling water. In a moment Sucre returned to its peaceful self, and it was safe to walk the streets, to sit in the plazas, to look up at the magnificent belltowers without fear of attack.
Ann Arbor/Detroit, Michigan
Tuesday, 17 April 2009
This is what Detroit looks like.
Decommissioned traffic lights lean and hang at tipsy angles from the lines above the quiet intersections. This is Motor City, but many of the cars look dishevelled, their fenders hanging loose or missing, rust patterns blooming over the wheel covers.
Entire residential blocks have been reduced to green green grass, with one lonely, left-behind house remaining. Idle people recline on the porches. Some houses have been blackened and burnt, their insides show through the scorched holes. The houses are built in disappearing geometries around warehouses and factories whose windows have been boarded up or smashed or boarded up and then smashed. The signs and insignia of abandoned businesses make for curious reading as they fade from shopfronts and billboards.
There is more rubbish on the street here than in the bronx. With the nobler signs of human civilisation crumbling and disappearing, the accruing trash might soon be the only reminder of the city that was.
It is not a ghost town; the downtown streets have cars and people and open businesses. The greektown casino glitters and sparkles. Homeless men with cardboard signs maintain lonely vigils at gas stations and street corners. The enormous General Motors compound soars upwards in sheens of bluish and greenish metal. it could be seen as a slap in the face, or as the last refuge of the damned.
A brief and patchy history of the city.
Part of the midwestern industrial boom and heartland of the American auto-industry, Detroit had no need of secondary industry. It was all cars and the steel they are cut from. Endless factory jobs right across Michigan attracted unskilled and poorly paid labourers, which, when the eventual downturn in the auto industry began (not that you can tell cruising the streets of America today), were left idle and desperate and angry. Race riots, white flight, and gang violence.
There are still bad neighbourhoods and outbreaks of violence, I’m told, but the anger has more or less passed in Detroit now, and been replaced with a quiet forlorness. I’m used to taking half-built buildings as a sign of progress and development, a half-full approach. In detroit the buildings are half empty and crumbling – aided and unaided – fast. It is this phenomenon that brought me here; where else can you see a city’s consumption of itself, a ready-made Hollywood apocalypse cityscape?
One of the most impressive ruins in Detroit is the old train station, incorporating an 18-storey office block. It is fenced around with the ubiquitous razor-wire, but there are ways around that. Rummaging among the Detroit ruins is a popular pasttime, and there are ‘underground’ websites that will tell you exactly where to go and what to do. So, a short scramble under a bridge, through a rusted roller door, and we (no way i’m going in alone) are breathing frosty breaths in the train station basement.
We are by no means the first people to come here. The entire place is festooned with graffiti, and after a while narratives begin to emerge, with certain characters – like ‘catfish’ - scrawled right throughout the building. The marbling has all been stripped from the walls, and lies about, but the grandeur of the architecture is still visible in the high lofted ceilings and enormous pillars of the station foyers. Everything has been looted or smashed – even the toilets – but remnants remain of the building’s old purpose. Rows of rusty shelves. Torn and trampled carpeting. New detritus has been imported. Odd shoes and gloves lie about the building. Some have pairs on other floors. The single, abandoned shoe is, I think, wonderful image of the desolation here.
Eighteen floors, all dilapidated in their own personal ways, the decay always finding new configurations and patterns. The yawning elevator shafts become more frightening for every flight of stairs we climb. And then the roof; it is slightly surprising to find the sun is shining brilliantly, and we have one of the best views possible of the city. The shiny edifices of remaining business downtown. In another direction the Ambassador Bridge, the river, and the near-shore of Canada. It is incongruously, strikingly picturesque.
Another incongruity.
An hour’s drive from Detroit is Ann Arbor, a walkable little town dominated by the University of Michigan campus. The unavailability of couches in Detroit had brought me here, where proffered accommodation abounded. Cyan was my Ann Arbor host and tomb raider guide to detroit. Strange patterns begin to emerge; Cyan was just finalising her creative writing thesis. So once again i was staying with poets and writers.
And swing dancers. by the time i left i had been taught the lindy hop, east coast something, the big apple impossibility. i had been taught them all and forgotten them all. On my first night there was also a recital of John Cage piano pieces, at midnight and by candlelight. Fantastic, soporific music. Ann Arbor is a place of art and learning, a fun town where doors are not locked and laptops are left unattended in the myriad coffee houses. It set my travel paranoia on edge; the decay of Detroit just down the road, but the university acting, i suppose, as a bastion against the encroaching desolation and despair.
That familiar morbid curiosity drew me to Michigan and Detroit and inadvertently to Ann Arbor. AA though was an insight into another USofA, one that it would be an injustice of me to neglect for the sake of sad stories about midwestern blight. The brick-by-brick disappearance of a city may be a curious phenomenon, but so is a well-funded poetry program, or the proliferation of self-made chapbooks about the campus, or an awkward aussie swing dancing among far more competent yankees. Michigan contains the best and worst of the states; the despair, anger and fear of Detroit; the smiles and ideals of Ann Arbor. Intelligent, active, discerning people. friendly people eager to engage with the world, and bring more smiles, intelligence and art into it.
The sun came out in Ann Arbor, squirrels were rasping and birds chuckling in the trees. Flowers poked through the warming earth. By the side of the immense highways ducks and geese cruised their ponds. Pickups and SUVs and trucks and Greyhound buses ground by. The skeletal winter trees began to give way to rich green pines. A man at the bus station offered me his email address and phone number just in case i needed assistance on my travels. Morbid curiosity is not the only attraction here.
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.
