All Gone to Look for America

FIRST AND FOREMOST
I would like to thank the friendly people at Amtrak who helped me organise my trip, fixing reservations when I needed them and organising a timetable across a continent on trains that mostly run only once a day. The US railroad system has its drawbacks but few of them are the fault of the enthusiastic, cheerful people who run it. They operate the legacy of one of the world’s great transport systems; maybe the need for greener forms of travel will one day see it restored to its former glory. But unless Barack Obama really surprises us, not any time soon.

Also thanks to my wife Jackie for putting up with my absence (not that much of a hardship) and for providing me with my one luxurious night in a grand hotel in Chicago.

And finally, but not least importantly, all those great musicians and songwriters who accompanied me on my iPod and in my head, providing a soundtrack both essential and inescapable to a country that has given the world so much of its popular music. I hope I have given all of them due recognition, but I owe a special debt to Paul Simon whose music haunts so many American locations, and which gave me inspiration for my title.

Peter Millar, Hook Norton, December 2008

I COULD HAVE BEEN BORN
an American. Almost. My mother
emigrated
there from Northern Ireland after the Second World War, but while her brother remained in the country she returned home. Like many British and Irish people, I have American relatives and have visited them. Because of that, and its familiarity from Hollywood and television, America is a country most of us feel we know well, but which can still surprise us by being disconcertingly foreign.

Many people in Europe instinctively love America or hate it: for having rescued us in the Second World War, and for never letting us forget it. The phenomenon of anti-Americanism has always – certainly in Britain – been part envy of America’s wealth and power, part resentment at how it throws its weight around. Yet there is an irony that almost precisely at the moment of the Cold War ‘victory’ which seemingly secured global dominance, America started to look more vulnerable. Over the past two years we have seen
something
remarkable: Americans asking questions about their own country and giving a political answer almost no one had thought possible outside the realms of Hollywood and television: the first black president.

New York is the modern Rome. When Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed after the attacks of 11 September 2001 that New York was the ‘capital of the world’, he wasn’t kidding. He was, of course, pandering to its citizens’ concept of their own status, but also expressing a metaphorical truth. New York is the ultimate expression of the city as we know it at the close of the twentieth century, which began with the high point of the British Empire and may have ended with the high point of America’s.

They have never called it an empire. It was our – British – empire which they still pride themselves on escaping. In films such as
Star Wars
the ‘empire’ is always bad while the good guys always fight for the ‘republic’ (even if it has princesses). But that is not such a difference as you might think. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, presented himself as the restorer of the ‘republic’, with
himself as merely its ‘first citizen’, and his wife the ‘first lady’. A little hypocrisy has always gone with the territory.

The cosmopolitan, financial and cultural powerhouse of New York, with its instantly identifiable architecture and boundless self-confidence, has for the last hundred years personified America. Yet visiting it today, after the outrage of 9/11, I can’t help wondering if this is what it was like to visit Rome at the end of the fourth century, still the metropolis at the centre of the turning world but, having suffered indignity at the hands of invading barbarians, no longer invincible. The eternal city, but no longer immortal. It is a sobering thought.

The great difference, of course, is that America is a proud democracy – as it has just resoundingly proved – but beyond that the similarities are marked. The USA is not just a vast territory in its own right, but the world’s
pre-eminent
military power with a sense of mission and a firm belief that to shape as much of the world as possible in its image is a good thing. The Romans would have understood.

It might not have been that way. And almost certainly wouldn’t if it hadn’t been for the railways. When the Golden Spike was tapped into a polished laurel wood tie at Promontory Point, just north of the Great Salt Lake in Utah at 11:00 a.m. on the morning of 10 May 1869, the single world ‘
Done
’ was flashed by telegraph to a waiting nation. A nation, that in truth was not yet wholly convinced that it was a nation.

One of the great wonders of the world had been accomplished, and the dream of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the fledgling coastline country called the United States of America, was fulfilled. The project which had begun when he sent explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark with barely a dozen men to find a way overland across an unexplored continent had become known as America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’. That dream was a United States that would stretch ‘from sea to shining sea’, a nation on a continental scale, and not, as had seemed extremely possible only a brief few years earlier, a continent made up of half a dozen political entities – nation states, colonies and tribal homelands – with different flags, different laws and customs and perhaps even different languages. It was an invention only in its infancy towards the end of Jefferson’s long life that made his dream possible: the railroad.

Without the railroad, the United States of America, global military and
economic
superpower, would never have existed in the form we know (and love or hate) today. Without a means of transport that 90 per cent of Americans nowadays never use, the South might have succeeded in seceding, California and Texas might have been independent countries, part of a greater Mexico or
independent Spanish-speaking nations (less hard to imagine these days than a few decades ago). Alaska would have remained part of Russia, the Indian nations might just have survived – think North American equivalents of
Paraguay
or Bolivia speaking English or French alongside their native tongues. Utah would have been a polygamy-practising sovereign Mormon nation. The prime reason a breakaway British colony on the eastern coast came to span a continent comes down to the humble railway train.

America is what it is today not least because it is a country the size of a
continent
. So what better way to explore it than by the engine that created it. It was not as easy as it might seem. The railway may have given birth to the USA but modern America has since abandoned it. Today Promontory Point, Utah, is not even on a line. Nor is Cheyenne, Wyoming, once one of the biggest railway junctions on earth. You can no longer get to Chattanooga on a choo-choo. America’s railroads today – long in decline – are at a turning point which might just see them revived and revitalised as a more environmentally friendly form of transport, or abandoned forever as an outmoded curiosity. Yet for now at least you can still use them to travel from coast to coast, from the Canadian to the Mexican borders. I was determined not only to ‘ride The City of New Orleans’, but to take those other trains that still bear such evocative, romantic names – Hiawatha, The Empire Builder, The Coast Starlight and The
Southwest
Chief – to see where they took me and what they told me about America today.

In little over a month, taking advantage of a roamer ticket only available to foreigners, I crisscrossed the continent travelling by train alone, in a route that – with regrettable omissions, such as New England or Florida, the latter for reasons that will become clear – encompassed as much of America’s magic as possible: the metropolises of New York and Los Angeles; the jaw-dropping natural splendours of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon; the casinos of Las Vegas’s little sister Reno in the empty Nevada desert, and the beautiful wild wastelands of Montana littered with bones of dinosaurs that once roamed an inland sea; the surprisingly similar homes of Elvis Presley in Memphis,
Tennessee
, and Bing Crosby in remote Spokane, Washington; the chilled-out, hi-tech city of Seattle, home to Starbucks and Microsoft, the laidback,
hurricane-damaged
Big Easy of New Orleans and the home of the Mormons in Salt Lake City; my first baseball game and David Beckham’s vain attempts to coax Americans to watch proper football.

This is not a trainspotter’s book: those who want details of engine sizes or horsepower will have to look elsewhere (there are, in any case, only two
real workhorse engines and sets of rolling stock on the whole of the Amtrak network). Nor is this a work of political or socio-cultural analysis except insofar as such observations fall within the framework of reportage. This is my view: opinionated, muddle-headed maybe, but always honest. In that respect it has one very American quality: I tell it the way I see it. As often as not over a beer and with a song rattling away in the back of my head. Modern America has rediscovered the microbrewery, and I defy anyone to travel anywhere in this country without its music jangling in the mental background.

The USA today is a nation not quite as easy with itself as it likes to be, still tied into a war that lacks popular support and a fast-growing population for whom English is not the native language and who, for the first time in US history, do not feel particularly compelled to learn it. Now it has in the
remarkable
and charismatic Barack Obama not just the nation’s first black president but a man to whom it looks for miracles that may yet, in a time of financial crisis and economic downturn, prove more than he can achieve.

But for all that, American remains an empire unto itself, the global power
sans pareille
. Yet times are changing, fast. India and China are rising to the challenge, while a revived capitalist Russia is a rogue card in a deck being rapidly reshuffled. George W. Bush’s neo-conservatives laid out a route map for a ‘new American century’, yet like imperial Great Britain so secure in its global hegemony just a hundred years ago, ended up heading for a train wreck. Whether Barack Obama can put the locomotive back on track remains to be seen.

This does not aspire to be a definitive picture of the United States: what could be? It is a subjective snapshot in time of one man’s trip around a great country at what may yet come to be seen as the apogee of its power. For better or worse.

Smile please, America.

Click.

YOU KNOW YOU CAN ONLY
be in New York when within five hours of landing, you’ve been held up by Presidents George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, caught up in a media scrum around a pouting Paris Hilton, and watched some bloke prepare to jump over six yellow taxis on a quad bike. All before dinner.

If, to much of the world, New York City
is
America, to most Americans it feels like somewhere else entirely. Somewhere they, like the rest of us, know mostly from the movies. A huge number of them have never been there. To many New Yorkers, on the other hand, ‘America’ is that place beyond the Hudson River, where they sometimes go at weekends but rarely visit. To those who live on the long thin island at its heart, Manhattan is a world of its own. In some ways indeed it is
the
world in microcosm, fond of dressing up to show the visitor different faces, yet beneath it all brashly itself.

The New York experience begins in the arrivals hall at JFK airport, with the stewards in the long line at immigration telling you in that broad nasal twang that in itself sets New York apart from the rest of the country, to wait until the ‘awwfissa’ calls you forward. With a population drawn from most other cities on the planet, New York when it wants to can resemble any one of them: on this particular day the arrivals hall at JFK is doing a very good impression of Tel Aviv. In the queue in front of me are lines of orthodox Hasidic Jews: pale faces with trailing ringlets under black hats and in long black coats. Many of the women have their hair covered with scarves. It is to be one of my more unexpected experiences that although the United States has a growing Muslim population the only women I encounter covering their hair for religious reasons are either orthodox Jewish or fundamentalist Christian.

On the shuttle minibus into Manhattan, sitting up front next to the driver is in itself a lesson in the ‘global city’s’ evolving ethnicity. Dark-skinned, with
a baseball cap on backwards – men’s headgear I am also going to discover is a more important social marker in America than women’s – jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers, I have the driver marked out as an unremarkable African-American. I’m amused by his native New York savvy as we negotiate the concrete
barriers
and bollards between the terminals – partly there as security measures but primarily because most of the airport, as always, is a construction site in a state of Third World confusion – and he nods to the first cop, a freckle-faced, red-haired man, with a ‘Thanks, pal’, while the second, a swarthier type with a neat moustache, gets a ‘
Muchas gracias, amigo
’. Then as we bounce up onto the freeway he picks up his mobile phone and reveals his native language to be Arabic. ‘I’m from Morocco,’ he tells me in the brief seconds during the whole 90-minute journey when he is off the phone long enough for me to ask.

The journey is 90 minutes rather than the usual 45 because almost as soon as we reach Manhattan – the astounding skyline even without the Twin Towers still as iconic of the twentieth century
AD
as the Roman Coliseum was to the first or the pyramids of Giza to the twentieth
BC
– the traffic closes around us in absolute gridlock. It had not dawned on me, as I suspect it had not on most people, that this is ‘UN Week’, the opening of the United Nations’ annual General Assembly session, the occasion of choice for national leaders with an urge to grandstand to the world. This was the forum at which Nikita
Khrushchev
banged his shoe on the rostrum and told America ‘We will bury you’, where Che Guevara and Fidel Castro accused America of imperialism and
terrorism
, while making the most of New York’s capitalist comforts. Today it is the turn of the White House’s
bête noire
of the moment, the president of Iran, to declare he will continue to flout American power by developing nuclear power. If the UN does nothing else, as George W. Bush in these waning days of his presidency certainly believes, it is nonetheless remarkable that it can bring him and Ahmedinejad together in one building, even if all they do is trade insults.

The other thing this deadly duo do, of course, is cause traffic mayhem, as limousines with motorcycle outriders rush hither and thither between the
riverside
UN building and the offices of their permanent missions (it requires a mental double-take at times to remember that New York is not the capital of the USA and therefore has no embassies). Meanwhile, we sit stuck in the bus, now on the Upper East Side looking out at backstreet lots between apartment buildings in brownstone or brick, with teenagers playing in basketball courts, for all the world like a scene out of
West Side Story
(east side or west side, there are few cheap parts of modern Manhattan), and then we shunt along a few
blocks and are dwarfed by the soaring commercial office blocks and hotel
skyscrapers
, then at last to the Upper West Side where I clamber out and look with no little apprehension at the towering old and rather dilapidated building where I am to spend the next three nights.

I’m not sure I can really say now precisely why I decided to stay at the YMCA. I’d love to say it was nothing to do with the song. But the image of the Village People in those costumes – fireman’s uniform, Indian headdress, cowboy hat etc. – is too ingrained in my generation’s consciousness not to think of it every time I hear the initials. There is simply no way to shake loose a song that has been parodied, spun off and imitated more times than any, other than Tony Christie’s ‘Amarillo’, and yes, I’d thought of asking the way there too.

Of course, the world – and the YMCA – has moved on a lot since the
seventies
. It is some time since it has been used by gay men as a cover for cruising, which is not my intention. The ‘Y’ has long been open to both sexes and used by families and student groups as budget accommodation. That, plus a
relatively
cheap rate for New York City and a nice-looking picture of a single room on their website, meant I’d hardly considered anywhere else. There was also the idea that next time it hit the jukebox I could sing along as someone who’d actually been there, even if not quite done that. The sad truth, though, I can say with hindsight, is: it’s NOT fun to stay at the YMCA.

If you’re used to dormitories or are a teenager in a school group from Germany, as most of the inmates seemed to be, maybe it’s not absolute hell. But having been advised – by an internet travel site – to ask for an 11th floor room with a view of the park, I end up in an 11th floor room with a view of the central heating system boilers. In fact, most of the building seems to be dominated by pipework and other industrial equipment, the 11th floor in particular. The ‘Y’ was in the midst of an extensive and much-needed renovation programme that meant parts of internal walls were missing and the corridors carpeted with soggy cardboard. I may be doing this trip on a budget, not least because I want to see real America, not be cocooned in Holiday Inn uniformity, but there is the middle-aged male bladder to consider and this is what I’m going to have to pad along for a pee in the middle of the night. My accommodation looks not so much like the small but cosy single-bedded room on the website, as a one-up, one-down at Her Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs, though at least that would have had a toilet in the corner. The sleeping facilities in my spartan white-walled cell amount to a set of iron-framed bunks against one wall. At least there’s nobody in the other one. Yet. But what the hell – they’ve already got my money (no refunds available) and I’m not here to watch cable TV. 

Unlike most of America, Manhattan is a pedestrian’s city. The West Side YMCA is on West 63rd St, a short walk from Central Park, the city’s great green lung and one of the finest city parks on the planet which has long outlived its once dangerous reputation. I’m told that over two decades New York has
metamorphosed
from the murder capital of the world to one of its safer cities, at least as far as street crime is concerned. Even so, I’m wearing my cash in a
well-concealed
money belt, not the most comfortable thing given that according to a temperature sign by Columbus Circle it is 86 degrees Fahrenheit, which a few seconds later thankfully translates to 30 Celsius. Older Britons may cling to Fahrenheit and love the Americans for preserving it, but a scale that goes from 32 to 212 rather than zero to 100 has always seemed doomed to me.

This is maybe the fourth time in my life that I have been to New York and I’m trying hard to be blasé. It doesn’t work. It never does. There is only one thing constant about New York: the sheer, awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping,
colossal
, cluttered, sky-clogging, perpetually self-reinventing vibrant immensity of the place. From Columbus Circle down towards the insane, pulsing,
tourist-ridden
, high-tech, low-life, urban jungle arena that is Times Square, New York is so in your face you can hardly step back and see it properly. I know from my minimal experience that this is the best time to confront it, in early evening when the heat is beginning to subside, the day turning quickly to a violet dusk as the kaleidoscope of neon and whirling promotional projections start to wheel across the soaring, jutting, idiosyncratic façades of the sky-scraping (think what a good phrase that was when it was first coined) architecture, fusing them surreally with the onrushing night. You can’t do Times Square without thinking they should never even have attempted to make Piccadilly Circus emulate it. Except perhaps as a focal point for tourists, the garish little clutch of neon lights around the statue of Eros never was and never will be on a par. It looks today much as Times Square did on my first visit: and that was as a child in 1968. Forty years ago.

The truth is that Times Square has never been a place on the ground so much as a space in your head. A commercial space at that. One that has far, far less in common with the quaint concept that we still call ‘the bright lights’ and far more to do with Ridley Scott’s vision of future Los Angeles in
Blade Runner
(in fact far more than Los Angeles). This is a sea of architecture in motion awash with moving faces and shimmering images. The buildings – themselves ever-changing over the decades as stone, brick and concrete have yielded to steel, glass and carbon fibre, rising and falling and rising ever higher in tune with the demands of the commercial property market – are just the backdrop.
The Times Square–Broadway interface is a figment of a fevered imagination enacted fleetingly in real life and constantly subject to reinterpretation, as the neon yields to laser, hologram and HD digital projection.

Even before I reach what passes for the ‘square’ itself, on the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway, crash barriers have been erected to cordon off a whole section of street and hay bales positioned around a half dozen trademark New York yellow taxis parked in close order next to one another. At one end there is a ramp and beyond it a man in padded clothing is revving a high-powered quad bike, clearly with the intention of driving it up the ramp in an insane Evel Knievel attempt to jump over the cabs. This is too potty, too archetypal ‘Noo Yoik’ nuts not to stop and watch, except there is nothing much to watch. He is spending a lot of time not actually doing it, just sitting there revving his engine, spewing clouds of noxious diesel into hot night air that already reeks of engine fumes. Meanwhile the film crews bustle here and there, as if they aren’t really sure when or if he’s going to do it or if, improbably, the whole set-up is about to be moved 50 or 100 yards in one direction or the other. But then they aren’t really there for him at all, it appears, as a surreally-stretched limo glides in from the far end of the street, through the hastily opened barriers. And in between a couple of burly black-suited minders, a pretty, bottle-enhanced blonde in a tiny black dress, steps out and heads for a door in the wall.

It’s the first time I’ve noticed the door or the fact that a sign above it says ‘Ed Sullivan Theater’ and realise this is the stage door for one of America’s most famous venues, long-time home of the show hosted by the eponymous Ed but for the past decade and a half the setting for the
Late Show
with David
Letterman
. As to the leggy luvvy stepping out of the limo I’m not left long in the dark about her identity as a vast scrum of hacks armed with microphone booms and television cameras crushes against the crowd barriers and begins calling, ‘Paris, Paris, over here, over here.’ For it is she, the Hilton heiress, famous for being infamous – and of course rich – primarily because thanks to her
ex-boyfriend
Rick Salomon, several million people on the internet have watched intimate details of her having sex. And also because she has been jailed for drink driving, discovering God in prison (amazing how many people bump into Him there) and emerging to declare herself ready to work for peace in Rwanda. Rwanda, I am sure, is thankful.

‘Paris, Paris, talk to us, we’ve been with you through all your trials and
tribulations
,’ shouts one overly devoted member of the media (though both trials and tribulations there have been in her silly pampered artificial existence). She trips across and trots out what I take to be the usual platitudes – I’m not close
enough to hear and really couldn’t care less – and then trots off through the stage door out of our lives and into those of the millions watching Mr
Letterman
on TV. The minders scowl at the disassembling press pack and disappear after her. Exit pursued by bears.

And then all is dark again, or at least relatively so in the absence of the
television
arc lights, and the other bear-like figure, the man in the padded jacket on the quad bike, has climbed off and is lighting up a cigarette by the hay bales, clearly in search of some alternative means of living dangerously. The one he had previously anticipated, it is rapidly becoming clear, is no longer on the cards, as the ramp is being dismantled by stage hands and a lorry has backed into the street where the limo was, ready to be loaded with the bales. I am left there in a state of some confusion and minor disappointment: had I missed the show? No, there was no sign of any previous attempt. Had he simply changed his mind? Seemed unlikely. I asked one of the hired hands, who just shrugged in a very Noo Yoik way and said, ‘I guess it was just in case…’ ‘In case of what?’ I asked. But he just waved his hand at the stage door and got on with shifting bales of hay.