All Gone to Look for America (5 page)

As we step off onto the jetty there is a great roar overhead as a passenger
aircraft
drops into its approach pattern to land at LaGuardia airport, New York’s domestic terminal. Before adjustments were made to the flight paths, games at Shea frequently had to be halted while an incoming aircraft passed low
overhead
, though I am not sure whether this was just because of the horrendous noise or because they feared some hard-hitting batsman could knock a Boeing out of the sky. As predicted I have no difficulty getting a ticket: Shea can seat 55,000 and has rarely been as full as it was when the Beatles played. The
cheapest
seats, right up high, cost little over five dollars, but I splash out on one lower down, closer to the action at $21 which these days works out at half what I pay to watch even a game in the second tier of English football, let alone the extravagant cost of watching Chelsea or Arsenal. The ticket salesman tries to coax me into a $35 seat, lower down and in a ‘better position’. But as I haven’t much idea of what goes on and can’t quite see myself sticking it out for the full three and a half hours or more, he’s on a no-win.

The arena itself is impressive – as big sports stadia are – but seems curiously incomplete with the seating on just two sides behind the batsman (called ‘the batter’), so that when he hits a six – or whatever they call it – he is unlikely to kill anyone (inside the stadium at least). This has at least one clear advantage over cricket, where to avoid risk of injury a live audience has to be so far back as
to need binoculars to see much of the action. With the words of Laurence from the night before in my head I am very much aware that all this speaks to the American soul like a cricket pitch or a football ground does to most
Englishmen.
Indeed, Roger Kahn, the dean of American sports writers, goes further: ‘The ball field itself is a mystic creation, the Stonehenge of America.’ Heavy.

Then everybody stands up, and they play the national anthem. I wasn’t expecting that, and it’s not the last time American patriotic displays will take me by surprise. We only play the national anthem at international games. Here they play it before every game, the way they fly the Stars and Stripes all year round. They did it before 9/11, but they do it even more now. Most of the crowd sing along, some with their hands on their chests. I stand and smile and remind myself that over here we Brits can rely on a residual goodwill towards us as a ‘loyal ally’, even those of us who thought all along Bush’s war in Iraq was cynical, stupid and probably illegal, and Tony Blair weak and foolish to go along with it. I remind myself I’m just here to watch the baseball.

As the two teams are introduced individually on huge billboard-sized screens opposite, they don’t just tells us their names, they give us little
behavioural
tips too, like: ‘If you throw things onto the pitch, you will be arrested’ (fair enough, should be made more clear at football games too) but I can’t see ‘Don’t use bad language!’ getting anything but a ‘Bronx cheer’ from a footie crowd in Britain, the origin of that little expression (the noise of disapproval made by New York Yankees fans) showing that baseball fans at least once upon a time had attitude too. The English-speaking players’ words are subtitled in Spanish, and one or two of them even add a
gracias
after their ‘thank you’.
Spanish
-speaking players speak Spanish, with subtitles in English! And even the coach finishes off with a spoken, ‘Thanks,
gracias
.’
De nada, de nada
. America is slowly imperceptibly mutating from within.

One element of its soul, however, remains unchanged: an unrestrained commitment to commercialism. The loudspeakers have not long finished introducing the teams and the first innings is just getting underway when they burst into life again: ‘Congratulations to the hungry fans in row 115 who’ve all won vouchers for Bubba Burger. Just take your tickets to the franchise to claim!’ Note, now, this is during actual play. Do that in a cricket game in England and people would tut-tut alarmingly at the bad manners, do it in the middle of a football match and, far from queuing up for ‘Bubba Burgers’ the crowd would probably hurl food at the screen. That is if they noticed at all. Because that’s another thing: at a soccer game – there, okay, I said the funny ‘s’ word – fans are committed; apart from the few wallies up in the corporate entertainment
seats, everyone in the ground is concentrating on the game, their only
diversion
being to sing or chant in support of their own team and occasionally hurl taunts at the opposing supporters. There’s a chant here – ‘Let’s go, Mets!’ – but it’s pre-recorded and booms out to a rhythmic beat from the loudspeakers at sporadic intervals in a mostly vain attempt to get the supporters to join in. And parents may approve, but it lacks the irony-laden exchanges familiar to British football: ‘You’re supposed to be at home’, and the retort, ‘We forgot that you were here’, not to mention that Falstaffian old favourite, ‘Your support is fucking shit.’

Here, with seating intermingled, few people in team colours and in fact few travelling fans – understandable for some of the vast distances involved, but this team are from Washington, just down the road – it’s hard to tell who’s who and most people seem to spend more time eating, drinking and chatting to one another than actually watching the game. For a start, for large periods of time not a lot is actually going on down there: the pitcher pitches, the batter bats – or tries to and if he misses three times he’s out, the ‘three strikes’ being at least one concept of this game that has gained global recognition. Innings are short – they need to be, there are nine of them! – and unless you’re avidly
following
proceedings it seems half the time the teams are changing over, not that I saw anyone avidly following the proceedings for more than a few minutes at a time. How could they? The seating may provide a great view of the pitch but every two minutes there’s somebody waving a huge tree of candy floss (‘cotton candy’) in front of you, or getting in your line of vision with a cool box full of beer cans on their head, or warming tray full of hot dogs around their neck. But even bringing all this food and drink to the punters in their seats isn’t enough to keep most people seated for long: there is a never-ending flow of people wandering up and down the stairs, between seats and out into the concourses. ‘Baseball isn’t a sport, it’s the national pastime,’ my naturalised cousin would tell me later.

And he’s right. It’s more like a shopping trip combined with three hours of eating and drinking with a bit of sport in the background. The pitcher walks up to the mound, assumes that strange, contorted, standing on one leg, other knee raised high, body twisted to the side, both hands polishing the ball and then the loudspeakers boom out, ‘Soft hands, smooth play! Palmer’s cocoa butter’, and a bar of soap appears on the screen behind him, and I fall off my seat laughing, but no one else even notices. It’s as if the adverts were part of the game, an intrinsic part of the whole culture, like eating and drinking, rather than just a way of bringing in revenue that the sport needs but we’d all rather
do without. I’m beginning to understand how commerce, the business of buying and selling, doesn’t just intrude into every aspect of American life, but actually constitutes the American way of life. This is capitalism in the raw; in Europe we just have a pale processed and pre-packaged version. It’s a bit like offering a cave-aged Roquefort to a supposed cheese fan who’s only ever tasted Laughing Cow. It may be the more genuine article, but the taste takes some getting used to, and I’m not at all sure which I prefer.

The one thing I am sure of is that after an hour or so sitting watching men hit balls and blokes run around trying to catch them with giant gloves to make it easier – at least cricketers use their bare hands – I have well and truly had my fill of baseball. The endless adverts and the smell of hot dogs and beer have worn me down. I know, I know, I haven’t really given it a chance and maybe – just maybe – if I got ‘into the stats’, which is what Laurence in the pub told me is half the fun of following baseball, I’d finally get something out of it, though I’ve never been much of a fan of football ‘stats’ either: I don’t care how many failed shots on goal we’ve had so I’m damn sure I wouldn’t care what
percentage
of home runs Babe Ruth scored. The simple truth is that, in the man’s own words, I don’t have ‘an affinity’ with baseball. And that’s that. Besides I’d get fat.

Time for bed. Tomorrow I’ve got a train to catch.

HUNKERED DOWN
in neoclassical splendour by the junction of
Vanderbilt
(named for Cornelius, king of the railroad tycoons) and 42nd Street (hub of theatreland), Grand Central Station with its great bronze eagle, clustered flags flying and great marble halls lit by myriad chandeliers, is the world’s most perfect departure point for a transcontinental railroad.

On the ‘dining concourse’ downstairs, the famous Oyster Bar and elegant cocktail lounges offer upmarket sustenance for the well-heeled voyager; to the east Grand Central Market is a food hall to put Harrods to shame with its cornucopia of fresh seafood – yellow-fin tuna, Maine lobster, heaps of shining fruit – glistening papaya, burnished Connecticut apples, piled high European cheeses and the most tantalising charcuterie that Little Italy can offer. In the main concourse all the stars of the constellations, painted in gold on a vaulted sky of purest pastel blue look down in benefaction on the passengers
descending
the cream marble steps. All in vain. Long distance trains don’t go from here.

They once did of course. When the current building, properly known as Grand Central Terminal opened on 2 February 1913 it was the focal point of a redevelopment of central Manhattan, creating some of the most expensive real estate on earth. The station itself, served by new electric trains, was intended to be a continental terminus to outclass anything in Europe, leaving Paris’s Gare de l’Est distinctly in the shade, never mind any of London’s relatively regional terminals. Even today only Kazan Station in Moscow, departure point for the Trans-Siberian, even remotely stands comparison.

As far as its owners, the New York Central Railroad, were concerned, its main domestic purpose was to outclass the terminal of their rivals the
Pennsylvania
Railroad, which only makes its eventual fate more ironic. When the station opened, its most famous train, the 20th Century Limited, was already famous worldwide for first class service and for 65 years, from 1902 until 1967,
made the journey of just under 1,000 miles to Chicago in 16 hours. To
emphasise
the status of the train and its passengers a thick red carpet was routinely laid out to take them to the train, giving the world the phrase ‘red carpet treatment’.

In 1947 some 65 million people, the equivalent of 40 per cent of the
population
of the entire United States travelled through Grand Central Station. But if that was its proudest year, it was also the beginning of its long decline as America’s new love affair with the automobile and the airplane caused the railways gradually to be abandoned like a jilted bride. Only two years earlier Elizabeth Smart had written her semi-autobiographical, poetic novel entitled
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
. A sweeping, romantic, self-pitying yet magnificent tale of adultery and lost love it became immediately notorious. No one noted at the time that it might have been a metaphor for the fate of the station itself.

Already by 1954 there were the first plans to demolish it and build an 80-storey skyscraper that would be 500 feet taller than the Empire State
Building
(ironically it would have been the first major commission for
Chinese-American
architect I.M. Pei who went on to design the Louvre’s famous glass pyramid and so might have ended up a landmark in its own right). The plan was shelved but as the New York Central Railroad’s decline continued plans for the station’s demolition multiplied. In 1968 the company finally merged with its once hated rivals, now similarly ailing. Their own, in many eyes, equally magnificent Pennsylvania Station, had been demolished amid an international outcry in 1964, its proud pink granite columns replaced with the concrete slab that holds the sports arena known as Madison Square Garden.

The new railway, then known as Penn Central, submitted plans to treat Grand Central the same way and build a new skyscraper office block on the site, only to find itself facing opposition led by a no less iconic figure than
Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis who pleaded with New Yorkers not ‘to let our city die by degrees’. Grand Central survived – after a 1978 court case fought by New York City against Penn Central, by then a moribund freight company. The passenger division had been ended by bankruptcy as early as 1970, a cathartic moment for the whole US passenger rail network which ended with
government
intervention and the creation of Amtrak, effectively as a rescue vehicle, in 1971. Grand Central’s survival in the end played its part in the destruction of the company that created it, an old lady ruined by an excess of youthful vanity.

Today Grand Central is simply the world’s grandest commuter hub, but long-distance trains continued to roll in until 1991 when a new line linked tracks from Canada and upstate New York into the underground mire of
modern ‘Penn Station’. And that, regrettably, in an anodyne underground
concourse
that has more in common with a provincial airport terminal, is where I have to start my journey. At 10:00 a.m. Penn Station concourse is awash with people bustling from the subways, consuming coffee in litre-size cardboard cups at takeaway stalls, flicking through magazines at news stands or feeding their faces with huge ‘deli’ sandwiches. I should feel exhilarated; in fact I feel rather ill.

I had vaguely hoped for some sense of occasion, even the noisy echoing grime of London’s Paddington or King’s Cross if not the restored Victorian splendour of St Pancras. At least some sense of echoing train shed and, however restricted, a view into the distance, light at the end of the tunnel. Instead I have a few airport armchairs in the middle of an underground shopping mall, an escalator disappearing into the floor and an electric sign saying Train 283 will depart on time at 10.45 a.m. It would be nice if they even called it by its name ‘The Empire Service’. But there is nothing imperial as we queue up to have our tickets checked and descend the escalator disappearing into the floor of the concourse.

The platform is dark and the train scarcely more impressive than a subway train; the locomotive itself is invisible in distant darkness beyond the platform end. I clamber aboard trying to inspire a spring in my step but at least breathe a sigh of relief to see that the seating, even in coach class, has been designed with the average girth of the normal – non-Manhattan – native in mind, and is therefore more than ample for a middle-aged European with middle-aged spread. Unless of course, a larger than average native takes the seat next to you. But out of high season the train – in blessed comparison to the overpriced, overstuffed cattle cars that run on some British lines – is barely one-third full. Perhaps the only noticeable disadvantage is that the windows are slightly
grubbier
and not quite as large as the camera-toting traveller would like.

Fellow passengers include an elderly couple who look for a moment
worryingly
English – he is wearing shorts and knee socks while she has one of those faces like a trout that’s just realised it’s beginning to go off. Curiously she adds to this disconcerting impression over the next half hour by consuming copious quantities of ripe orangey-pink melon that gives off a cloyingly sweet smell uncomfortably reminiscent of putrefaction. The cardboard ticket the
conductor
attaches to the luggage rack above their heads says they’re going to Rome. I hastily check my ticket to ensure I’m on the right continent. Just in front of them a group of four seats arranged in facing pairs is almost completely taken up by an extremely large black man in jogging pants and a baseball cap. It is
only when he pulls out a mobile phone and launches into what you just know is going to be an extremely lengthy conversation that I realise from his voice that he is, in all probability, a woman.

It is a less than encouraging prelude to my first long American rail journey, but all of a sudden my concerns are immediately pushed to the back of my mind as the dispatcher on the platform cries, ‘All Aboard’ – they really do – and the driver toots his horn expansively, even underground. I am quickly to discover that American trains toot a lot, almost incessantly at certain times, as if they know it’s expected of them, like chewing gum or wearing baseball caps backwards – and we pull out smoothly through underground tunnels and steep cuttings, urban gorges cut through Harlem, to creep as unnoticed as a worm out of the Big Apple. Crossing the Harlem canal we finally enter what snooty New Yorkers call, almost disparagingly, America.

The difference, when the train at last emerges definitively from the
underworld
, is more dramatic than you might expect. The skyscrapers are gone,
vanished
, nowhere to be seen, not even in the receding distance. Instead, here we are trundling along the leafy banks of the vast, wide Hudson, until after about 20 minutes we slow down to stop at the delightfully named Yonkers, a wholly unremarkable piece of small-town provincial America, famed only for the fact that one day back in 1853 a local lad called Elisha Otis invented the emergency brake that for the first time made elevators safe and thereby at a stroke made possible the whole mad megalopolis just a few miles down the river.

With sailboats bobbing gently against the steep rocky bluffs on the far bank of the Hudson, on both sides at one point as the train rolls over a causeway between islands, the whole thing seems an implausible rural idyll so close to such adrenalin-pumping urban insanity. And then the sight of white-painted guard towers on the left brings back a touch of more brutal reality. There are no visible signs to say so but this is Sing Sing ‘correctional facility’, one of America’s oldest prisons, where convicts are still sent ‘up the river’ to do time. Like ‘the Clink’ in London this is a jail that has given the English language an expression.

The country that surrounds it though, is affluent. Elegant
nineteenth-century
houses perch on the hills overlooking the river amid thick deciduous forests that only now in late September are beginning the extraordinary
metamorphosis
from green to gold, crimson and just about everything in between that the New England ‘fall’ is famous for but ‘upstate’ New York exhibits every bit as well.

I try to snatch a few pastoral photographs as we trundle along at speeds of
perhaps 50–60 mph, tree colours, groups of swans basking in the sunshine, but the train guard, a jovial pot-bellied man whose bald head is set off by a
magnificent
flowing white goatee beard, is unimpressed: ‘Did you get the barge turned over back there?’ I hadn’t, hadn’t even spotted it in fact. ‘Pity. That’d have been good.’ He also takes the time to explain to me patiently that in America they don’t call him a guard, but a conductor. This seems like hair-splitting to me, which earns me a serious lecture in American railroad language. For a start this is a car we’re sitting in, not a carriage. Secondly, and clearly most importantly, the conductor on an American train is anything but a ticket collector; he has subordinates for that.
The
conductor is the man that matters, the man who tells the engineer – never call him a ‘driver’ – when to proceed, how fast to go and who makes sure that the points are properly set and the train runs in an orderly fashion.

I make clear that I have learned my lesson and give him his proper respect. Happily I also have the chance to change the subject as we round a bend in the river and come across a great pink stone ruined medieval castle complete with remnants of turrets and drawbridge across a moat. It looks like it ought to belong on the Rhine rather than the Hudson, squatting on an island in the middle of a narrow section of river funnelled between two escarpments. The conductor, as I now know to call him, tells me the rugged crags on either side are called Storm King and Breakneck Ridge, the fortress-like ruin is called
Bannerman’s
Castle and was indeed intended as a fortress, a folly built in 1900 that housed a private arsenal. The American right to bear arms – as we know – often takes extreme forms. The reason it is a ruin is not hard to guess: the
ammunition
dump exploded.

Stroking his impressive beard learnedly the conductor has clearly now settled into the role of professorial travel guide to this simple foreigner and takes the opportunity to impress me further with his knowledge of our route by pointing out that although there was nothing much to see, we have just passed West Point, the US Army’s equivalent of Sandhurst and legendary
military
academy that has trained just about every US general you’ve ever heard of, from those grizzled civil war veterans Ulysses S. Grant and Stonewall Jackson to more recent warriors such as Dwight Eisenhower and ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. Another alumnus was General George Custer – he of the last stand; what were reputed to be the few identifiable bits of him are buried there.

Next stop is Poughkeepsie, an Indian name, but originally a settlement that like much of New York – state and city – was founded by the Dutch (Amsterdam is still to come) in the late seventeenth century. Today it is mostly
renowned for making ball bearings and cough drops. We rattle rapidly out of town past mansions that belonged to F.D. Roosevelt and the same railway rogue Vanderbilt who gave his name to the avenue next to Grand Central.

If certain aspects of European history had taken an only slightly different turning in the middle of the seventeenth century, all of this area would still be speaking Dutch or German – settled as it was in the days when even we British didn’t differentiate much between the two (‘Dutch’ is an anglicisation of ‘deutsch’). My Rhine mirage of just a little back suddenly doesn’t seem so bizarre after all. The next stop here is called Rhinecliff while the laden orchards we pass are centred on Germantown.

This is the beginning of the Catskills, where the legendary Rip Van Winkle (now I understand the conductor’s beard) fell asleep for a hundred years. For much of this route, I realise, the ‘Empire Service’ is very like European trains in that it makes fairly frequent stops at places not far enough apart for a flight; here, unlike in most of the continental USA, the railway remains a relatively economic and convenient mode of transport and as a result trains are relatively frequent. There are up to eight a day on this line, which is more – far more – in some cases, as I am to find out – than there are in a week on lines further west.