Stepping out of the sun into the cavernous Alamo depot on East 31st Street we could be in the garage in Some Like it Hot. But no Spats, no card school, no bullet holes in my double bass and certainly no Sugar. Just the smell of grease and petrol and, in the office, the sting of cheap air freshener.
We sign for the car and head west before snaking across on Broadway to collect my wife and the bags from the hotel.
Manhattan is hung on a 3 dimensional grid with fire escape and escalator struts. Randomly bent and bubbled by organic tumourous shapes – the lakes in Central Park, the Guggenheim, the bodycraft of horse drawn carriages – and by non-conformist streets which disfigure the symmetry. Water towers puncture the skyline like old railroad steam whistles but the trees seem strangely at home.
From the pavement with the bags we bundle my wife into the car and head north. My daughter’s employer was astounded we were proposing to drive out of New York without the aid of satellites. But we manage to make the requisite 2 right angle changes of course in the correct places and keep the car going in a straight line through a succession of Hopperesque back-drops long enough to make our escape over the Tappan Zee Bridge.
We climb the wide arching back of the bridge and it feels as though we are being drawn to a magnetic west. Not to a pole or a pinpoint but onto an endless and increasingly diffuse cobweb of grey ribbon roads that bind America.
My wife, my daughter and I are taking a road trip to Toronto – stopping at Troy and Niagara on the way out; and Ithaca on the return. We are visiting my cousin. We are excited and apprehensive. We have never met his family. I have not seen him since the childhood visits of 40 years ago or more, except briefly at his mother’s funeral just over a year earlier. We joked on that occasion, “see you at the next funeral”. But it was too much to expect him to come over again for my mother’s less than 2 months later. We lost our favourite aunt, our fathers’ sister, the same year. There were five bereavements all together in a short span of time – quite a cull of the preceding generation and some kind watershed for me.
We arrive late at the hotel in Troy, in the dark, after a minor detour from which my daughter rescued us with hitherto untapped map reading skills. We slip in unnoticed, like the Greeks, through wedding reception stragglers.
On a sunny but icily sharp Sunday morning we head into the old town looking for the unspoiled part beloved of film makers for their 19th century street scenes. We find it cordoned off and thoroughly spoiled for a cycle race.
I try to picture Newton Archer calling on the Countess Olenska. But even Scorcese would have struggled to envisage such a scene surrounded by hordes of lycra fetishists and their faithful voyeurs.
We drive north out of town towards Oakwood cemetery climbing a steep wide road lined with trees and substantial grey timber town houses. We are seeking the grave of Samuel Wilson, local butcher, meat packer and brick maker, whose name became the personification of the United States. It is unclear how the Uncle Sam legend was pinned on this man as it predates his long and lucrative business association with the US Army. Neither is it clear what he did to deserve such veneration. Was it the quality of his beef and bricks? We park the car among the trees at the edge of the cemetery and look down on the Hudson River way below us, to the falls at the joining of the Mohawk around the islands Peebles and Van Schaick. The grave is unremarkable when we find it so we stare and wonder and shuffle among the leaves under the trees.
We have no graves to visit. Our parents ashes are scattered in gardens unremembered.
My father’s youngest brother, my cousin’s dad, lit up the room. My aunt had said that my father was the studious one, “the Prof”, a man of few words. But his youngest brother, he was always fun, always in trouble, always a mischievous smile – my grandmother’s – a wide gold tooth grin, always full of stories. As children we looked forward to and loved his visits.
Their generation grew up in a real world and struggled more than we could ever know. An army family, given birth India, moved around with smallpox and TB, raised post-discharge in varying degrees of alcohol inflicted hardship. My grandfather was stripped of his Victoria Cross for drunkenness. Raised in the aftermath of the Great War and in the looming shadow of the next, their education was completed on the battlefields of North Africa, Italy and Burma.
Back on the interstate driving west through landscapes faded like old deck chair canvases, greys and light browns, cold and colourless, post winter pre-spring. We follow the Mohawk flowing the other way passing Rome, Syracuse, Geneva and on towards Buffalo. We stop at a log cabin ranch style service station and my wife amazes the counter assistant by ordering one Timbit. To be fair they did have only one left of the flavour she likes but the woman was obviously unused to such restraint. We skirt round Buffalo and as dark approaches make the Canadian border. Not overly pleased to see their colonial cousins they do let us in eventually. We bump the car over the sleeping Mounties and ice, abandon it amongst the degenerating piles of dirty snow in the car park and rush to the hotel warm. To the right of reception, all chilly blue grey and bare plaster, some major reconstruction of the restaurant and conference facilities is in progress. We are told we need to go next door to an adjoining bar and grill to be fed. Is everything here bleached of colour by the coldness?
I am amazed and gratified by squeals of delight when we discover that the extra few dollars I paid for a “falls view” has not yielded the squinting miniature wrong end of the telescope sight I had imagined. We are looking right down on the Horseshoe Falls as coloured lights play on clouds of candy floss spray in the darkness. It looks tackily spectacular.
By contrast on my early morning walk I am awed by the vastness and the closeness of the falls as I cross the silent and empty dual carriageway and the wide promenade to stand quite alone – apart from the elderly street sweeper – looking over the railings where just a few feet away the water is hurtling over the edge. “Luring men on to their own destruction, a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control.” The ghosts of Rose and George whisper.
The American Falls opposite are draped with frozen mid air cascades, awkward and irregular like the gravity defying drippings of candle wax at the Christmas carol service. I imagine a solitary native American gazing on in the primitive landscape with all that width and weight of water creeping slowly towards him like a terrible history.
Two hours later, after a leisurely and substantial cold-proofing breakfast at the grill, I am back with my wife, daughter and a cast of thousands thronging the prom. It’s a struggle to get close to the edge and look over now. The magic is all gone.
My father’s Canadian cousins and their friends all did the grand tour of Europe in the 1960’s. Vivacious girls with short skirts and American accents, they could not understand houses without central heating. They were excited and fascinated by everything which was everyday to us but strange and foreign to them. Family gatherings, meals and outings, they were exotic and romantic, I was smitten. And now we are returning the compliment, too old and too late.
We first catch sight of Toronto glistening across Lake Ontario as we speed along Queen Elizabeth Way. Through drab non-descript ribbon development, service stations and retail parks. The classical venues behind us now we pass through Beamsville, Grimsby and Interlaken. My toll road stress is reaching an intense high as we see sign after sign which, though increasingly threatening, do not tell us how to pay. Three years later I am still waiting for the knock on the door. They always get their man.
We are almost overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm of the welcome. Huge hugs and smiles. My cousin’s daughter jumping up and down with excitement on the porch. We are immediately relaxed and at home. Cups of tea, wine, snacks and hot food. Stories of the trip; news of family members; connections and remembrances.
It’s maple syrup time and we visit the heritage centre where my cousin’s wife works. We are happy little farmers in the sugar shack. We walk the nature trail and see beaver dams. We ascend the CN Tower and gaze down through the reinforced panes on the clean, neat, model metropolis. Would I take a thousand dollars for each of those dots that stopped moving?
My great uncle came this way in the 1930’s. How far was it then from being what it is today? How hard did he have to work to make a place for himself and his family before returning to Europe to fight our war? Was it still a country that needed to be hewn out of the permafrost; ploughed, mined and harvested by men who shaved with blow torches and cut-throat razors, who wore woollen vests and lumberjack shirts? Surely there were no passengers then watching safely from under glass? No happy little farmers? How different from our generation for whom life is so much tourism.
My cousin explains that they have recently become Canadians. It is not so much the passing of the examination and having their application for citizenship approved. Much more significant is the fact that they had their own skating rink in the garden this winter. A few bricks and planks, plastic sheeting, turn on the hose and hey presto, we are real Canadians. Furthermore, they have been accepted and approved by the local racoon clan who have moved in under the decking and who peer at them eye to eye from the trees. Tread carefully.
We leave Toronto and begin sliding slowly down the far side of our trip.
Ithaca is a small town bulging and bursting with all its universities and colleges; and three conferences going on simultaneously. People are queuing for tables on the streets outside the bars and restaurants.
The hotel is a curiosity. An architect designed home, built in the 19th century for a local family of wholesale grocers. Saved from destruction in the 1990’s, the house has been smotheringly restored and beyond by someone so obviously gifted in cake decoration. Indeed the sideboard in the dining room is loaded with cakes and desserts from which guests can help themselves in the evening.
Our landlady, a Bruegelesque Lewis Carroll Queen of Hearts, welcomes us with the threat of a guided tour on which, I guess, we are expected to express wholesome appreciation of her work. There is a definite look-don’t-touch-adore-and-wonder feel about this Adams-family house. Leather bound classics strategically placed on coffee tables but with a tell-tale film of dust on them; curtains that look beautiful but cannot be drawn and if they could would not meet in the middle.
Citing medical reasons and the tiredness of a long drive, we excuse ourselves and seek the sanctuary of our room only to be reprimanded later when asking for some milk – “Well if you’d taken the tour, you’d know where it was!”
My daughter’s bed is in an alcove set across the corner of our room at 45 degrees, all fluffy pale yellow and white pleated drapes and covers. I tease her that we will wake in the morning and find that the alcove has disappeared without trace and she will have been recycled into tomorrow’s desserts. She doesn’t sleep too well.
Avoiding the interstate, we head back to New York through small settlements consisting of as many churches as houses, service stations and stores. Tracing the path of the Susquehanna, we are still going against the flow, but still a long way from discovering any source.
New York is gridlocked. It’s the Friday afternoon rush hour, so no one is rushing anywhere. Again my daughter map reads us to safety and the car rental return deadline in spite of unmapped bridge closures and road works. The town car taxi drops our daughter in Brooklyn and takes us to the airport.
As we go down Atlantic Avenue, our mood deflates in sync with the neighbourhoods each looking poorer and more derelict than the last. The airport hotel is the pit. If the sun was shining and we could open or see out of the high clerestory window, which is blocked by the air conditioner, this would still be sad.
But then, I don’t feel so bad.
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