Spuyten Duyvil (and this part of the Hudson north)

Funnily enough we have spent quite a bit of our time in Manhattan escaping into the country, or into parts that are more like country. Last Saturday we went up to Hastings-on-Hudson on the Metro-North line, enjoying our view of the northern tip of Manhattan as we looked back over Spuyten Duyvil (as the waterway at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers is called).

 It takes about 20 minutes to get to Hastings - and then you're in real Norman Rockwell country.

There was the diner straight out of the 50s, it seemed, and people willing to talk everywhere we went.

We spoke to a director of photography who was running a lawn sale on his property. I noticed he was selling books that I have in my collection, such as Jeffrey Shesol's Mutual Contempt, about the rivalry between LBJ and Robert Kennedy. This guy loved the Kennedys. He and his family are moving up to Cape Cod, Kennedy Country. I said, 'What happens when you get up to Cape Cod and someone misquotes Bobby, and you go to reach for your copy of Mutual Contempt?' He said, 'I know, I know, but how many times can you read a book - really, once you've read and reread it a number of times?'

This guy is one of the few people I've met who appreciated Oliver Stone's Nixon. We talked about Eisenhower and Nixon and Republicans today. 'Nixon started the EPA!' this guy said. And I mentioned how Nixon's scriptwriters guessed that Nixon hushed up Watergate because Nixon was afraid that Howard Hunt would spill the beans on the Bay of Pigs affair. There was that great scene where Anthony Hopkins blanched when he heard the name Howard Hunt mentioned in connection with the Watergate break-in: 'Howard Hunt - Jesus Christ - Howard Hunt'. And I mentioned to the DOP guy that months later I saw a copy of a new biography of Nixon, and it said that that actually was the reason why Nixon had tried to hush up Watergate: so, scriptwriters trying to deduce the dramatic truth had stumbled onto the historical reality.

Hastings-on-Hudson is a beautiful town, and all the way along the train line, which follows the Hudson, you can enjoy the New Jersey cliffs.

Clearly this is not the New Jersey which usually, famously is the butt of jokes about people living next door to chemical waste.

We stopped at Juniper's in Warburton Street for lunch, and I thought we may have butted in line, so I checked with the other woman who was waiting. With that, we sat down and talked with her and her mother for a good hour about life up here. She hates the snow, after a year in the Cayman's, but apart from that it's a very nice place. And so close to Manhattan. The DOP says he can get into town in anything ranging from 15 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on traffic. From the station you can see the George Washington Bridge.

It's tiny in the distance, but it's there, as you stand on the Manhattan-bound side for the journey home (Note the glass booth for taking shelter from blizzards.)

But what about this urge for the countryside? I've just now taken another walk through Inwood Hill Park. It's low tide and waterbirds are walking on the mudflats.

I remember in the 80s particularly when the Labor Party was trying to shed its image of the party of soft social conscience, and both sides of politics in Australia were trying to establish themselves as the party of economic management, how newspapers and interviews with politicians (and yes, people at Darlinghurst dinner parties) were always bringing up the term 'economic agenda', and how I ran into a colleague at Darwin airport who said, 'But there are other "agendas". What about seasons, tides, flowerings, seedings, fruitings?' It's one of the five or six statements that I've always remembered. And probably the sort of thing that someone would say from living in Darwin, where the people not far away in Kakadu are immersed in seasons, tides, flowerings, etc...And since then, I've always wanted to maintain a connection with the natural world.

In Inwood Hill Park, I watched as a group of boys on the cliffs on the Bronx side of Spuyten Duyvil prepared to leap into the river. Why is it called Spuyten Duyvil? Because apparently an offsider of Peter Stuyvesant, in the early days, swam across here 'in spuyt den duyvil' to warn Dutch colonists up the river of a feared British attack. He drowned.

I was going to mention the boys on the cliff to a guy sitting on a bench nearby when he slid off the bench onto his knees to pray. I thought for a second that he may have been muslim, except his hands were clasped in prayer and he was facing New Jersey, due west. It was, however, a very modern Norman Rockwell scene and would of course have been more modern had he been muslim - the Huck Finn's opposite, the scene of piety.

The DOP in Hastings told us he used to love Inwood Hill Park, but he was DOP on an episode of America's Most Wanted which told the story of a murder that took place there about 20 years ago. It soured the place for him. Bitterness wasn't the flavour, though, as I walked back through the park. People were walking their dogs, sunbathing, baseballers were batting, children were swinging. They were enjoying themselves - even 'in spuyt den duyvil'.

Into the Heart of Country (a trip from NYC to Binghamton)

Going out into the country from here, the experiential difference with Australia can be guaged from road signs that I initially find puzzling. In New Jersey I see signs saying, 'Bridge Freezes Over Before Road Surface'. Huh? Yes, it's true apparently. Because the road is laid over the earth it doesn't freeze as easily as a bridge hung in mid-air. It basically means watch your driving over bridges in winter, not something I've had much to do with in the temperate or tropical Australian cities, or in Alice Springs where I can only remember one bridge. In Pennsylvania the message becomes more succinct: 'Bridge Ices Before Road', or even more sharply: 'Bridge May Be Icy', no explanation.

Not that ice is a problem at this time of year, when the air is hazy and summery. Pennsylvania is beautiful.

and the native stone

flat like this, makes for beautiful dry-stone walls.

There seems to be so much woodland out along this route to Binghamton; much less acreage cleared, compared to Australia. It's surprising really, given the US's extra 200 years of settlement and 10 times the population. Is it because Australia is less arable that the early settlers felt they had to render so much more of it productive to agriculture and clear it?

I hope this part of the world (now in northern Pennsylvania) stays as natural as it is, but people will tell you of the gas field bigger than anything in Texas under here. Lawns carry placards saying, 'Friend of Natural Gas' or have a slash through the circled word 'Fracking'. Some say that they don't mind 'fracking' 'as long as there's some regulation...Others were against it, but then realised it'll 'pay for the patio'.

And there are traces of the Indians here, as we get into New York state again

'Indian Castle' - was that a permanent village? But I'm intrigued by the spelling of 'Chenango'. We'd been hearing locals pronounce it for days, and thought it was a river named after a German immigrant - Schnagel. They must close off the 'o' so quickly it folds into an 'l'.

'Reconciliation' is not a word that you come across here, as you would in newspapers and in dinner-party conversation in Australia. And pacification of Native Americans is so bound up with the proud history that I wonder if the proud history could be unwound enough to allow a concerted effort at the attempt. In Australia a plaque like this would probably contain an element of atonement in the historical inscription (although perhaps we err on the other side; do accounts of the Barrow Creek attack, for example, where the Kaytetye attacked the Telegraph Station in 1875, express sympathy for the families of Stapleton and Franks?)

However, I did notice that The People's Free Press, which I was given at a Lawn Sale, carried a protest from the Onondaga Council of Chiefs on Behalf of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois League) about the codename Geronimo being used for the operation against Bin Laden. This had previously struck me. No tears for Bin Laden, but no Australian institution or individual in public life would get away with equating an indigenous leader with the country's bitterest modern enemy.

Finally, we arrived at Binghamton. It seems to have known better days.

but was a once-proud city. I prefer its size.

You can see the country from here.

Corrected again (Hessian troops)

My good friend Bob Clarke has taken issue with the phrase in my previous post: 'hirelings of the British pursuing the American colonists'. He points out that a good many of those fighting with the Hessians would have been subjects of the Elector of Hanover, who was George III. They had a perfect right to be in America fighting for their sovereign against those who rebelled against his authority.

Little things I notice

I realised in Minneapolis that I missed the sounds of trains roaring up from below whenever I walked across a grate, something you experience in New York City. Funny the little things you notice.

Yesterday I walked past a little park down the street, the William M. Tighe Triangle. I hadn't realised a mammoth's tusk was found there in the late 1800s. It's now in the Natural History Museum - pity it's not actually here under reinforced glass; that would have had more atmosphere. And yesterday I also noticed a plaque that said that Dyckman's Farm, the old 1784 building on the corner,

was a camp for Hessian soldiers (hirelings of the British pursuing the American colonists) during the battle for New York.

We have just been down in Harlem, where once again we fell into conversation. The waitress, Tren, at the diner we just picked out by chance, started out by telling us about the healthful properties of honey and we ended up talking about language (nutrition and language being her two interests). She told us that, according to studies, Black English is less changeable than European English. It's transportable, a lingua franca. We talked also about Gullah and then I told her about the people on Tangiers Island in Chesapeake Bay who spoke a form of Elizabethan English, at least until quite recently.

We then moved on to the Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture. They had on an exhibition of quilts by Sidis, descendants of Africans who started migrating to India 1,000 years ago; some, the descendants of Africans who were taken as slaves to Goa, all part of the African diaspora.

It's a jam-packed country, full of wonderful things even where you didn't expect to venture.

Erratum (Fulton's Landing, Brooklyn) and Minneapolis conference

After failing to hold Brooklyn Heights, Washington's army rowed away from this beach on the Brooklyn side of the East River at sundown on 29 August 1776 under cover of fog and moved up Manhattan to Harlem Heights.

Howe later tried to encircle him by landing troops in Westchester county to the north, but Washington got up to White Plains (where Percy Grainger later lived, by the way) where there was a battle, and then into New Jersey.

Went to Minneapolis last week for the League of American Orchestras' conference. Interesting place, Minneapolis. It's probably more my size of city, but I wonder about the emptiness in the downtown streets. Is it a hangover from the many days of snow? Probably the most striking feature are the skyways that connect the city buildings. Without street corners to orient me in this aerial path through city buildings, I ended up back at the Hilton ballroom (site of the conference) with no idea how I got there. It's better, of course, than getting lost. The day I arrived, it was 101F. It was probably nostalgic for the populations of Ethiopians and Somalians (and Hmong) who now live there, but a bit of a shock given it's not what we normally think of as Minnesotan weather.

Highlights of the conference included the concert with the Minnesota Orchestra's performance under Vanska of Sibelius' Second Symphony. You could almost imagine this music being in the bones of Minnesota's Scandinavian descendants and for the first time I understood that description you often find of Sibelius' many perspectives; that it's like sunlight falling in different ways through thick forest. I do wonder about Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto though. The first movement still sounds like written-out extemporization, which it was (Beethoven hadn't written down the piano part by the time of the first performance), and I have always found it slightly odd that people play it as if it were set in stone. Why not treat the orchestral part as a paradigm, and play with this part a bit? But would that be acceptable? The catch word at the conference was 'innovation' but is everything up for grabs?

Last night we went to a night of African-American monodramas at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, subjects like Harriet Tubman, texts by people like Langston Hughes, and beautiful singers. Full-blown song is what got the audience most going. (I am really starting to wonder about atonality's artful evasion of cadence, its refusal to set foot on an 'earth'; it often sounds to me like not getting to the point. It may be enjoyable to perform, intellectually fun to keep off the tonic, but somehow failing to give listeners emotional payoff.)

We pinch ourselves to think that we travel so far to go to things here. Inwood to High Street, Brooklyn would be 13 miles.Yet we jump on trains that come every five minutes, think nothing of travelling this distance to see a show, but in Sydney terms it's Sydney to Parramatta and we wouldn't just blithely jump on a train to do this in Sydney. The way regular trains eat up such distances here is a sign of the energy of the city, I think.

A walk in the woods (two blocks from Broadway)

I remember when I was a kid, seeing the road dug up outside our house in Prahran (a suburb of Melbourne Australia), and being horrified that the soil was only inches below the bitumen. I had a horror of the countryside. Now I long for the natural environment to creep into cities, and that is one of the features of Inwood, this part of Manhattan. That's New Jersey on the other side.

There may not be bark hanging in strips off tree limbs or the smell of wattle or eucalyptus smoke, but there is birdsong, a woodland smell, and a papery machine-gun rat-a-tat sound as the odd squirrel scuttles over leaf litter on the forest floor. The traffic noise of Riverside Drive is below us. For Sydneysiders who appreciate being able to walk into the bush off city streets, this is almost nostalgic.

We came across the spot where the Indian village once stood. A huge and ancient Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) once marked this place, until it died in 1938.

The plaque is nice. It tells us that legend has it that this was the spot where Manhattan was exchanged for a few trinkets. But how much more appropriate would it be in this environmental age, and to acknowledge the prior indigenous population, to replant a Tulip Tree here. I might write to the mayor.

Union, now and forever

One of the questions that has come up a number of times in conversation here, is whether the US is really a union. Let's face it, there is a great deal of difference between the most famous cities - Los Angeles, New Orleans, Boston, Albuquerque, New York, and then the vast differences in terrain. I wonder if Americans feel little need to explore the world (only 8% of congress have passports I heard) because such a hugely diverse world is available at home.

On the other hand, there is something immediately recognisable about American architecture. Just as an Australian will recognise the Australian suburban home cartooned in a painting by Howard Arkley, an American must feel s/he is in-country from the appearance of towns coast to coast.

Come take a trip with me:

Gallup, New Mexico


Raton, New Mexico


Fort Madison, Iowa


Cumberland, Maryland

Brooklyn, New York

Doesn't it look like there's a 'house style'?

Insights, perhaps, from a good walk (Inwood, NY)

We're in Inwood now. Many of the people are from either the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rica, and Spanish is spoken in the street. There must be a Russian population as well, as signs in the parks are also in Cyrillic.

It's much greener up here and you can feel the past. Around here, on either the Harlem River ship canal, or a waterway with the great name of Spuyten Duyvil, the Brits' Hessian allies landed when they were trying to force the American colonial forces to flee into New Jersey or Westchester.

This is still Manhattan, but Battery Park is 14 miles away. If you walk down Broadway the entire length, you can be overwhelmed by the miles and miles of apartments, many of a similar size and bulk. I tried to convey a sense of what this felt like, the other day, by saying that as I walked down Broadway mile after mile, it was like being a cartoon character who is walking on the spot while the same scenery revolved behind me. Of course, that's to forget to look at the details and realise that many of the buildings are individually quite unique.

One of the notices in the Inwood Parks tells people not to smoke in the park. As I climbed some steps I saw some people cheerfully defying the ban - the good old lack of concern for authority. Were they Russians saying, 'Mycop!'? But it made me wonder something about the pyschology of the Tea Party. I wonder if the reason they rail so vituperously about rules and regulations is because they were the people who always used to obey the rules - to the letter and cheerlessly and increasingly begrudgingly, and now they're 'angry and they're not going to take it anymore'? It's what makes me think many of them will eventually calm down.