Rubbernecking on the Rock

The last day of our American odyssey is brilliantly sunny, if still Arctic. The snow still gleams in piles, contrasting with the Demerara sugar that the slush has become. I take a picture of it to remind me of the city snow of my youth. Our cases are packed for the last time – by now, I am so heartily sick of the garments I brought with me that I wonder if I shall ever wear them again. Packing for such variations in temperature and social activity has severely restricted the variety of any one genre – though I doubt if you can have genres of clothing. We park our bags in the basement of the Waldorf, check out, and head out for a final spot of rubbernecking.

Actually “rubbernecking” is a misnomer, for we take the chance of a fine morning to be whisked to the top of the Rockefeller Centre – “Top of the Rock”, it’s called – in a terrifying lift which renders me deaf almost immediately and which has a transparent ceiling through which we can see exactly how high we’re going picked out in blue lighting. We avoid a shoal of squealing school kids and their harassed teacher (he loos far too old still to be doing this) and emerge on the top platform to an amazing perspective on Manhattan. (My pics on flickr don’t really convey the impact, but I tried).

Come lunchtime we’re frozen – like being on a mountain-top, that was, in city clothes – and happy to cram into an Italian eatery near the ice-rink. Then back to the hotel to wait for the shuttle-bus, entertained as we freeze in the hotel loading area by the doorman, who has a tough way with errant yellow cab drivers. “You keep cool, d’you hear? You keep cool and you do what I say in hear, or you’ll not get back. Geddit?” Vague jabberings from the victim of his wrath suggest a recent American, possibly from the Indian subcontinent. Our bus is late. We are not surprised.

Actually we are the first to be picked up by the so-called Express Shuttle; I listen silently to the complaints of later passengers who seem to have been given a time 40 minutes earlier than us. Can this be a fringe benefit of the posh hotel? Our driver, another recent arrival, looks like Denzel Washington and has a neat way with one-way streets, forbidden right turns and the use of petrol stations and exit lanes to get ahead of the crush on the New Jersey Turnpike. We arrive at Newark airport exhilarated by such lawlessness, but are immediately cast down by the terrors of electronic check-in: for some reason I can’t get my passport to scan and have to ask for help. It works first time for a bearded man whom I assume to be an employee – he looks like anyone else but seems to know what he’s doing.

Three hours and a chocolate croissant later we are on the plane and it is over. We decide that the sun is well over the yard-arm and allow ourselves a G&T each. We are fat and bloated from too much food and too little exercise, but there will be time to address the flab when we’re back in the boondocks. We eat cardboard lasagne and wish we had chosen the chicken. The lights go out and we try in vain to sleep. I am assailed by restless legs and annoy all around me by wriggling incessantly. After two hours they bring round breakfast and a dim Ireland appears below us. The clouds thicken and we know we are home.

There came both ice and snow ....

A snowy morning in NY lacks the luminosity of the same weather in Scotland. Perhaps being on the 24th floor makes a difference – halfway into the clouds, really. I peer down at St Bartholomew’s dome and the yellow taxis crawling along the white street and realise that there is still stuff falling – the dreaded “frozen rain” of the forecast. It lands in little hard lumps on the window ledge and stays there. Obviously no rise in the temperature, then.

Fearful of venturing too far in streets turned suddenly lethal, we plan a circuit of interesting places within sliding distance. St Patrick’s Cathedral is huge, warm and atmospheric. There are huddled bundles on some of the pews; they may be praying but are almost certainly there for a heat. No-one disturbs them. St Bartholomew’s, the Episcopal church below our window, is dark and strangely unappealing, though we find the restaurant in their “Great Hall” at just the right time. They serve fries in flowerpots, but I manage to avoid temptation. The red tiled path outside by now is suicidally slippy and we clamber instead over the lateral moraines of cleared snow. We visit the Museum of Modern Art – a huge Anglepoise lamp appeals – and hear a wonderful choral Evensong in St Thomas’, Fifth Avenue. This last is a bonus: I have mistaken our direction and we end up outside the church five minutes before the service.

By this time the pavements (sorry – sidewalks) have been cleared perhaps half a dozen times. The precipitation has ceased (in other words the frozen rain, hail and snow are no longer timesharing) and the sky is clearing as darkness falls. Where the clearing has been most efficient, it is impossible to cross the road without braving either a deep pool of brown slush or a mountain of frozen stuff. The less favoured roads are covered in a soupy mixture of slush and salt, through which the traffic slithers and honks. Pedestrians – rather like Glaswegians – jaywalk at every crossroads, cursing in a variety of languages as the soup closes over their shoes. They are shod in every manner of footwear from wellies to stilettos. Businessmen and fur-clad women vie with Rohan-wearing tourists (us) for the shallows. I have never seen so many fur coats – don’t know if this is because I live in the sticks or if it’s an American thing.

We dine out again. It is Valentine’s Day and the hotel is very busy. We brace ourselves for the after-dark cold and make our way along Lexington to find a family-run Italian recommended by the concierge. It is excellent and very atmospheric, with an air of triumph as if we had all braved something just to be there. By the time we leave, it is colder than ever – 17 degrees Fahrenheit, someone says. The slush is freezing again, and there are gangs of men on small tractor-like machines pushing it into piles. Some are shovelling. They don’t seem to be wearing hats – I seem to have had mine glued to my head all day. I haven’t been so cold since I was a child – that hot-eared, dry-skinned, frozen feet feeling.

I no longer want to crack the windows in the hotel.

New York, New York ...

New York.

Wow. Almost too iconic to take in; almost too familiar to believe. Three days spent feeling I’m in a movie, but aware because of the acute cold that this is for real. I see filming happening – indeed, we are moved on at the Rockefeller Centre because we mustn’t get in the way, and have to slither round to another entrance in the snow which has resisted the clean-up – an impressive operation which seems to continue long into the night, the huge piles of snow in the gutter ever harder to negotiate when we cross a road.

We stay in the Waldorf Astoria. The doorman is wearing a long black overcoat, and a fur hat over a fleece balaclava. The bellhop who brings our cases to the room is large and earnest and breaks a lightbulb while making way for our stuff. I ask if it will be possible to make the room any cooler, and he suggests “cracking a window”. We wonder, wildly, if this is his preferred method of ventilation, but discover he merely means to open it. (We do, later, and then have the devil’s own job closing it as an Arctic wind tosses the net curtains around us. In the morning, we see the wee notice begging us not to attempt this feat without help.)

The hotel lobby is opulent, scented by a huge bowl of lilies, and full of business people networking, barking into cellphones or looking hopefully for someone. I throw a waiter into a frenzy by demanding soya milk with my breakfast, but it arrives, and is there for the asking for the rest of our stay. I tell the waiter he’s a star and he smiles sweetly every time we meet. It is so warm that I have to strip the moment we come in the door – and the lifts are so rapid that my ears are in a constant state of trepidation.

I decide I love New York. I take endless (and slightly squint) photos of skyscrapers, and travel the Staten Island ferry before the promised snow arrives. The Statue of Liberty seems strangely small, but arresting nonetheless. Frozen from the ride, we brave the subway once more and emerge unscathed in the wonderful Grand Central Station, where we eat among thousands, sitting up at a bar. I take photos of steam rising from the streets – another iconic phenomenon. We march half the length of Central Park to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art – some well-kent paintings and a display of old musical instruments, among which an Erard grand which features in the book I’m reading (The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason).

On our way home we are seduced by the gleaming cube of the Apple Centre on Fifth Avenue, and after Mr B has attacked the door with his head (they shouldn’t clean them so assiduously) I buy a mini GDrive to back up my life. Much cheapness for travelling Brits these days. We eat out that night in a jolly Italian place under the Met Life building, and emerge to the first flakes of snow. We reflect that upstate New York has already vanished under several feet of the stuff, and wonder if we shall ever be able to leave.

Entertaining entraining - and detraining

It’s time to start blogging again – I’m tired of unpacking and laundering and catching up with mail and trying to remember who I am and who I know …. The curse of being away for a month!

So where to start? I realise I’ve already done quite a bit on the Alabama experience, and I realise that there’s more on my other stops than I had thought, so I’ll start where I left off, about to leave Virginia for New York. By train – Amtrak – just for a change.

We’re on the platform of Williamsburg station. All very small-town and agreeable, as maybe half a dozen people turn up and wait at intervals down the platform. It’s sunny and freezing cold at nine-thirty in the morning, and we avoid standing in the shadows. Marcia asks a young man if he’s a Business Class passenger (we’re travelling Business as it’s a seven hour journey and any bloody fool can be uncomfortable, as my father used to say). Anyway, he is, and we’re standing in the right place and when the train pulls in jolly men throw the Suitcase from Hell (mine) and the new one from Macy’s up into the compartment and off we go.

We travel for ever through frozen swamps and rotting trees – I hadn’t realised so much of coastal Virginia was swampland – and every time we go over a level crossing we hoot in a traditional sort of way and I feel I’m in a black and white movie. The young man from the platform, who turns out to be a Washington lobbyist and speaks just like the guys in The West Wing, comes down the carriage to tell us what to look out for, so that at the appropriate time we see the Capitol, the Washington Memorial and two of the President’s three helicopters, which sit near the line at a Marine base called Quantico. We are duly impressed.

The conductor encourages us with little messages: We’ve had a message, folks. We’re going to be travelling pretty slow, ‘cos there’s work on the line. You gotta go slow, just like when there are road works. We do apologise and thank you for your patience. Or better still: We shall be continuing momentarily. I suppress a vision of stop-start motion. It’s better than a plane taking off momentarily.

The Potomac River is frozen over, and in a station I see that the taps on standpipes have been left running gently, so that huge icebergs form under them. The conductor informs us that we can get off and have a smoke, if we like, but warns that the temperature outside is significantly lower than when you boarded. We’re glad we don’t smoke. Later we pass through rows of Coronation Street-type houses which are a far cry from the places we’ve been. Baltimore slums, I think.

We dive into a long tunnel and emerge in Penn Station, New York. Somehow we drag our burdens onto the platform, which is on a level with the carriage. (In Williamsburg they had to provide a wee yellow step for us.) Eventually we locate a lift – sorry: elevator. It does not, however, go as far as the street, and we end up perched precariously on an escalator in the rush hour. We manage not to fall back down again, and find ourselves on the street. I eyeball the driver of a yellow cab and he cracks his boot – sorry: trunk – for us. I eyeball him again and he gets out to help. We scoosh off through the frantic streets. We think we know roughly which way we should be heading, but the one-way system soon puts paid to that. We surrender to our fate. We’re in New York.