Back to Savannah

I caught Greyhound back to Savannah this afternoon.

and loved the driver's spiel:

We got seatbelts. You can use them if you wish. I can't force you. Aint no drinkin'. Your profane language? Keep it in your head. We have decent men, women and children riding with us today, thank you sir, thank you ma'am.

After all that, there were only about four people on the bus, but I got here.

The King Street

Scene in King Street Charleston last night

A man stops me and says, 'I'm X. I'm XX years old. I'm homeless. This all I got.' (He indicates the pack on his back). He says, 'I don't want to beg and I'm not begging. I hope you will listen to me without laughing as the people down the road did. Like I said, I'm not begging. But I'll polish your car, wash your windscreen, clean out the interior, but please - I'm not begging - for a few dollars.'

(Above is King Street.)
I said, 'I don't have a car, but I'll give you a couple of dollars.' He stands back and explains, 'Now, let me explain why I'm standing over here - so you won't think I'm going to snatch your wallet.' I give him the money. And then he says, 'Thank you. Now may I ask, did I offend you in any way by asking you for money?' I said no. And he said thank you again. I said 'good luck' and he was gone.

This evening as I was walking back up King Street, a fiddler busking in a doorway stopped playing and asked me about the book I was carrying under my arm. I said, 'It's The Dream of the Red Chamber. It's the greatest Chinese novel.' 'How old?' he asked. I said, 'Around 1760.' He asked if I was English. I said no. He said, 'I know folksongs in a number of languages. I can sing you something in Swedish.' I said I was hurrying back to do some work. He asked what I do, and I told him I write words for music. He then asked if I'd heard of Alfredo Le Pera, the greatest writer of tango lyrics (wrote lyrics for Carlos Gardel), and then he recited from memory a poem about a man returning to a village where his first love lived. I was quite taken by the idea of this guy giving me a one-man recital in King Street at night. Mind you, he then said, 'You don't often meet Australian writers.'

Little things I have learned:

- You don't need to wear sunglasses here, even though it's bright.
- They have rocking chairs in the waiting areas at Savannah airport.
- Stephen Sondheim is a lingua franca. When I was at a Savannah high school with some opera singers last Thursday, and they announced that they were going to sing some Sweeney Todd, the kids all cheered.
- This is a land of whole hog. This high school I'm talking of is a public performing-arts high school. You have to audition to get in. After the opera singers had finished their recital, the kids offered their wares in exchange. A quartet of teenage boys got up and sang some barbershop quartet numbers they'd been rehearsing. Then the entire choir sang us the Lutkin Benediction - 'The Lord bless you and keep you...' They encircled us. The guests on either side of me wiped away tears. The opera company director who sat next to me said, 'That's America for you. We don't just do some of it; we do all of it.'

Hundreds and thousands.

We have enjoyed catching the train across the United States - that way you get a sense of the scale of the country. I noticed last night though, as I stepped out of the Savannah airport terminal, that what you get flying is an immediate fragrance of a place. As I walked out at Savannah, I noticed a fruity, salty odour.

I also noticed, travelling down from Chicago to Savannah at midnight, that America is brightly lit.

This is Chicago. In the distance, Lake Michigan. But it's bright lights all the way down, with occasional little puddles. It's not like Australia where there is an ocean of black either way you look. I couldn't think of a more graphic illustration of the size of the country and its population. They remind me of the 'hundreds and thousands' we used to sprinkle on cake.

'...the other side of the sphere'

Coming back here via California partially prepares you for a return to Australia. California has a fair smattering of eucalypts and other Australian natives. Bottlebrushes flower there at the same time as they do here. But Australian natives do not form part of the general flow in the US, and though Los Angeles, hot as it is, may have plantings of Tasmanian Blue Gums, nowhere did I see Angophora costatas (Sydney Red Gums, in the background here). Angophorae costatae (if that's the plural) and scalloped sandstone - that is definitely a Sydney look.

We met a children's book editor from New York on the plane. She was coming to Sydney for her fourth visit. We asked her what she would be doing? Visiting an old friend of course, but going to see some shows, and shopping... Shopping? A New Yorker comes to Sydney to shop? Yes, she said and when asked to elaborate said Australia has great magazines. It hadn't occurred to us.

It is nice to find the familiar made newly-familiar, nice to hear anew Australian accents (or should Oi say Austrayan?), even nice to see pests like Indian Mynahs (pests in Australia) on a fence.

Finding plenty there - a return to Oakland

Gertrude Stein, who lived in Oakland in the late 19th century, once famously said 'There is no there there.'
Actually I reckon there is plenty there. And we have enjoyed the past few days wandering from Piedmont Avenue to the Lions Pool in Fruitvale, three gullies over. We have enjoyed learning from plaques along the way about the Chochenyo or Huichiuss Indians who once camped at the corner of Trestle Glen and Lakeshore Avenues, availing themselves of plentiful food at the head of what is now Lake Merritt. We have seen with our own eyes the truism that Oakland has almost equal proportions Hispanic, African-American, Asian and Caucasian in its population (the Oakland-East Bay Symphony recognises this in programs for Persian New Year, Chinese New Year...) We have enjoyed the glimpse of perhaps grander days as we walked past the great old Dream Palace cinemas, which in old black-and-white photographs have trolley cars trundling past them. This:

and this:

and Thomas Pflueger's wonderful old example of Depression-era fancy, The Paramount.

The whole Bay area is exciting though. People talk about San Francisco's 'eclecticism'. I think it engenders a touching whimsy, particularly say, in the Mission District where you see spectacular murals on garage doors, walls and back gates.

Not far from here are beautiful old Victorian homes, built in the 1880s, which were not dynamited, as were the buildings in this area of Valencia, to halt the fires following the 1906 earthquake. Perhaps because 'newer', these buildings have not been kid-gloved as old buildings but treated almost as blank canvasses for wonderful flights of imagination. They're just as much tributes to human artfulness and charm as faithful preservation, as in this side wall of a women's health centre,

painted by

which treats the theme of women's health to a particularly vivid epic sweep.

The whole Bay area is a series of micro-climates we were told yesterday. We had a vivid experience of it as we emerged from overcast fogginess on the east side

to sunny streetscenes not very many minutes later.

The variety and extremes may be something Bay dwellers mention in passing, but they must contribute to San Francisco's excitement greatly.

Continental view

As the one-year anniversary of our time in the US approaches, I thought I'd try visually to sum up what I love most about the United States.

I love the people, their courtesy, their flamboyance and the 'upness' of their behaviour and the scale of American achievement, but I also love the look of the States, from a pond in the northeastern woodlands

to cedar swamps in South Carolina

to the slattern effect of leaves in woods behind Hastings-on-Hudson

to Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan and its glimpse of the New Jersey Palisades

to the sweep of California (this from above San Francisco Bay)

or this from LA, which gladdens my Central Australian heart;

to the Americanness of American street scenes (here, in Raton, New Mexico

or Montrose, Pennsylvania)

and the distinctive architecture. Not just the old historical sites, but the grand 1920s/30s statements, this being the inscription on the side of Berkeley High School

or the Berkeley Public Library

and the beautiful whimsy of 1950s/60s signage. (This from the San Fernando Valley

and this from Savannah.)
 

the beautiful mystery of Savannah

the beautiful civic-minded detail of design, say this from base of a street light on Vanowen Ave, Reseda

or a tree box in Pasadena

the entire grand variety, from sea (from Fort Clinch in Florida)

to shining sea.

(San Clemente from the train) - 'all over this broad land.'

'Down Mexico way'

Of course, one advantage to being in San Diego is the ability to go down to Mexico so easily.

And you get there via a trolley car which, at the beginning of its journey, travels through the city streets of San Diego like a tram. (We went down for lunch.)

I guess as an Australian I'm quite knocked out by the ability to travel so far in so short a time. Victorians can travel across the Murray to Albury, of course, and New South Welshmen (or women) can go across to Wodonga, but 15 minutes after alighting at San Ysidro, California you're in the land of Dia de los muertos, toreadors...

Amerindian traditions...

and requesting 'Dos cafe con la leche' in a McDonald's where the young kids behind the counter do not speak English.

It's bustling and noisy (both in colour and sound) and contrasts with San Diego, which strikes me as a once-beautiful city where an eraser went through and left swaths of carparks

(although definitely once beautiful).

In Mexico, 15 minutes after leaving the States there are the typical shortcuts of poorer countries - unsecured lights and unfinished wiring hanging down over the rough, uneven steps of a pedestrian overpass, for example.

It makes me wonder why it hasn't occurred to anti-regulatory Americans that the absence of regulation can be a pre-condition for Third World standards. But, sigh, people hug their entrenched positions...

I noted also, on the way down to Mexico, the wonderful mountain ranges you see all the way down the Californian coast to Tijuana.

There is a grand beauty in the mountainous spine of this state. Which gives me another chance to extol the beauties of Los Angeles - once you get away from the freeways and culverts. Because this is what you can see in the Santa Monica Mountains between the coast and Thousand Oaks.

Seriously. This is maybe 8 miles from the Ventura Fwy. There are warnings about mountain lions at the beginning of the trail. How come no-one ever talks about the remnant beauty of this city?

Perhaps because this hidden gem is less easy to get to than Mexico?