Classical restraint

Living close to the roller-coaster of emotions - it's a real phenomenon of US culture. Reality show after TV Reality Show follows people who have nothing better to do in their lives than fight like cats. The Housewives of Springfield or Lafayetteville or Nataucka flare up over the smallest triviality and hold grudges for weeks on end only to resolve them in 'full and frank' (televised) discussions which just degenerate almost immediately into another round of finger-pointing and feuding.

Even last Saturday, we got to overhear emotions just under the surface as a Miss Cellphone lived her life out in full in our train carriage. This was on our way out see one of American Opera Projects' works-in-progress at Princeton (a sedate activity, matching the university-town atmosphere you'd think - look at the bicycles for heaven's sake!)



From our end of the conversation (overheard), we were able to construct an entire biography of the caller. ''Cos yo' ass don't work 9 to 5, Mr Judah P. Washington Jr,' she says, justifying yelling at a recalcitrant boyfriend who then gets her off track by mentioning a film he's been watching. 'Was it in 3D?' she asks, and you wonder whether she might get further with the guy if she can stay on track in what is an apparently serious argument. By the time we get off we've got her entire life in a nutshell - 29 years old, one daughter, a whole life which is run as instantaneous response to external stimulus.

In the main street of Princeton we pass this marker:

I once read some praise of the Declaration of Independence; that it was a remarkably classical document, sublimating its rage in lofty objective language. It may have been a lucky coincidence for Americans that their revolution occurred in an age of enlightenment, when people set store by rational argument. I wonder if they could have formed a lasting government if they'd been governed and overwhelmed at that time by yo-yoing emotions?

Mind you, I suppose we're now seeing (in the deficit debate) whether a nation so swayed can long endure.

The continuing past

For weeks now we have been looking at this structure in Inwood Hill Park and I finally asked the ranger what it was.

It's a Lenape wigwam. He said it was built by Lenape people from New Jersey who still maintain it. The frame is White Pine and it's clad with slabs of Tulipwood (which is anti-fungal) and Beech, which are all native to the area. The Park is gradually weeding out the Norwegian Maple which was planted here in previous generations.

I was interested that there are Lenape people still in New Jersey, though during Removal they 'went' as far as Nebraska and Montreal (and stayed). And it's nice to know that the traditional crafts are still alive.

This reminds me of the wiltjas I saw at Pipalyatjara in northern South Australia (100 miles south of Uluru) back in 1976. When I went out to a similarly remote area three years later, the wiltjas were made of corrugated iron and hessian bags, although that doesn't mean that the knowledge of the craft is no longer alive.

A riff on a historical landscape

Since we're good walkers and New York is a walking city, we decided to visit the historical sites of northern Manhattan today, starting at 204th Street around the corner, and working our way downtown from Duyckman's Farm, the house built up here in 1784.

The Hessians were camped on the Duyckmans' property in 1776 and the original farmhouse closer to the Harlem River, northeast of here, was destroyed during the Revolutionary War, which is why Duyckman decided to rebuild his farmhouse here instead, at the corner of 204th and Broadway (as it is now), after he returned from upstate (where he'd kept his head down during hostilities).

The Hessians' huts were dug into slopes around here and I didn't realise that when they were doing archeological work up here in 1915 Pelham Bolton found remnants of their huts in the hill on Payson Ave, visible outside the window where I've been working.

I also noticed, from a period map reproduced on a plaque in the grounds that Spuyten Duyvil, the waterway up near the conjunction of the Harlem River and Hudson, was once translated as Spitting Devil, rather than 'in spite of the devil', but I guess this still denotes a dangerous stretch of water.

From Duyckman's we walked to 160th Street, traversing the street-level cityscape we've been missing each time we've caught the 'A', and arrived at the Morris-Jumel Mansion at 160th Street. Washington used this house as his headquarters in 1776.

On 10 July, 1790, in the first year of his presidency, he invited his cabinet up here for a day trip from the capitol downtown. I can imagine Washington, Vice President Adams, Secretary of State Jefferson, Treasury Secretary Hamilton and Adams' son, John Quincy, coming through this foyer reminiscing about the days when the outcome of the struggle was far from certain and whether they would all escape with their lives.

Hamilton wouldn't have known that the house would one day, in 1833, become the home of a former vice president Aaron Burr, the man who would take his life in a duel in1804.

Did the party look out this window?

Washington would surely have. His office during the war was back of here, in an octagonal room (if not quite an oval office).

Around the corner, at 16 Jumel Place, is a fine old Victorian building which was once the home of Paul Robeson.

We weathered the heat (how did people cope in 1790? I was in shorts) to walk on down to 141st Street where Hamilton's 'country retreat' is now located.

Here is the home of one of America's founding geniuses. I admire Hamilton not just because he found a financial underpinning for the infant republic in the 1790s, but because he espoused the idea of 'implied powers'. He believed as did the whole revolutionary generation that governments are instituted among men to ensure their welfare. Hamilton argued that the consitution gave the government certain powers to achieve that end and that government had the right to do whatever is necessary to achieve the ends specified to it. In 1790, he and Jefferson were yet to become as bitterly opposed as they would eventually become. Jefferson believed in a more literal reading of the constitution: government cannot assume any power not specifically delegated to it. I love Jefferson's idea that everyone should have a farm, but I'm glad that in arguments before Washington, Hamilton usually won out. In the early 1800s, after Hamilton was dead, Adams and Jefferson also fell out over similar positions, but in the last years of their lives, resumed their friendship. (A lesson for today's opponents? Even Burr on his deathbed is supposed to have said, 'I've realised, all too late, that there is room in the world for an Alexander Hamilton and an Aaron Burr.')

This is the house's third move since the 1890s, but it is now only two blocks from its original location at W143rd, and on land which was once Hamilton's estate. This is now St. Nicholas' Park, and when you come out of it, you're in sugar Hill, where Duke Ellington once lived. Downtown is still some way away, and you can see the Empire State Building in the distance.

We were tempted to walk on to the Gershwin House at 103rd - not really, we were beat. The temperature was in the 90s. So we went only as far as 125th Street. It's Harlem, but I thought I was hallucinating when I looked across the road and saw this building.

We'd been trying to evoke a sense of New York 200 years ago, and we see this. Ignore the Jimmy Jazz sign, this building wouldn't look out of place in Prahran - Chapel Street!!!

Traversing the actual lengths

One of the great pleasures of actually being in the United States, as opposed to studying it from afar, is unbinding the false sense of distances that your imagination has created from dozens or hundreds of movies or books. It's a revelation to learn that it is actually quite a long way from one end of Manhattan to the other or that Pennsylvania is actually quite close to New York. I love to see the lie of the land and feel the topography of battles. For instance, just outside Chinatown is this plaque:

It says that Washington assembled his troops at this spot for their victory march into New York in 1783. Into New York? It's a long way downtown now, and the environs look like this:

Back then, of course, it was on the outside of the 'city'.

Then there is the spread of the city. From the look of this, looking over Long Island Sound, who'd believe it was in The Bronx?

It's actually City Island, which was founded as a fishing village in 1625. In the parks around New York you can tell which languages have overlaid the streets from signs banning smoking in parks. In Inwood, the signs are in English, Spanish and Russian (Cyrillic). Here on City Island they are in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole ('Pa fimen nan pak la'). Just think: Dutch was once most prevalent around here, an interesting fact to remember only a week after 4 July. The sign above the Washington assembly-area plaque is in Hanzi. Would Washington have anticipated Chinese in this area in 1783? And who knows: in about 100 years, it'll probably be some sort of Hispano-English spoken in New York. Australians will feel less at home here then.

I spend some time thinking of the exact difference between here and there. I doubt you'd find a statue of Verdi in Australia and a local (not me) who could explain to Japanese tourists who Verdi was and why his statue's here (at W73rd Street). And you wouldn't see fireflies in the twilit grass around either him or the local.


Here are some other things to tell you you're in New York:

- guys really do hang out of their windows in singlets in the summer,
- people have full-blown fights on cellphones in the street - 'You set me up!'
- rap-dancers and preachers start up their performances in train carriages; they time their presentations to the space between express stops,
- you turn a corner and hear two cops discussing where you bleed out from the most,
- people are astonished when you tell them Sydneysiders complain about the cold when it gets to 60F, and
- people are astonished when you tell them government funds the arts to about 60%

Travelling through Pennsylvania on the weekend (to hear a recital of Ragtime in a Brethren church), I think I worked out why many Americans think the financial crisis is none of the government's business - because all the empy factories they see around their desolate city industry-scapes are private companies - Franklin's Rubber, Osborne's Electric, Johnsons' Ball-bearing and Runner Factory.

As I said, you get some surprising revelations as you travel around the country. And by the way, have you noticed that most people pronounce Pennsylvania as if it's Pencil-vania, not Penn-sylvania?

If you agreed, here is a bonus: a list of New Jersey Native American words:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~njmorris/general_info/indian.htm#Glossary

I'm intrigued by the number of places that end in 'pany', as in Whippany. I think it means 'place of'.

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.