Chapter 1

Note that this trip was in 1999, before the attack on the twin towers forever changed the New York Skyline.

Chapter 1

“I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

John Wayne (attrib.)

I left just after first light on a June day that was cold, grey, and typically English. The heavy overnight rain had eased into a thin depressing drizzle and had left the roads black and shiny. I could see the early morning traffic from the window of the train. It didn't feel any different from my dozens of other departures and, I reflected, apart from the time involved perhaps it wasn't. It would be a new Millennium when I returned in nine months and, even discounting my flights to and from home, I would have covered more than 22000 miles - most of it by road - but was there anything fundamentally different about this trip? I didn't know for certain but I was looking forward to finding out.

Birmingham Airport was busy even at such an hour and apart from being requested, for no readily discernible reason, to check my perfectly normal rucksack in at the over sized luggage counter, everything went smoothly and I was soon in the limbo of boredom that is transatlantic travel.

I always find flying a strangely unreal experience. Almost from the moment I step onto an aeroplane my sense of time and distance deserts me. I eat whatever food is placed in front of me, watch movies that I would normally walk barefoot on broken glass to avoid and converse with strangers that I shall never see again on topics of mind-numbing mundanity. I doze a little and discover on waking that I am unable to say with confidence whether I have been on the thing for ten minutes or ten hours. It's disorienting and disconcerting and it happens to me every single time I fly. This time was no exception. It seemed only minutes after I had sat down that I opened my eyes from a moment's rest to find that we were taxiing along the runway at Newark. Barely moments later by my faulty reckoning I was standing outside wondering vaguely why I was dressed for cold conditions when it was clearly a scorching day. I took the air conditioned Greyline bus to my Manhattan Hotel, the Skyline where I had stayed before on my last visit to New York. My sense of time had started to return and by the time I had checked in, showered and changed into clothes rather more suited to the climate I was ready for lunch.

I love visiting New York. It manages to be simultaneously familiar and strange, as if you have suddenly found yourself on screen in a Woody Allen movie. Everywhere you look is different to the familiar shapes of an English city. Above you the impossibly high skyscrapers rise - every one of them unique. At your feet steps lead down into strange basement apartments and shops. I walked down Fifth Avenue with a jazz soundtrack playing in my head and bought a sandwich in a deli in the Empire State Building. It was comfortably big enough to feed a family of four with enough scraps left over to take home for the dog.

I was on my way to meet an old friend and former colleague, Nigel, who had left the delights of the West Midlands to marry a New Yorker and live and work in the United States. The twin traumas of leaving behind his beloved Aston Villa and decent English beer should, I surmised, have left him a broken man. I ambled slowly down the length of Manhattan to the financial district and into the basement shopping mall of the World Trade Center. I was too early so I killed time counting the number of spin off products in the shops from the latest Star Wars movie, which hadn't yet opened in England. There were plenty to choose from, books, T-shirts, games, toys, bags, costumes, posters, stickers. I had easily passed a hundred when I realised that it was time to meet Nigel.

Like me Nigel used to work for the West Midlands Police computer department. Unlike me he was still gainfully employed – somewhere high in one of those remarkable twin towers. He came striding through the glass doors from the Trade Center bang on time and we went for a couple of beers and a pizza. Far from being the mere shadow of his former self that I had expected he seemed extremely happy with his new circumstances, striding around New York as if he had lived there all of his life. We sat talking over old times and drinking our reasonably palatable beers until we both remembered that we actually have virtually nothing in common apart from our shared former employment and called it a day. Gossip about ex-colleagues is all very well but can’t keep the conversation going for very long. Anyway I was jet-lagged so an early night seemed like a very good idea, particularly as I had only one full day in New York and wanted to spend it more or less awake as I had a couple of things I wanted to see and places I wanted to visit, places that my even briefer previous visit had left me unable to reach.

The last time I was in New York I tried to do something that is patently impossible. I tried to see the whole of Manhattan in a day, from the Empire State Building to the Statue of Liberty, from Radio City Music Hall to Chinatown, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park. The result, unsurprisingly, was that I saw every sight for about five seconds and remembered none of them a week later. In particular I had seen the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island without ever even leaving the ferry. This time I was determined to see less but do it more thoroughly. To that end I took a morning subway ride down to Battery Park, caught the ferry and allocated most of the day to my visit to the most famous statue in the world although really I was rather more interested in Ellis Island, the former central processing station for United States immigrants.

First though there was the statue. At the main entrance are inscribed the famous words by Emma Lazarus

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”

Now, with the end of the century rapidly approaching, the huddled masses that fill the ferries to the monument are anything but tired and poor. They come bright eyed and wide awake clutching expensive camcorders to capture their visit. The name of the statue is actually - with surprising self-effacing modesty - Liberty Enlightening the World and in spite of the name it has to be admitted that up close it is a pretty damned impressive combination of art and engineering. The pedestal alone is the size of a ten storey building and the statue the size of a twenty-two storey one. More impressive though is the feat of endurance required to queue to get in to see it. I had arrived early before the real mad rush of visitors but even so I had to join a line of people several hundred yards long and stand for over forty minutes just to reach the deck which isn’t even the top of the pedestal. I decided that even with my new relaxed attitude to time life was just too short to stand on the steps for six hours to reach the crown. Instead I had a look around the small museum where an exhibition showed in detail just how complex an engineering feat it is. The even smaller art gallery contained assorted paintings and models of the statue. The irony of a gallery devoted entirely to small artwork representations of the giant artwork inside which it was housed seemed to strike no-one but me.

When I’d exhausted the possibilities of the museum and art gallery, I returned to the ferry to carry on to the less visually impressive but infinitely more interesting Ellis Island.

When I started planning my trip I discovered that the only country requiring me to have a visa for entry was the United States and that simply because I would be arriving by air and couldn’t give a definite date for my departure by road. I was fascinated by the questions on the application form which included the truly bizarre

‘Are you entering the United States for the purposes of Crime, Extortion or Terrorism?’

I pondered over that for ages before deciding that the correct answer was probably ‘No’. I expect that it catches a lot of people out. My theory is that most Americans are so completely certain that their land is the finest on Earth that it is inconceivable to them that anyone would ever want to live anywhere else. That’s why they insist on having proof that you intend to leave before they let you in. I can understand it though in a country where virtually every inhabitant is from immigrant stock. Between 1892 and 1924 twelve million people passed through Ellis Island on their way to becoming citizens of the United States and they were from practically every nation you can name. The redbrick buildings exude a sense of history. As the ferry approaches them it is easy to imagine the feelings of those arriving a hundred years ago to whom they must have seemed palatial.

Nowadays the complex has been turned into a museum of immigration. Inside, the sense of history is even more palpable. I followed the route that the prospective Americans would have followed. It led through the enormous cathedral like reception hall which was once filled with rows of benches for the thousands of new arrivals. I went on through the medical facilities and past the dormitories where those awaiting a decision slept in their narrow cots.

The medical tests applied were often cursory and arbitrary, taking as little as eight seconds - short even by National Health Service consultation standards - and could lead to an immediate rejection of the candidate but it was the tests for mental acuity that intrigued me most off all. One woman, according to the display, was asked

“Would you begin washing stairs from the top or the bottom”

Allegedly she replied

“Stairs? I do not come to America to wash stairs”

which seems fairly mentally acute to me.

The stories and testaments of the people are powerful and eloquent and I felt a sense of empathy that was at times almost overwhelming, particularly when I went to watch the video presentation of starkly powerful black and white cinematic pieces intercut with photograph after photograph of faces filled with a visible mixture of hope and fear. When I compared the journeys they had been forced to make with my own planned wanderings it put things into a new perspective. There is an enormous chasm between travelling because you must and travelling because you can. Nevertheless it seemed to me that I could hardly have chosen a more appropriate starting point for my trip and I left to return to the mainland in a distinctly more thoughtful frame of mind.

For all that the various tour companies offer a broadly similar service there can be enormous differences in the specifics involved. On my various trips I have travelled in everything from a luxury air conditioned bus to the back of a pick-up truck that had previously (and obviously) been used for carrying goats. The first of several companies with whom I would be travelling this time was Trek America who specialise in small group camping trips. They provide transport in the form of a minibus and conditions, when they are full, can get rather cosy. Last night, after returning from Ellis Island, I had met with the other ten people who would be sharing the experience with me. They were a mixed bunch. Apart from myself and Dave the driver there were only two other men, two friends from Denmark both aged about twenty. The women were two Australians and one each from Ireland, England, Italy, Japan and Holland. They were all pleasant and friendly but I hadn’t found it a promising start. I’d known when I booked that I was likely to be the oldest person on the trip but I hadn’t quite expected how big the gap would be. At least half them were too young to legally drink alcohol anywhere in America, a country where for teenagers its easier to buy a gun than a beer. Still I decided to make the best of it. After all the way I had my trip planned I would be changing my entire set of friends on average about once every four weeks. This, it had been suggested, might be more to their benefit than mine but I was putting that down to jealousy on the part of the unkind colleagues who weren't leaving their jobs to travel.

Now, inside the bus it was rather more comfortable with only eleven of us than it would have been with a full complement of fifteen though the air conditioning seemed to have the strange property, depending on the setting, of producing either a sauna or a hurricane or both simultaneously - one on each side of the vehicle. As we set off on the first proper morning of my trip I couldn’t help the feeling that only now was it all beginning. The flight here and the day seeing New York had been merely an acclimatisation process, getting me ready for the big day. It was a feeling I would have at the start of every new section in the first half of the trip mirrored by the less welcome feeling at each section in the second half that here was where my journey started to wind down to the end. For now though there were no thoughts of the end, only of the enormous expanse of days that were laid out in front of me. It was inconceivable that all too soon I would be looking back on it wondering where the time had gone