Suspended between poles - legato

I slept poorly on the evening before my journey from Vancouver to Mumbai.


We took off at 9pm, the alchemy of the golden hour gilding our tilting wings before we tracked into the North American night. At 5:30 am we bounced onto the Newark tarmac where I had a sixteen hour layover.

When I arrived at US immigration around 6am I found it confusing and disorganized. The assistants were gruff, demanding and clueless, barking orders that contradicted the signs passengers had read prior to standing in line. Arrows and instructions pointed in opposing directions and the security personnel seemed harried and inexperienced.

For a country that apparently places such a high priority on security I got the impression that the people on the ground lacked training and information.

I collected my luggage, which I wasn't allowed to check through to Mumbai due to the length of my layover, and following the example of some other passengers, I curled up for a nap on a platform next to a column in the baggage claim area with my feet propped up on my suitcases.

After 3 hours of fitful sleep I felt nearly functional and decided to use the remaining time to make my first visit to New York City. I wanted to avoid horrendous roaming charges so I decided to save money with a data SIM card from a vending machine. It swallowed $20 but no SIM card was forthcoming.

I left my luggage in the hands of the attendant. I was a little uneasy when she said she couldn't give me a receipt but she had a trustworthy demeanor and a crisp uniform. I eschewed the pesky taxi drivers in favor of public transport.

The Air Train is a clunky, teetering monorail which transports passengers to the mainline rail station, where you can catch the fast, clean Amtrak trains directly to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. They have a definitively stainless steel '1980's look to them but seem built to last.

On the way from Newark the tracks pass through a marshy area. High-tension cables dip from tower to tower across the gloomy post-industrial landscape, while a line of sagging wooden poles at their feet were in the process of decaying slowly into the grass-rimmed pools of the marsh. Some half-submerged creosote-coated poles clung tenaciously with glass-insulator fingers to a brigade of increasingly more erect poles.

Landscapes of industrial decay awaken a sense of mysterious excitement in me - the rot of civilizations monuments is a triumph of inexorable nature - still it was troubling to think of the world's only superpower not deeming it necessary to clean up such obvious signs of dilapidation. For many people entering the US for the first time the statue of liberty wouldn't be the first sight they saw, rather the New Jersey marsh with its old line of rotting telephone poles.

It's not the un-sanitized decay that worries me but the discrepancy between it and the bombastic patriotism American media bombards the rest of the world with. It's like the big brawny, clear eyed dependability of the bus driver was suddenly cast into doubt by his lopsided grin and the suspicion you'd caught alcohol on his breath.

My quick impression of NYC continued to be a study in contrasts. The grimy subway stations tunnel beneath massive old brownstone buildings were punctuated by the sails of steel and glass of the gargantuan clipper ship that is the Manhattan skyline.

The One World Trade Center towers above them all. The illusion of elegant curves where the straight lines of the Twin Towers once stood seems to illustrate a change in attitude, a break from the past, obviously from an aesthetic of 1970's architecture, but even more than that, a single tower where two had stood, the vertical lines appear convex, distorted by the view from the ground, swelling out even as the tower narrows from the base to peak. The tower is impressive but somehow very conventional. In my mind its sheer size is what remains.

I decided to pay the $38 entrance fee to see NY from the observation

deck. What a disappointment! At every turn there was someone trying to sell you something else. It was a wearying sales pitch with that enthusiasm only Americans can muster. It was a sorry cliché of shopping-mall-style opportunism and bloated, self-congratulatory nationalist pomp. They took an amazing view and turned it into a grating ordeal.

I found it disgusting but had only myself to blame; the entrance presentation along with the price announced its intentions loud and clear. Saturated with cynical loathing I decided to take a quick stroll through the Ground Zero Memorial and head back to the airport in time to run another security gauntlet.

On seeing one of the memorial pools my anger evaporated. In a way that defies description of its form and dimensions, similarly to the holocaust memorial in Berlin, the Ground Zero Memorial creates a stillness, a quiet, expanding space within the indifferent context of the city center. The square excavation seemed at once too small to have once been the footprint of one of the twin towers yet cavernous in its breadth. The pool below flows perpetually from all sides into the void of the square, inner well. There was the effect of the water in glassy, solid form, sloughing in on itself, carrying the ashes and the sorrow over the edges out of sight, out of reach.

I turned and went on in somber contemplation.

I took the subway north to Penn Station and as I made my way up into the main hall I was again transfixed: a big man with a backing synth was playing blues licks on a Gibson, accompanying himself on "Ain't No Sunshine". His booming baritone broke, keening into the chorus and the delicate vines of guitar notes curled up, beneath, in-between and took the melody on a little foray into the complexities of jazz before settling back down into the well-oiled riff and depositing me back into the hubbub of the station feeling cleansed.

The singer chuckled. The man beside me took a long pull on the bottle he clutched in its brown paper bag. I smiled, threw some green dollar bills into the hat and walked away from New York City.