Dry land at last

So I’m back. Back in the land where freighter terminals not only have public transport but also trees, green spaces and even a wind turbine!

Actually as I write this I’m onto the next stage of my journey home, sat on a train at Antwerp station which should be on it’s way to Brussels before I finish the post.

Very pretty station by the way. Very pretty indeed.

Then I’m bound for London, hopefully making use of the compensation journey I’m due from Eurostar after the nightmare trip back from the Copenhagen climate conference last winter. With any luck there will be time for coffee and a bite to eat at the station.

I actually found it harder to sleep last night than I did throughout the journey, despite the calm waters and the ship’s engines being largely off. The excitement of something happening, of the destination appearing, of an actual view to look at, had me getting up to stare out of the window time after time.

Even now, as the train sets off, I’m aware that my eyes are struggling to adjust to the change of perspective and the presence of actual scenery. When I first set foot on board the ship I wondered if I’d come away swearing never to travel that way again. In fact I’d sign up in a heartbeat for another freighter journey, though I’d prefer to do it with a few friends, and I’d want to plan it further in advance to try an get a shorter (and cheaper) route. I also find that I actually have some real feelings about the trip, some kind of emotional understanding of the distance I’ve covered. It’s a far cry from the sterile, deadening experience I’d be having if I found myself waiting at an airport baggage retrieval system after a seven hour flight.

I’m sure this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and sparing the time will always be a barrier to slow travel. But if you consider the journey not as an inconvenient chore to get through but as an integral part of travel, almost as though it’s part of the destination, it can be far more satisfying and relaxing than time spent in any manufactured tourist experience.

And so to sea

I always knew that one day my ship would come in, and today it did. I will be boarding for the long trip homeward in a couple of hours, and I’m just taking the last opportunity for a bit of wifi in a lovely little cafe near my hotel. One more blogpost, a few more tweets, and a skype call or two. Then eleven days or so with no network. I’m feeling withdrawal symptoms already.

What of this strange land I’ve been exploring? It’s as conflicted and polarised as I’d expected, not only on the topics like climate change and LGBT issues which I was deliberately focusing on, but on the very nature of this “experiment in limited government”. The current hostility between Democrats and Republicans, and between the wider ‘conservative movement’ and everyone else, is only the latest phase in a very long running conflict, the conflict into which the country was born. The polarisation between right wing and left wing media is also more polarised than ever – it’s almost impossible to find actual news coverage which is free from bias of the most blatant and manipulative kind.

It would be easy for me to characterise America’s inability (and the right’s unwillingness) to act on climate change as simple selfishness. Americans may think that they have the most to lose from the dramatic emission cuts which are needed… that’s if a change to their current energy-intensive lifestyles is to be considered a loss. But it may be that they have far more to gain as well, including some freedoms they forgot to protect. In their jealous guarding of the right to drive everywhere, they have in practice lost the freedom to walk (you wouldn’t believe the distances I’ve had to go to find the simplest things, from a bookshop to a laundrette, often along sidewalks which couldn’t be called pavements because they’ve never been paved). In defending the many freedoms of business, they’ve been left with a public which doesn’t feel free to live simply and within their means; with a media which is daily attacking people’s freedom to think for themselves; and with a political culture which narrows the range and depth of democratic freedom to an extent which would no doubt have horrified the founders of the nation.

This is also a country which seems disturbingly obsessed with the idea of being number one, of proving over and over again what a great thing America is. Which makes me wonder who they’re trying to convince.

I don’t have the answer to that, and I certainly don’t know what the outcome of their ideological war on the climate will be. I also have more thoughts to mull over before I can express them properly. Thankfully I will have plenty of time in hand…

Goodbye internet, until I see you again on the other side of the Atlantic.

N’awlins. The best place in the world?

How can I describe New Orleans? How can I put into words the utter delight of the place, and my dismay at leaving do soon? Quite simply this could very well be the best place in the world.

My stay here has been a straightforward holiday – the programme I’ve been participating in ended in Houston so there have been no meetings or piles of reading material to get through. Just a wonderful city to explore.

I was excited by its reputation for food and music, but to be honest I really only booked some time there because it’s more or less en route from Houston to Wilmington, my departure point from the US later this week.

I’m indescribably glad that I came. There may well be a festival or one sort or another pretty much any time, but I felt immensely lucky that my arrival coincided with Satchmo Summerfest, the free open air festival in celebration of the great Louis Armstrong. Sunday was one long blissful day of jazz, beer, sweltering heat, red beans & rice, fried chicken & mustard greens.

There’s something wonderful about the diversity of the place. Every race, every age, every style that’s cool and everything that’s not. I would never have believed that a wiry, lean black guy dancing frantically in nothing but pearls and sparkly purple pants and waving the tiniest daintiest tassle-fringed umbrella ever seen could not only get away with it, but somehow make it look impressively butch.

Thankfully the crowd, increasingly drenched in sweat as the day wore on, also included many 50-something jazz fans dancing with huge enthusiasm and zero talent, in whose company even rhythmic inadequates like myself feel empowered to shuffle vaguely.

New Orleans is more cool than the cool places – a kind of cool where it doesn’t matter if you’re cool or not. Nobody’s keeping score. Will it mean anything if I say that it felt post-retro? It’s a city where the old rubs shoulders with the new with a completely natural charm; buildings, clothes, furniture, people, and of course music. Everything is up for continual reuse including the tunes.

There’s also a pride of place here which is genuinely well founded, by contrast what I felt to be an automatic and empty nationalism I found in some parts of the US.

Later (with a fair amount of drink taken, it has to be said) I almost wept to think how lucky I was to be there. I’d call this a real place. Not the first one I’ve visited… Chicago definitely qualifies… but the first that I could see myself falling in love with.

And the food. Oh my, the food. I don’t quite know where to begin, but I know that I’m ending with a definite commitment to cook some gumbo as soon as I get home. Whether cheap or expensive, the food was pretty much always sensational. The spices were rich but never overpowering, and the seafood was always a hit. Whoever thought of putting a deep fried soft shell crab into a roll and serving it like a burger deserves a place in whatever afterlife they wish. Last night I wandered back to the guest house quite sober but with a belly full of the best meal I can remember eating, and wishing that I could promenade along Decatur every night of every week.

I leave wanting to know more about the place, and have been recommended to watch the HBO series Treme, which it seems is as much about the musical heart of the city as it is about the striving for recovery after Katrina.

What of the future for this extraordinary place? Rising sea levels and stronger hurricane seasons could pose a terrible challenge to New Orleans. But it’s alive now, and magical. This city can provide moments worth living in here and now, whatever the future holds. Sometimes it seems that the only rational thing to do in the face of an uncertain future is to take the irrational decision to commit to surviving despite ourselves.

“Say, its only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me…”

I just don’t like Houston

Throughout my American adventure I have been blogging belatedly. The delays have previously been caused by the electronics, the wifi, and the long hours of meetings. But with Houston, I just needed some time to come to terms with the place before I could begin to set out my thoughts.

In short, I hated the place.

I knew I was going to an oil state. The oil state. I thought my prejudices would serve me well, but they were utterly inadequate to the task. This was a city built of road. It really isn’t possible to walk anywhere, and even if it was there’s nowhere to walk to. There seem to be no real streets or places, the sort of bustling lively urban areas which real cities are made of. Instead there’s just an endless sprawl, every building looking like a motorway service station or out-of-town mall.

I had just two days of meetings there, but reaching the venues took a total of about eight hours of driving (I could never have done that myself… thanks go to my escort officer Paul, a nice chap who only does these assignments occasionally after retiring 15 years ago from the State Dept… he actually went to China with Nixon!). The landscapes we passed through were just mile after unending mile of bleak industrial desolation, the view from the road punctuated only by fast food chains and huge adverts from law firms urging people to sue somebody.

To be sure, Houston has some things which must be said in its favour. It is more liberal than the surrounding state (as the political advisor to the new Mayor… the first openly lesbian Mayor of a major US city… was at pains to emphasise) and is finally beginning to install some public transport infrastructure albeit in a small way. There are also some examples of more radical thinking about energy resources, economic growth, and the need for smaller, closer, walkable communities. But in general the complete lack of any planning controls have resulted in a whole region devoid of any shape or form, as developers have simply run amuck.

Most people’s response to my questions on climate change was, perhaps predictably, to bury the head further into the sand. With a few exceptions, people either looked at me blankly or changed the subject so quickly that it appeared they hadn’t understood what I was talking about.

I can understand, of course, that a generally right wing state with its economy so utterly tied to the oil industry would oppose cap and trade legislation or a carbon tax. But the denial is so deep here that a state which will also see direct effects of climate change – from more severe hurricane seasons to changing migration patterns – seems also to be ignoring the adaptation agenda.

I was utterly relieved at the end to climb on board the Greyhound and make my way to New Orleans. Better still, when I arrived I found that I was just in time for the Satchmo festival. More on that tomorrow, but for now I’ll leave you with the words of a trumpeter who worked on the TV series Treme who was speaking at a Q&A during the festival:

“I just don’t like Houston.”

It’s Star Trek, Jim, but not as we know it

Those who know me and my tastes won’t be surprised that when I saw this online, I made a beeline for what I took to be an open-air screening of an old Star Trek episode in a Seattle park.

How wrong I was. How delightfully, wonderfully wrong.

What I found after a longer than expected walk to the Dr Blanche Lavizzo Park was in fact a full, line by line, scene by scene live performance of the episode, The Naked Time!

With home made costumes, minimal props, and a split-second sense of timing the community theatre group Hello Earth were striking exactly the right balance between respectful fandom and knowing humour.

Even in a city with a sci-fi museum, this was an unforgettable highlight. I can’t recommend this highly enough, for anyone with a love of warp drive and a sense of humour.

(that’s sickbay in the foreground, the bridge centre-stage, and if you look closely you’ll see ‘Engineering’ chalked on the back wall!)

It’s cool up north

And so to Seattle (as ever, updating the website slightly after the fact!) for a break from the relentless heat… though only for a while as I’ll be in the South after this until I leave.

For a city so closely associated with cool it first struck me as morelike a typical northern town, with a bit of traditional seaside cheerfulness thrown in. But after exploring for a while there did seem to be a bit more to it. The cool is, predictably, a bit self conscious and forced. One hip alternative magazine I flipped through was bemoaning the recent takeover of its favourite hip alternative area by the ‘invasion of the hatboys’, though in truth this might simply have reflected the magazine’s dysfunctional relationship with its own hip alternative readership.

The popular Pike Place Market, while certainly a little touristy, has much more of genuine quality than many such places. And the International District (called that, I suppose, because it’s ethnically rather broader than the name Chinatown would suggest) is gritty enough to be of real interest and far enough from the tourist track to offer plenty of temptations for a spicy food fan, without leaving you reaching guiltily for the credit card.

Seattle has a reputation for a more radical tradition than most parts of the US, and the city government is certainly keen to take a progressive stance on climate change. But there’s also a vibrant volunteering tradition, and throughout the city community gardens are springing up with the support of projects like P-Patch and Seattle Green Partnership. These projects are bringing people together to improve their local communities and, whether or not climate change plays a part in their motivation, their work makes the city more reslient to changing weather patterns. More tree cover and healthier green spaces will help against both urban heat and rainwater run-off. Oh, and the results are beautiful too.

I’d like to say that the effort to reduce emissions are equally impressive. But as I’m finding in many places I visit it appears easier to motivate people to volunteer on remedial work like habitat restoration than it is to get them to vote for political change. I popped into a meeting of the Seattle Green Party while I was here, and found a very familiar situation – a small but valiant band, figuring out the same issues our branches back home all deal with – how to reach out to bring in new members, fundraising, candidate selection, campaigns, and how best to pitch the Green message in a positive way. There are plenty of radical ideas out there, and indeed many people actively rejecting the deadening values of consumerism in favour of something more human. But connecting that to political change is tough, whatever the political context.

I’ll leave you now with some lovely images of those community gardens, including one I volunteered at for a few hours on Sunday, which is very much under construction.

NB. For those who are wondering, the best cup of coffee I’ve had so far was still in Chicago – at Intelligentsia.