Three days in America
Recently I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to the east cost of the USA, where I’d not been before, for a few days for work. This is not the place to discuss the purpose of the visit; enough to say that I was with some great colleagues, and we had lots of interesting meetings and visits. But even apart from that, it was fascinating.
We arrived in Washington DC in the early evening on the Tuesday, and made the journey east on endless freeways from Dulles into the city. Despite the torrential rain I decided to go for a walk: our hotel was about half a mile north of the White House, and I wanted to make sure I saw it however packed our schedule. American rain is as wet as English rain, and the blustery winds quickly bent my umbrella out of shape as it tried vainly to keep me dry, a reassuringly familiar experience.
The grid arrangement of DC’s wide roads (they don’t seem to do narrow sidestreets), with traffic lights at each junction, means it takes a while to walk anywhere: I had to stop at each crossroads while water was chucked from above; jay-walking is not allowed while the crossing displays a forbidding Red Hand, and even when the pedestrian is permitted to move - instead of a Green Man, a White Hand beckons and seconds tick down impatiently opposite - we have to watch for traffic coming round the corner, which is unnerving for a Brit even though cars do give way. I don’t know if waits at DC pedestrian crossings are actually longer than at home, but it certainly felt like it.
I got to the park in front of the north facade of the White House, got my phone out and took a couple of quick dripping photos, then turned and went back to the hotel as fast as the Red Hands would let me. Drained of colour in the damp evening greyness, those pictures turned out better than I deserved.
As usual when I’m abroad, I found myself noticing the often small things that are different from home. Obviously cars, which on average are a lot bigger than in England, drive on the right, and the school buses really are yellow. The road signs are different too - the shapes and sizes, the jargon and the fonts a constant reminder that we’re somewhere slightly exotic.
And the traffic lights, usually with road names attached, are unfamiliar shapes, like the elegant, serif fonts Americans seem to prefer at least on paper.
I also noticed something quirky I remembered from when we holidayed on the west coast a decade ago: written markings on the road (‘pavement’) are ordered from the bottom up; I couldn’t help reading them in reverse, thinking of the Yoda voice my son used when he saw them (‘TURN LEFT NO’) - and I wondered idly if this was an inspiration for the introduction to Star Wars, when we have to read the portentously scrolling explanations from the bottom.
The following morning the rain had gone, as if it had never happened, and I got up early and walked in the morning gloom back down 16th Street NW, lined with trade unions, think tanks and lobbyists. This time I went all the way round the White House; on the far side, kept far away by the security, I could just about see in the distance the familiar south facade, with its semi-circular portico. Nearby, steam billowed from directly under the traffic - I assume the output of a heating system like the one that stars in New York movies.
Pennsylvania Avenue, famously the address of the White House, marches defiantly at an angle up from the Capitol, ignoring the grid arrangement of the rest of the roads in the centre of the city. Looking at a map, its line would take it right through the middle of the White House itself, so it is diverted for a bit, travelling east-west as it skirts the north of the President’s residence.
There were no cars on that bit of road, but lots of police, who didn’t seem to mind me walking there and sticking my phone through the railings to get a picture.
Later in the day, in bright, cold sunshine, we walked between meetings past the Capitol building, peaceful now, and took touristy photos between the trees.
Then, after barely 24 hours in the capital, we flew north-east, over Pennsylvania and New York to Boston, and spent a couple of days there. Everyone had said that Boston would be bitterly cold in January, so my packing was multi-layered. But although a few days before we went, there had apparently been a foot of snow covering the city, it had all gone - bar the occasional sheltered pile - by the time we got there. I went for a walk first thing the following morning, and though it was fairly cold, it wasn’t a temperature that would have been at all remarkable at home.
Boston juxtaposes new skyscrapers with old buildings, like the Old State House - now dwarfed by the buildings round it, but standing dignified, holding its own amongst these newcomers.
I walked down along the waterfront to Fort Point Channel, and across the Evelyn Moakley bridge (Evelyn was the wife of a congressman, apparently) where the sunrise made a lattice across the sky ahead of me. Walking up to the Fan Pier Park at the northern tip of South Boston, the skyscrapers back in the main part of the city were strikingly flecked with pink from the waking sun.
The Boston Tea Party, 250 years ago last month, was near here: 340 British East India Company tea-chests, weighing 46 tons, were smashed and thrown into the Harbour from Griffin’s Wharf, which no longer exists. There is a museum about the event on a boat by the next bridge down the channel.
As I walked back to the hotel (which, as well as not having a ground floor, surreptitiously didn’t have a 13th either), my map told me I was passing the birthplace of the telephone on Cambridge Street: Alexander Graham Bell lived in the city. Boston does, though, have postboxes - mostly shiny blue, with legs - unlike Washington, which didn’t seem to have any at all (security risk, apparently). Boston also has buttons on pedestrian crossings which bark ‘wait’ when pressed, like a harassed parent of an excitable toddler.
On the final day I walked up Beacon Hill, south of our hotel, towards the new State House. The elegant brick houses could have been in any number of British cities, though the fire escapes clinging to the outsides of the larger buildings, like those I remember from San Francisco, would have looked out of place there.
Later that day we went to Lexington, and saw the spot where Paul Revere, a folk hero immortalised by Longfellow, was caught by the British in 1775 while making a midnight ride to try to alert the American colonial militia in Concord to the approach of British forces - a key event in the early stages of the American Revolution. Obviously the British were the enemy then, but in 2024 we were made to feel very welcome.
And then we headed back to Boston, with its Friday evening traffic and tunnels and visible history, and said farewell to our little bubble of east coast time, which is now just an intriguing memory; and we flew home, back to Green Men, sans-serif traffic lights, ground floors and familiarity.