All good things ...In what Bill Taylor has decided should be the last of his appetising morsels of New York nostalgia, he recounts the twists and turns of a long road trip out of the city in the Cadillac you see above (the picture, he thinks, was taken in Indiana). See all items in the series at http://www.francesalut.com/not-a-native-new-yorker/ - and we won't charge you a dollar-and-a-half just to see 'em ..
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know where you’ve got till you’ve gone…
Joni Mitchell may or may not forgive the paraphrase but, either way, it was time for a break from New York. Since I’d taken up residence in Manhattan, I’d seen very little of the United States other than the small Pennsylvania town my girlfriend (and wife-to-be) Lesley hailed from and the small Connecticut city where she went to university. And the view from the buses and trains that took me there.
I had some time off coming from my job with the British government but not a lot of money. There didn’t seem much scope for travel.
And then someone told me about “drive-away” services.
They’re still very popular in North America. This is a big continent and not everyone is comfortable with long-distance driving. So if you’re moving and you prefer to fly, you can entrust your vehicle to a drive-away company which undertakes to find someone to get it to you in a safe and timely fashion.
The enterprise I offered my services to didn’t seem at all concerned that I had a British license and very little experience of driving on the “wrong” side of the road.
I gave them my travel dates and they said they had two cars needing available then. One was a three-year-old Toyota Corolla for delivery to Miami. Sunny Florida … white beaches, palm trees, glorious weather… that sounded altogether promising.
The other was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, destined for St Louis, Missouri.
I had no idea where St Louis was (or Missouri, for that matter). But that’s where Lesley and I were going.
This was the car of my dreams. More than 19 feet long and almost seven feet wide. You could just about land a helicopter on the hood (bonnet, if you must). As the 7.7-litre V8 engine gulped fuel, you could literally see the needle on the gauge moving towards “empty” but this was before the energy crisis of the late 1970s and gasoline/petrol was not expensive.
St Louis, sometimes known more romantically than it deserves as the Gateway to the West, is about 1,000 miles from New York. It stands on the Mississippi, a river rightly known as the Big Muddy.
To remove any temptation to turn the trip into an elongated sightseeing epic, the company gave me four days for the drive with a mileage limit of 1,250 – enough time and distance for a quick detour to pick Lesley up in Connecticut and to do at least a part of the journey away from Interstate 70, the quickest and most direct route. The car came with a full fuel tank and after that we were on our own.
I signed on the dotted line and booked our flights back from St Louis.
Driving north through the relentless, cut-throat traffic of Manhattan and the Bronx was … disconcerting. Physical contact seemed at times inevitable and I wasn’t about to take one hand off the steering wheel to add to the bedlam of horn-blowing. But by the time I crossed the state line into Connecticut, I was feeling more comfortable with the size of the car. I’d also become used to not changing gears. The Caddy did it for me (in those days, Cadillac’s automatic transmissions were so good they were used in Rolls-Royces).
And then, as the 19th century newspaperman and presidential hopeful Horace Greeley famously said (or is said to have famously said; it may not have been original): “Go west, young man.”
Another overdose of romance. Greeley apparently wasn’t talking about California, he was telling someone they might do rather well in Ohio.
Ohio was behind us in a matter of hours. And, truth to tell, I was quickly discovering that small towns there looked very much like small towns in Pennsylvania.
But I liked the idea of being on a road that would take us, if were prepared to commit a felony and make the Cadillac our own, 2,000 miles or more before we reached the Pacific. I was finally getting a sense of the sheer size of America.
I liked the freewheeling nature of the trip in this amiably luxurious beast of a car. I liked the motels, I liked the truck stops. I liked the hamburgers and I loved the milkshakes.
I didn’t realize that we were about to encounter something rather less likeable.
These days, the US is a lot more homogenous than it was 40 years ago. News still didn’t travel all that fast and Lesley and I stood out a little in the Midwest – she with her eastern fashion sense and make up, me with my suede jacket, patched jeans and shoulder-length hair.
We’d stopped for lunch in a restaurant in a little Indiana town, a place with something of the ethos of the southern Bible Belt. There was a sign on each table saying that if customers were self-conscious about saying grace in public, a staff member would be happy to lead them in prayer.
I was paying the bill while Lesley went off to the bathroom. She came back looking rather pale and walking quickly.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Let’s just get in the car and go,” she said. “Right now.”
It turned out that a woman, a few years older, had followed her into the bathroom, looked her up and down and said: “We know all about your kind around here. And we don’t like them. We don’t want them in our town.”
It was, Lesley said, an ugly moment. Better to cut and run than stand and argue. There’s strength in numbers and there were only two of us.
St Louis, it must be said, was a disappointment. A city where, once the downtown had emptied of office workers and the shops had closed, they rolled up the sidewalks and no one ventured out. Not only was there nothing to do but it could, the hotel staff warned us, be dangerous.
When we dropped off the car at the drive-away company’s office, I asked the woman there what St Louis had to offer. She needed to think for a few minutes.
We could ride up the inside of the 630ft Gateway Arch for a view across the Mississippi of East St Louis. But under no circumstances should be cross the river and go there for the place was one big ghetto and we might not get out alive. She was very earnest about this.
She pondered a little more. “Forest Park’s quite nice,” she said. “That is, if you don’t mind a lot of coloured people. But they’re not the obnoxious kind…”
As it turned out, the choice was made for us. With no restaurants nearby, we ate in our hotel room. I think it was the turkey tetrazinni (a kind of bastardized casserole) that laid me low.
Even worse, I was in no fit state to travel – 10 or 12 feet from the loo was about my safe limit – and we had to push our flights back 24 hours until my digestive system regained its equilibrium.
I was done for the moment with travelling. All I wanted was to go home, home being where the heart is.
Home, I realized, had become New York.
* During this series, I have preserved and Bill's Canadian spelling preferences. But should I also have left 'traveling' untouched since he was writing about a time when he was a resident of the United States?
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