I did something unnatural the other day. I crossed a land border into a new country. To some of you that won't sound like too much of a big deal, but to the English this is an alien concept. We prefer our international perimeters to be described by large bodies of water, and this partly explains why cries for Scottish, Welsh or even Northumbrian independence might confuse us. Why bother having a separate country if one can just walk there? Well, that's what you get for growing up in a cul-de-sac, I suppose.
Such rules can not be applied to the vastness of North America and, to be fair, the Niagara river that divides the USA from Canada is large enough perhaps to give even the most insular Englishman pause for thought. But after a plethora of road tolls on the way there, the border checks to get into Canada didn't really seem that much of a big deal. If anything, it was an unexpectedly convivial process. Not that this should in any way be taken as a sign that Canada isn't a 'proper' country: Americans take note, one doesn't judge a nation's greatness by how difficult or unpleasant it is to get into it.
On another occasion we might have fooled about with the idea of driving to the border from Texas, but it's not really feasible during Spring Break. Another time, perhaps. No, we flew to New York to stay with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere) and drove from there. A trifle of a drive, really, just four hundred miles or so. We took our time.
The road winds up through perfectly rounded hills, its path endlessly criss-crossed by shallow river-beds. The water is dark, winter-cold and dashed with pale rocks and stones. The hills are covered with countless bare trees so that their outlines are softened to a faint grey blur. When the land does flatten it is thick with fur-brown grass, like the countryside has its own winter pelt.
It was nice to be up in the North of the world again. A mixture of oddness and familiarity. I realised I miss even the subtlest of things: the low angle of winter sunlight; the way shadows pool up in the sharp valleys, in the lee of hills; it's an intricate landscape, chiselled and sculpted. There isn't much in the way of topography in my part of Texas and none at all in the city, of course. Even if you do get out west, the land is smashed flat, hammered into an expanse of grassy plains or beautifully desolate desert.
The road in to Ithaca, NY was vertiginous in comparison, rising up over the brim of yet another hill before plunging down into the city. We only stopped for dinner but I liked it. I didn't realise that it was the home of Cornell University, but I should have guessed it was something like that: there were too many cool-looking young people around for it to be an ordinary out-of-the-way small town. From there it was another hour or so, driving through the pitch dark between invisible finger lakes to Geneva, and then in the morning we headed for the border.
It is weird that America is so big. It is unhelpfully large, so much so that I can see, just a little bit, why there are crazy people here who are scared of the federal government or think that their state should be able to ban contraception or what have you. Even I had come to the point, I realised, where I was starting to think of the states as individual proto-countries. Texas is so different from New Mexico, let alone New York, that I had begun to think of them as distinct areas, mis-matched patches in an ungainly American quilt. And then I crossed a real frontier into a real foreign country and I was forced to squeeze the 50 states back into the small box in my head labelled "America", mixed and muddied together like poorly-managed playdough. And, having, done that, I had to try and come to terms with Canada, a country which looks just like America, but which has the Queen on their money.
So, yes, we did Niagara Falls. The horseshoe falls are the big ones and, to be fair, it is impressive. The falls are nagging, insistent, unrelenting. If you ever had to do anything like woodwork at school then I expect you've forced a rod of dowling against the wheel of an electric sander, pressing it forwards so that it is inexorably shwizzed into wood dust. Well Niagara is like that. Relentless and inescapable. No photo can do it justice because it is always thundering and always in motion, continuously dragging the eyes over and down, over and down, over and down until one gives up the fight and lets them rest against the white-out of the gently coiling mist.
The worst bit (or the best bit, depending on your inclination), is the part of the path that somehow goes around the top of the falls so that one is just a couple of metres from the very lip itself. I stood there, caught in a single rolling instant of time, watching the same water rush over and disappear into the event-horizon itself. The sunlight stabbed down, slicing through the water so that I could see just how deep it was at the edge. It also made the water shine, translucent like thick glass, so that I could almost see through the apex. But never for very long. Always the thunderous flow would drag me on with it and I'd be back again to the comparative calm of the lower river: the smoke-blue water giddily spinning and foaming; the mist falling as rain; the permanent rainbow; the hundreds of gulls, wheeling and diving, black against the whiteness.
In my imagination I had always seen it as being set in a wilderness, rather like the Grand Canyon. But no, it has two towns wrapped about either side of it: Niagara Falls, NY, which is rather rugged and a little decrepit in a post-industrial way, with a rather ugly shiny nub of downtown, and Niagara Falls, ON, which is a little tacky. It's got some nice buildings, some lovely houses but it also has a stretch of crap amusement arcades, wax work displays and over-priced pizzerias. For the deeper pockets, there's the casino - the upmarket end as it were. The boys went on a ferris wheel and then we went up the Skylon Tower. Both offered excellent views of the wider landscape and therefore options for escape.
We carried on to Hamilton, ON to stay the night with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere, did I say?). It was another of the most fleeting stops, but we had a lovely time. We got to shop in a real Canadian store and we got to walk along the hill and stare out over another Great Lake, Ontario. In the very dimmest distance we could see the faint skyline of Toronto.
Annoyingly this first trip was only a series of first impressions, but I like what I saw of Canada. It was suddenly exotic and exciting to see something other than the Stars & Stripes flying, and it was rather wonderful to see kilometers and French words on the road signs. But is this a kind of knee-jerk homesickness? After all, even New York feels like Britain after a winter in Texas. I don't know. It is nice to see that the USA, which can sometimes believe itself to bestride the whole world, doesn't even fill North America. And Canada is such a fascinating idea, a parallel-universe Bizarro America, tinged by another century or so of British rule. Having seen it for myself, I think I understand the country a little now, I have a better sense of how it plugs into the world. It's worth exploring properly and I hope that I will get a chance to do that one day.
We spent the whole day driving back to New York. Surprisingly, getting back across the border was a rather fraught affair, with lots of queuing and waiting and, at the end, a surly American border guard who rolled his eyes at us for trying to navigate the frontier at all. But after that we had a good day's drive. We had possibly the best hot dogs ever at a place called Ted's in Buffalo, NY (America, for good or ill, excels at inexpensive, unpretentious and very tasty food) and then we ploughed on back down the road, through the hills and across the rivers, all looking much the same as they had on the way up, until the sunlight ebbed from the world and the galaxy of lights that is New York city rose up before us.
It's unlikely to happen but we did get to spend a day chipping away at the mystique and I fixed down some of the things I half-remembered from previous visits. This felt good but of course there was no defence against stumbling into new unforeseen wonders or, worse still, foreseen ones.
For example, I knew Grand Central Station was impressive, but seriously? For the first time, I arrived in New York by train and it took a long while to get out of that building. I had expected it to be grand. I hadn't expected it to be exquisite and banded by its own blue vaulted heaven of sky and stars.
Once outside, we ambled. Battery Park to stare across at the Stature of Liberty, then back uptown. On a whim we poked our noses inside the Schwarzman building - the branch of the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street - only to find another palace. Like a Tuscan church its white stone and marble gives away to a beautiful interior of carved dark wood and luscious frescos. The Reading Rooms were full of people, studying and researching, their gaze split between page and screen - libraries aren't just for storing books, they are for helping knowledge and information to spread freely, regardless of the medium.
With the time we had left we took a walk along the High Line, an old elevated railway line that has been reclaimed as a public park. Initially I was underwhelmed: I hadn't come to New York city to encounter calm or quiet. But as we strolled along above the streets and the traffic I took to it. It's fun to share the space with other pedestrians, to see the backs of buildings and to enjoy the odd vantage points: a secret version of the city hidden away amongst the air rights, which is after all exactly the sort of thing I had been hankering after. Best of all, being an old train line, the High Line actually took us somewhere. Rather than walking around a park to end up where we had started, our stroll had taken us to our destination. Or rather the next in a series of destinations, a series that ended, finally, late that night with us rolling up to the door of our home, way down south.
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