Alone on the Cape

I'm writing this from the quiet, leafy paradise that is Conway, Massachusetts, but more on that in a later post. First, an update on my solo trip to Cape Cod last week.

After my stay in Boston I had a few days to spare before I was due back in New York to help my friend KC move out of her apartment and home to Conway. I was keen to go somewhere I'd never been, so I got on a ferry in Boston and sailed across the bay to Provincetown, where I stayed for two days in the town's only hostel. Then I took three buses and another ferry to the island of Martha's Vineyard.

I had a very pleasant time on Martha's Vineyard, and consequently I have less to say about it. The hostel was clean and airy, and provided free pancakes every morning; I met some friendly people, visited some pretty places, and ate some nice food. Provincetown was a different story, but ultimately that was a positive thing - it provided me with food for thought and plenty of fodder for a blog post.

I'll say right now that I am probably one of the only people on the planet not to have enjoyed themselves in Provincetown. It is bursting at the seams with people enjoying themselves. Perhaps I'm old before my time, but that is precisely why I didn't enjoy it.

P-town, as it is affectionately known, is a small, picturesque seaside resort at the northern tip of Cape Cod, the long, thin peninsula that juts out of southern Massachusetts and curls north towards Boston. It is crowded with seafood restaurants and artists' studios; its main street follows the shoreline and a goodly number of its many bars and restaurants look out over the ocean.

Provincetown harbour

At this time of year, it is populated almost entirely by holidaymakers and seasonal workers - in fact, Wikipedia informs me that it has a measly year-round population of 3,000, which can increase to as many as 60,000 in the height of summer. It is bold and brash, exuberant and colourful, and it prides itself on making a mockery of polite, suburban values. It is a town where you can buy sex toys at any time of day or night, where half-naked-picture-posting clubs distribute their publicity in coffee shops (see below) and where drag queens dressed as mermaids are occasionally driven around in rickshaws. Its geographical location is strangely, symbolically appropriate: if Cape Cod looks like a clenched bicep, Provincetown is the fist.

Heheh.

Provincetown is quirky and unique and wonderful in many ways. But no one goes there alone. As soon as I got off the ferry I felt conspicuous in my solitude, and as I walked through streets thronged with couples, families and groups of friends, I felt lonelier than I have ever felt before. It was immediately apparent that P-town is a place people go to eat and swim and dance and be merry, not to sit alone in coffee shops reading or sit alone in parks reading or to take long walks alone in order to find more deserted spots in which to sit alone reading. A wonderful town it may be, but it is no place for the solitary.

For the first time on this trip I began to question my own ability to be by myself. I love being with people, but I also like to think I do solitude rather well. I wouldn't be travelling alone if I didn't. And yet here I was, barely a hundred miles from my friends and three days away from rejoining them, and I was homesick and miserable. This was only a baby solo trip, ostensibly a taste of things to come in the weeks and months that I will be spending in new territory, where I know no one. It didn't bode well. Maybe this whole trip had been a mistake.

But then I realised that the problem was not so much being alone as being alone in my aloneness. It was being alone among people who were there precisely in order to be together. People who travel solo rely to one degree or another on the friendliness and openness of strangers, but holidaymakers need no one but each other. They are socially provided for; they do not need to meet people for the sake of their own peace of mind. That was why I didn't enjoy Provincetown: because I was the only person there who needed strangers.

A couple of days later I was leafing through Paul Theroux's The Tao of Travel in a bookshop on Martha's Vineyard (the travel section of any bookshop has mysteriously become the most interesting to me), and I happened upon a quote, borrowed from another travel writer, Jonathan Raban. It was this:

You are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions. Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.

After mentally thanking Paul Theroux for such timely words of comfort and wisdom, I gave this idea some thought. And maybe it's true. My loneliness in Provincetown did make some things happen: it was a catalyst for many hours of reflection and writing, and it provided plenty of material for a blog post, and then some. Most of all, my being alone allowed for fleeting but valuable connections with some of the people I encountered, most of whom I will never see again, but all of whom were important to me in the moment.

If I'd been with a companion, I probably wouldn't have met Ben, a barista working in Provincetown for the summer, who told me stories about South America and gave me a tiny rubber manatee to take with me as a mascot, or Ernie, the proprietor of a cafe on Martha's Vineyard who let me have free coffee ('if you would like a little coffee on me, my dear, you go right ahead'), or Richard the GP from Brooklyn, who gave me his number 'because you never know when you might need a doctor', or Chris the receptionist, who works at a different hostel every summer and travels for the rest of the year and wants to cross Africa by land. I probably wouldn't have conversed for so long with the retired ladies on the ferry who borrowed my sunscreen and were effusively grateful about it, or my hostel roommates whose names I never learned, or the numerous people who asked what I thought about Prince George. I might have talked to them a little, but I'm sure I learned more about and from them by being alone. When you are alone, human contact is thrown into relief and becomes more precious for it; fleeting interactions make a deeper impression. My loneliness was punctuated by moments of genuine warmth and happy surprise at the consistent kindness of human beings.

So I was wrong in my first blog post, when I said a solo traveller need never be lonely. Loneliness is probably inevitable, and if Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban are to be believed, it is also necessary. It is an experience, and experiences are valuable. It is part of what differentiates travelling from simply going on holiday.

That said, I am glad, for the moment, to be back among friends.

Thoughts on maps

So here I am in Boston, on leg #2 and week #3 of the great adventure, after the best kind of send-off in New York (a rooftop picnic at sunset and, er, a game of Scrabble to the Mary Poppins soundtrack), followed by a five-hour car journey out of the city and into New England.

On my first full day here I had a curious compulsion to visit Cambridge (can't think why). There I sat on a lawn chair in a Harvard courtyard, reading, occasionally looking up from my book to wonder whether the people around me were visitors, locals on their lunch hours, academics, graduate students, summer school attendees, or none of the above, and whether there were any solo travellers across the Atlantic, in the other Cambridge, sitting on lawns in university courtyards, wondering the same thing.

But since I am now in a city where the heat is a little drier and breezier, there has been at least as much walking as there has sitting. And this has necessitated some map usage, which feels like a particularly significant topic of discussion just now because I have very recently made the transition from using old-fashioned paper maps to newfangled digital ones.

As some of you may know, I was stubbornly attached for several happy years to a dirt cheap Nokia that just about knew how to call, text, tell the time and convert pounds to euros, and which suited my humble needs perfectly. Last month I begrudgingly gave in to smartphone culture after some fairly persuasive arguments from my parents (one of them being to buy me a smartphone), and now I have a thin black boxful of information with me wherever I go. One such informational function is, of course, Google Maps, which has been put to frequent and active use. Previously, my first acquisition on arriving in a new city would have been a map, but now I have no real need for one. All my cartographic needs are supposedly taken care of by the oblong in my pocket. And yet they aren't - not quite.

Google Maps certainly has its advantages. A paper map immediately singles one out as a stranger, a foreigner, or - worst of all - a tourist, rarely a desirable thing and sometimes an unwise one. Checking my phone as I walk down the street, however, I could be any old local; no one need know what I am doing. The scope of the map is also potentially much broader when it is digital. No corner of the city is too far-flung - nor indeed is any corner of anywhere. If I wish to peruse Beijing from above while wandering around Boston, that is no issue. I can zoom out of Boston, out of Massachusetts and out of America; I can abstract myself from the surface of the map until I am floating in space; I can skim in any direction I desire over the country and over the world.

But while it can, if I want it to, show me the broadness and the connectedness of everything, most of the time it just shows fragments. It shows what fits onto its small, oblong screen, which, if I want to see my surroundings in any detail, is not very much. Only with difficulty can it show me how the pieces of the city fit together and work together, how individual streets and neighbourhoods slot into the bigger picture. It doesn't tell me how Medford relates to Somerville and Cambridge or how all three fit with central Boston or Jamaica Plain.

Worse, it is disabling my internal compass. No longer an anonymous map reader of unmarked whereabouts, I now have a presence on the map itself in the form of the little blue arrow that walks when I walk, turns when I turn, hesitates when I hesitate. And this little blue arrow has become my main concern. I have stopped judging my whereabouts by looking at street names and landmarks and started slavishly following the arrow, even when it is wrong. I am blinkered to the things that lie outside the arrow's chosen path. I no longer dive down streets because they look interesting, with no concern for where they might take me. I know exactly where my cartographic alter-ego is at all times, but I don't know much about where I am any more.

This makes me a bit sad. I feel I have lost something. Stopping to look at the map is no longer an indulgence to be savoured; I feel guilty, as if I'm cheating. The map is just another smartphone function, a distraction that removes me from my surroundings precisely when I most want to engage with them.

And so yesterday, to counterbalance this woeful state of affairs, I visited every cartophile's dream place: the Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy library. Mary B.E. was the founder of the Christian Science movement, and the Mapparium was built to symbolise the movement's far-reaching, international significance (although those of us with atheist leanings can equally take it to symbolise the far-reaching, international significance of just about anything). It is a room with stained-glass walls that form a giant, inside-out globe. You go through a door, out onto a bridge, and you are STANDING INSIDE A MAP OF THE WORLD.

Source: thephoenix.com

It's not just any old map of the world, either, but a map of the world as it looked in 1935, peppered with defunct place-names like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Abyssinia and French West Africa, Siam and Indochina. The shape of the room - which also makes for some bizarre whispering-gallery acoustics - hammers home the things that flat maps cannot quite depict: how wide the world is around the equator, how far north we are in Europe, how tiny the UK really is, what a great distance it is from Montreal to Buenos Aires... The only problem, I discovered, as I was craning my neck to look at the North Pole and leaning out over the bridge to look at the South, is trying to take in the whole world in the twenty-minute allotted time slot. It's impossible.

Today, I will appease my inner cartographer in a more everyday fashion. I will buy a map of Boston made of ink and folded paper.

Street journeys

I have a curious premonition that journeys will be a recurring theme of this blog. There will be solo journeys and group journeys, around and between cities, across oceans, continents and borders; journeys to the country, to the mountains, to the coast; journeys on planes, trains, buses and boats, on public transport and on foot. I'm hoping there will be plenty of internal transportation, of the kind set in motion by a good book, and doubtless, by the end, I'll realise I've been on some kind of metaphorical, spiritual journey too, though I promise to spare you the details of that.

The current stage of my trip is characterised by urban, pedestrian journeys around Brooklyn and Manhattan, every one of which, be it down a street or round a block or across a park, serves to reaffirm the vastness of this endless, unconquerable city. I am currently reading this appropriately-themed book, selected from my host KC's extensive collection of intriguing tomes:

New York, the author claims, is one of the great walking cities, even though the systemised grid layout of the streets - 'each block present[ing] you with a traffic signal and the instruction to walk or not walk' - puts many people off exploring it on foot. With my tendency to prioritise aesthetics over logic, I initially found the idea of a grid system decidedly lacking in imagination. Numbers over names, convenience over quirks - it all seemed so unromantic. But it's grown on me. I like that you can estimate the distance of one address from another without having to look at a map. I like that you can track your progress down a street by counting the number of cross-streets that intersect with it. I like that the grid system fits with New York's angular, constructed geometry, with the straight lines and right angles that define its iconic aesthetic. Most of all, I like the words that the system necessitates, each of them singularly American and slightly wooden-sounding in my English accent: block, sidewalk, crosswalk, cross-street, intersection, avenue. They have a utilitarian romance to them. They are simultaneously familiar (because everyone uses them In The Movies) and exotic (because no British person uses them in his or her everyday speech).

It sounds from the above like I have been walking a lot, but I haven't - not really. When I lived in London, I walked all over the place. It was a way of making the city my own and of piecing together a landscape fragmented by underground travel. Whenever I visit a new city I walk as often and as far as I can, attempting to trace a path across it rather than skimming over (or under) the surface. But there has been a significant barrier to my doing so in New York: the stagnant, grimy heat the city has been enduring of late. My walks have therefore been purposeful and as efficient as I can make them, frequently aided by Google maps and the subway. But yesterday it was a little cooler, and I took the opportunity to wander round a place that usually gets forgotten by New Yorkers and tourists alike: Roosevelt Island.

It is an eerie, fascinating place. Two miles long and only 800 feet across at its widest point, it sits in the middle of the East River, connected to Manhattan by cable car, Queens by road bridge, and to both by subway. But despite its central location, and even though it was the site of my most substantial pedestrian journey yet (I walked its length twice and its breadth four or five times), Roosevelt Island feels less like a place where journeys happen than a place where journeys end.

Neither the cable car nor the traffic on the road bridge continue on through the island to the opposite shore, but must stop there, turn around, and go back the way they came. Even though the bustle of Manhattan is clearly visible - and audible - from the west side, the island itself feels adrift in a time and a place apart. Its main and pretty much only street is called - you've guessed it - Main Street (no grid system here), which gives it a small-town, provincial feel. Many of its residential buildings have the tired, run-down appearance that is the fate of most 1970s architecture. Apart from a new development clustered around the subway station, its businesses cannot keep up with the fashions and fads of those across the water, and nor do they try.

At both the north and south ends of the island are branches of the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, a chronic care facility - not the kind of hospital you pass through during a temporary sickness, but the kind where you stay a while. The island was also once home to the New York City Lunatic Asylum, the Charity Hospital, and the Smallpox Hospital, where sufferers of unpleasant contagious diseases were quarantined, and which now stands in ruins on the island's south tip. At other times in its history, it was the site of a penitentiary and a workhouse. For many former residents, their journey to Roosevelt Island was likely to be their last.

The old Smallpox Hospital - to be converted to a museum within the next five years.

And now, as an antidote to the doom and gloom into which this post has somehow descended, here's a list of the FUN things I've been up to. While in New York, I have: played in the sprinklers at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; seen the ORIGINAL Winnie-the-Pooh and friends, as played with by Christopher Milne (aka Christopher Robin); been a quintessential tourist at Grand Central Station and the Metropolitan Museum; walked the High Line, a former elevated railway that's now a park; danced to jazz in Williamsburg and to 'Twist and Shout' at an outdoor screening of Ferris Bueller's Day Off; seen the New York Philharmonic in a park; been to a flea market; drunk a 'Rose Tyler' at a Doctor Who-themed bar, stuffed my face with pizza slices and practically drowned in iced coffee. On my list for today: Washington Square Park, and doughnuts. Sorry, donuts. Better get on and do that.

The real Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet; A.A. and Christopher Milne in the background.

In which I start to chill (the fuck) out

I'm here! In America, New York, Brooklyn, my friend KC's apartment. The plane stayed airborne, the US border officials stamped my passport without turning a hair, and I arrived intact, if exhausted, to my destination, where I was welcomed by two friendly New Yorkers and an affectionate cat. It's now day #2 of my long-awaited five month adventure, which will see me exploring the US until the end of August, Canada in September, and Argentina in October and November.

It hasn't all been plain sailing: my last fortnight in the UK was overshadowed by an endless to-do list, neuroses to rival those of Woody Allen (I still haven't quite shaken the fear that I will get bitten by a rabid mammal and die, alone in a strange land), and looming emotional goodbyes. I had forgotten all my reasons for wanting to embark on such an ambitious project. I could no longer recall why it had once seemed like such a good idea, why I had felt it necessary to take off on my own for so long, why I couldn't just go to France for a fortnight with a couple of friends and have done with it. All my hankering for adventure had dissipated; I was peeling myself away from a life I loved to pursue a kind of freedom that no longer interested me.

Everyone said it would be fine once I got there, and of course, everyone was right. I am fine. That's not to say I am completely unfazed by the thought of those five months (21 weeks, 148 days) stretching out before me, in which I will have no space that is really mine and no possessions that don't fit into a backpack. But I have some very dear friends here in America, and even though later on I'll be visiting places where I know no one, the Couchsurfing website (which puts travellers in touch with people willing to give them a bed for a night or several - and with each other) is a failsafe way to prevent loneliness in far-flung lands. I've barely been here 48 hours and it has already proved its worth: at around noon yesterday I bought sausages and lemonade and made my way to the Couchsurfing 4th July Potluck Barbeque in Prospect Park. Nine hours later, I was standing on a pier in Manhattan with a group of six different nationalities (American, Bolivian, South African, Swedish, British, New Zealand(ish?)), watching the fireworks over the Hudson River. At the end of the evening, we exchanged contact details and promised to meet again before we all leave. Experiences like this reassure me that even if I am travelling alone, I need never be lonely.

Other than that, my new Travel Shoes have had their maiden voyage and been baptised in Prospect Park mud; I have discovered coffee ice cubes (iced coffee dilution-prevention); I have had a bagel breakfast. This morning, as I ate an orange and watched a colony of Brooklyn ants diligently transporting their eggs from A to B, it started to dawn on me: I am here. This isn't just an idea any more. There are details now, like the sight of those ants and the taste of this orange. I set aside the time and raised the money to fulfil my longest-held dream, and now I am living it.

I have spent the past month telling myself, and listening to other people telling me, that everything about this trip will be okay. Now, finally, I'm actually starting to believe it - aided, in part, by this sign I saw today:

Amen to that.