Hell is other people on a bank holiday weekend in the Lakes

 

 

The Lake District has become ground zero for an acrimonious debate in hiking circles about how far tolerance should be extended for what some may regard as anti-social behaviour. The benefits of nature are now so well understood that doctors can prescribe outdoor activity for well-being, but there is a balance to be struck between wanting people to enjoy the environment and also treat it and other hikers with respect.

 

First, the anti-social behaviour. Leading up to the bank holiday weekend in August, Wasdale Head was busy: hikers, climbers, family ramblers, Wainwright baggers, first timers. Everyone looks that kind of happy you only get when you’re outdoors and the weather is good. It’s like we’ve won the lottery. After a circuit of Scafell Pike, I’m washed and clothes rinsed in the six minutes that £1 in the coin operated hot water system will give me, leaving me with ample time to find a nook in the pub for reading, chat to a few others, recharge electrics, and have some soup and chips.

 

But at some point between the shower and the chips, a large group of men pitched up in the camping field, with a gazebo, slabs of beer and whisky, and a sound system requiring earplugs until the receptionist from the Inn had to come over to tell them to can it. There are ‘Ibiza’ campsites throughout the Lakes; fields that farmers open during the season, sometimes with no facilities other than port-a-loos. They are full of massive tents, BBQs, sound systems, and canvas barriers demarcating territory. Humans just love a wall. It’s great that there is so much camping kit now that we can bring all the ‘comforts’ of home. Not so great though if it’s excluding everyone else (human and non-human).

 

Personally, I head for the camp sites that have a moratorium on gazebos and zero tolerance for noise at night.

 

Secondly, the Icarus effect, otherwise known as the human aversion to realistic risk assessments. Ascending Scafell Pike, England’s highest peak at 978m, it’s cold and windy, rocky and steep, even on the tourist trail. I pass several not-having-a-good timers on the way up. Not the right clothes, shoes or fitness. I hope they make it. Humans generally under-estimate risk so I feel for the Mountain Rescue crews who volunteer to haul unprepared people off peaks. Having made this mistake myself some 17 years ago in the Dolomites, I’m in no place to judge others, except the two women trying to walk their dachshund up to High Street when a storm front was forecast and clearly visible. Or the couple trying to carry their chihuahua with them along Striding Edge. That is just obviously silly.

 

After Scafell, I ran into two lads at Angle Tarn who, having lost connection on their phone and therefore lost their only map, had wandered well off their path (the Cumbrian Way). I gave them my spare map and showed them the route, but in the end it was easier to point out landmarks in three dimensions for them to follow down to the valley floor to eventually get back on track. At several points, particularly near popular routes or landmarks, more lost souls needed a hand with directions. Map reading is a dying skill.

 

At a minimum, let’s leave the hubris and the sound systems at home. Check the weather. And thank Mountain Rescue by donating to their services.

 

 

 

The Lakeland Way

 

The Lake District is famous for its landscapes and formerly resident literary giants William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, associations that for me conjure up images of crowded trails where I do not want to be. At one end of the scale there are the multitudes seeking Peter Rabbit and, ironically, the solitude of lonely clouds, and at the other, the insanely fit running up and down fells, bagging Wainwrights (the 214 peaks listed in Arthur Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, 1955-66). I confess this perception was based solely on two weekends in the region: the first in 2008 for the ultra-marathon Lakeland 50, so most of it I don’t really remember because I was too knackered. The second in 2023 was a weekend camping at Coniston to climb Hellvelyn via Striding Edge, which was stunning, but reminded me of a) the crowds, and b) that I don’t sleep well when people are driving cars across campsites.

But with two weeks falling clear for hiking in late summer, a route was needed where I didn’t have to go too far from London or that needed too much preparation. The Lakeland Way is a new (ish) 144 mile trail designed by Richard Jennings, who has kindly added the maps, gpx, and suggested camping on the website, and promises the less popular trails. All I needed to do was follow a track with plenty of deviations to be had along the way if I wanted.

The only real stressor was getting there. The rail network did its best to demonstrate the collapse of British civilisation: cancelled train at Euston, alternative found and cancelled, another alternative found but bumped off at Crewe, another alternative was cancelled at Lancaster. I rounded up two other stranded hikers and we taxied to Barrow-in-Furness where a two-carriage diesel train finally made an appearance for the last leg.

As we chugged along, hours behind schedule and £100 out of pocket, it became impossible to hold onto annoyance. Crossing into an enigmatic landscape of mountain, light and sea, I arrived at Ravenglass to claim a pitch under a tree canopy scattering the last golden hour of a long day. I asked the murder of crows above to cease their cawing and settled down for the first of 12 nights on terrain marked by centuries of interconnection with humanity, stretching well beyond today’s fans of fellrunning, Wordsworth and Potter.

Every section of the Lakeland Way has its joys but if I had to pick favourites I’d go with Wasdale Head to Keswick via Scafell Pike and Haystacks (over three days, big ups, big downs, incredible views). Past Burnmoor Tarn, looking down on Waswater at the base of giants, Scafell to my right, it was so ridiculously beautiful I almost cried. For an easier traverse, the path from Troutbeck to Grasmere winds through forests above Lake Windemere, with a famous gingerbread house at the end. Under pressure to choose quickly from the very long queue behind me (Wordsworth fans!), I end up with gingerbread, ginger fudge, ginger marshmallow and ginger liquorice.

Beyond the favourites, every day settles into the rhythms of camping: an early start and flurry of activity, ending in reverse as campsites are remade and folk settle down for the night. Noise peters out until it’s just the sound of wind and grazing sheep in the next field. The sun rising on the other side is heralded by soft voices, gas burners, and tent poles and nylon packing down.

 

Between the start and end of each day the trail is mostly, surprisingly, silent. People, young and old, large groups and solo, wild campers and those just passing through, stretch out over the fells and valleys, rivers and lakes, along grand routes and little-used paths soon to be lost in new enclosures. We walk across cascades of water, rock and purple heather, infinity pools and dragon backs reaching down from high fell to low marsh.

There is a collecting and dispersing of humanity at crossroads and peaks. Gatherings at waterfalls honour free ranging kids joyfully leaping off cliff edges, and then dissolve into opaque forests. At some moment in the day there is a general stopping for picnics, brewing of tea, contemplation of geography. The unspoken rule is invoked: leave space. At an unappointed time, maybe as the air becomes a little cooler, we slowly stir again, going in whichever way we need to go, following becks, zigzagging down into valleys, or choosing steep scree and scrambling to remind the heart it’s alive.

While people could be sparse, there was at times quite a bit of wildlife and I began to understand where Beatrix Potter got her inspiration from. A robin came over to say hello on my first evening in Ravenglass. A rabbit hopped over for breakfast in Keswick, distracting me while a frog tried to climb into my pack to hitch a ride to Patterdale. A slug left its mark after a wild night sliding up and down the inside of my tent in Troutbeck. And for the grand finale, a red squirrel dropped out of a tree into my camp next to Ullswater. ‘You’re a red squirrel!’ I exclaimed. ‘I know!’ she said. We waved hands/paws and she headed off for a forage. 

Apart from reminding us of our relationship with the non-human, the Lake District is also marked by the remnants of empire and deep time colliding with industry: Roman forts and bathhouses; mining slag heaps, slate grey dust and rusting iron; rutted forestry trails passing abandoned stone walls; crowded chocolate box villages with global chain stores and flat whites marking out new kingdoms. There are the gashes and clefts of old quarries cut into rock, now overgrown and pagan, home to creatures of myth and imagination.

 Ruins are a reminder of how change wears away at the human, as does the weather. The seasons were turning as they always do, and there is that slight sadness that comes with the end of another summer. Campsites are closing down, paddle boards being deflated, cool boxes emptied and stowed. Squalls chase me up to Stick’s Pass into clear, warm sunshine on the other side. A storm rips through nighttime to make way for a clear morning. Another storm front hits by midday. Another clear afternoon. Again, a storm overnight. Wet gear on, wet gear off. Rivers rise, fords become wilful.

The weather forces us together. Joined by my partner at Coniston, we slide down moraine alongside a torrential river into the welcoming arms of the Newfield Inn, Seathwaite. The pub is full. An elderly couple and Arthur the dog chat for a while. A couple take respite before pushing on in the dark to their car 7km away. Four men kick the can down the road, drinking beer until they can figure out how to get home. A table of new age nomads play cards nearest the fire.

The next day, coming full circle, we cross from the Dudden Valley back to the Esk, following a Roman road over two days to the sea. I want to leave the lakes and fells and heather and infinity pools as slowly as possible and hoped for a signal failure or sink hole to cancel the trains. Only this time the network was actually functioning. No delays, no cancellations, no missed connections. We hopped on a train south to a maximal city I love but that can’t quite be reconciled with the joy of not being in it.

Some practical notes 
I made a few deviations to the official Lakeland Way route to add in some height and some scenery: Muncaster Fell on Day 1; Scafell Pike on Day 2; Haystacks on Day 4 (you can’t be that close and not have a look at Wainwright’s favourite fell on the way to Buttermere). If the weather is good from High Street, near Windermere, take the route on the left, down to Troutbeck via Bell, Yoke and Buck Crag.

With time constraints and limited accommodation in Dockray, I had planned to compress the three-day section from Buttermere to Patterdale into two, pushing on past Braithwaite to camp in Keswick and then skipping Dockray going straight to Patterdale. But unless you’re fit and fast and doing it in summer with more light, I wouldn’t recommend it. It was almost 30 km from Keswick to Patterdale and over 1200m ascent. It had been a long, hot day and I was fatigued. With storms forecast to break the next day, it wouldn’t have been any fun to push through in bad weather. I rerouted to skip over to Patterdale from Keswick via Stick Pass.

This deviation did slightly shake my iron clad faith in OS maps as I realised that not all their trail markings are passable/findable. From Keswick I met 10km of road, head high bracken, bog, bracken, road. I should have taken the bus to the trail head at Legburthwaite. 

 Day 1 also shook any illusions I had that the route would be ‘easy’. With my deviations, days could range from 14-24km, with several including 900m-1000m of ascent. My pack, including light camping gear, food and water, weighed about 15kg. A book (Trespass by Nick Hayes) was probably a luxury I could have left behind but seemed appropriate to be reading in the circumstances. The mini-solar panels I should definitely have left behind. I’ve lived in the UK for almost 20 years so you think I would know that a) the British sun would not be out long enough, and b) would not be strong enough to recharge a phone. Some campsites do not have any charging points so a spare battery is useful. 

With the exception of junctions with larger towns, there were far fewer people on the route than I imagined for the end of summer including a bank holiday, and far fewer tea houses and pub kitchens open than I thought there would be. The latter meant that occasionally lunch consisted of two packets of crisps and a slice of cake. Keswick, as tourist central, is a great place to stock up on essentials, repair stuff, and load up on Cumbrian baked goods and decent coffee. 

The route has now become a mental map of places I’d like to wild camp next time, but for a little more luxury campsites only cost £8-£18. The Caravan and Camping Club are my newest favourite friends. They have a policy of never turning away backpackers and have a special rate for us as long as we absolutely promise we are arriving on foot. Their shower blocks are lovely. In both Ravenglass and Keswick I had a spacious site under a tree, surrounded by nice neighbours in very expensive RVs.

Many farms in the region have diversified their income by opening up fields and building toilet/shower blocks for campers and caravaners. Castle farm in Stonethwaite has fields but also converted a small walled orchard behind the farm sheds, free of cars and made for small campers (although some still brought tables, chairs, cool boxes etc). Side Farm, near Patterdale, has a tea shed for refreshments while the tent is up and drying (no substantial food, just tea, cake and snacks, so stock up in Glenriding). It’s a beautiful site, overlooking the lake. 

Get in early for the best pitches. I like to have a tree canopy and at least one side facing a fence/wall so that I can have just one neighbour if possible. At peak times, do not be surprised if you wake in the morning and find all the gaps between tents have been filled with latecomers overnight. Take a few £1 or 50p coins for those sites that have coin operated showers (e.g. Wasdale Head Inn and Castle Farm, Stonethwaite).

I have perfected the art of keeping everything dry (ish) in wet weather, even in an ultra-light one-person tent. I can pack everything away from the inside out. It helps being only 5’2”. The pack stays inside under my feet or tucked into a nook in a nearby tree with its cover on overnight. Packing wet tents is not fun, even if you have the latest tech that beads water and lets you shake most of it off, but at least in the UK you know the sun will come out at some point and the tent will dry eventually. For my MSR tent, it takes about the same time to dry out as to order and eat a double egg butty at the Wasdale Head Inn.

Other great camping options are YHAs. I am a lifetime member but until this trip have rarely used them in the UK and somehow missed their regeneration into the modern world. I wandered over to YHA Borrowdale (Stonethwaite) in the hope of finding a socket for recharging. I found wifi, a bar, restaurant, camping area, pods, bell tents, Airstream RVs, teepees, and fire pits. They still don’t technically open reception until 5pm (ish) but there is always space to wait inside out of the rain. They have very popular drying rooms, although the boiler was broken at YHA Windermere so the room was soon covered in dozens of pairs of wet socks, shirts, underwear, trousers, and gortex, with no hope of getting dry. The smell was rank but at least there was chickpea and sweet potato curry in the evening (it’s the same menu in every YHA but it’s decent).

If you want to B&B it most towns on route have pubs, inns and/or hotels. The Boot Inn is excellent for accommodation and food, ready for all inner-city hipsters with a seriously good veggie menu AND oat milk flat whites. Newfield Inn, Seathwaite, is a bit more rustic but excellent hosts and pub food. On the other hand, the Black Bull Inn in Coniston is an awful place to stay. Its rooms in no way reflect the website photos. I woke about 12am to get into my camping sheet as my skin was crawling with suspicion that the bed sheets had not been laundered between guests.

There is no guidebook or full route description yet for the Lakeland Way so sometimes I had no idea why Richard had sent me in a particular direction. I got to Hodges Close, for example, at the top of a forested ravine and thought ‘random!’. Luckily two people emerged from a rough-cut path and described the hidden quarry below. It’s definitely worth the diversion.

 

Dad, one last time …

 

Dad, one last time in his new chair, waves goodbye with both hands as we all say ‘see you tomorrow’. And in the morning there’s an empty space that eventually will be filled with memories that shift out of focus, not exact replicas of the past but enough to remember that George Butcher was here and he made a difference …

Teaching me to fish off Tathra wharf.

Teaching me to fix things using the Readers Digest book of how to fix everything.

Teaching me to drive a tractor while he threw hay bales and irrigation pipes off the back.

Chasing us kids for some misdemeanour and Rusty the dog coming to our aid by chasing him.

Playing cricket in the backyard on summer days, Rusty the dog in the outfield.

Driving in winter to flute lessons in Cooma and sliding on black ice off the road into a guide post. We kept the post for fire wood.

Rocking socks and sandals at the RSL.

Yelling for him when a red belly black snake had parked itself between my room on the verandah and the front door … he was in the shower but came out wrapped in a towel and killed the snake with a shovel.

Panicking him in deep water in Bournda lagoon when we bombed him, and realising that dad’s can be vulnerable too.

He really didn’t like Jackson Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’ when the Whitlam government bought it. I don’t think he liked Gough Whitlam’s politics much but I don’t remember ever asking him what he believed in.

Going with him to the job centre in Canberra after finally giving up the farm. Back too messed up. Price of milk driven too low. Having to ask for a job and me getting a lesson in dignity. He washed cars for a while. 

Working with him on the honey stall at an inner city boho market in Sydney. A man who had spent a farming life getting up at 5am was worried no one was coming … it was only 10am. Newtown didn’t get out of bed before midday. We had a good day selling honey to the goths and hipsters and gay couples.

He liked reading large font books from the library. 

Always outdoors where hands are needed more than words. They smelt of lanolin in the winter; sweat and engine oil in the summer.

If he was inside it was in the clubhouse after golf having a schooner with mates, or at the table in the kitchen playing yahtzee or mahjong, or on the sofa watching British comedies on television while all the drama of the world passed on by.

Mostly I remember when he was a truck driver for a while and in school holidays I’d get to climb up into the cab and we’d drive around the Riverina picking up wool bales and sheep skins from local abattoirs. He’d buy meat pies and sticky buns for lunch. We’d sit in silence, daydreaming outwards from a window in motion, letting me imagine the possibilities of other worlds.

Hitchhiking for the 21st Century

There comes a time when we have to accept that Eurostar has become an elite form of transport that is no longer generally affordable (£176 one way for the 6am train to Paris … I don’t think so, Eurostar).

There also comes a time when, as a Francophile and train nerd, I have to accept that even France’s rail network has its limits. No matter how much I stare at the timetable, no train will appear that can get me from the region of Suisse Normande to St Malo on a Friday evening without having to first go east to Paris and then come back west again to the Breton Coast. With no bus service that evening either, I was potentially stranded in Caen while my partner was hanging out in a posh hotel on the beach.

Now was the time to rethink hitching and all the horror stories about it that women have welded into our subconscious by anxious parents (and I should never have watched Rutger Hauer in ‘The Hitcher’, which did for car sharing what ‘Jaws’ did for my ocean swimming).

This, however, is the 21st Century, and while that doesn’t mean we lose the little alarms bells in our heads entirely, it does mean we have apps. BlaBlaCar, for example, is doing for car sharing what AirBnB has done for spare rooms. Started in France, it now covers 22 countries with over 100 million members, allowing people with cars to connect with passengers who need to travel in the same direction and share the journey.

For those who think society is catastrophically breaking down, be comforted by the knowledge that there is a high degree of trust in these online relationships, with the usual star ratings and feedback facilities to give added confidence. BlaBla work hard at overcoming our innate anxieties about getting into a car with strangers. In a recent internal report, 88% of their members say they trust other BlaBla members, which is not far below the 94% and 92% trust we have in family and friends respectively. Work colleagues only come in at 58% trust which begs the question why anyone feels comfortable car-pooling to work.

Setting up an account in ten minutes, I find Tania driving from Caen to St Malo at roughly the time I needed and who could meet me at the station where I was arriving by bus from Clécy that evening. With some judicious re-arranging of suitcases and dog accessories, my backpack is squashed into the boot of a spacious Corolla, and I slide into a seat in the back. Two other young women are taking up the spare seats, making it four complete strangers meeting in Caen, trusting we will all be at the station on time, and trusting that none of us will become Rutger Hauer in whack-job mode.

I do, however, become very conscious that I have 25 years on all of them, that my French is terrible, and that they smell very nice. I, on the other hand, look like a woman who has been camping for four days, walked 20 kilometres to get to a bus stop in the heat and rain, and who now has that faint smell of damp sheep about me from the merino thermals I’m wearing.

After obligatory ‘bonjours’, we are mostly in silence. Passenger 2, next to me in the back, puts her airpods in. I stare out the window. Time passes. Inevitably the passengers have no control over the car play-list but I have now caught up on some of the latest in French rap. We also have no control over the driver’s abilities, and I would suggest Tania stop chewing her fingernails and keep both hands on the wheel, and perhaps could smooth out those lane changes a little, but we arrive in St Malo in one piece.

There is some negotiation over drop off points. Passenger 1 leaves us on the outskirts of town, but as it turns out Passenger 2 also needs a street near the beach so I am delivered two doors from my hotel.

While the train option would have been over £100 and taken seven hours, my 2.5 hour car share cost £12.50, two other passengers also got to where they needed to go, Tania covered her costs, and we helped out the environment a little bit. More importantly, sharing the voyage reminds us that strangers are not always scary people. If the worst that happens is you end up sharing a car with someone vaguely smelling of sheep then it’s not a bad way to travel.

Notes to Self for the New Year 2023

I'm letting the fabulous women of La Mujer Obrera do the talking this new year ...

‘They want to determine what I do in my day, and how we use our creativity, they want to keep us in survival mode, right? But in this other vision, hey, we set the timeline. And we make our plans about how our day is gonna look like as well, right, at least part of our time, as much time as we can take. So that's why it's important to [think] how do we have a little bit of freedom, even if we're living in this chaos, right? And if that's a meeting, if that's an event, if that's us hanging out with the neighbours, if that's playing with the kids, us playing too in the dirt in the community farm … we taste a little bit of freedom.' (Lorena Andrade, La Mujer Obrera)

(The Trouble with Freedom, https://thetroublewithfreedom.wordpress.com/)

Going South, Part III: I Wish I Was in New Orleans

 

Friday 24 June 2022, Birmingham to New Orleans

Like Montgomery, downtown Birmingham is marked by monuments, signposts, murals and sculptures commemorating the Civil Rights movement, but despite the influx of tourism that comes with these markers, the economic legacy of slavery and its engrained inequalities are still evident. Beautiful museums sit incongruously next to shuttered shops, derelict buildings, fast food joints and dysfunctional public services. There is perhaps a question to ask as to what role memorialising the civil rights movement has on poverty and racism in the USA today. More on this when we meet Mz Jackie of Memphis in a few days’ time. 

 

On the (correct) assumption that Amtrak would be late again (one hour), I decided I had time to try the local speciality: boiled peanuts in cajun spices (other flavours are available). My choice may also have been driven by sympathy for the people making a living standing over steaming industrial vats of boiling peanuts while the mid-day heat melted my rubber soled sandals and roasted a banana left in the car (which was still delicious).

At the station I join the queue on the platform and waited for the Crescent to arrive, chatting to Herbert next to me in line, an elderly gentleman who recalled joining Birmingham’s children’s marches in the 1960s. As the train pulled in a conductor called for groups to board first; Amtrak, in the 21st century, doesn’t have a seat reservation system so they have to shuffle people around manually. Herbert and his wife incorporate two young black women and me into their family so we could board together. The guard looked sceptical, as well she might, but lets us go ahead.

I bought a lot of work to do on the train journeys but it’s not getting done. There is a big window to look out of and an ever-changing landscape; I fear I might miss something if I look away. It’s the original FOMO. I know I sound old but people have lost the art of staring out of windows. We now look at screens or feel compelled to facetime someone rather than manage the discomfort of having to amuse ourselves with our thoughts. I catch a few podcasts, including The Grey Area's ‘The rise and fall of America’s monuments’ which seems a fitting programme to listen to while travelling through the South. Since the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020, some 200 statues connected to the slave trade and the Southern Confederacy have been removed, with most just put in storage. There is uncertainty about what should stay and what should go, which effigies should be destroyed completely or just moved out of sight.

But the puzzlement in the presenter’s question of why people might object to the removal of statues of slavers and confederate soldiers (and the Bienville monument in NOLA, pictured, really shouldn't last much longer) fails to recognise the emotional responses that underpin change. There is power in the hands of architects and sculptors and dead Generals astride horses; there is power in feelings of shame and humiliation that we will do much to avoid; and there is fear of what power will be lost if things disappear. 

 

As a metaphor for the USA today and the debate surrounding its past, the Crescent moves at the speed of the 19th century through forests of thin trees, patches of swamp and rice paddies. We must bow down before the heat of the day in case the tracks have buckled. We must bow down before freight. 

 

 

Pulling into a siding to wait, I lose track of time: no-one knows how far away the freight is or how long we will be here. No radios or mobiles or timetables can apparently help. One carriage is freezing, another is roasting. The conductor occasionally apologises over the tannoy and free water and snacks are passed around. At three hours late the conductor walks through to personally apologise, mentioning the obvious, that America is a ‘poor country in many ways’. I regale passengers with tales of a magical place called Europe where trains are plentiful and fast and cheap (ish; I leave the UK out of the fantasy). To put it in context, it’s just 314.3 miles by train from Birmingham to NOLA, a journey that took 12 hours. It’s 355 miles from Paris to Toulouse, a journey that takes just under 5 hours on a TGV. 

We stutter our way South, finally reversing into New Orleans at 2am, five hours late. I ask for a compensation form and Amtrak customer services laughs. Luckily my host is a night owl so was awake to let me in. He is also all biceps and chiselled torso, wandering into his kitchen naked except for a hastily wrapped scarf acting as a flimsy loin cloth … ah the joys of AirBnB.

New Orleans (NOLA), Saturday, 25th June, 2022

 

NOLA is the epitome of ‘so much to do, so little time’, with activities generally divided into eating, looking at stuff, and music. I have an ever-growing list of recommendations but as always the best option on the first day in a new city is just to wander. Admittedly it would have been better to check the weather before making this plan, as I soon realise on stepping out from my air conditioned apartment. It is mercilessly hot; 36 degrees on the gauge but taking into account the wet bulb temperature, the Gulf’s reverse equivalent to New York City’s winter wind chill, it’s feeling about 45. Welcome to climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson’s opening tragedy in The Ministry for the Future, where millions die in a heat wave because people can’t sweat enough to cool down, doesn’t seem that far away.

I blame the creeping lethargy for the loss of my navigational skills (always embarrassing when a geographer gets lost). After several diversions in the wrong direction, I begin to realise I’m going to need a paper map: the diminished detail of a phone sized screen is no match for a city bent along a very large river. 

Starting at the French Quarter, it is as the postcards depict: all low rise colonial architecture, boujie shops, restaurants and bars, mule drawn carriage tours, interspersed with tat and massage salons. I find a yarn shop … yes, it’s 45 degrees in the shade but I buy yarn. There are sheep in Louisiana apparently, just not on the coast.

In the French Market, lazy ceiling fans and jugs of iced tea keep the tourists cool, as cafés and stalls offer jazz and dixie classics, oysters and ‘gator burgers, cocktails and mouffelleta. 

Outside the French Quarter, there is the gentrifying neighbourhood of Bywater, with craft breweries and cafes tucked away between pastel-coloured wooden houses in tree lined streets. In the time honoured tradition of deindustrialisation, warehouses have been converted into artist studios, and their walls are now canvases for riotous murals. The whimsical JamNOLA is designed purely for Instagram; fun but not worth the $34 plus tips.

My strategy of walking 20 minutes then stopping at the nearest cafe/bar for liquid may have underestimated the need for water: beer and iced tea are no substitute. As the music started to wind up in the French Quarter, the rest of me started to wind down. The lack of sleep, and excess of heat, alcohol and luminescent pink created a slightly hallucinogenic effect not helped by night tours appearing on each block touting vampires and other hauntings. 

 

The scourge of Amsterdam-style ‘drink while cycling’ trolley cars and various other moving parties needed to be sidestepped. The final convulsion before complete bodily shut down was discovering that Bourbon Street, a place held in high reverence in my imagination, is in fact a study in urban ruin. The jazz and blues has dissolved into R&B sound systems and MCs, each trying to out-compete each other to attract roving hens’ parties and frat boys. I fell into a taxi heading for bed at 8pm.

Sunday-Monday, 26-27th June 2022

Recovered, and prepared for the heat, Day 2 starts, as all days really should, with beignets and iced coffee at Verte Marte, a hole-in-the-wall bodega famous for its takeout. There’s a quietness in the streets this early (9am ish). No crowds, no competing sound systems; just a few morning walking tours and the locals going about their business unimpeded by the hoards. I find a stoop and slowly cover myself with icing sugar. Cookery school adds to the food stains on my t-shirt so some fresh air and lazing about in the bayou seemed like a good idea for the afternoon. 

Honey Island swamp is enclosed by the arms of the Pearl River, and our captain, Ally, couldn’t be more of a cajun stereotype if he tried. Growing up hunting and fishing in the bayou, he regales us with exploits including tales of the Honey Island Swamp Creature (in cajun, the rougarou, or sasquatch), and catching an alligator with his cousin ‘by mistake’ and having to shoot it, putting six holes in their boat. He was 12. I ask the obvious question: ‘you had a gun at 12?’ Of course. When having to explain to their parents why they'd put six holes in a boat, it was their mum they most feared. The power of the matriarch is embedded in the Cajun greeting, regularly shouted across the river at other boat crews: ‘How’s your mum, and them’ (‘them’ being everyone else in the family of lesser importance than your mum).

Ally takes us into the nooks and crannies of the bayou, finding the alligators that we all want to see, who obligingly pop up in expectation of snacks and then hang around a bit to stare and generally freak us out with their jurassic appearance in a world where humans like to think we're the apex predators. 

 

Other swamp dwellers make cameo appearances: a raccoon family among the tangled roots of trees have learned that if they dip the crocodile pellets in water to soften them then they can eat them too, assuming they stay out of the way of the alligators. Kevin, the wild boar, keeps his distance. Herons stand stock still, ankle deep, waiting for lunch to swim by. ‘I wiiish I could fiiish as good as those birrrds’, says Ally. I wish I could bottle his accent, with its elongated vowels and rolling ‘r’s, and take it home. We pass the occasional cabin that might feature in Deliverance (including one resident bravely checking his anchor submerged in the same space as the alligators) but in signs of swamp gentrification there are now also some very boujie summer homes on the water.

 

If lazing about in the swamp generates a hazy slowing down, cruising the Mississippi has the opposite effect. This working river is all flow, industry, grinding metal and alteration. Paddle steamers still take tourists on afternoon, day or overnight trips and I sign up for the two hour history tour on the Creole Queen to the site of the Battle of Chalomet (better known as the Battle of New Orleans between British and American forces). It’s a proper paddle boat, no propellers the captain reassures the several hundred passengers who’ve paid for authenticity.

At this point we weren’t paying much attention to the tannoy as we discovered that our tickets, clearly stamped ‘No Lunch’, are being accepted at the buffet. I load up on ‘a bit of everything’ (gumbo, jambalaya, salad, more bread pudding) and find a window seat while lawyer, turned historian, Charlie Cheeseman, in a bass voice to die for, gives an informative and hilarious history of the settlement, the attempt by the British to reclaim NOLA and their eventual defeat. A Johnny Cash song dedicated to the battle is played and disturbingly I realise I know it. Somehow obscure US pop culture made it onto a very rural dairy farm in NSW and infiltrated my childhood playlist: ‘we fired once more and they began to running down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico’). The boat docks at a pier downstream and we can stretch our legs at the very non-descript battle site: a big open field, the remains of a defensive dyke, a reconstructed plantation house that has nothing to do with the battle, and large trees hung with Spanish moss.

 

The 40 minute cruise back included Charlie’s impassioned retelling of what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005), and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) do not come out of it well. The French Quarter is the highest ground and damaged the least, while to its east and west (from Esplanade and Canal streets) is reclaimed land below sea level. During the flooding many people drowned in their attics, unable to cut themselves out (it is emergency procedure in Louisiana now to keep an axe in the attic). For some in the city, FEMA's decisions, or lack of them, rank up there with desertion or dereliction of duty at least. 

 

NOLA is still marked by the tragedy even 17 years later. The expressway into and out of the old city passes the Superdome: an edifice to concrete modernity and human misery etched into the mind’s eye of anyone old enough to remember the aftermath. The city hospital that couldn't be fully evacuated is still mostly derelict, with a section only recently rebuilt by a university. The remains of the old bridge over Lake Pontchartrain has been left as a memorial. The last building with shreds of the blue FEMA tarp, a school still unrepaired, is visible from the boat. NOLA’s new levees look no more than a few metres high but are now reinforced with concrete cores and withstood Hurricane Ida in 2021, which is just as well as locals mutter concern in every bar room conversation that the weather and the ocean is already so hot that a bad hurricane season is expected.

One advantage of the flat landscape means that walking and cycling is a good way to get around NOLA’s various quarters, despite the heat. I choose a bike tour of the famous above ground cemeteries and the Garden District on a slightly cooler day with some cloud cover and the cycling generating a nice breeze. The cemeteries are practical: no one wants to see corpses floating through their streets when it floods. Vaults keep the bodies where they are supposed to be and often include a neat stacking system: a fresh body gets the top shelf and the previous occupant, now nicely decomposed after a year and a day, gets moved to the bottom.

 

The Garden District is southern ostentation at its best. The genteel streets are quiet and tree lined while the houses, previously occupied by plantation and slave owners, are copious Italianate and neo-classical mansions. The tour includes the obligatory celebrity spotting with big ups to those that contribute to the community (well done Sandra Bullock and John Goodman) and not a lot of love for Nicholas Cage who wants to be buried in the city but couldn’t pay the plot fees. After a couple of hours the midday heat kicks in again so it’s onto the Trolley car (the oldest continuously operating trolley in the world) and down the very boujie St Charles Avenue. For only $1.25 it’s a bargain although there’s only a handful of lines.

 

While there is plenty to keep the visitor active in the day it’s really the music and night life that draws the crowds. While the Bayou created Cajun Zydaco, with its washboard and off beat two step, NOLA created Creole 'second line', the jazz beat that marks out the sound of Frenchmen Street (where the real music now happens). The city is a titanic improv session, as musicians wander in and out of sets, joining bands for a number or two and then moving on. Performers are so laid back they are almost sliding out of their chairs, and so practiced that while one is having a solo other band members can step outside for a cigarette and collect tips … they know how much time they’ve got till they need to be back on stage. There is never a cover charge but the rules are generally one drink per set and the band plays for tips so be decent about it. 

Never have I felt so comfortable going out on my own into the wee hours. I park myself on various bar stools with assorted cocktails. I graze along Royal, Frenchmen, and Decatur streets to Envie Coffee House in the early hours. I sit outside and meet Desmond, an artist, at the next table. Sadly my taxi comes and I am now forever left wondering what if I’d just cancelled the car and spent an evening chatting with Desmond. NOLA has that effect. There’s no hassle: chat, don’t chat. It really is the Big Easy. Do your own thing, don’t bother anyone else, enjoy. As my driver, Gail, said the next morning, everything is laid back in NOLA: ‘we walk slow, we talk slow, everyone here has some creativity’.

Tuesday 28 June 2022

 

Food is NOLA’s other big attraction. In the space of three days I tried everything from ‘hole in the wall’ to the uber cool Bacchanal, a European inspired outdoor restaurant where you pick your own assiette of posh cheese and/or meat, to which they add an extraordinary amount of trimmings (crudites, bread, olives, chutneys). With just one morning to go I still have several items on my list of things to try. Cafe du Monde’s production line of beignets is more impressive than the actual product, churned out in their thousands and thrown into a paper bag, accompanied by a paper cup of iced latte. I figure the ten minute walk to Cafe Maspero is not really enough to justify a bowl of crawfish etouffe but it’s a NOLA specialty so has to be tried.

Then the stroll to Mothers is in the same direction as the railway station so I queue with the locals for PoBoy with grilled gulf shrimp to eat on the train, picking up their famous Debris au Jus (yep, all the meaty bits that fall in the pan from the slicing of roast beef for PoBoys) and bread pudding (third variation with brandy sauce) to ensure all food groups are catered for. Hands down one of the best meals you can have if you're flexitarian.

I roll into the station at the same time as The City of New Orleans: a giant of a train, double decker but with a dainty little compartment below the main seating area for women to powder our noses. There is an observation car on this line, one of the reasons that many people tell me they choose AmTrak despite its many deficiencies. Windows extend up into the ceiling allowing the landscape in, along with America’s underclass and poverty that should not exist in a country this wealthy: derelict terraces, decrepit industry, twisted and tamped metal, tyres and industrial waste on the outskirts and in the inner cities hurried through.

An Amtrak train crashed in Missouri the previous night killing three (two on board, one in the dump truck it hit) so I was not feeling totally secure, but at least we left NOLA on time. But the optimism for a scheduled arrival soon dissipated as we ground down to the speed curfew during the heat of the day and shunted into a siding to allow a train to pass. There’s no WiFi. According to the conductor: ‘The broadband in this region is terrible’ so Amtrak stopped paying for it. Geographic inquality between the South and the North made manifest in infrastructure disparity.

We skirt Lake Pontchartrain, its other side unseen, then chug slowly through bayou. The earth gradually becomes more solid, the trees bigger, the sky full of threatening rain, and finally we roll into Memphis, Tennessee, an hour late. Just after midnight my hotel is looking scarily locked up until the receptionist eventually appears and lets me in.

 

Going South, Part II: Sweet Home, Alabama

Birmingham, Tuesday 21 June, 2022

Not for the USA a high-speed rail network with punctuality. 90 minutes late departing Atlanta, I take this to be part of the country’s glorious exceptionalism: trains will run slow and behind schedule. We trundle through Georgia then Alabama, sitting in icy AC while outside climate change rushes past in a heat wave hitting 40 degrees. Cleaved between the jagged edges of forested ravines and peri-urban industrial parks, the slowness reveals frontier style main streets of small town southern America; grand homesteads, porches and chairs, shacks with little porches and one chair (southern hospitality, there is always a chair). White, weather board Baptist church steeples compete for congregations. Deer meander in fields, turtles sunbake on creek-bound logs, and an eagle settles into a tree.

I chat with the young man in the opposite seat: 28 years old and this his first trip outside California where he was born. He is part of post-Covid mobility in the USA; changing jobs, working online, looking to move to a state where it’s cheaper to live or where there are more appealing medical, abortion and/or tax regulations. He has been travelling 50 days, staying for stints in New York, Savannah (GA), and now on his way to New Orleans, trying different cities before he decides where to settle.

As we creep eventually into a shimmering Birmingham, one hour late and in a new time zone, I’m starting to suspect that the strange smell following me around was coming from the cardigan I had picked up off the pavement in Atlanta. Clearly the light dusting I had given it was not enough. 

A short walk from the station there is an actual functioning bus service, hourly, mostly empty, handily dropping me right to the hotel on the edge of the city near the airport. The location is a food desert and while my cardigan dries after a good beating in the sink, a taxi gets me to the nearest strip mall for supplies. I did think about walking but the usual configuration of expressway splitting cities into two or more pieces prevents any urban meanders. The white driver, maybe late 30s, early 40s, is polite and chatty but warns me to ‘be careful’ as it’s ‘not a nice area’. I push him to say why: is it poor? Not exactly. In fact one of Birmingham’s wealthiest neighbourhoods is nearby. It’s not violent, exactly. But he feels the people there might steal something.

After some time in the USA the codes for things not said begin to emerge. ‘Not a nice area’ is code for ‘people of colour’. ‘It’s the South’, with an eye roll and a shrug, means someone’s being racist. While the legacy of slavery is not confined to the South, nor to the USA, those states of the Deep South that had been most dependent on an enslaved plantation economy (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) are still marked by high levels of poverty, inequality and racial discrimination.

Valerie, a middle-aged black woman, is my taxi driver for the return drive back to the hotel. Another migrant from California’s high cost of living, she has a day job she loves in health care but drives taxis between shifts because she likes meeting folk. She knows that there are people in Birmingham who ‘think differently’ (code: racist). She knows that many are ‘sincerely friendly’, but ‘It’s the South’ (eye roll). Acknowledging ongoing constraints, such as being the only woman, and only one of three black members on a corporate board, all her ideas (e.g. the city providing public transport or setting up employee buses to help get people to work) are ignored, although the latter may also be rejected because they are distinctly ‘socialist’ in the lexicon of American individualism. 

Montgomery, Wednesday, 22 June 2022

I am sweaty at 7am having had to run back twice to the hotel for sunglasses and then a USB cable, but in time for the hourly bus. The driver helps me use the bus system's ‘change card’. ‘I got you’, she says. It’s a phrase I hear often: from restaurant servers, drivers, my Texan family in Atlanta, my Spanish hiking companions in the Pyrenees last year, my friends. They got me.

The driver is familiar with her passengers, and there’s a lot of chat about ‘love’ with a man sitting near her. A few people get on and off along the back streets of Birmingham but there is never more than six. I am, again, the only white person on public transport. Dropped off 20 min from the Hertz pick up point in a very industrial part of town the other side of the tracks, I jog to the yard to arrive only 10 minutes late but it was a pointless expenditure of energy. Hertz refused to rent me a car despite my booking. My international credit card that I’ve used around the world and all across the USA with other companies, doesn’t have a US zip code attached to it and is therefore unacceptable to Hertz. That’s some extreme exceptionalism even by USA standards. Ten minutes of remonstrating gets nowhere so I run thirty minutes to the next two rental yards before finding an available car (thank you, Enterprise).

I am now dripping in sweat. While waiting for my pick up, an older woman returning her vehicle is asked by the young agent, wearing her sun hat indoors, if she has left her gun in the car. She hasn’t but this is a question they are now required to ask all customers as a matter of course: over 20 guns a week have been getting left behind. The agents can’t touch the gun and the car is out of use until police come to take the weapon away. Firstly, I say in my imaginary arguments with the gun lobby, if your gun is in the glove box where you will eventually forget about it, how is it going to defend you should you actually find yourself in a gun fight? Secondly, if they mean so much to you, why are you forgetting about them and leaving them behind!

Finally, getting a car at 0930, 90 minutes late, just like Amtrak, I take off to Montgomery, driving through thick forest and past a Big Peach (nice to see it’s not just Australia). The capital of Alabama, with no train connections, is the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement in the USA. In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, and her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, co-organised by a young pastor in the city, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs Parks (and I have learnt not to be an informal Australian in the South and to address people properly) has her own dedicated Museum with multi-media and static displays. But it is the Equality and Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum that encapsulates the breadth of the struggle and its continuing impact: drawing out the links between a slave society, with its engrained racialised hierarchies and creation of a threatening black imaginary, to today’s experiences of racism for Black Americans, including police shootings and the highest incarceration rate of industrialised countries.

A mix of archival material, video, artwork and interactive holograms highlight the numbers: more than 12 million kidnapped into slavery, more than two million died at sea, more than 4000 murdered/lynched, and many, many more unknown and uncounted. It is too easy for these statistics to become incomprehensible in their magnitude and repetition, so the Museum has created a space where the numbers become a thing felt within the body: starting from the small opening room where projected dark waves and the noise of a storm threaten to submerge the viewer into the fear that someone in the belly of a slave ship must have felt. By the time I got to the section on lynching I was close to tears. 

The Museum, situated in a warehouse space, has thousands of visitors a week, from across the USA and internationally, and by the afternoon it’s heaving with young and old. In contrast, the EJI has also created the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, to remember those lynched in racial violence well into the 20th century; mostly men but women and children as well. This is a sacred space. It’s quiet: an expanse of lawn left empty through which a path winds up to a covered structure, open on all sides, with rust coloured boxes listing counties and the names of those known to have been murdered in each one. 

This literal counting of the dead signifies that these deaths must count for something: hope, perhaps, that humanity does better in the future. The walkway gently descends so that the metal boxes begin to hang over the spectator. A wall fountain at the deepest point honours the many 1000s more whose names are unknown. Outside there are sculptures honouring activists, past and present, and highlighting ongoing violence such as police shootings that for some are an extension of the lynchings of the past.

The museum and memorial are part of the EJI’s wider call for justice in the form of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process so that the trauma of slavery and its legacies can be healed. They have already established a process of ‘community reckoning’ where the descendants of those murdered can gather soil at lynching sites that is then stored in large jars at the museum.

While much of contemporary Conservative and Republican politics rails against the idea of looking back in order to move forward, clearly there is a need for some kind of reckoning with this past. The desire for segregation and denigration and walls and keeping the other in their place isn’t going anywhere. Which might go some way to explaining the level of security and metal detectors at the entrances to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial. 

I’m guessing the city of Montgomery was attempting an act of reconciliation when it noted on the city seal both its role as ‘Cradle of the Confederacy’ and ‘Birthplace of the civil rights movement’. The secession convention, forming the Southern Republic, was held from January to March 1861 in the city, and the first White House of the Confederacy was established here. There’s still a Confederate Memorial Day in some Southern states, and it's an official state holiday on the 4th Monday in April in Alabama. Just to wind people up further, Alabama also has a Robert E. Lee day on the same day as Martin Luther King Day (the 3rd Monday in January). Local councils require permission from state authorities (Republican since 2003) should anyone want to remove a confederate statue (the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, 2017) of which there are many more than I thought there would be in my naivete.

Driving back to Birmingham, about 20 minutes or so from Montgomery, on a high cutting on the left of the highway, in full view of the world, a large confederate flag flies above a memorial for the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans. The League of the South are based just an hour north of Birmingham, still advocating for secession and hosting well known antisemitic, white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, as a guest speaker at their 2022 annual conference. 

Calhoun County Confederate Memorial, Janney Furnace Park, O’Hatchee, Thursday, 23 June 2022

It doesn’t take much desk research to find the nearest Confederate memorial: a museum tucked away down a country road with no signage except to Janney Furnace Park. The ‘furnace’ is a ruined forge used in the civil war and later destroyed by Union forces, but the main memorial is a three piece black granite wall engraved with the names of those from the County who volunteered for the Confederate army. Between the lists of names is an etched likeness of Robert E. Lee on one side, and local hero, John Pelham, on the other. The five flags of the confederacy are flown behind the memorial, and a stacked row of seats is set in front. A metal box for visitors includes a sheet of ‘True facts you will never hear or see in the classroom’ about the Civil War.

Next to the memorial is a small, one room county museum presenting in display cases and wall galleries a local history of the area. It includes indigenous artefacts but also, inexplicably, a lot of knives from a range of eras and countries. Mostly it is Civil War memorabilia and an interpretation of how this 20 mile area in remote Alabama became connected to global conflicts: the British-American fighting in 1813 that entangled First Nation communities, and then, as its called here, 'the war of rebellion' or 'the war for Southern independence'.

The museum is only open a few days a week and at 10am on a Thursday morning I was the only person there. The docent, a genial veteran in his late 60s, gives me a personal tour for almost two hours. The civil war takes on an heroic narrative with women invisible or in their usual war time role of cradling the hero on his return. Origin stories take a turn away from slavery towards victimhood in a conflict redressing the injustice of an unfair economic relationship between a wealthier south subsidising the north. A painting at the entrance to the museum, one of the first to be seen, is the image of an enslaved man who, the story has it, on hearing his ‘Master’ was killed, joined the Confederacy in his honour. And so it goes: the battle over ‘truth’ and ‘history’ and ‘representation’, the defence of heritage and nation, continues. 

In late March, early April, the surrounding park is used for re-enactments of local Civil War battles by members of the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans (although you don’t have to be an actual son/daughter of a confederate veteran to take part). They also had a medieval re-enactment society, jousting with watermelons or soft weapons. It was shut down for being too dangerous in what I’m guessing some local people thought was another example of political correctness gone mad.

Driving away from the park, the violence this small county has seen is muted by the serenity of the landscape through which history passed. As always taking the long way home, I crossed lush countryside, wooded hills, corn and vegetable fields. Rivers became lakes dotted with boat houses and decks shaded by old tree canopies. Homesteads are tucked behind trees, shaded from the heat, but the occasional dirt track reveals run down, off grid, trailers as well.

In need of a sugar hit, I stop at a Trading Post emblazoned with ‘God Bless America’. The shopkeeper, a grizzly middle-aged man, also had a large knife collection including samurai swords and a Game of Thrones replica for sale, as well as Amish pickles, jams and assorted sweets. I made a joke about how the knives were a nice change from guns. He said he kept his gun in his car so he can calm down before he gets it but he had a baton under the counter, which didn’t make me feel any safer. He argued a better strategy was to get close enough to an attacker to bite their ear off as a way of deterring further violence. I couldn’t work out if he was being serious but he discounted my chocolate so that was nice.