A plane came down in the Hudson river at the weekend, a few blocks north of my New York apartment. News of it came on television just after dinner and, loading up the kids, we went out to look. Much of the neighbourhood had turned out too, and the riverbank was so crowded that bike commuters had to get off and walk, while helicopters circled overhead and a line of fire trucks ran from the water’s edge all the way up the emergency access road.
The plane was a vintage second world war fighter of a kind now used only in air shows, and with only the pilot on board. This information, conveyed as each newcomer joined the crowd, elicited murmurs of dismay and also – there was no mistaking it – a measure of disappointment. Unlike Chesley Sullenberger’s famous ditch into the Hudson seven years ago, this would not, after all, be a major news event. You couldn’t even see the plane, just the activity around it – primarily police launches with search beams.
And the crowd itself. This, it turns out, was the real spectacle. The term rubbernecking brings to mind drivers slowing down to stare at a crash on the motorway, an act motivated by “grim fascination” at best, sick instinct at worst. This was not quite that. There was a search for sensation, and a basic curiosity in something out of the ordinary; but there was also the spirit that drives people out of doors during city-wide blackouts, or those with no interest in sport to bars on big match days – which is to say the desire to be part of something with the people around you.
As it turned out, this small plane crash that only made the local news had a higher fatality count than Sullenberger’s US Airways crash, in which all 155 people on board survived. The pilot on Sunday night died, and at some point news of this began to ripple through the crowd. The jolly atmosphere evaporated and, guiltily, everyone went home.
Tribes in trunks
There has been no spring in New York. Overnight, we went from overcoat weather to 90F heat, and it has been a little hard to adjust. In the city the traditional marker for the start of summer is to sit in one’s car for hours, trying to get to the beach. When you finally arrive, the scene at the beach club is like the first day of school: everyone sizing each other up for new friends and irritants.
As usual, this year I couldn’t reliably identify the subcultures and had to rely on Americans to translate. They pointed out the Italians, the Poles and the dyed-in-the-wool Long Islanders; the person most likely to start a fight, or to finish one. At the far end of the club a huge party took up an entire row of cabanas, among them a four-year-old boy, hair down past his shoulders in the current style for young boys.
“Are they hipsters?” I asked. “Are you kidding?” said one of my party. “They’re religious Jews. It means they won’t be here on Saturdays.”
I heart Kmart
On the way there, we pulled off the expressway to shop at a huge branch of Kmart. I know it’s bad and wrong, but I can never quite get over my love of American superstores.
I get the same buzz in Walmart – the strip lighting, the 36-packs of eggs and two-gallon barrels of milk; the knowledge that, if you kept your head down, you could probably live in the store for a year without leaving.
Browsing the jumbo packs of marshmallows and the towering stacks of sliced cheese felt, as ever, like landing in Oz after a lifetime spent in Kansas.
