We start at dawn from the Colgate Inn: there's fresh snow. The guy from the cab company cuts north through Canatosta; he wants to reach the New York Thruway, where the plows have been out. Every township has its sign marking its First Settler in the 1790s. But they weren't the first people living there, every place name reminds me of that.

We cross the Erie Canal which first opened the territory to colonists. The word 'settler' strikes me forcibly. In England there are no signs marking where the invading Saxons displaced the Celtic population 1500 years ago; in fact no-one knows quite what happened. The culture of so recent a 'settlement' must affect Americans' perception of Israel's policy, just as Europeans can't escape the legacy of their own empire states.

On to the Interstate-90, west. Here is the turn for Syracuse. The driver doesn't know his way, but I can remember enough from 25 years ago, and help him find the bus station.

But it's all changed since the 1970s: a new Transportation Center with the bus terminal integrated with the Amtrak station. I'd gladly take a train downstate through the wonderful Mohawk and Hudson valleys, but the next arrival from Chicago is signalled 'ETA ????' which is not encouraging. In the bus station, I join the carless of America, the poor who use public transport. I look at the Onondaga County museum display case, and am reminded of how the first Europeans to penetrate this area actually came from the north and were French.

We're watching Clinton's last pardons, breaking news on CNN along with the National Missile Defense. I take a copy of the Syracuse New Times and see its columnist Karen de Crow who is still writing about the 1970s. I remember so well my life in a liberal enclave in the Republican upstate, when new times were still new.

I also remember the rugged, reliable, well-organised, all-weather, road transportation that keeps America running.

Here's my bus with its heart-warming sign:
	We head south on the I-81, which cuts a great swathe through downtown Syracuse. Once I trudged those streets every day in the snow. I was a post-doc at the Physics department of Syracuse University in 1976. Here is a glimpse of the hill where Syracuse University is based. We pass by South Salina Street where I lived 25 years ago, in a post-hippie rooming house.

We stop at Binghamton, then Great Bend, and head through wild eastern Pennsylvania. We join Interstate 80, and I think of San Francisco a continent to the west. We pass into New Jersey through the Delaware Water Gap, and the fine valley flattens into increasingly frenetic shopping malls.

In 1976 I used to drive downstate in my Volkswagen Bug, exploring many different routes. Now I see afresh that skyline of Manhattan above the industrial Jersey marshes, magic as Venice... we gear up to the barrier of the hard-rock Palisades, the great spiral down to the Lincoln Tunnel, ready to emerge in another planet.

A Zweite Heimat for me, the sceptical restless awkward Jewish culture that lies behind so much of my scientific work, and the amazing New York Review of Books.

my Second Home Page

Tunnel into New York City

my images

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