Memories of a Caroloregian: the Kingsport pages

Jean Nicaise

(Translator's note: Square brackets [ ] enclose clarifications or explanations. Italics show when Nicaise himself uses English.)

[Belgian teacher Jean Nicaise has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach French and Latin at Dobyns-Bennett High School during the school year 1958-59. As this is his first time to the U.S., his experience begins in New York City where he and his wife Renee disembark after an ocean voyage.]

Part 1: New York

          Time goes by fast and after six days we dock in New York at 11 p.m. We don't disembark until the following morning. Elbows on the ship rails, we gaze out at the thousand and one skyscraper windows that twinkle in the night like so many stars. A silvery stream flows down from the north. It's the line of cars coming down into Manhattan. The river they cross is blood-red from the cars leaving the city. We can't take our eyes off this fairyland spectacle. We stay up as long as possible before going to bed. When we finally climb into bunk beds and become immobilized, we have a hard time getting to sleep. What keeps us up is our impatience to finally set foot on the promised land and explore the immense metropolis. Will the American reality measure up to the dream?

          We pass through customs and immigration without hindrance. Not until then, on dry land, does Renee start to feel slightly seasick! The customs agents hardly rummage our bags, being on the lookout mostly for fruit or live plants, the only forbidden commodities. They then asked me to produce my lung x-ray! A health official scans it carefully and clears me. It takes some more time to ship our trunks directly to Kingsport. It's almost past noon by the time our taxi drops us in front of the hotel where rooms have been reserved for the Belgian "Fulbrights," the Sheraton-McAlpin Hotel, on the corner of Broadway and 34th St., in the middle of Manhattan.

          We hurry to drop our luggage and freshen up a bit with the intention of going right out onto famous Broadway. But the first place we meet turns out to be a hospital! During the voyage, Odette [a fellow Belgian Fullbright] got a splinter in her thumb. The slight wound became an infected bump accompanied by pain and a fever. Rather than recommend a doctor, the hotel advises going right away to the hospital, and we decide not to let our friend go alone in a taxi on an unexpected tour of the city that would be painful and non-touristy and that would wind up in the Bronx. While the intern operates on the suffering thumb, we stand around in the emergency room entrance that years later would be made famous by a TV show. Not the kind of "behind the scenes" we expected at this point! So much for two good hours of lost time for visiting this near-mythical city, cruel and fascinating at the same time.

          The buildings are beyond human scale, but the city is invigorating in spite of a filthiness that astonishes us. It seems like the whole world is there, swarming among old pieces of paper being blown about by the wind. In spite of the heavy traffic, it's not as noisy as Paris or Rome. The explanation for this I figure out in the lukewarm air-conditioning and padding of our 23rd floor room, where not as much as a murmur intrudes: big American cars glide along noiselessly whereas, in Rome or Paris, Vespas and [Fiat] Cinquecentos, mopeds and [Renault] 2CV's make -- each one of them -- as much noise as ten Chevrolets. In lots of places mounted police directed from their perches the crazy traffic, in which bright yellow taxicabs predominated.

          I'm not going to describe this "tentacular city," the tumultuous model for all the ones denounced by Verhaeren [Belgian poet]. This has been done thousands of times.

          It's very easy to find our way around, since the streets, duly numbered, run approximately east-west, and the north-south avenues -- except Broadway -- cross them at right angles, making blocks. Whenever we got lost, I'd ask for directions and the reply would be something along the lines of "go straight ahead for two blocks, then turn right." The problem is that the blocks can be short or long, so there's always the chance that unexpected kilometers will add considerably to the travel fatigue of an unknown city that's already immense enough. We also often hop on the buses that always run straight ahead, the ones on the avenues never bothering to turn off onto a street. On boarding, you pay ten cents, a "dime," (pronounced daïme) into a sort of coffee mill device placed right next to the driver. No tickets, unless you want a transfer to a street line.

          We cover dozens and dozens of miles during four days, from monuments to museums, from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center, from Greenwich Village to Central Park, from the Cloyster [the Cloisters] to the Museum of American Indians. Both my camera and my movie camera begin their frenetic consumption of film. The general information brochure provided by the hotel touts the places that are the biggest in the world: Pennsylvania Station is the most used in the world; we go see a dance show with the famous "Rockets" [Rockettes] at Radio City Music Hall, the largest theater in the world. We make a quick visit to the public library, the largest library system in the world, and we finish at the church of St. John the Devine [Divine], the largest gothic cathedral in the world, which, it appears, won't be completed until 2020. Not far from there, the Washington Bridge that straddles the Hudson is unfortunately only the second longest suspension bridge in the world.

          It is easy and useless to make fun of this show of records. All countries in the world are quick to glorify such accomplishments when they can. Paris boasts of having, in the Champs Elysées, the most beautiful avenue in the world, an aesthetic judgment not subject to verification. Thanks to the Louvre, France brags that it runs the largest museum in the world. Normandy prides itself on providing, since January, 1995, the longest cable-stayed bridge. But no nation beats the record of records of the Americans, surprising people who are mocked even as they are envied for their energy, mastery, and audacious imagination.

          Worn out from our forced marches and our museum vigils, we discover inexpensive places to keep us going: drugstores and cafeterias rather than the restaurant at the Sheraton, which is too expensive for our meager funds. We are agreeably surprised at the quality of the food, at least in comparison with the bad reputation its been given and with our own brief experience at the American pavilion at the Brussels Exposition. Who is it who has said that in America, you don't eat, you feed? This is true, if you can believe the enormous billboards saying "FOOD" that line the roads leading to a restaurant. "Foods" characterized as "fast" have since invaded our own cities and towns. I suggest that French language rule-makers replace this horrible locution with a suitable French translation: "bouffe-vite."

          Thus we "feed" very agreeably and without looking overmuch to "eat." Our means don't allow us to do that any more in the States (as the Québecois say) than we can in Europe.

          There isn't just one American cuisine, but scores of them especially in "The Big Apple": Italian, Chinese, Greek, Kosher, Creole, Southern, and maybe -- here or there -- Yankee, like Tad's Steaks on 42nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. There we eat a T-bone steak and an enormous Idaho potato in the skin, generously buttered, for $1.65. If you add onto this a Budweiser or Miller beer, the meal is worth the detour, as Mr. Michelin might say. We have simple tastes, and city slickers used to three [Michelin] stars would no doubt think we are hicks.

[Translated from French by Jud Barry]