New York City & Clove Valley Farm

There is a great scene in Home Alone 2 in which Kevin McAllister arrives into what he thinks is an airport in Florida, only to be awestruck by the towering vista of New York out the window. His jaw-drops when the woman at the desk confirms, "That's New York, sir". Unlike Kevin, my visit was planned, but I reacted similarly when my bus from Philadelphia turned a corner to suddenly present the mighty Manhattan skyline in all its glory. Other American cities have skyscrapers, but nothing comes close to the visual impact of New York. It was an odd experience to witness something so instantly recognisable yet unlike any place I'd ever seen before. I met my friend Linda at Port Authority bus station, just off Times Square, and we were happy to make a quick getaway from the manic and overhwelming corner of 9th Avenue and 42nd Street to the serene and residential Brooklyn Heights, where Alex, my Mum's friend from university, and her husband Daniel, kindly put us up for a couple of nights in their stylish apartment. It was interesting to get to know someone who best knew my mum when she was younger than I am now, as it probably was for Alex to meet the grown son of an old friend. Linda and I had just one full day in Brooklyn, as we had arranged to volunteer on a farm for a week before returning to the city, and on our brief introduction to New York, half way across the Brooklyn Bridge was as far west as we ventured. Brooklyn Heights feels like another world from Manhattan, yet it's still very close to "the city". At the promenade just around the corner from Alex's is an incredible view across the Hudson River of Lower Manhattan, whose giant buildings feel much closer than they actually are.

After our taster of New York I felt reluctant to leave for a week in the sticks. Clove Valley Farm, about two hours north of the city, is located under a ridge of the lush and green Catskill mountains. As picturesque as the location is, when I arrived I felt tired at the prospect of another stint of farm life. Aileah, the smiley young woman who runs Clove Valley, revealed to us that there was no toilet or shower, and our first task was to clean the very dirty caravan where we'd be sleeping. But once we fixed it up and got settled, Linda and I both started to enjoy our time there. The rustic toilet arrangements worked out fine and we were able to use a shower in a mini barn on the farm which David, a constructor who occasionally helps with the farm work, had magnificently transformed into a charming wee house for himself and his daughter. Opposite David lived a couple in their early thirties who had, in the space of about 6 months, converted a former chicken barn into an incredible little home. It was inspiring to meet people with such self-sufficiency in growing their own food and building a place to live. However, while I am grateful for my experiences on the farms in New York and California, I don't think farm work is something I'm keen to do again. I want to buy local food and support local farmers but growing it myself holds no interest. And apparently that often showed, as I would drift off thinking about everything and anything but the work we were doing, and bring up completely unrelated coversation with an amused Linda! She enjoyed the work itself more than me, and the experience has inspired her to start growing more of her own food. Both of us, however, took great satisfaction at the physical difference made to patches of the farm, after hours of turning straggly patches of weeds and leaves into rows of neat beds with planted vegetables. I also appreciated the spare time I had at the farm to write.

Most significantly, the social life at Clove Valley was much more fun and varied than at Flying Disc Ranch in California. We usually worked alongside Aileah, and often friends of hers would help out for a few hours, each with interesting personalities and back-stories. Linda and I kind of shadowed Aeliah for the week, running errands with her, going for dinner with her friends, meeting various people in the nearby towns of Rosendale and Kingston. There was a lovely community atmosphere in the area, particularly evident at a Pot Luck, with lots of good food and about forty people in attendance. A key issue currently bringing the community together is their opposition to hydraulic fracking in New York state, a procedure whereby gas is extracted from deep underground, but with very dangerous and real environmental conseqeunces, such as contiminated water supply and pollution of the air. Every second car had a "No Fracking!" bumper-sticker and the walls of Kingston and Rosendale were plastered with posters advertising a rally with Mark Ruffalo and Yoko Ono speaking.

Linda and I were still searching for accomodation in NYC by the time we left Clove Valley, so we stopped for two nights in nearby New Paltz, which turned out to be a pretty awesome place itself. One of the highlights of America has been discovering cool little towns I knew nothing about before, and New Paltz has possibly been the best of the bunch. The hip college town is like a more chilled-out version of many neighbourhoods in New York, except with mountains as a backdrop rather than skyscrapers. Its main street has an extraordinarily international array of restaurants, one-off pubs, and cafes. New Paltz's whole foods stores, co-ops, and all-round hippie vibe is befitting of a town just 25 miles from Woodstock. All the students make for a very youthful and lively town  - one which is in its own bubble, perhaps, but a no less fun place to visit for a couple of days. On the bus to New York I watched in astonishment the live online updates of Man City's stoppage time title win, and the sensation did not dwindle as we passed the Manhattan cityscape again on our way into the station.

From the hippie upstate area we were soon in the hipster haunt of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where we stayed with a couple named Bree and Kevin who had worked at Clove Valley last year. Bushwick is a working-class area, predominantly Latin American, that seems to be in an early phase of gentrification. Bree and Kevin were one of a growing number of young people, many artists or musicians, attracted by the cheap rent and more edgy New York experience on offer there. One of the most fascinating things about New York is its constant evolution. 'Hoods that were once gritty are now yuppie; areas that used to bohemian - such as Greenwich Village - have long since lost their edge; every week new hot spots all over the city; and all the while numerous national enclaves are sprouting up and expanding and encroaching upon one another. I read recently that the prositution, human trafficking, and drug-dealing that used to go on in Times Square twenty years ago has since drifted to Western Queens. Today, Times Square has a Disney shop, and is about the most touristy part of the city. There must be so many extraordinary but also tragic goings-on in New York that tourists or even residents never hear about. Every city has multiple sides to it, and represents many different things to many different people, but nowhere can that be more true than in the many worlds of this colussus metropolis.

The inside of Bree and Kevin's apartment, located in an old warehouse, is awash with colour, decorated with their flatmate's paintings and other art, and all sorts of random stuff picked up off the street. Bree and Kevin run their own community garden and also grow their own vegetables. On a couple of mornings Linda and I watered plants on their roof, which looks like the set of a mobile phone advert or a music video, with arty grafitti all over the white rooftop and, yes, another staggering view of Manhattan. One of the best things about staying with different people throughout my trip has been the opportunity to join them in the interesting things they do in their own daily lives. At Bree and Kevin's we were treated to Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway with their flatmate Scott, a really nice guy who at 21 years old is an assistant to one of the executive producers of the show. The talent and versatility of the actors was quite something to behold. We also attended a weekly philosophy discussion group led by their flatmate Nyssa, where we sat around drinking wine and talking about the functions of language, from which we went off on many tangents. Both the organised discussion and conversations at the apartment provided an insight into some of the points of debate in 2012 America. Some of them   have been expressed by young people in decades gone by and doubtless will in decades to come to come, while others are more specific to this era. Among the opinions voiced were the perceived failures of the nation's educational system; frustration at the western world's perennial emphasis on material wealth; reflections on some of the tensions brought by growing Hispanic immigration; the crimes and secrets of the US government...and so on.

After three days in New York we still had much to do and see, and arranged to stay with a couchsurfer, Emily, and her flatmates, Tamara and Megan. They live near Prospect Heights, another part of Brooklyn, and in keeping with the trend, are really cool people with varied interests. Emily spent a year in France as part of her degree in French and Francophone studies, Tamara is an actress, and Megan is doing a postgraduate in Museum Education. It's easy to underestimate scale in NYC, and up to that point Linda and I had struggled to pack in all that the city has to offer. But following some sightseeing tips by the girls, in one action-packed day we
sailed passed the Statue of Liberty on the free Staten Island Ferry, strolled through Battery Park up Lower Manhattan, past Wall Street, craned our necks at the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, and marveled at "the best view in New York" from the top of the Rockerfeller Center. And a surprise highlight of the day was the innovative Chelsea Highline, a linear park recently built on the elevated former New York Central Railroad. In the evening we had sushi for the first time with Emily, Tamara, and her boyfriend Dave, before going for drinks. The following day we tagged along to the Met Museum with Dave, a painter and tutor at the New York School of Art, where we joined two of his students on his thought-provoking tour of the museum. He's a very articulate and knowledgable speaker, and probably about 80% of what I now know about art comes from that two hour tour!

Our New York experience came full circle when we returned to Alex's on Cup Final Saturday. Streaming the game in an internet cafe, I watched with sympathy for one half of Edinburgh - and one half of my family and friends - and with happiness for the other. Next I witnessed the Champions League Final in a "British" pub named the Chip Shop. In extra time there was an amusingly Americanized slagging match between two US followers of English football, as a sarcastic Liverpool supporter was kept in check by his friend after riling a Chelsea fan with, "Where's your history, dude? That's a nice history you guys got there!" Later that night we were back at Emily & co's for their flat party, where we urged them to get in touch if they ever visit Scotland. We began our last full day in the city with a slap-up pancake breakfast with Alex and her daughter Becca, and went to the NYC Grid exhibition in the afternoon. Manhattan feels huge but also strangely compact, like every square inch of the island is being used, and the exhibition confirmed that it was planned in exactly that way. Scale is a funny thing to grasp in New York. If it was a city, Brooklyn would be the fourth largest in the country. In area, Manhattan is a fifth of the size of Edinburgh, but three times the population, which makes it hard to imagine what the borough would be like without the giant refuge of Central Park, where we spent our last afternoon wandering and soaking up the sun. It was nice to to get away from the intensity of the surrounding streets - we were starting to feel ready for the tranquil climes of New England.