Massachusetts, day 1

Moving across time zones is a strange experience. You effectively displace yourself so fast as to end up time travelling. This I did yesterday, setting out at ten am from Brussels and landing in Boston at three pm, eleven hours later.

Of course, the price you pay for this sci-fi experience is jet lag. In an attempt to fight it I stayed up until 0430 in the morning my time, which is a decidedly less impressive 2230 local time – as evidenced by the cocktail waitress’s look of disbelief when I was going cross eyed after half a beer – and then slept like a log jam until dawn.

Now, traditionally, Easter is the time when witches are abroad, so where better to spend my first day in Massachusetts than in Salem, scene of the most famous witch trials in history?

I didn’t see any witches (maybe the competitions were held elsewhere?), but the city certainly capitalises on the old madness. Wiccan shops, haunted houses and the like abound, and tourists come from afar to revel in the gruesome history of the place.

Me? I was blown away. Literally. The gale force winds forced me inside at regular intervals, even though the sun did lure me back out, time after time. And I shouldn’t complain – turns out they had seven feet or snow here until only a couple of weeks ago!

Eventually though, my body had had enough. Several hours’ worth of siesta was required to bring me back on my feet just long enough to enjoy my first Maine lobster, but now midnight (the local one) is approaching, and I’m about to leave the state of Massachusetts for the state of unconsciousness once more…
Massachusetts, day 2

The US is a land of extreme contrasts; the unsightly hangar-like superstores along the roads on the one hand, the beautiful New England clapboard houses on the other, the ever-present Dunkin Donuts drivethrus next door to organic eco-eateries/yoga centres, colonial historic sites encroached upon by modern skyscrapers and so on.

Similarly, people are diametrically different; I visited Trinity church in downtown Boston which was packed to the rafters for the Easter sermon, and went outside only to find several women cosplayers climbing on the church building in an attempt to look more like the Assassin’s Creed characters they were dressed up as*.

And yet this is what makes it such a wonderful place, I think. There’s room here for all kinds. So when a bold eagle appears high in the sky above the highway on the way home, it feels symbolically quite fitting.

Land of the free, home of the brave indeed.

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*One creed is as good as the next, I guess…
Massachusetts, day 3

There are places in the world that seem to act as magnets to forces other than normal natural forces (gravity and whatnot). So for instance Jerusalem is a black hole to religions and New York exudes a force field of capital.

In Boston, there is a higher than usual background radiation of learning, and I spent the day trying to expose myself to as much of it as possible (in the vague hope of turning into the intellectual equivalent of the Incredible Hulk). So the morning saw me visiting Walden, the pond in the forest where Henry Thoreau spent two years in splendid isolation contemplating the beauty of nature and a simpler life (except for when he went over to mum’s for pancakes and a change of clothes on Sundays), and in the afternoon I went to Harvard and MIT – not many people have done both, and certainly not in the course of a day, so maybe I was turning into a green intellectual giant after all?

Regardless of colour, it is certainly easy to grow too large here, but in the evening I threw caution to the wind and fulfilled a life-long dream by eating in a Worcester diner, a wonderfully retro institution with table jukeboxes, busty waitresses calling you “honey”, a menu (made) out of Grease and a clientele that between them must have weighed like a whale. My arteries contracted as soon as I stepped inside, and I didn’t give in until I had gulped down a load of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and a wedge of lemon merengue pie (that could have held the door open), the effects of which had me eying the walls for a defilibrator. Bliss!
Massachusetts, days 4 and 5

I’ve spent much of my time here roaming up and down the coast, exploring capes and coves, taking in the quaint little fishing villages and their typical New England architecture.

I freely admit I am in love with the colonial style, which seems to consist of taking Edwardian houses as your starting point and making sure that the architect has the blueprints confused with a recipe for wedding cakes. All of them have an abundance of turrets, pilasters, ornate gables, Roman pillars, covered porches, outside staircases, nooks and crannies, which gives them a stately but very organic look.

The nicest ones are old sea captains’ houses, built by wealthy skippers and traders gone ashore, but not willing to give up the sea – built along the coastline, often right on the water’s edge, with balconies and lookout points where their original owners could spy their ships come in from the Caribbean, where their cargo of slaves had been offloaded, and molasses taken onboard, to be processed to rum in New England and sold on to slave traders back in Africa. (This last detail is oft overlooked by Ralph Lauren and others selling the New England lifestyle for some reason…).

White dominates, but a whole spectrum of muted greys, blues, and beiges exist, mirroring the colour of the weather-beaten landscape and the ever-changing ocean in a way not dissimilar to the buildings in the Dominican Republic, although diametrically opposite its palette.

As always I leave taking something with me. This time, it’s an irrepressible urge to add a covered colonnade to my house…