Heading to Australia, the new Swimmer, and a small story of a criminal clown
A few random thoughts ahead of a twenty-six hour flight
I leave Thursday for a month in Australia; more on that below. My next post on walking Sydney will come a little later than normal given travel time and jet lag. Until then, here is a grab bag of three unconnected essays — on visiting Australia, John Cheever’s The Swimmer, and Cowboy of Hunts Point.
Subscriptions have doubled recently, so I want to thank all of you, but it also means I’ve not been able to keep up with the emails, messages, and requests I’ve received. I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I cannot handle the deluge.
I’ll try to partly rectify that by doing a subscriber zoom call on Wednesday, the 30th, at 12 pm EST (noon) and I’ll stay on the call for a few hours until everyone has their questions answered. I’m trying to accommodate as many time zones as possible. Link at the end of this post.
My Australia Trip
Every time I've written about a trip before starting it, I've had to cancel. Still, even though my back is iffy, I'm determined to leave for Australia Thursday, where I will be spending all of August. I’m very excited about going.
I want to visit Australia because it is a unique branch of the British Empire evolutionary tree, which makes it an interesting comparison to its US cousin. To borrow language from biology, it's an allopatric culture to the US, and cultural evolution is my thing. Also, it has really silly animals. I mean, who in their right mind would have designed the platypus, echidna, wombat, quokka, sugar glider, blobfish, frilled lizard, numbat, bilby, and cassowary, much less all of them?
I also want to go because in my sixty years of travel I've never been.
My parents went many times, especially after my father became a fan of the mystery writer Arthur Upfield, and offered to bring me, but unlike others in my generation I never experienced any period of Aussie fascination. Not when Men at Work was a thing, nor Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max, AC/DC, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Thorn Birds, A Town Like Alice, Crocodile Hunter, or INXS. None of the small Aussie cultural fireworks that have exploded across my life, from high to low, have appealed to me at all. Rather, I've found them all wafer thin, with a veneer of dusty crudeness. From what I could tell, Australia was Canada with deserts, beaches, and idiosyncratic animals.
It didn't help that two of the worst people I worked with in banking were Aussies, both bloated with empty arrogance, who tried to skate by on their mystique, which mostly meant bragging about how large, empty, and isolated Australia is, while sprinkling into conversation diminutives (footy, brekky, barbie, mozzie, lollies, bikkie, chokkie, prezzie, telly, sickie, tradie, sparkie, firie, truckie, and swimmie1) that made them sound like toddlers.
All of that is very unfair (well, most of it), so when I began this newsletter, I tried to find a way to explore Australia that did it justice, because it's indeed large, empty, and isolated, with a nature that can be fierce, making it hard to walk and know easily2.
So when I found out that Australia has its own Greyhound, with monthly passes, I realized I’d found the answer to my problem, since I’ve long said, “if you want to understand the US you need to ride a Greyhound across it.” So that is what I would do. I would try and ride across Australia by bus. Well, not in the East-West direction, but North-South, since Greyhound seems to only operate in the right half of the country.
That’s the plan now. To spend a week in Sydney, then work my way up to Darwin by bus, stopping along the way, similar to what I did last week in the US, with the understanding that Australia is, outside of a few small regions, very empty.
Despite my prior agnosticism, I’m excited about this trip, excited about being in a different culture where I can talk to everyone, even if they do sound like toddlers, and even if there aren’t that many of them.
Above is a map of my very rough itinerary (all by bus, I would die walking any of that), and should you be along the way, let me know in the comments. The rough rough further plan is, if I make it to Darwin with enough time, to then fly to Perth, or Melbourne, before returning to Sydney. We will see. I go into trips like this, in a place I’ve never been, with a lot of wiggle room built in, to adjust to new information.
"The Swimmer” short story, updated
The Swimmer is John Cheever’s best known work, which can still be read in the New Yorker, where it first appeared.
The plot, as I understood it before reading, is about a man who swims from a party to his home, eight miles away, one neighboring wealthy suburban pool at a time3. Since its publication, it's been widely praised as a modern odyssey, an allegory for everything wrong with American suburban life: empty affluence, privilege, hypocrisy, shallowness, etc., etc., etc.
I thought of the story while walking in Michigan City, the small commuter town I rested in for four days following my Greyhound trip. Each day I awoke at five a.m., walked the mile from my room to the downtown McDonald's, then another three to the McDonald's out past the busy bypass. Almost my entire trek, there and back, was on the very straight five-lane Franklin Street.
If sixties suburban life can be epitomized by backyard pools, then the current, lowbrow version is strip malls, and I began to think of my walks in similar terms, but with mall parking lots instead of pools—fording connecting drainage ditches, climbing over barrier berms—to cross from one strip mall to another, before finally making it home, to McDonald's, or on that first day, the adjacent Denny's.
I was curious enough about the story that when I finally arrived at Denny’s, I found it online, and realized it had been published exactly sixty-one years (to the day) before. A coincidence that demanded I read it, which I did, while eating my first Grand Slam breakfast in decades. Which, given Denny’s origins seemed appropriate, since it represents a democratization of upscale suburban life — a sixties Westchester county life now available for the masses.
It's a remarkably well-written story, with beautiful prose, that's surprisingly short and fast-moving. It's an easy, enjoyable read, and I get why its reputation has held up, although I find it as gimmicky as it is deep and insightful.
(Spoiler alert: Skip the rest if you haven't read it, which you should, since it will only take you a few minutes.)
I suppose the intended lesson (and it is a short story that very much believes it has a lesson) is that modern life is nature tamed, with each home in suburbia a small gated kingdom with its own riverbank, albeit a highly stylized one, complete with festivals, gatherings, and other social occasions, and that what we see as freedom is actually a continuation of a rigid class system that has been with us since the Middle Ages. Yet, despite all the refinements civilization has brought, including the felicity of Sunday afternoon pool parties, it remains in denial about the inevitable decline of aging and, ultimately, death. Humans are mortal, and no amount of material well‑being, no array of placid pools, can overcome that. Or something like that. Honestly, a story like The Swimmer, intentionally opaque to give it the added mystique of depth, is one reason I tend to stay away from literature that isn’t solidly grounded in reality.
Or maybe that's what I wanted to see in it, because that fits what I write about: how material wealth is fantastic, but it doesn't translate into fulfillment, because humans are defined by higher needs, including the need to be a valued member of something larger than themselves. Having a purpose that transcends the corporeal is the foundation beneath our hierarchy of more tangible needs, rather than something to aim for once those are completed. You can’t unwind the physical from the spiritual, we are indivisible fusion of both.
Yet, we have achieved wonders in the material realm, as my six dollar breakfast with enough calories for the entire day, eaten in a comfortable booth kept at a perfect seventy two degrees, despite the soggy heat outside, illustrates.
It is easy to forget how astonishing modern life is, including Cheever's suburbia, at the earthly level. A three-thousand-square-foot home, with central heat and AC, a two-car garage, and a two-acre estate complete with a swimming pool, with weekly festivals, is the life of a past baron or lord, now available, in some form, to most Americans.
While Franklin Street in Michigan City4 is far less idyllic than Westchester suburbia, it would also be a magical place to anybody from the nineteenth century, from baron to lord to servant. It is a safe, well maintained place of immense wealth, convenience, opportunity, excitement, with endless diversions. Which is a thought I kept having while walking it, because while I was trekking along the shoulder, I was also listening to Vanity Fair5, and the contrast was hard to miss, especially all the massive cars passing me. Everyone can now “keep a carriage,” a past symbol of gentility, which drives them from one market to the next, from one fair to the next, including the twelve-floor casino at the end of the street, and access to all sorts of wines, liquors, and ales, from all over the globe. No matter where you live, there are endless diversions you can reach in a few hours by car, accessible to almost every American, that would make Vauxhall Gardens look humdrum by comparison. Such magnificence!
That the suburbia of Cheever, and the strip malls of Michigan City, can nonetheless feel drab, depressing, and empty, rather than being the gift horse those in the past would have seen them as, is precisely what I write about over and over and over.
While we should celebrate this unprecedented age of wealth and wonder, there's more to life than material diversions, and policy should focus on that deeper human need, not our continuing rush to make more stuff, ever more efficiently.
There comes a point of diminishing returns from the material, and we’ve long ago passed that, yet we seem unable to stop, making and buying more and more. Like Cheever's swimmer, moving from pool to pool on a quest whose purpose he's forgotten, only to arrive home and find his life has slipped away
Cowboy’s Crime Spree
(This is a rewrite of an old story of mine that has disappeared from the internet. I think of Cowboy often, while reading the news, because there are misunderstandings about crime that his story illustrates. One is that criminals are clever, smart, and sometimes ingenious. Watch any Dateline, and I watch a lot, you quickly see the opposite is true. Most are impulsive, stupid, and without any guile, like Cowboy. The second is that anyone can turn to crime, with the right circumstances, but most people are good, no matter their surroundings, and the majority of crime is caused by a very small minority of bad people. Or, there are indeed career criminals. Cowboy is one of them.)
Cowboy is a clown, a dangerous, desperate, but foolish clown. The type who robs a laundromat with a machete for drugs and almost injures only himself in the process.
Cowboy went on his type of crime spree. After pushing a man in a wheelchair over to grab his wallet, he then robbed the Giant Laundromat on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx a few minutes before midnight on a Friday night.
This happened a few blocks from the Hunts Point drug trap where I had met him two years before. When I first saw him he was dressed as he always was, shirtless, with olive green shorts and flip-flops, and doing what he always did, which was shooting up heroin, or as he called it, "hair-on." He'd tied his own arm with a discarded shoelace, using the clenched teeth method, then pestered a friend to shoot him up, while he looked away, claiming he still hated the sight of blood after all these years.