The way of an oyster
Language does matter. I found out why I prefer European cities. It all turns around the word ‘square’, widely preferred over the latin evolution (or involution) word ‘place’. The Americans have an exceedingly practical view of the World, so they took the word by its full meaning and, while building their huge cities like a grill, found a perfect correspondence between geometry and urban development. US squares are essentially… square in shape. And another shape would be highly unlikely, because they can only ‘build’ a square either razing down one or more blocks, or working out some palliatives by driving a street sideways and calling it Broadway. These last examples are… pathetic, to say the least. Take Times Square. Can one imagine a worst square? It’s ridiculosly small triangle, impractical, ugly, and by a traffic point of view it’s courting disaster. So they lit it up, and the only thing worth taking a picture of is the giant M&Ms having fun. Or the police in amazing numbers. So, while Europeans easily meet in ‘places’ – place, plaza, piazza, trg, none of these having any connection with geometry - conveniently snug around cities AND villages, Americans get lost along Broadways and Main Streets, and are therefore forced to meet at - guess where – intersections! I mean, how sad is that… ‘Dear Frances, meet me at 8th and 53rd’…’ Moreover, intersections in the Big Apple have no less than 4 busy, crowded and faraway corners, where young lovers would have a hard time in seeing each other in case they are not tall… The absence of proper meeting places may not make much difference in a big city, but it can be alienating in small ones, where they usually have just one, if any, with courthouse/church/townhall included. To make up for what is an evident lack of civilization, the Americans invented an even more alienating place to recreate the Old World social wisdom, the shopping mall. There will always be a whole ocean between us…
So, where would a civilized European arrange a date with a girl? Bertie Wooster would rather be dead in a ditch than meeting Frances at 8th and 53rd…Well, believe me or not, there is a perfect ‘place’, an excellent balance of style and location, right in the middle of New York City. Hard to believe, I am talking about a railway station, Grand Central Terminal. The European versions of a station are an affair that should be given as wide a berth as possible, although with the due exceptions, for a variety of reasons. First of all a proper company should not be expected. Even if nice ladies, old gentlemen and some university professors do still have an affection for trains, the category will soon become extinct, replaced by a less remarkable horde of bipeds, usually unfavoured by place of birth and wealth of parents, and not often given chances to improve their conditions. Second, European governments, often expression of the left wing of Parliaments, favoured the train as a cheap and egalitarian form transport, thus overlooking unnecessary details such as cleanliness. Third, while the station itself is often a remarkable object, the technical paraphernalia around it seem to attract misery, in the form of noise-pestered neighbourhoods, filthy underpasses, and not-fought-for real estate. GCT has none of these problems. NYC traffic is a deterrent for any class of workers, and trains ferry humans from Bronx and Connecticut alike. As for cleanliness, Vanderbilt Hall and the Main Concourse rival a Four Season hotel, not to mention the Campbell Apartments where, hear hear, proper dressing is compulsory. As for the environs, being the rails all buried under Park Avenue, well, what is left is… Park Avenue, the gothic Chrysler building, a splendid façade and a general air of serious prosperity and order – not exactly cheap by the square foot… So, while a ‘normal’ station is a spot where you want to go to feel beautiful – by stark contrast – or to experience pickpocketing, GCT is actually a place you want to visit, and visit again, even if you do not have to catch a train – which, incidentally, you can do, far from curious eyes, in the bowels of building. The main lobby is probably the closest thing to a European square you can get in NYC, but it’s cleaner and more fascinating. But GCT hides more secrets. Go down a level, and instead of tripping over bums and rubbish, you find a spectacular food court, with, apparently, New York best Oyster Bar. With a take away! I mean, how cool is that! You get out of your office on Park Avenue, go catch a train for one of the hundreds of well trimmed stations of well trimmed villages in Long Island or up the Hudson Valley, stop by a convenient window and shove up a bucket of live shellfish. I am sure your darling, waiting for you behind well trimmed whitewashed wooden walls and well trimmed lace curtains, will be very happy, mainly because shelling oyster is not a lady’s affair. The Station is so nice that a billionaire decided to move there, and the Campbell apartments now host a vip bar. Probably one of the few drawbacks of the food court is the lack of natural light, but it should not be a problem for New Yorkers, considering that darkness must be expected anyway among such tall buildings anyway…
Dutifully we had a nice platter of oysters sitting on the stools around an exceedingly long and winding bar, made of white tiles and well attended by a very large number of waitresses, all of them vintage, blonde, and very efficient. Strangely enough, their mothertongue appeared to be English and not Spanish, Lebanese or Hindi, like it happens in most NYC joints. Needless to say the chaps at the shelling station could barely speak English.
Our visit to GCT and our entry to the world of Wellfleet oysters was a perfect excuse to lay down the itinerary for the second part of our East Coast driving tour, New England. Our plan was to drive along Long Island as far as the very head, catch a ferry to Connecticut and drive through proper New England. But few plans withstand the contact with the enemy, and Long Island proved a dissappointment. I must admit that Peter Matthiessen is to blame. The revered author wrote a book about the LI fishermen in the beginning of the eighties, a marvellous collection of impressions, stories and interviews. Those were the days of the surf fishermen, tough and semi-illiterate folks who launched heavy surfboats out from the beach – probably thinking that harbours were for faggots - set the nets close to the shore, challenge the surf back and winch the lot back in, hoping to find enough striped bass to feed the family. Disaster was definitely a common occurrence on the shores of villages with such sexy names as Agamansett, Montauk and Sagaponack. I expected fishermen’s havens and shacks, fishmonger shops, a rough atmosphere of smoky pubs and fried haddock, and oyster shacks almost every half a mile. I was wrong.
The Hamptons, as the area is better known nowadays, is a 50-mile long and uninterrupted line of mansions arranged in strips according to their value/proximity to the beach, which is often hard to reach. No smoky pubs, no oyster bars, no fishermen to be seen, but it’s very easy to buy a Prada bag. The road gets closer to the sea only at the very end, at Montauk Point where, hear hear, there is a State Park, a lighthouse and a… campground!. A perfect place to stop, one would say. Wrong. A tent site is 58 dollars. 58 dollars in November. So we decided to take the ferry the same night, knowing well that ferries in most of the US are very good value. Again we were wrong, and even our very German mileage per gallon provided a cheaper alternative. Also because the road back to New York passed very close to a stunningly nice State Park, a very convenient accomodation due to the fact that it was closed, and therefore unguarded, for the winter season.
Our drive through Long Island increased our fears that New England could indeed be a very large tourist trap. Well, it is not, provided not to visit the usual places at the wrong time. If your plan is to visit Martha’s Vineyard, Hyannis and Provincetown on Labour Day weekend, you had probably woken up thinking you are a rotten onion. But our objective was Wellfleet.
The village giving its name to the slurpy molluscs is on Cape Cod. This geographical oddity hosts at its end Provincetown, the American equivalent of St.Paul de Vence, where a handful of artists used to gather and have fun loosening morals and mixing up genders. Needless to say these activities became fashionable even with the crowd, and the cosy village grew rapidly into a tourist trap of snug houses selling those essential items no citizen of the western world can now live without, such as candles, shells, T-shirts, donuts and sunglasses. As if further proof of the sheep principle was needed, crowds tend to concentrate in tourist traps, because the combined IQ of multiple individuals is never higher than its average; therefore bipeds and quadrupeds act alike and follow the flow, leaving side jewels relatively quiet. Welfleet is one of these. It’s not much, actually, just a bunch of houses hidden in the woods, some nice coves and a proper fishing harbour, where a fisherman is still a fisherman, driven by passion and proud of his 30 yo forty footer, and not a chinese wop out of a monster factory ship.
On a quiet Monday, the boats come in to unload their catch. A white beard chap unloads lobster traps on his pick up truck, a friend helping him out and his wife giving a hand. They helpfully address us to a very close and honest oyster bar.
We go back to the dock after lunch, while another boat is moored to the pilings. Her captain is a blonde guy in his early thirties, fifteen years spent in his bibs now, and proud to be. He drags oysters and is very happy to give me some, which I pay with a beer – one should always drive around with a case of excellent microbrews in the car, especially in winter, one just never knows. He gets 75 cents each, not bad, and has hundreds in the load. The careful European reader will now probably think that I am an ass, because oysters are not dragged, but harvested. And that is, in Europe, true. But not in many parts of America. Yes, because while the yanks could even invent corn that grows faster than debts, and a way to squeeze gas out of it, their financial efficiency was not applied to shellfish, which are rarely farmed. Indeed what happens is that fishing boats go around in circles, dragging the sandy bottom of the shallow sea, mainly around Cape Cod and Cheasapeake Bay, basically separating the oysters from the less valuable sand. Thus something strange happened: while the immense fishing heritage of the area – Cape Cod and New bedford whalers, Long Island surf boaters and New Englad Cod fishermen – now exists only in the fading images of the museums, many Americans still happily sail around dragging oysters and trapping crabs and lobsters in a traditional way, exactly like in Alaska, where retired lawyers and accountants go around fishing salmon by the hook, happily loading their derelict trollers just for the fun of the lifestyle.
While chatting with the pleasant chap, one cannot avoid realizing that oyster fishing is not such bad business. The grey shells cost 2.5 bucks to the final happy slurper in the most expensive oyster bar in NYC, and the fisherman gets a third of it. That means that the distribution chain is unusually short and not excessively greedy, that the restaurant is somewhat honest and very efficient, and that the oysters travel fast. But the real surprise comes from the realization that young Americans, unlike their European counterparts, are much more entrepreneurial and hard working.
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