At various points along my ten hour bus journey from Philadelphia to New Bedford, Massachusetts last Friday, I was nagged by a persistent feeling that I’d heard the name of my destination somewhere before.
It was a long journey with several stops on the way. My last stop before New Bedford was Providence, Rhode Island. As I had an hour before my bus left, I decided to take an impromptu tour around the enchantingly named capital of Rhode Island, which is the smallest US state. From the perspective of an aimless, completely uninformed wanderer with an hour to spare (on Friday early evening), the centre of Providence was a slightly bizarre place. Despite an appropriately metropolitan backdrop of appropriately grandiose public buildings, clean streets, pretty shops, take-away chains, churches etc, the streets were disconcertingly devoid of people. The few representatives of Providence that were out and about were hard to square with both each other and their environment. Right by the station muscled, topless (male) teenagers were artfully combining casual aimless hanging out with multiple somersaults; by a nearby fountain, toddlers ran around parents who, spliff in hand, would pick them up and thrown them in the air playfully. Young, vaguely bookish types, presumably students at Brown, the Ivy League university based in Providence, would occasionally scuttle in and out of view. Brown is Providence’s second largest employer. The fact that school hadn’t started yet was probably important context.
On the way back I came through Providence again, but this time I got to spend an afternoon with some cool Providence residents. They were the kind of charming people who seemed to effortlessly weave a life of interesting ideas and meaningful productive activity into a sluggish, messy pace of existence. One was a musician-cum-hotel worker; another two worked with unions in the area and all seemed enviably attuned to their environment. Among the highlights of my afternoon was a ‘Monte Cristo sandwich’, apparently of (at least) regional renown. The sandwich was composed of ham, swiss cheese and a fried egg - inside French toast no less - and with a smattering of maple syrup. My inherently conservative, risk-averse British brain was initially resistant to such a brazen example of American sandwich-making maximalism (“we will take the egg and the cheese and the maple syrup”) but, with some slight prodding from my hosts I took the plunge and was thoroughly impressed. I was also treated to a quick trip to a beach enclosed in a beautiful stretch of nature that is owned by one of Providence’s art colleges (such grandly utopian set-ups are typical of the US’ private higher educational institutions, many of which seem to be drowning in money).
In between my times in Providence, I was visiting a friend from Syria who was staying in Fairhaven, Boston, next door to New Bedford which, I was quickly reminded, is the first place Moby Dick’s protagonist heads to in search of whaling action. Ishmael, as he asks to be called, is the man quoted above displaying the kind of honourable abstemiousness you’d expect of a good sailor. New Bedford, where I ended my bum-numbing bus journey, greeted me with more hospitality than it did old Ishmael as I had a car waiting for me ready to transport me to warmth, food and beer by the sea in Fairhaven.
In the end, Ishmael sailed not from New Bedford but from nearby Nantucket, which historically had been New Bedford’s main competitor for whaling. In Moby Dick, Ishmael chooses Nantucket in spite of New Bedford’s evident leading market position in the whaling business, because Nantucket, in his view, was “her great original”.
New Bedford’s glory days are of course well and truly in the past. With the disappearance of whaling and the rapid shrinking of New Bedford’s manufacturing industries, the city has been in a historical decline for decades. Melville’s novel, comfortably perched atop the modern American literary canon, offers a poignant immortalisation of the Whaling City's past glories, all the more so in view of the current state of affairs in New Bedford. A satisfyingly measurable index of social deprivation offered itself in the observation that, in the one hour my hosts had spent waiting for me at New Bedford bus station, they overheard an entire drug deal from start to finish.
There was, in my time in both Fairhaven and Providence, an unmistakable common theme of once-great American towns and cities traumatised by the gutting of a historic trade or manufacturing base. Providence’s textile mills, once the mainstay of its thriving textile industry, face a typically post-industrial, compromised existence as either conversions to modern apartments or homes to small, local businesses, some of which recall Providence’s heyday as second-hand clothes stores or costume shops. Sometimes the future would seem a lot more straightforward if the past wasn’t still around, casting its pesky long shadow.
