the mountains still endure

So a week ago I was sitting on a plastic chair on the deck watching the sun set over West Virginia, with a  pleasant and healthy twang in my legs from a gruelling walk down to a waterfall in the Shenandoah Valley.

It feels like another lifetime.

That was about 24 hours before we returned home to mounting bills and angry notices in bold type and more than 120 hours before the end of a week surviving on Ramen noddles and empty promises, dreams of a different life and the reality of applying for second jobs demonstrating magic sausages in supermarkets or driving a forklift round a warehouse at 2 a.m.

You can dress up the American dream anyway you want but I have a recurring and distubed vision now that it hangs naked and blanched from an elm tree at midnight like one of Salvador Dali's dripping watches weighed down by 30 pieces of silver.

Today the mercury rose to 107 degrees and the air was almost too heavy to breathe. The East Coast sweated, its skyscrapers were warped and indistinct in a heat haze. The grass turned yellow and then turned in on itself. The smell of burning rubber stalked the freeways and tunnels.

Conversation was muted in the newsroom as if the heat had knocked the life out of everyone. There are large, redundant spaces, whole departments that lay waste and forgotten. I had not thought efficiency cuts had undone so many.


Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, as we shuffled out of the heat and watched the clock mark the slow passage of the remains of the working day.

America seems to have been subdued for so long. It is no longer the place I read about at school; Cohen's cradle of the best and the worst.

On this day in 1967, a bothed police raid on a party in Detroit led to five days of rioting that left 43 people dead, 1189 injured and over 7000 arrested.

America is less inhuman now but perversely less human too. Yesterday's rioters are resigned to their lot, to push trolleys full of rotting goods through stip malls riddled with concrete cancer.

The euphoria of Obama's election victory has long since faded away. The visionary has turned back into a politician. The cheer has been replaced with a half hearted sigh in a place where the air is sticky and stuffed with the rank humidity of summer.

Passion is a mere snapshot and a rictus of memory; a face in the dark and sensation snatched away, a promissoy note that we can never pay.

The cities are listless and wilting in the heat or the recession but not all is lost.  Beyond the horizons of our petty struggles the mountains still endure.