The First Husband and I spent five days over Easter in New York City, travelling there with some friends who are quite familiar with the city. My one and only experience of the Big Apple was some 15-20 years ago, when No. 1 Son and I stayed with friends in Connecticut, and spent a couple of afternoons and evenings strolling around Manhattan.
During this trip, we travelled by subway on several occasions and also went to the Top of the Rock, the elevator ride to the top of the Rockefeller Building. Both experiences were immeasurably heightened by the fact that I was reading Colum McCann’s amazing book during our infrequent down times in the hotel.
One of the protagonists, Nathan Walker, belongs to a team of “sandhogs,” the workers who are digging the subway tunnel under the East River in 1916. He is one of four “muckers,” men who go to the furthest reaches of the tunnel, out beyond the metal shield that holds the mud back in the event of an accident. It’s their job to shovel the mud and load it on carriages that are pulled out by draught horses, so that the shield can be pushed further into the tunnel. On the day the book opens, there is a spectacular accident. It’s based on an historical incident, the Great Blowout of 1916, when a blowout in the tunnel caused some sandhogs to be sucked right through the hole and out into the East River, on a geyser four storeys high. In McCann’s narrative, three of the sandhogs survive, while the fourth is trapped inside the walls of the tunnel.
Another of the protagonists, Nathan’s mixed-race grandson, born in 1964, becomes a beam walker, working on the skyscrapers. It’s his job to step out into space, onto a ball on the end of a crane jib line, which carries him across to a column, where he wraps his legs around the column and waits for the crane to bring him a beam, which he knocks into place. Then he and the co-worker who had done the same job at the other end of the beam, walk across the beam to the middle, where the headache ball, as they call it, picks them up again and carries them down to the decking several storeys below, where the other workers are.
One of the sub-themes in the books is the unbelievable racism of those times. I know that racism is far from dead in the USA, but it’s nothing by comparison with then, when black people were treated like animals. Immersed as I was in the events taking place in McCann’s book, there was a certain sweet irony to noticing an African-American woman on the subway, one evening, reading one of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith.