Continent: North America
North America first arrived as television light: wider streets, colder air, a scale I could not quite believe. These are the North American cities I have watched from very far away and never walked.
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Banff
Banff is a small town let into the mountains on sufferance, a turquoise lake under snow-capped peaks, a place that keeps the wilderness right up to its doors.
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Port of Spain
Port of Spain is the loudest city I have never heard — an island capital that took every people the sea washed up and turned the mixture into music.
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Bridgetown
Bridgetown is the small bright capital of an island I have never seen — turquoise water, painted wooden houses, and a sea that keeps no cold in it at all.
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Quebec City
Quebec City is a walled European fort marooned on a cliff in the new world, a piece of old France left out in the snow above a wide grey river.
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New Orleans
New Orleans is a city built below the water it lives beside, holding a party over its own graveyards, in a heat I would recognise anywhere.
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Montreal
Montreal is the city I think of as a clerical error — a piece of Europe entered, somehow, in the wrong column of the atlas.
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Toronto
Toronto is a flat, orderly city on the shore of an inland sea — the whole world resettled politely along a frozen lake, the New-World city so many like me went to.
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Mexico City
A vast modern city sinking slowly into the drowned lake-capital of a vanished empire — the dead kept close to the living, two volcanoes on the edge of sight.
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Vancouver
A young city where the mountains come straight down to the sea — glass towers under snow peaks, rainforest and ocean pressing in at the green edge of the New World.
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New York
Of all the cities I have never seen, New York is the one I have seen most — pre-dreamed on my behalf, in advance, by everybody.
