1. New York, New York.

New York, New York, where do you start? As it happened, our first night, my cousin John drove us from his place in the Bronx down through Manhattan to Battery Park at the southern tip overlooking the Hudson, out towards Liberty and Ellis Island, and then to ground zero. Early April, it was bitterly cold, the wind whipping through the skyscraper streets. The 9/11 Memorial includes two great waterfall pools surrounded by bronze parapets etched with the names of all who died; amongst them the 345 firefighters, including their chaplain Mychal Judge, John’s predecessor. It’s a moving place. John described how he spent nine months of nights here, along with many others, combing through the rubble for any scraps of human or their belongings. Nearby is the survivor tree, a Callery pear, rescued from the rubble as a smouldering cinder, brought back to life at the botanic gardens to be replanted here, and on a further visit a week later, coming into pinkish flower, a ‘living symbol of resilience.’

I’d come with my daughter Rowan to discover something of the Irish family diaspora and for her to meet some of the next generation of cousins. We took the Staten Island ferry one day over to Ellis Island to relive the immigrant entry to the USA, as many of my relatives and ancestors had experienced. The great ornate entrance hall must have been a daunting welcome to those who’d never been further than the creamery back home. We picked up audio guides and worked our way through, retracing the process of interrogation and inspections. ‘Are you a polygamist or an anarchist? Deformed or crippled?’ State of health was paramount … any sign of infection would not have been dealt with sympathetically and could have meant a return journey to Europe. Rowan answered one questionnaire designed to assess the contemporary view of mental health, and on responding ‘yes’ to ‘do you sometimes talk to yourself?’, would have been sent packing.

John took us to visit one of the Manhattan firehouses (fire stations) where he was welcomed as an old friend. The guys from the engine company were there and there was talk of how they’d lost a colleague recently, trapped in a burning building. Rowan and I tried on jackets and helmets ... we could hardly move with the weight. The ladder company arrived, the driver backing the enormous truck in with great flair at some speed. In addition to John’s role as Fire Department chaplain he acts in a similar role to students at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the far north of the Bronx, where he lives with three fellow Franciscan friars, and where we stayed. It was a relief each day to get back to those leafy grounds, close to the Hudson River, our quarters overlooking the lacrosse field, apparently a game that was developed from indigenous origins.

John is a family legend, been involved in various social welfare projects over the decades … working with street kids, terminal AIDS patients back in the 80’s, setting up foodbanks … as well as supporting all of those families bereaved by 9/11, and continuing to bury their dead … in the three weeks before we arrived he’d officiated at eight firefighter funerals, six of whom had been there, where it’s believed a particularly toxic mix of chemicals from the inferno had impaired the health of many, including John himself. One of his fellow Franciscans Ben, a gentle soul in his eighties, known as the saint of Harlem, is not in great physical health either but was working on a new funding application for a project to support young Afro-American men coming out of jail.

Rowan and I tramped the streets, visited some of the sights, ate bagels, wandered through galleries, Central Park, the botanical gardens. And rode the subway, always the subway, complete with great buskers and bands at the stations, and in between, especially in the evenings, virtuoso storytelling on the trains from the panhandlers, along the lines of ‘sorry to interrupt your journey folks, but I’m asking for help … my girlfriend’s pregnant, we’ve just been kicked out of our apartment, she’s got mental health issues, I’m …. ‘ Everyone ignores them, but I reckoned it was worth a dollar for the performance alone.

We drank in a few bars including Showmans, a famed jazz joint in Harlem; and the Dead Poet in the upper West Side, with framed verses from Joyce and Dickinson on the walls, where a young drunk French guy, missing his mother, played Edith Piaf in her honour on the juke box. You could spend weeks at the American Museum of Natural History. The entire fourth floor is taken up by the fossil collections tracing vertebrate evolution, including two dinosaur halls, with skeletons of T rex, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus et al. Outside the museum stands a great stone statue of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the founders, on horseback, proclaiming … ‘the nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.’ Amen to that, Mr Trump! Not to paint too rosy a picture of Teddy, and indeed the president of the museum when the statue was erected in 1940 ... it's flanked by semi-naked figures of a native American and an African, both on foot beneath the great leader. I later learned of the ongoing controversy around this, and requests to have it removed.

Rowan went off for a night to stay with a friend in Brooklyn and do some rooftop bars. I went to the Highline. Sometime back in the 90’s I was in the Photographers Gallery in London where there was an exhibition of this old disused elevated railtrack in New York, wild nature reclaiming industrial space, and I thought to myself, ‘I must go there’.

And so on a sunny Sunday afternoon I joined the crowd wandering along the line, now reclaimed as an urban park accessible by stairways and elevators from street level, appreciating art installations and skyscraper views. The rails remain in sections amongst the block paving and plantings, too early in the season to fully appreciate the latter. The freight line served the warehouses and factories of the Meatpacking and Chelsea districts, close to the Hudson, a huge area now largely being redeveloped. The line was saved from demolition by local community action and has inspired similar projects to reclaim brownfield sites around the world. ‘Rails to Trails. Dead tech re-purposed - beautiful and insanely popular’ as David Byrne describes it.

We visited my cousin Ann in Philadelphia; I’d only met her once before, in Dublin back in the 70’s. And went out to dinner with her son Michael and newish wife Nicole. The place was heaving, Philly beating Cleveland at basketball. Driving back along the NJ Turnpike I was reminded of the Simon and Garfunkel song and ‘we’ve all gone to look for America’. Another evening we drove over the bridge again to New Jersey where John and family grew up, to meet his brother Brian, wearing his Vietnam vet cap, and his wife Georgette. And Ellie another cousin for Rowan. John’s worked a lot on the family tree, on my dad’s side, and during our stay he shared a lot of stories of those who’d emigrated to the US, like his mother, almost 100 years ago now. There was emigration also on my mother's side, my maternal grandparents reputedly meeting in New York, but there's research to do to uncover that history.

Our ten days together came to an end, Rowan left to get her flight home and for me another six months in north America stretched ahead.