Number Crunching

Let's be frank - Orange is not, in the scheme of things, a thriving metropolis. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't need to be, and despite my promise to myself when I was 19 and first left my hometown that I would NEVER return, I've found over the last few years I've started to get pangs of nostalgia for the peace and quiet of Orange. I wonder sometimes, if I feel a bit crazy about all this, how must Ellie feel? Ellie is 18, from Orange as well, and this year also moved to New York to study dance at Julliard, one of the US' most prestigious arts schools.  She's pretty much finished school, moved from Orange to New York without the benefit of the buffer period I've enjoyed of moving to gradually larger cities (aside from a couple of years she spent at school in Sydney. Wish I'd done that, darn it). When I first met Ellie in Orange a few months ago however she seemed composed, more together than I was when I was 18, and completely serene about the fact that she was about to move to what is one of the great cultural centres of the world from (again, let's be perfectly frank) what is... um... not one of the great cultural centres of the world.

Lucky her. I was always worried about how I'd cope with the hustle and bustle of the big city because I'm a country boy at heart. So when Daniel invited me to visit him in little New Haven last weekend, I happily accepted.

He seems to be settling in alright (at the very least there's been no more vitriolic encounters with cab drivers or the police. Yet). After a couple of weeks in New York, it was kind of strange to be in a little country town again. New Haven is kind of like Orange - it's fresh and open with lots of great food and beautiful houses, but at night it can be a pretty dodgy and there's certain neighbourhoods you don't walk alone in unless you have a bunch of pesky money taking up valuable space in your wallet and you need some thoughtful mugger to take it off your hands.

When it came time to head back home I jumped on the train and choo-chooed my way two hours south back to Grand Central Station. As I stepped onto the platform there was no doubt I was back in New York - on the platform with me moving purposefully towards the station entrance were hundreds of people, all collected from the dozen or so stops between here and New Haven. "Shit", I thought. "All these people got on this train to come to New York on a random Sunday. This line has a train arriving every half hour on Sunday. On weekdays during peak-hour, this train runs every ten minutes. Hundreds upon hundreds of people commuting back and forth every freakin' day. That's nuts!"

As my tiny mind reeled from considering the sheer numbers of people moving back and forth along this single train line out of hundreds of others in New York my fellow passengers and I entered Grand Central. Inside we joined thousands more people all either catching trains or leaving trains or greeting friends or seeing loved ones off or trying to sell shit to everyone else. And outside, unseen, were millions upon millions of other people determinedly, busily, relentlessly doing whatever it is people do in New York. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Suddenly, New York seemed to be impossible. How many people were outside the station? Where do they live? How do they all fit? How do they get their food? There's certainly no bloody farms here - there's barely even grass here. Where does their rubbish go? (A goodly proportion of it seems to end up on the sidewalk outside my house, but perhaps I'm being finicky). How the hell does it all operate? How can it even exist? Why doesn't this city just end up as a big, chaotic, stinking hole-in-the-ground, its inhabitants reduced to a sub-human scrabble for survival? (I mean more so than now. You know, without the musicals.)

I needed to know. So I did some comparative research. Orange has a population of about 38,000 people and takes up about 25 square kilometres of the Australian continent (I didn't actually find an official measurement on this, I just looked at Orange on googlemaps and held my thumb and forefinger against the scale and compared it to Orange on the map. It looks like about 25 square kilometres to me). Orange is a primary producer of quite a number of foodstuffs including pears, apples, stone fruit, animal produce, and of course, bucketloads of wine (but, as we all know, not oranges).

Orange is also the proud owner of Springhill airport, which cheerfully hosts 1,300 flights a year for about 60,000 passengers. It has 7 different bus routes, which can take you all the way from Warrendine to Blechington. All this food and transport and busy Orange-folk generate about 54,000 tonnes of rubbish every year, which ends up in the Ophir Road landfill (although during my research it turns out that this will fill up in about four years. Keep your eyes out for more news on this fascinating topic).

Conversely...

New York is home to about 19,500,000 people jammed into about 780 square kilometres (and Australia has a population of about 21,000,000). That means there's 25 people per square metre of New York. (Orange enjoys spacious luxury with each square metre being taken up by a mere 1.5 persons). Add to that the tourists that traipse up and down Times Square every day and the population swells an additional 8,600,000 a year, 420,000 of which are Aussies. To get there, these visitors and other travellers probably arrive and depart via one of the three international airports in New York, which hosts 1,360,000 million flights a year, welcoming or waving off 110,000,000 passengers. While in New York they probably take advantage of New York's famous subway, consisting of 24 routes servicing 468 individual stations to take the 1.58 billion individual commuters around the city annually.

All these people need to eat, so New York imports all of its food. This includes 5,400 tonnes of meat, 9,800 tonnes of cereal, 27,300 tonnes of fruit and vegetables and 5,000 tonnes of booze daily, for a grand total of 28,600,000 tonnes of food a year. FYI, the Statue of Liberty weighs 225 tonnes, and the Empire State Building weighs 325,000 tonnes.

That's a shitload of food.

Literally. New York also generates 5,600,000 tonnes of rubbish (or "trash") a year. Proving that Americans can be mysterious and paranoid about just about anything, this rubbish is packed into containers and floated away on barges to a top secret location. No shit. I couldn't find statistics on sewage (probably for the best... hope you're not eating breakfast) but I bet it's a wee bit more than Orange (pun totally intended, bitchez).

It's not surprising then that it can be overwhelming to think that all these people with all this activity and all this industry is bubbling away around you constantly. I can see how people here can feel completely disconnected from other human beings. It's not that there's no one else around, it's that there's so many people here that you ask yourself - how can my little voice be heard in all this noise?

This was all ticking in my head last weekend as I got on my subway to head home - I am living in a f#*king big place. I had to make a brief stop in a new part of town to get a keyboard. I got off the subway, walked up the stairs, and standing at the top as though we were outside the Orange Post Office on Summer Street, was Ellie, calm as a buddhist monk and apparently completely unsurprised to see me.