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Ann Wroe in Atlantic City

Our friend and colleague Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of The Economist, is in America this week to talk about her much-admired new book, "Being Shelley" (pictured left) at the English Speaking Union in New York on September 20th at 3pm; and to indulge her private passion for visiting seaside piers. Yesterday she was down in Atlantic City; today she is out at Coney Island. She left us this vignette from the first of those outings...

On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City amplified music pumps out with the dawn, whether or not there is anyone to hear it. Last Sunday, Johnny Cash and Tina Turner boomed from Trump’s Taj Mahal out over the shining ocean past an audience of stray cats, one woman feeding them, a street-sweeper, a man rolled in a blanket on the sand dunes—and two drunks, carrying kites.

They came slowly along the boardwalk, half-dancing, half-swaying. Both were middle-aged, with graying beards, pork-pie hats and old, stained beachwear they might have picked up in the dunes. But their kites were new. One drunk held a plastic dragonfly, red and green with spread wings. The other waved a butterfly, black with bright splotches of yellow, purple and blue. Both also held cans of beer, carried with practised care. It was a fine day for flying, with a stiff breeze off the sea that whistled in the marram grass and rippled the canopies of the still-sleeping shops. Funnel cake, psychic readings, "Every Thing 99 Cents", "Cash for Gold", dreams of sudden fortune under gold-trimmed marble domes. The town, the sea and the sky were theirs.

Down the walkway they lurched, towards the ocean. The gangway was narrow; they bumped each other, cursed. One dropped his spool of string, setting it bounding over the walkway and through the railings. He turned back for it; the string wound round his legs, half-tripping him. His partner went on, down to the beach, where the proper force of the wind caught him. He ran a little, delicately, on the tips of his toes, pointing the nose of his dragonfly into the huge sky, shaking it. His friend swayed after him, pumping his right arm, doing the same. But not for one moment would they dare to let their kites go.

Ezra Pound wrote once of Li Po, who tried, drunk, to "embrace the moon in the Yellow River". It’s harder to embrace the wind in Atlantic City, if you don’t put your beer down first.