The Eisenhower Interstate System

You might blanch at the prospect of me enlarging any further on this subject, but–as they say in call centres–bear with me, it really is jolly interesting. It concerns, after all, the greatest public-works project in the history of our species.

In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration released the budget and set in motion the creation of an enormous network of major roads, connecting all the great metropolitan areas of America. Those who fought in Europe had been mightily impressed by the German autobahn system and the American automobile industry, amongst other pressure groups, was desperate for the United States to have something similar. In today’s money the whole project can be estimated as having cost something in the region of half a trillion dollars: $500 billion. A bargain. America could never work the way it does without these roads: 46,000 miles of high quality, federally funded roadway connecting east to west, north to south in a vast network. As one who has travelled along what seems all of it, I can testify to the astounding quality; there are amazingly few cones, construction sites and contra-flows and while much of it passes through thoroughly boring, samey and uninspiring countryside, there are interstate sections as beautiful as any railway line in Europe, traversing mountains and forests and lakes and gorges and valleys of heart-stopping beauty. Sometimes an interstate is a two-lane road, sometimes three or, in cities, as many as four, five or six lanes wide. Sometimes the speed limit is 55 mph, sometimes 75. It will depend on the state.

The numbering system is simple once you get the hang of it: east–west roads have even numbers designated to them and north–south get the odd numbers. Hence the monumental I-95, the east coast interstate from Maine to Florida or the I-70 from Utah to Maryland, which was the first interstate to be built in America.

Which brings us back to Nebraska. The railroad which once dominated the economy of Grand Island has been replaced by the I-80, one of the great transcontinental roads, second only in length to the I-90 (Boston to Seattle).

Interstate 80 begins life in downtown San Francisco and ends in the New York suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey. Or should that be it starts in Teaneck and ends in San Francisco? Who is to say?

In the West and Midwest it passes through Oakland, Berkley, Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Lincoln, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, South Bend and Cleveland before heading off through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, crossing between those two states on the beautiful Delaware Water Gap.

The I-80 also passes through Grand Island, Nebraska.

All along such a great road, it goes without saying, there will be filling stations, eateries and motels, services encapsulated in the common sign ‘Gas Food Lodging’. For me in my taxi these are the scourge of my waistline. A three-hundred-mile journey along an interstate is only made tolerable by regular stops for diesel, beef jerky, Rees’s Peanut Butter Cups, trail mix, fizzy drinks and bottles of weird energy drinks that keep one awake at the price of tremblings and shakings and manic screechings at the wheel.

But there are other road users for whom my piffling journeys are as nothing. I am talking about the long-haul truckers.

For this legendary figure there has grown up an institution called the truck stop. Rarely glimpsed by the non-professional road user, I am to be given an insight today…if I can reach Grand Island in time, that is. My route south from the Dakotas is via slow state highways through the towns of Valentine and Broken Bow and I am anxious to arrive at the truck stop before sundown.

Some truck stops are little more than diners with big enough forecourts for lorries to park in–not much different from our own transport cafés, but the Boss Truck Stop, is on a bigger scale entirely. There are shops, showers, truck-washing facilities, a variety of food outlets and a massive area for parking the rigs in herring-bone formations in designated bays. Motel rooms are on offer, but most truckers prefer to sleep in their cabins. There are also rumours of that legendary creature, the Lot Lizard, a prostitute who specialises in truckers. Naturally her existence is denied by all.

My first stop is the main store, which sells everything: silver trucking mascots, dentist-style mirrors for checking under your vehicle, more of those judder-inducing energy drinks, all kinds of clothes. Having promised myself I wouldn’t be such an ass, I finally succumb and buy a hat. Not a ten-gallon Stetson, but unmistakably the kind of western cowboy hat that no Briton can wear without looking like ten types of dick. Oh well. I also manage to add to my collection of American state fridge magnets. By the end of my journey I should have them all. Time to go outside and pick up a trucker.

The European juggernaut has nothing on the great American trucking rig. The pride in the paintwork, the vertical chimney-style exhaust, the sheer scale is of another order entirely. I stand around hoping to fall into conversation with one of the drivers. It is close to sunset now and lorries are turning in from the highway at a rate of ten a minute.

Finally I meet Bruce as he clambers down from his huge magenta cabin. He agrees to take me out on the road the following morning. He is headed for Pennsylvania.

‘Eight o’clock sharp,’ he says on his way to the main complex.

‘On the dot,’ I assure him.

Someone in our crew oversleeps. We arrive at 8.20 a.m., Bruce’s engine is running and he is all ready to go. He is too American and therefore too polite to bawl us out but I can tell he thinks little of the professionalism of a film crew that can’t honour an agreed rendezvous time.

We drive east along I-80, into the rising winter sun.

Bruce is the perfectly imperfect interviewee–laconic and unsentimental. He comes from North Carolina and went into trucking because he likes to be his own boss and because, quite simply, he enjoys driving. I ask questions about the maverick status of the trucker, his ideals, his world view, his sense of himself and the great Open Road of America. Bruce vouchsafes little more than a grunt or an ‘I don’t know’ to what now sound like, in my ears, absurdly pretentious and irrelevant questions.

He is a trucker. He drives a truck. He does this in America, so the distances are sometimes great. He likes to be punctual. He enjoys his work. He is a trucker, not a philosopher or a poet or a songwriter. He drives trucks. End of story.

I respect that.

KANSAS

‘Somewhere in the wilds of Shawnee County, past battered, storm-shattered shacks, I find Subterra Castle.’

Is there a state in the Midwest that does not have the western meadowlark as its official bird? Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming have all chosen it. There are sandhill cranes which fly in stunning formations over the waving grasslands of Nebraska, why should the western meadowlark be so special? And now Kansas too has joined the unimaginative majority of Great Plains states in electing this bird, which is after all no more than a blackbird in fancy dress, to stand as avian ambassador for their state.

If you were asked to look at a map of America and stab your finger down in the middle, the chances are it would land in Kansas. Authoratitive sources tell me however that ‘the geographical centre’ of the United States is in fact seventeen miles to the west of the town of Castle Rock in Butte County, South Dakota. To my eye that just looks wrong. Too far north, surely? You have a look at the map and see if I’m right.

The geodetic centre of America, whatever that might be, is in Osborne County, Kansas–or at least was until 1983. It is all very odd. I am beginning to think geographers and cartographers are unseemly weirdos in need of a good slap.

What comes to mind when we say ‘Kansas’? Tornadoes of course, thanks to Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz. Kansans suffer on average more than fifty serious episodes a year. Sunflowers–Kansas is America’s leading producer. ‘I’m as corny as Kansas in August,’ Nellie sings in South Pacific, revealing that corn too is a major crop, although in fact Kansas grows more wheat than maize. The state, like Noël Coward’s Norfolk, is very flat. Perfect for planting cereal crops no one can deny, but perhaps not the most geographically dramatic or aesthetically enticing experience that America has to offer.

Glen Campbell’s lineman came from Wichita, which is in Kansas of course, as is Smallville, Clark Kent’s beloved home town. I guess Siegel and Shuster chose Kansas for the Man of Steel because it is the precisely the state most Americans think of when they picture the Midwest. In other words, whether it is geographically and geodetically central or not, Kansas is in many respects the emotional and cultural heart of the Midwest, which is itself often referred to as America’s Heartland. All the downhome virtues and none of the metropolitan vices–that is the image.

And where shall my journey to the heart of the Heartland take me?

Why, underground. Deep underground. And back in time to the height of the Cold War.

A Castle in Kansas

Somewhere in the wilds of Shawnee County, twenty-five miles or so from the state capital Topeka, past battered, storm-shattered shacks that look as though Dorothy and Toto might still be living in them, I find Subterra Castle, the home of Ed and Dianna Peden. They look like what they are, gentle ageing hippies who could do with a good steak and kidney pie and a pint of ale inside them. How strange then that they should choose to live in a place that was designed to be able to deal out remote megadeaths at the push of a button.

The Pedens were the first people to buy and convert an American underground missile launch complex into a home. The first? You mean others followed? You bet. A missile bunker, you would imagine, is a cold, concrete place, inimical to cosy domesticity and vibrant hippie values and yet somehow this remarkable and kookily likeable couple have created as comfortable and desirable a pad as you can imagine.

The American military built the complex in the early sixties at a cost of around $4 million–a vast sum in those days. The Pedens bought it for $40,000 twenty years later in 1982. It was constructed originally to house a 78-foot-long Atlas missile–essentially a long rocket with an A-bomb built in. Everything about this place is massive. The main door weighs 47 tons and the walls are 18 feet thick–all designed to withstand a nuclear blast.

The rocket would lie on its side and be ‘erected’–Ed enjoys the innuendo of this and repeats it in various forms many times until I take pity on him and laugh–into an upright position, so the chamber, as you might imagine, is more than double height. Below is a deep pit, designed to take the heat and flames from the thrusters on take-off. There was something similar on Tracy Island for the Thunderbird rockets, I seem to remember.

KANSAS

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:KS

Nickname:The Sunflower State

Capital:Topeka

Flower:Sunflower

Tree:Cottonwood

Bird:Western meadowlark

Song:Home on the Range

Motto:Ad astra per aspera (‘To the stars through hardships’)

Well-known residents and natives: Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th President), Bob Dole, Marlin Fitzwater, Gary Hart, John ‘body lies a-mouldering’ Brown, Amelia Earhart, Clyde ‘Pluto’ Tombaugh, Carrie Nation, Erin Brockovich, Walter Chrysler, Clyde Cessna, Damon Runyon, William Inge, William Burroughs, Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Hattie McDaniel, Ed Asner, Dennis Hopper, Don Johnson, Annette Bening, Kirstie Alley, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Wendell Hall, Samuel Ramey, Melissa Etheridge.

The control room and its panel of instrumentation is still there, together with the tunnels and signage and other evidence of the complex’s first use. But Ed and Dianna have managed to lay over it a rich fog of patchouli, hippie ornament and happy vibe. Ed’s plan was always to counter the ‘heavy negative energy’ of the place with his and Dianna’s ‘positive energy’. They are unreconstructed and proud peaceniks and it is hard not to agree with them: their possession and conversion of this sinister place is a kind of victory over war and militarism. I cannot imagine what the buzz-cut military figures who first occupied this place would think if they knew it would one day resound to the etiolated guitar strums, bongos and flutes of New Age music. How would they react if the space–time continuum somehow got confused and they were to walk round a corner and encounter a nude Ed and Dianna, smoking weed and humming mantras?

There may be little natural light down there in Subterra, but these places are warm in winter and cool in summer. They are, Ed maintains, the modern equivalent of castles, secure, dramatic, prestigious and desirable. Remote cameras, operated by joystick allow them to see who their visitors are and to sit out the blizzards, supercell storms and tornadoes that rage impotently overhead.

For all their blithering about energy and their sweet natures, Ed and Dianna are true Americans and therefore equipped with the focused minds of hard-headed entrepreneurs. They now run a business that advises those who want to live a similar life. No one will ever get such a bargain again, of course, but many are prepared to pay fabulous money for a decommissioned Cold War complex. Americans. Even within the fluffiest hippie there will beat the cold heart of an unsentimental businessman.

Ghost Town

The next place I visit could do with an even bigger makeover yet. White Cloud is in Doniphan County, in the top right-hand corner of the state, right on the Missouri River. It is now a ghost town and I walk through with Wolf River Bob (aka Bob Breeze) the local historian and a White Cloud citizen who can remember the glory days.

Where once there was a prosperous river port, churches, saloons and a thriving community now there is next to nothing. No shops are open, despite signs inviting me in for ice creams and sodas. Another sign points to a lookout on the hill from where, on a clear day, four states can be seen: Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa.

In a land so huge not every town can be connected to mainstream America. It seems that a river port like White Cloud is too far from the interstate and the railway to stay prosperous in the modern world. It has no USP, as they say in business these days, no unique selling point which can bring business or tourism flocking to it. White Cloud is just another town and despite Bob’s efforts, it looks as though its decline is permanent. Maybe that is where its future lies. A little more dilapidation, some artful sagebrush and tumbleweed and he could have a heritage ghost town on his hands…

The day is ending: I drive to my Topeka hotel and collapse on a hammock. Tissues must be restored and energies recharged for the long journey south into neighbouring Oklahoma.

OKLAHOMA

‘When they start the rodeo itself, it is all I can do not to cry out in joy and wonder.’

Only New Mexico and Arizona of the forty-eight connected or ‘contiguous’ states, were admitted to the union after Oklahoma. Gore Vidal’s grandfather, the blind Thomas Pryor Gore, was a founding senator when it finally achieved statehood in 1907. Before that time it had been a territory for the displaced American Indians who had been booted out of their ancestral lands in the southern states. Their enforced journey is known in Indian lore as the Trail of Tears. As agricultural real estate became more valuable in the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, the tribes were ejected yet again when white settlers came over for the famous Land Run, a first-come first-served scramble for farmland. Those who broke the rules and grabbed their land before the official time were known as ‘sooners’, which gave the state its nickname. Out went the Indians, in came the homesteaders and statehood for okla humma, which means, with cruel irony, ‘land of the red man’.

Nature exacted a harsh revenge on those white homesteaders in the early 1930s when drought, high winds and poor agronomy came together to curse the land and create the notorious dustbowl. Thousands and thousands of poor farmers upped sticks and headed for California. John Steinbeck’s character Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath came to stand for this kind of downtrodden Okie. Henry Fonda in the John Ford film adaptation of the novel made famous a speech of Joad’s which has since become a kind of fanfare for the common man:

I’ll be all around in the dark–I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look–wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build–I’ll be there, too.

It is no coincidence that around the time of the dustbowl, Lynn Riggs wrote the play Green Grow the Lilacs, which looks back to a time when the Oklahoma Territory, just before statehood in 1906, seemed like a kind of agricultural paradise. In 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein turned the play into the hit Broadway musical Oklahoma! Coming only three years after the John Ford film, Oklahoma must have felt like the most examined state in the union around this time.

But it wasn’t all dustbowl, depression and doom for the Okie. Oil made Tulsa one of the richest cities in the country from the 1920s onwards and today the state is amongst the most prosperous in America.

Salvation

Which is not to say that there are no poor. I am in a Salvation Army hall in downtown Oklahoma City this afternoon. Every week they feed the homeless with meals cooked up by the cheerfullest and sweetest-natured kitchen staff you could ever hope to meet. Today, which is Good Friday, sees an especially big crowd lining up outside.

I talk to Captain Vance Murphy, an officer of the Salvation Army. They really do mimic the military with their ranks and hierarchies. Maroon epaulettes on his clean white shirt bespeak his rank as clearly as a silver gorget on a Lifeguard. As one who abominates religion and most religious organisations, I have always had a soft spot for the Salvation Army. They are so resolutely unsexy, so affably unhectoring, so charmingly unconditional in their kindnesses. They just get on with feeding and clothing the poor while expecting nothing in return. The only hint of preaching is confined to a rather hopeless but good-natured moment of biblical exegesis which is delivered by one of the officers as the ‘clients’ eat. Nobody appears to be paying much heed, a few of the homeless women nod their heads encouragingly enough for the officer to pick up a guitar and sing. A ghastly rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’, predictably enough, but a small price to pay for what looks like truly excellent hot food on a cold March day.

I speak to Terry, one of the homeless, and to a companion of his whose name I never quite catch. They like this place. They respect the lack of interference and religiosity. Terry’s companion finishes his meal and gets up from the table to help the Salvation Army kitchen staff stack chairs. It is his way of saying thank you.

The spokesperson for the Salvation Army (old-fashioned as they are, they have succumbed to the twenty-first century mania for PR people) who is there to facilitate our filming is a sparky, pretty and amusing young blonde called Heidi. She reveals, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, that she is a belly-dancer. There is not a hint of eastern blood in her–but every week she belly dances professionally in restaurants and nightclubs around Oklahoma City. None of us in the film crew is prepared to let it go at that. We make an appointment to come and film her that evening. But first, one of the great American institutions awaits us: the rodeo.

Rodeo

The Central Oklahoma Junior Rodeo Association, COJRA, holds its meetings several times a season in the Tyler Blount Memorial Arena in Guthrie, OK. It is possible that this is the juiciest slice of American pie that I have yet tasted. The sight of young children wandering around in cowboy hats and boots is endearing enough, but when they start the rodeo itself, it is all I can do not to cry out in joy and wonder.

The event is open to any single boy or girl who has never been married and is 18 years old or younger. There are five divisions, according to age: 14–18, 10–13, 7–9, 6 and Under and 4 and Under. When you have seen a three-year-old child in a Stetson trying to rope a steer or ride a sheep, you have seen it all.

OKLAHOMA

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:OK

Nickname:The Sooner State

Capital:Oklahoma City

Flower:Oklahoma rose

Tree:Eastern redbud

Bird:Scissortail flycatcher

Waltz:Oklahoma Wind

Motto:Labor omnia vincit (‘Work conquers all’)

Well-known residents and natives: Geronimo, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Wiley Post, Belle Starr, Pretty Boy Floyd, T. Boone Pickens, Sam ‘Walmart’ Walton, Lynn Riggs, Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Gene Autry, Lon Chaney Jr., Will Rogers, Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Vera Miles, Dale Robertson, Walter Cronkite, Dan ‘Laugh-In’ Rowan, Blake Edwards, Jennifer Jones, Tony Randall, James Garner, Chuck Norris, Gary Busey, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ron Howard, Brad Pitt, Woody Guthrie, Chet Baker, J.J. Cale, Eddie Cochran, Roger Miller, Tom Paxton, Garth Brooks.

The rodeo begins (and I have been in America now long enough not to be surprised by this) with the National Anthem. Hats are doffed and placed over hearts as a young man rides round the arena bearing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. I am, much to my own annoyance, deeply and inexcusably moved. I console myself with the thought that I would be just as emotionally stirred by the Bulgarian National Anthem being played at an archetypally Bulgarian event. I am of course fooling no one but myself by imagining this.

We kick off with ‘Goat Undecorating on Foot for 4s and Under’. How do you undecorate a goat? Well, first a supervising adult has to decorate one, in other words they have to attach a ribbon to it. At the sound of the bell the child then runs up, holds the goat between its legs, detaches the ribbon and runs back. Quickest time wins. A wealth of comedy is concealed in that simple phrase ‘holds the goat between its legs’, for while each child may be clear about the rules of the game, the goat is not and there is much chasing and falling over to be gone through before it will consent to be undecorated. As it is the same goat in each instance, the proceeding becomes more and more fraught each time as the goat grows increasingly impatient at the whole proceeding and begins violently to wish itself elsewhere.

For 6 and under there is an added wrinkle: ‘Goat Undecorating on Horse’, which is essentially the same but mounted. This is no trivial addition, for goats and horses do not get on well. It all adds to the broad comedy, however, and by now I am red, watery-eyed and wheezy from laughter.

Mutton Bustin’, Goat Tying and Steer Riding all follow. Mutton Bustin’ isn’t quite as alarming as it sounds. The wild horse and the bronco are considered too much for toddlers to cope with, even here in laissez faire, libertarian, devil-may-care cowboy country, and so the youngest age categories are given sheep to ride. The longer they can stay on without being thrown the better. They may be dressed in protective clothing, but for all that these are brave little cowboys and cowgirls. Their determination and seriousness is marvellous to behold.

The sun sets, the moon rises and the older children show off their skills, which are much greater but so much less appealing.

You cannot attend such an event without reflecting on the contingencies of life, birth and destiny.

America has its millions of urban children, ghetto children, born to gangs and drugs and guns and violence and abuse. And it has these children, raised in the countryside, born to goat undecorating, mutton bustin’, lassoing and riding. The two kinds of child will probably never meet in all their lives. Will they ever respect each other, learn about each other or even consider each other? Probably not. There were children eating in the Salvation Army hall this afternoon who may well never see a horse, unless it is a police horse, in all their lives.

Belly

Whether children from either side of the tracks will ever see belly dancing is another question altogether. From Guthrie to a kind of rodeo of human flesh in the Shishkabob Restaurant, Oklahoma City. Our old friend Heidi is dancing with a girl who is by day a staff sergeant in the United States Air Force. I tuck a dollar bill into an area that I can look at without blushing and head for bed.

COLORADO

‘Someone suggests a slug of Tabasco hot pepper sauce as a specific against altitude sickness. I fall for what is a crude, cruel and childish practical joke.’

A vast rectangular slab, the boundaries of Colorado were determined not by its rivers, valleys, mountains or other natural features, but by mankind’s arbitrary lines of latitude and longitude. For all that, one cannot but think of natural features when contemplating this grand and beautiful state. Here the Rocky Mountains climax into their highest peaks, indeed Colorado is everywhere above 1,000 feet, the capital Denver being at an elevation of precisely 5,280 feet, thereby accurately earning its nickname of the ‘Mile High City’.

Powwow

It is to the capital I come first, to witness one of Denver’s regular events, the annual March Powwow (that’s March the month, not march the military strut or political demonstration). A powwow is a Native American gathering, any kind of intra-tribal or inter-tribal conference. These days, large-scale powwows like Denver’s are opportunities to celebrate American Indian music, costume, history and culture. From all over North America the tribes people come: Black Foot, Crow, Cree, Apache, Comanche, Cherokee, Choctaw, Ojibwa, Lakota, Navajo, Hopi, Passamaquoddy and dozens and dozens of others.

Denver’s downtown Coliseum Convention Center is enormous and at the climax of the powwow its main arena is entirely filled with thousands of men, women and children in their traditional buckskins, beads and feathers. The whooping and stamping are precisely like the ‘war path’ scenes of cowboy movies. Hollywood used ‘real live Indians’ in its movies of course, so there is no reason for the authentic dances and moves to be any different from what I’ve seen in westerns, but nonetheless it gives me a shock.

The colours, the gorgeous costumes and the spirit of celebration completely overwhelm me. For all the negatives that I encountered on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, for all the righteous fury of Russell Means and others, it is clear to see that for many American Indians what comes first is pride.

The Slaughterhouse Woman

The next day is Easter Sunday, which I spend in Fort Collins, an attractive college town sixty miles or so due north of Denver. Our sound recordist, Adam, is so entranced by the atmosphere and charm of the place that he tells us all he is determined one day to come back and live here. Not since Ashville, North Carolina have we been in a town so refreshingly devoid of big-name chain restaurants and corporate franchise businesses and hotels. Adam is not alone in his delight. Fort Collins was voted Best Place To Live by Money magazine in 2006. Perhaps the presence of Colorado State University helps: certainly the profusion of pleasant, cheap restaurants and coffee shops bespeaks the student town.

It is to the campus I come on Monday, to see Professor Temple Grandin, a person fully as remarkable as her name. My Easter Sunday day off has given me time to read her book Animals in Translation.

Temple Grandin was born with autism. During her childhood the only diagnosis for this condition was ‘severe brain damage’. Possessed of a formidable will, a fine brain and an instinctive love of and connection with animals she grew up determined to use all those qualities. She has found the perfect job. She is–wait for it–America’s leading designer of humane slaughterhouses.

Temple can ‘think like an animal’–that is to say she notices all the things that stress a stockyard animal during handling and transportation. When her work began she actually used to go on the walkways, crawl along the chutes and personally reproduce the journeys animals took from field to truck, from truck to yard, from yard to slaughterhouse. All rather grim. But she noticed everything. She noticed when rusty signs creaked, she noticed bright colours and reflections, she noticed blind turns, forbidding corners and spooky shadows. She instinctively understood the little things that freak animals out, little things that a ‘normal’ human would never pick up on. All these go together to create doubt, fear and stress, causing the animals to brace their legs and refuse to be budged, which congests the stock handling systems which in turn creates more congestion and more stress farther back down the line. Out come the electric cattle prods, the cattlemen zap and yell, further increasing the stress and further slowing down the system. Everyone’s day becomes increasingly hard and slow and strained, the profits go down (stress hormones prior to slaughter markedly reduce the quality of the meat) and no one is happy.

It used to be that people believed all this bother was inevitable. According to conventional wisdom, animals are ornery and dumb, they are hard to shift and hard to push round the stockyards and they always will be. Temple visited dozens and then hundreds of farms, ranches and slaughterhouses and was able to redesign systems and teach basic interpretative skills to the ranch hands and workers. The results were remarkable and Grandin is now Numero Uno in all of America when it comes to designing slaughterhouses, chutes, pens, walkways and the like. She also lectures regularly to veterinary students at Colorado State University. Quite an achievement for one labelled as ‘retarded’, ‘brain damaged’ and ‘unable to function in the world’.

You may think that a person who loves animals would want nothing to do with systems designed for slaughtering them, but Temple is far from fluffy-bunny in her attitude to animals. Indeed, the whole point of her approach is to recognise how unlike us animals are. Their ideas of discomfort, unease and discontent are very different from ours. It is clear that her apprehension of what spooks, stresses and alarms an animal is extremely accurate: I wonder however if someone will come close one day to understanding what thrills, delights and pleases an animal? Do they respond to beauty in nature, for example? Can they detect, appreciate and value the difference between a dull urban sprawl and a mighty mountain landscape?

COLORADO

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:CO

Nickname:The Centennial State

Capital:Denver

Flower:Rocky Mountain columbine

Tree:Colorado blue spruce

Bird:Lark bunting

Mineral:Rhodochrosite

Motto:Nil Sine Numine (‘Nothing Without Providence’)

Well-known residents and natives: John Kerry, Horace ‘Go West Young Man’ Greeley, James Michener, Allen Ginsberg, Clive Cussler, Antoinette ‘Tony Award’ Perry, Ken Kesey, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Bill Murray, Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Don Cheadle, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, John Denver.

Aspen

I defy any human not to be astounded and enchanted by a drive like the one I now take, from Fort Collins to Aspen. As we climb the switchbacks that girdle the Rockies it is easy to see why this region has become so desirable a winter destination and why resorts like Vail, Beaver Creek and Aspen have become so exclusive and so shatteringly expensive.

Aspen, the best known town in this string of chi-chi ski resorts is about 7,890 feet above sea level, almost exactly a mile and a half: high enough for me to huff, puff and gasp and be glad that I gave up smoking a year ago.

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, David and Victoria Beckham, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman…Mariah Carey, Don Johnson, Jack Nicholson…Aspen is the Dubai of the North when it comes to glitzy residents, for many of whom Aspen will be the seat of their third or fourth residence, a little eight-or nine-million-dollar chalet–nothing fancy.

They tell me the skiing is first rate, absolutely first rate. Stephens don’t ski, however, so this news is of little more than passing interest to me. I do like alpine resorts though; I enjoy the fresh air, the dazzling whiteness and the rumbustious rosy-cheeked cheerfulness of the adults and children. I have been on several skiing holidays where I have been content to get myself a ski-pass and be transported every morning to the highest café where I will sit writing letters, reading and sipping hot chocolate with rum in it while my friends fizz down the slopes. We meet for lunch and the whole thing is repeated in the afternoon.

This morning in Aspen, I ascend the mountain, which adds another 3,000 feet or so to the elevation and also increases my breathless dizziness. Someone suggests a slug of Tabasco hot pepper sauce as a specific against altitude sickness. I fall for what is in my opinion a crude, cruel and childish practical joke.

At the very top of the mountain I find a place which serves hot chocolate with a tot of rum, just the way I like it: the Aspen Mountain Club, annual subscription fees $175,000. Yes I know alcohol is the last thing one should have two miles above sea level, but fortunately my body doesn’t. I sip gently, taking away the taste of Tabasco and building up the strength to venture out onto the slopes. I am to join the resort’s Ski Patrol as they go about their duties and their training.

The members of the patrol are what passes for Cool Dudes today–in other words they are skinny and sexless and skimpily bearded. They are entirely charming, however, and with great patience they drag me over the snow, pulling me on a sled until we reach an area where they are to set off a bomb. The idea is to prevent avalanches by starting small controlled ones. A klaxon sounds and we watch, from a safe distance, as a puff of snow blossoms out from the mountainside and, five seconds later, the sound of the explosion reaches our ears. No actual avalanche is precipitated by this detonation, which is apparently a good thing. I am most disappointed, however. I wanted a real show.

The next thing to do is to find some children to bury. This is easily done. A bunch of pert, intelligent and fabulously self-confident children bump into us and enquire about the cameras and sound equipment and, hey, wasn’t I in that film V for Vendetta?

‘I was, as it happens, yes,’ I tell them. ‘Perhaps you would like to be in this film?’

‘Sure. What’s the fee?’ Their father is a show-business agent in New York City.

Once the negotiations have been agreed–which is to say once I have appealed to the children’s better natures and persuaded them to perform for free–two of the boys are taken off to be buried in the snow while I distract a sheepdog. The idea is that the dog will sniff around the snow, find out where the kids are buried and alert the patrol with a peal of frenzied barking. It would be cheating if the dog actually saw them getting into their hiding place, so I do my best to take its mind off the task ahead with cheerful prattle about sheepdogs I have known in Scotland.

When all is ready, the dog is released and finds the children in their secret cache instantly, barking with joy at its own cleverness. Personally, I suspect it of peeping out of the corner of its eye while we were talking. We dig the children out and move on to the next job: piste maintenance. Aspen’s famous slopes are kept in their perfect condition by a fleet of specialised vehicles which comb, roll, tease, smooth and generally perfect the surface of the snow. Every night for hours and hours and hours the drivers of these snow cats groom the mountainside so that the rich and their children might slide happily down the mountainsides the following day. I try one of the vehicles out and, fun though it was, I decide not for the first time that work of this kind is best left to others. I return to the hotel and fall in with a couple of rich women who suggest I accompany them to a nightclub.

I am faced then with two options: a) a nightclub filled with the rich, beautiful and famous or b) an early night alone in bed with a book. Never has any decision been easier.

The book was gripping. I hope the girls had a nice time in their club.

TEXAS

‘I cannot guess how many gallons of blonde colorant have been poured onto the assembled heads.’

This entry is big, for Texas is big. Texas is very big. Everyone knows that. Nonetheless the Lone Star State likes to remind itself of this at all times. Commercials on TV and advertising hoardings talk of ‘Texan-size servings of beef’, ‘Enough space in the trunk of this car even for a Texan’, ‘Only one toilet paper is big enough for Texans…’ and so on. If ever a place mythologises itself that place is Texas.

With its size, that tendency to self-mythologise, its iconography, its accent, its props, its cuisine and its history, Texas is able (and willing) to think of itself as a land apart more than any other state in the union (‘It’s a whole other country’ is the current state slogan). The Republic of Texas was a sovereign nation for the best part of ten years in the nineteenth century–its embassy in London was in St James’s and it remains memorialised to this day by a ‘cantina’ restaurant just off Trafalgar Square called The Texas Embassy.

When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 it immediately claimed those lands we know today as Texas. Over the succeeding years European settlers and landowners, led by Steve Austin and Sam Houston (whose names live on in Texas’s capital and largest city respectively), prepared to secede from Mexico and claim independence. One day in 1835 Will Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie (of knife fame) and over a hundred other volunteers and regular soldiers came to defend the Alamo Mission in San Antonio from Mexico’s Generalissimo Santa Anna. A massacre and a defeat for the defenders, this action led to the Battle of San Jacinto in which the Mexicans were soundly beaten and Santa Anna was captured. The independent Republic of Texas was declared. By 1845 her experiment with nationhood was over and she joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state.

The official slogan may be ‘Friendship before statehood’, yet one cannot but feel that for every true-born Texan the real state motto would be the words with which Sam Houston’s men went into battle at San Jacinto: ‘Remember the Alamo’. Statal pride is bigger here too.

A cowboy state and an oil state: this image of Texas has continued right through history and through the thirteen-year run of the TV series Dallas. Oil is still important to the state, and in ways of which many Americans are not aware.

Strategic Reserves

Today I am visiting the federal government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves in Freeport, TX, just sixty-five miles south of Houston, right on the Gulf of Mexico.

In the mid-seventies America and the rest of the world got one hell of a shock when the oil-producing OPEC countries not only began to push up the price of oil but also to embargo those nations that had traded with Israel. Rationing, mini-riots, hyper-inflation–the cost was disastrous and the United States government vowed that such a calamity would never happen again. And so they planned for the construction of vast sites where oil could be stored against any future shortage that might imperil the good order of the Republic.

This being America and not Britain, all the data on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is instantly available. A quick glance at the Department of Energy’s dedicated site www.spr.doe.gov tells me that the reserve currently stands at 703.4 million barrels of oil, divided into 280.7 million of sweet crude and 422.7 million of sour. That is somewhere in the region of £90 billion dollars worth (though as I write the price of oil is rising daily). The full capacity is 727 million barrels, but this is deliberately being run down in order to help increase the amount of oil out in the market and therefore to reduce the price.

There are four SPR sites: all of them are sited along the Gulf of Mexico and all of them employ the same technique for storing the oil. Essentially the oil is pumped into huge salt domes, natural phenomena that have formed over millions of years. The oil replaces the natural brine within and can remain in its salty caverns in tip-top condition, theoretically for eternity. Freeport is the largest of the US government’s facilities, capable of holding over a quarter of a billion barrels at any one time.

I am allowed into Freeport’s heart after a fretful hour and a half’s wait in the most tigerishly fierce security area I have yet to visit in America. It took ten minutes to get on board the USS Springfield nuclear submarine in Groton, Connecticut, but here they really mean business. For some reason our director’s name and passport number had not been sent ahead and, despite the security guards believing in our bona fides, and the Freeport SPR press people being present to welcome us, we could not enter until the mystery of the director’s clearance was solved. He, poor man, got on the phone to Washington, in order to try and speak to the Department of Homeland Security PR person who had his official security clearance details and by a freak of good fortune he was wrongly put through to Alex, the very Border Patrol fellow who had escorted us to the Canadian border back in Montana, weeks ago. Words were spoken, faxes and e-mails sent and before another half hour had passed we pierced the perimeter.

TEXAS

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:TX

Nickname:The Lone Star State

Capital:Austin

Flower:Bluebonnet

Tree:Pecan

Bird:Mockingbird

Cooking implement:Dutch oven

Motto:Friendship Before Statehood

Well-known residents and natives: Lyndon B. Johnson (36th President), George H.W. Bush (41st President), George W. Bush (43rd President), Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Admiral Nimitz, Audie Murphy, Lady Bird Johnson, Sandra Day O’Connor, Jeb Bush, Ann Richards, John Wesley Hardin, Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, David Koresh, Katherine Anne Porter, Rex Reed, Patricia Highsmith, Horton Foot, Larry McMurtry, Kinky Friedman, Howard Hughes, Red Adair, Ross Perot, Michael Dell, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Tex Avery, Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Cyd Charisse, Debbie Reynolds, Dooley ‘Play It Again Sam’ Wilson, Sharon Tate, Larry Hagman, Dabney Coleman, Rip Torn, Farrah Fawcett, Gene Roddenberry, Shelley Duvall, F. Murray Abraham, Morgan Fairchild, Powers Boothe, Wes Anderson, Patrick Swayze, Sissy Spacek, Terrence Malick, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey, Kate Capshaw, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, Ethan Hawke, Forest Whitaker, Jerry Hall, Anna Nicole Smith, Robin Wright Penn, Jennifer Garner, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Carol Burnett, Steve Martin, Bill Hicks.

Jorge, the officer who was escorting us around the premises, explained to me the difference between sour crude oil and sweet. Sweet has fewer impurities and can be converted into gasoline cheaply, whereas sour needs to undergo extra refinement processes. Jorge even poured a flask of crude for me to inspect. Disgusting stuff: the smallest splash of it ruins clothes forever. What it does to the feathers of a seabird we know all too well from news footage of spills. And my dear, the smell…It is for this noxious, evil-textured stuff that wars are fought and fortunes made. It is somehow fitting that the black gold that fuels our entire civilisation is almost more disgusting than faeces.

Doing Donuts

After an exhaustive and exhausting tour, my taxi and I feel like expending some of that vile substance in the most childish and politically unacceptable manner imaginable. Freeport, I have discovered, is only a few miles from Quintana Beach, one of only two in all America on which one is allowed to drive a private road vehicle without restrictions. The taxi and I spend a happy half-hour carving huge donuts on the sand. At one point I get a little overexcited and plough right into the surf–huge quantities of salt water invade the bonnet. I only hope there won’t be Consequences. Some of you reading this are doubtless thinking that they would be fully deserved. All I can say in my defence is…er…carbon offset. I promise. Honest.

Anyway. Moving on.

The Galleria

It would be madness to cover the United States without having investigated a little more deeply than one usually does the phenomenon of the Shopping Mall. In Europe we are used enough to these monstrous entities by now, but to visit one of the first and largest is nonetheless instructive.

The Houston Galleria calls itself a city within a city: it has an ice-rink, car parking for 14,000, 400 shops, 11 beauty salons and two hotels. Over 24 million people a year come here. It is the fourth-largest mall in America and proudly caters for the high-end shopper with outlets including Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Gucci, Macy’s, Tiffany & Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Bvlgari and Nordstrom. And, to make me happy, an Apple Store. I wander about under the enormous glass roofs in a delirious daze. Two Texans in cowboy hats tell me that they and many friends come here just as you might to an art gallery. To look and to wonder.

A proportion of the richer people who come regularly to the Galleria would count as members of Houston’s ‘social register’. For all its ‘good ole boy’ image, Texas like much of America has its class system, its roster of the rich, ritzy and respectable. To be fair to this elite, they almost only ever assemble en masse for the sake of charity.

Gala

I have been invited this evening to a gala (pronounced the same way Durham miners do: ‘gayla’) in aid of the Houston Society for the Performing Arts. I arrive at the reception and am immediately served a tumbler of enough whiskey to knock out a bison. The theme of the evening is the great American musical and the women here have gone to great lengths to look sensational and glamorous in the American mode, a mode which involves a great deal of facial make-up and careful attention to hair. I cannot guess how many gallons of blonde colorant have been poured onto the assembled heads. Perhaps there is a Strategic Clairol Reserve in Houston. It has always struck me as bizarre that when in Europe American women should be so loud in their praise of the elegance and beauty of Parisians and yet be able to go back home and do exactly the opposite. Plainness, simplicity and restrained elegance are not to be numbered amongst the accomplishments of the rich Houstonian dame. I do not want to sound bitchy, however. They welcome me with charm and warmth. The price for my supper is a small speech, which they receive very kindly.

The ladies I sit with attend a dinner/ball/rout/gala of this kind at least once a week in the season. Endowment and philanthropy are enormously important. The rich are expected to choose at least three or four pet charities and to be extremely generous to them. The beneficiaries of this evening’s party are a large number of institutions directly funded by the Society of Performing Arts. Any assumption that rich Texans are automatically philistine, right-wing and crass is instantly contradicted. These people value culture in all its forms, including a theatre whose practitioners often bite the hands the feed it:

‘Honey, I ploughed so much money into a play you would not believe. Wonderful young writer, but oh dear me he does so hate us all.’

Yes, on one level you could look at the sea of dyed hair and blushered cheeks and listen to the tortured vowels of refined Southern speech and cry ‘Vulgar! Self-satisfied! Rich! Vain!’ but you would be dishonest not to acknowledge also the unconditional generosity, open-mindedness, hard work and charm with which these people live their highly privileged lives.

How much easier America would be to understand if it conformed simply to all our snootiest, snobbiest and most sneering expectations. Instead it does conform, but not simply. It conforms with ambiguity, contradiction and surprise. Maybe that is why I love it so.

Border Patrol

The frontline in America’s war against illegal immigrants is the Mexican border. I come to El Paso, where many of the fiercest frontline battles in that war are daily fought. Mexico has influenced Texas hugely; their respective cultures have combined to form a very particular style of Tex-Mex food, drink, music and architecture. But while Mexican music, beer and quesadillas may be welcome in the United States, its people are less so.

There is a class of vigilante volunteer who patrols the southern border off his own bat. Not officially sanctioned or funded, these people’s vigils are fuelled entirely by their personally felt enmity towards ‘illegals’ and by what they would describe as their own patriotism. They call themselves the ‘Minutemen’, a title borrowed from the militias of the Revolutionary Wars who declared themselves ready to face the enemy (in that case the British) at a minute’s notice.

I join Minuteman Shannon, in the frontier town of Fabens, about an hour from El Paso. He drives us along the borderline in his pick-up, pointing out places where illegals are known to try and cross. Every now and again we pass a genuine government Border Patrol vehicle. They are on friendly terms, Shannon assures us, for the Federal Agents know the Minutemen are law-abiding and would never tackle an illegal themselves, they would radio the information to the proper authorities. Are there British ‘patriots’ who are so incensed by illegal immigration into the United Kingdom that they would set up their own border patrols in like manner? Shannon strikes me as more sad and lonely than dangerous. He has that slightly obnoxious and overstated pride in his obedience to the law and his respect for proper authorities characteristic of the self-righteous patriot. I ask him whether he has any sympathy for the Mexicans whose lives are so poor and who look out daily across a river to a land of riches and plenty? He evades the question by referring once more to the law.

Incidentally, I say that the Mexicans look out over a river, and it may be that you already know that I am referring to the Rio Grande, which for much of its course forms the natural border between America and Mexico. Illegal immigrants are often called ‘wetbacks’ on account of their having had to swim that river. You may imagine my surprise then when Shannon showed me the Rio Grande. Not a river at all, but a drain, a dry ditch. Further along it swells into a small stream, I am told, but here it is no more than a trickle.

The following day I join the official United States Border Patrol in the city of El Paso itself. Agent Romero drives me along the fences on the US side of the border and we see, over the dribble that is the Rio Grande, Mexicans in the city of Juarez gazing across at us. Helicopters fly overhead and we pass dozens and dozens of other Border Patrol vehicles. The budget for this level of security must be colossal.

There were a few moments of high-intensity action when we are sped towards spots where illegals are actually crossing, according to our in-car shortwave radio. We arrive at one place in time to see a pair of elderly Mexicans being led away. Often, Agent Romero tells me, they will be paid to try a bold and ridiculous crossing in order to create a diversion that is cover for a more serious incursion somewhere else along the frontier. As often as people, it is drugs that are smuggled across. I ask him the same question I asked Minuteman Shannon. Does he, as a Latino-American especially, feel any sympathy for those trying to get in? He returns the same answer. It’s the law. They must not break the law.

‘If the law was different I would feel different,’ he eventually confides. A very odd thing for a free human being to say in my opinion, but I suppose a government agent being filmed is not, in the usual sense, free. Illegal immigration has become a huge issue in America, much as it has in Britain, and perhaps he feels that if he is caught on camera expressing even the smallest degree of understanding or fellow-feeling his job will be forfeit.

I climb into a ‘sky box’, a preposterous, hydraulically lifted mobile sentry box in which the poor agent tasked to it has to stay for eight-hour shifts. Either side of the river lie the two enormous cities of El Paso and Juarez, and I can see them clearly from my high vantage point. The difference in prosperity is all too apparent. The only way to stop people wanting to migrate from Juarez to El Paso, it seems to me, is for Mexico to become as prosperous as the United States. In recent years Mexico’s economy has grown, certainly, and it continues to expand at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps the day will come when it is American illegals who try to swim the Rio Grande? Not in my lifetime, I think, but perhaps one day.

Since Montana and the Canadian border I have trailed the Rocky Mountains southwards. It is here that they end, in the pass (El Paso) where their southern journey through Mexico as the Sierra Madre begins. I sit in an old cantina, sipping Mexican beer and being treated to Mexican music and I contemplate the next leg of my journey which will take me back north–as far north as America goes. The frozen seas of the Alaskan Arctic seem a long way away from the warmth of southern Texas.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 576