I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, “But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie-burn rate, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.” It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.

  According to a concerned and faintly horrified recent editorial in the Boston Globe, the United States spends less than 1 percent of its $25 billion-a-year highway budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, I’m surprised it’s that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last thirty years and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. Often you won’t find a single pedestrian crossing.

  I had this brought home to me last summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee on Route 1 in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations, and fast food places that sprout everywhere these days. I noticed there was a bookstore across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and pop over. I needed a particular book for some work I was doing and anyway I figured this would give my wife a chance to spend some important quality time with four restive, overheated children.

  Although the bookshop was no more than seventy or eighty feet away, I discovered that there was no way to get there on foot. There was a traffic outlet for cars, but no provision for pedestrians, and no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end, I had to get in our car and drive across. There was simply no other way. At the time it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterward I realized that I was possibly the only person ever even to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot.

  The fact is, we not only don’t walk anywhere anymore in this country, we won’t walk anywhere, and woe to anyone who tries to make us, as a town here in New Hampshire called Laconia discovered to its cost. A few years ago, Laconia spent $5 million pedestrianizing its downtown, to make it a pleasant shopping environment. Esthetically it was a triumph—urban planners came from all over to coo and take photos—but commercially it was a disaster. Forced to walk one whole block from a parking lot, shoppers abandoned downtown Laconia for suburban malls.

  In 1994, Laconia dug up its pretty brick paving, took away the benches, tubs of geraniums, and decorative trees, and put the street back to the way it had been in the first place. Now people can park right in front of the stores again, and downtown Laconia thrives anew.

  And if that isn’t sad, I don’t know what is.

  Here are a couple of things to bear in mind as you go through life: Daniel Boone was an idiot, and it’s not worth trying to go to Maine for the day from Hanover, New Hampshire. Allow me to explain.

  I was fooling around with a globe the other evening and was mildly astounded to discover that here in Hanover I am much closer to our old house in Yorkshire than I am to many other parts of the United States. Indeed, from where I sit to Attu, the westernmost of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, is almost four thousand miles. Put another way, a person in London is closer to Johannesburg than I am to the outermost tip of my own country.

  Of course, you could argue that Alaska is not a fair comparison because there is so much non-U.S. territory between here and there. But even if you confine yourself to the mainland United States, the distances are imposing, to say the least. From my house to Los Angeles is about the same as from London to Lagos. We are, in a word, talking big scale here.

  Here is another arresting fact to do with scale. In the past twenty years (a period in which, let the record show, I was doing my breeding elsewhere), the population of the United States increased by almost exactly the equivalent of Great Britain’s. I find that quite amazing, not least because I don’t know where all these new people are.

  A remarkable thing about America, if you have been living for a long time in a crowded little place like the United Kingdom, is how very big and very empty so much of it is. Consider this: Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota have an area twice the size of France but a population less than that of south London. Alaska is bigger still and has even fewer people. Even my own adopted state of New Hampshire, in the relatively crowded Northeast, is 85 percent forest, and most of the rest is lakes. You can drive for very long periods in New Hampshire and never see anything but trees and mountains— not a house or a hamlet or even, quite often, another car.

  I am constantly caught by this. Not long ago, I had a couple of friends over from England and we decided to take a drive over to the lakes of western Maine. It had the makings of a nice day out. All we had to do was cross New Hampshire— which is, after all, the fourth tiniest state in America—and go a little way over the state line into our lovely, moose-strewn neighbor to the east. I figured it would take about two hours— two and a half tops.

  Well, of course you have anticipated the punchline. Six hours later we pulled up exhausted at the shore of Rangeley Lake, took two pictures, looked at each other, and wordlessly got back in the car and drove home. This sort of thing happens all the time.

  The curious thing is that a very great many Americans don’t seem to see it this way. They think the country is way too crowded. Moves are constantly afoot to restrict access to national parks and wilderness areas on the grounds that they are dangerously overrun. Parts of them are unquestionably crowded, but that is only because 98 percent of visitors arrive by car, and 98 percent of those venture no more than a couple of hundred feet from their metallic wombs. Elsewhere, however, you can have whole mountains to yourself, even in the most popular parks on the busiest days. Yet I may soon find myself barred from hiking in many wilderness areas unless I had the foresight to book a visit weeks beforehand, because of perceived overcrowding.

  Even more ominously, there is a growing belief that the best way of dealing with this supposed crisis is by expelling most of those not born here. There is an organization whose name escapes me (it may be “Dangerously Small-Minded Reactionaries for a Better America”) that periodically runs earnest, carefully reasoned ads in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and other important and influential publications calling for an end to immigration because, as one of its ads explains, it “is devastating our environment and the quality of our lives.” Elsewhere it adds, “Primarily because of immigration we are rushing at breakneck speed toward an environmental and economic disaster.” Oh, give me a break, please.

  You could, I suppose, make an economic or even cultural case for cutting back on immigration, but not on the grounds that the country is running out of room. Anti-immigration arguments conveniently overlook the fact that America already expels a million immigrants a year and that those who are here mostly do jobs that are too dirty, low-paying, or unsatisfying for the rest of us to do. Getting rid of immigrants is not suddenly going to open employment opportunities for those born here; all it’s going to do is leave a lot of dishes unwashed, a lot of beds unmade, and a lot of fruit unpicked. Still less is it going to miraculously create a lot more breathing space for the rest of us.

  America already has one of the lowest proportions of immigrants in the developed world. Just 6 percent of people in the United States are foreign born, compared with, for instance, 8 percent in Britain and 11 percent in France. America may or may not be heading for an environmental and economic disaster, but if so it certainly isn’t because six people in every hundred were born somewhere else.

  There aren’t many human acts more foolishly simplistic or misguided, or more likely to lead to careless evil, than blaming general problems on small minorities, yet that seems to be quite a respectable impulse where immigration is concerned these days. Two years ago, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 187, which would deny health and education services to illegal immigrants. Almost immediately upon passage of the proposition, Governor Pete Wilson ordered the state health authorities to stop providing prenatal care to any woman who could not prove that she was here legally. Now please correct me by all means, but does it not seem just a trifle harsh—a trifle barbaric even—to imperil
the well-being of an unborn child because of the actions of its parents?

  No less astounding in its way, the federal government recently began removing basic rights and entitlements even from legal immigrants. We are in effect saying to them: “Thank you for your years of faithful service to our economy, but things are a little tough at the moment, so we aren’t prepared to help you. Besides, you have a funny accent.”

  I’m not arguing for unlimited immigration, you understand, just a sense of proportion in how we treat those who are here already. The fact is, America is one of the least crowded countries on earth, with an average of just 68 people per square mile, compared with 256 in France and over 600 in Britain. Altogether, only 2 percent of the United States is classified as “built up.”

  Of course, Americans have always tended to see these things in a different way. Daniel Boone famously is supposed to have looked out his cabin window one day, seen a wisp of smoke rising from a homesteader’s dwelling on a distant mountain, and announced his intention to move on, complaining bitterly that the neighborhood was getting too crowded.

  Which is why I say Daniel Boone was an idiot. I just hate to see the rest of my country going the same way.

  Now here is something to bear in mind should you ever find yourself using a changing room in a department store or other retail establishment. It is perfectly legal—indeed, it is evidently routine—for the store to spy on you while you are trying on their clothes.

  I know this because I have just been reading a book by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy called The Right to Privacy, which is full of alarming tales of ways that businesses and employers can—and enthusiastically do—intrude into what would normally be considered private affairs.

  The business of changing-cubicle spying came to light in 1983 when a customer trying on clothes in a department store in Michigan discovered that a store employee had climbed a stepladder and was watching him through a metal vent. (Is this tacky or what?) The customer was sufficiently outraged that he sued the store for invasion of privacy. He lost. A state court held that it was reasonable for retailers to defend against shoplifting by engaging in such surveillance.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. Nearly everyone is being spied on in some way in America these days. A combination of technological advances, employer paranoia, and commercial avarice means that many millions of Americans are having their lives delved into in ways that would have been impossible, not to say unthinkable, a dozen years ago.

  Worse still, there are now scores of information brokers— electronic private investigators—who make a living going through the Internet digging out personal information on people for a fee. If you have ever registered to vote they can get your address and date of birth, since voter registration forms are a matter of public record in most states. With these two pieces of information, they can (and for as little as $8 or $10 will) provide almost any personal information about any person you might wish to know: court records, medical records, driving records, credit history, hobbies, buying habits, annual income, phone numbers (including unlisted numbers), you name it.

  Most of this was possible before, but it would take days of inquiries and visits to various government offices. Now it can be done in minutes, in complete anonymity, through the Internet.

  Many companies are taking advantage of these technological possibilities to make their businesses more ruthlessly productive. In Maryland, according to Time magazine, a bank searched through the medical records of its borrowers—apparently quite legally—to find out which of them had life-threatening illnesses and used this information to cancel their loans. Other companies have focused not on customers but on their own employees—for instance, to check what prescription drugs the employees are taking. One large, well-known company teamed up with a pharmaceutical firm to comb through the health records of employees to see who might benefit from a dose of antidepressants. The idea was that the company would get more serene workers; the drug company would get more customers.

  According to the American Management Association two-thirds of companies in the United States spy on their employees in some way. Thirty-five percent track phone calls, and 10 percent actually tape phone conversations to review at leisure later. About a quarter of companies surveyed admitted to going through their employees’ computer files and reading their e-mail.

  Still other companies are secretly watching their employees at work. A secretary at a college in Massachusetts discovered that a hidden video camera was filming her office twenty-four hours a day. Goodness knows what the school authorities were hoping to find. What they got were images of the woman changing out of her work clothes and into a track suit each night in order to jog home from work. She is suing and will probably get a pot of money. But elsewhere courts have upheld companies’ rights to spy on their workers.

  In 1989, when an employee of a large Japanese-owned computer products company discovered that the company was routinely reading employees’ e-mail, even though it had assured the employees that it was not, she blew the whistle, and was promptly fired. She sued for unfair dismissal and lost the case. A court upheld the right of companies not only to review employees’ private communications but to lie to them about doing it. Whoa.

  There is a particular paranoia about drugs. I have a friend who got a job with a large manufacturing company in Iowa a year or so ago. Across the street from the company was a tavern that was the company after-hours hangout. One night my friend was having a beer after work with his colleagues when he was approached by a fellow employee who asked if he knew where she could get some marijuana. He said he didn’t use the stuff himself, but to get rid of her—for she was very persistent—he gave her the phone number of an acquaintance who sometimes sold it.

  The next day he was fired. The woman, it turned out, was a company spy employed solely to weed out drug use in the company. He hadn’t supplied her with marijuana, you under stand, hadn’t encouraged her to use marijuana, and had stressed that he didn’t use marijuana himself. Nonetheless he was fired for encouraging and abetting the use of an illegal substance.

  Already, 91 percent of large companies—I find this almost unbelievable—now test some of their workers for drugs. Scores of companies have introduced what are called TAD rules—TAD being short for “tobacco, alcohol, and drugs”— which prohibit employees from using any of these substances at any time, including at home. There are companies, if you can believe it, that forbid their employees to drink or smoke at any time—even one beer, even on a Saturday night—and enforce the rules by making their workers give urine samples.

  But it gets even more sinister than that. Two leading electronics companies working together have invented something called an “active badge,” which tracks the movements of any worker compelled to wear one. The badge sends out an infrared signal every fifteen seconds. This signal is received by a central computer, which is thus able to keep a record of where every employee is and has been, whom they have associated with, how many times they have been to the toilet or water cooler—in short, to log every single action of their working day. If that isn’t ominous, I don’t know what is.

  However, there is one development, I am pleased to report, that makes all of this worthwhile. A company in New Jersey has patented a device for determining whether restaurant employees have washed their hands after using the lavatory. Now that I can go for.

  Every year about this time I do a mildly foolish thing. I gather up some of the smaller children and take them to one of the summer movies.

  Summer movies are big business in America. This year between Memorial Day and Labor Day Americans will spend $2 billion on movie tickets, plus half as much again on chewy things to stuff into their mouths while staring saucer-eyed at images of extremely costly mayhem.

  Summer movies are nearly always bad, of course, but I believe this may be the worst summer ever. I base this entirely, but confidently, on a quotation I saw in the New York Times from Jan de Bont, director of Speed 2
: Cruise Control, who boasted that the movie’s biggest dramatic event—in which an out-of-control cruise ship carrying Sandra Bullock plows into a Caribbean village—came to him in a dream. “The entire screenplay was written backward from that image,” he revealed proudly. There, I think, you have all you need to know about the intellectual quality of the average summer movie.

  I always tell myself not to set my expectations too high, that summer movies are the cinematic equivalent of amusement park rides, and no one ever expected a roller coaster to provide a satisfying plot line. But the thing is, summer movies have become so dumb—so very, very dumb—that it is hard to abide them. No matter how much money has been spent on them—and it is worth noting that at least eight of this year’s crop have budgets over $100 million—there is always such a large measure of implausibility as to make you wonder whether the script was concocted over canapés the night before filming began.

  This year we went to the new Jurassic Park movie, Lost World. Now never mind that it is largely identical to the last Jurassic Park movie—same booming footfalls and trembling puddles whenever T-rex comes into the vicinity, same mortified people backing away from a door against which velociraptors are hurling themselves (only to find another toothy creature looming over their shoulder), same scenes of vehicles dangling precariously from a jungly bluff while the heroes hold on for dear life. No matter. The dinosaurs are terrific and a dozen or so people get squashed or eaten in the first hour. This is what we’ve come for!

  And then it all falls apart. In a culminating scene, a Tyrannosaurus escapes, in an improbable manner, from a ship, runs rampant through downtown San Diego, crushing buses and destroying gas stations, and then—suddenly, inexplicably—is in the middle of a heavily slumbering suburban neighborhood, alone and unobserved. Now does it strike you as remotely likely that a prehistoric, twenty-foot-high creature not seen on earth for sixty-five million years could cause mayhem in a business district and then slip off into a residential zone without anyone’s noticing? Does it not seem a trifle nagging and unsatisfactory that while downtown San Diego is full of people doing lively, mid-evening sorts of things—lining up at movie theaters, strolling around hand in hand—out in the residential area the streets are silent and every last soul is fast asleep?