I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  And so it goes on from there. While police cars are dashing around bumping helplessly into each other, the hero and heroine manage to find the T-rex unaided and—undetected by anyone in this curiously unobservant city—lure her some miles back to the boat, so that she can be returned to her tropical island home, thus setting up the happy, inevitable, and commercially gratifying possibility of a Jurassic Park 3.

  Lost World is slack and obvious and, for all its $100 millionplus budget, contains about $2.35 worth of actual thought, and so of course it is on its way to setting all kinds of records at the box office. In its first weekend alone, it took in $92.7 million.

  However, my problem is not really with Lost World or any of the other summer fare. I’m way past expecting Hollywood to provide me with a cerebral experience during the warmer months. My problem is with the Sony 6 Theaters of West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and the thousands of other suburban cinema complexes like it, which are doing to the American moviegoing experience essentially what Steven Spielberg’s Tyrannosaurus rex did to San Diego.

  Anyone who grew up in America in the 1960s or before will remember the days when going to the pictures meant visiting a single-screen institution, usually vast, usually down-town. In my hometown, Des Moines, the main movie theater (imaginatively called “The Des Moines”) was a palatial extravaganza with spooky lighting and a decor that brought to mind an Egyptian crypt. By my era, it was something of a dump—I am sure there was a dead horse in there somewhere, and certainly it hadn’t been cleaned since Theda Bara was in her prime—but just being there, facing a vast screen in a cubic acre of darkness, was an entrancing experience.

  Except in a few major cities, nearly all those great down-town cinemas are gone now. (The Des Moines went in about 1965.) Instead what you get nowadays are suburban multiplexes with an abundance of tiny screening rooms. Although Lost World was the hottest movie around, we saw it in a chamber of almost laughable minuteness, barely large enough to accommodate nine rows of seats, which were grudgingly padded and crammed so close together that my knees ended up more or less hooked around my ears. The screen had the dimensions of a large beach towel and was so ill-placed that everyone in the first three rows had to look almost straight up, as if in a planetarium. The sound was bad and the picture frequently jerky. Before it started, we had to sit through thirty minutes of commercials. The popcorn, candy, and soft drinks were outrageously expensive, and the salespeople had been programmed to try to sell you things you didn’t want and had not asked for. In short, every feature of this movie complex seemed carefully designed to make a visit a deeply regretted experience.

  I’m not cataloging all this to make you feel sorry for me, though sympathy is always welcome, but to point out that this is increasingly the standard experience for moviegoers in America. I can handle a little audiovisual imbecility, but I can’t bear to see the magic taken away.

  I was talking about this to one of my older children the other day. She listened attentively, even sympathetically, then said a sad thing. “Dad,” she told me, “you need to understand that people don’t want the smell of a dead horse when they go to the movies.”

  She’s right, of course. But if you ask me, they don’t know what they are missing.

  I’m going to have to be quick because it’s a Sunday and the weather is glorious and Mrs. Bryson has outlined a big, ambitious program of gardening. Worse, she’s wearing what I nervously call her Nike expression—the one that says, “Just do it.”

  Now don’t get me wrong. Mrs. Bryson is a rare and delightful creature and goodness knows my life needs structure and supervision, but when she gets out a pad and pen and writes the words “Things To Do” (vigorously underscored several times) you know it’s going to be a long time till Monday.

  I love to garden—there is something about the combination of mindless activity and the constant unearthing of worms that just suits me somehow—but frankly I am not crazy about gardening with my wife. The trouble, you see, is that she is English and thus can intimidate me. She can say things like, “Have you heeled in the nodes on the Dianthus chinensis?” and “Did you remember to check the sequestrene levels on the Phlox subulata?”

  All British people can do this, I find, and it’s awful—terrifying even. Even now I remember the astonishment of listening to the ever-popular BBC radio program “Gardeners’ Question Time” for the first time many years ago and realizing with quiet horror that I was in a nation of people who not only knew and understood things like powdery mildew, peach leaf curl, optimum pH levels, and the difference between Coreopsis verticillata and Coreopsis grandiflora but cared about them—indeed, found it gratifying to engage in long and lively discussions on such matters.

  I come from a background where you are considered to have a green thumb if you can grow a cactus on a windowsill, so my own approach to gardening has always been rather less scientific. My method, which actually works pretty well, is to treat as a weed anything that hasn’t flowered by August and to sprinkle everything else with bone meal, slug pellets, and whatever else I find lying around the potting shed. Once or twice a summer I tip everything with a skull and crossbones on the label into a spray canister and give everything a jolly good dousing. It’s an unorthodox approach and occasionally, I admit, I have to leap out of the way of an abruptly falling tree that has failed to respond to ministrations, but generally it has been a success and I have achieved some interesting and novel mutational effects. I once got a fence post to fruit, for instance.

  For years, especially when the children were small and capable of almost any kind of mischief, my wife left me to the garden. Occasionally she would step out to ask what I was doing, and I would have to confess that I was dusting some weedy-looking things with an unknown powdery substance that I had found in the garage and that I was pretty confident was either nitrogen or possibly cement mix. Usually at that moment one of the children would come out to announce that little Jimmy’s hair was on fire, or something else similarly but usefully distracting, and she would fly off, leaving me to get on with my experiments in peace. It was a good arrangement and our marriage prospered.

  Then the children grew large enough to attend to their own cranial blazes and we moved to America, and now I find Mrs. B. out there with me. Or rather I am there with her, for I seem to have acquired a subsidiary role that principally involves bringing or taking away the wheelbarrow at a trot. I used to be a keen gardener; now I’m a kind of rickshaw boy.

  Anyway, gardening isn’t the same here. People don’t even have gardens in America. They have yards. And they don’t garden in those yards. They do “yardwork.” Takes all the fun out of it somehow.

  In Britain, nature is fecund and kindly. The whole country is a kind of garden, really. In America, the instinct of nature is to be a wilderness—glorious in its way, of course, but much harder to subdue. What you get here are triffid-like weeds that come creeping in from every margin and must be continually hacked back with sabers and machetes. I am quite sure that if we left the property for a month we would come back to find that the weeds had captured the house and dragged it off to the woods to be slowly devoured.

  American gardens are mostly lawn, and American lawns are mostly big. This means that you spend your life raking. In the autumn the leaves fall together with a single great whoomp—a sort of vegetative mass suicide—and you spend about two months dragging them into piles, while the wind does its best to put them all back where you found them. You rake and rake, and cart the leaves off to the woods, then hang up your rake and go inside for the next seven months.

  But as soon as you turn your back, the leaves begin creeping back. I don’t know how they do it, but when you come out in spring, there they all are again, spread ankle deep across your lawn, choking thorny shrubs, clogging drains. So you spend weeks and weeks raking them up and carting them back to the woods. Finally, just when you get the lawn pristine, there is a great whoomp sound and you realize it’s autumn again. It’s really quite dispiri
ting.

  And now on top of all that my dear spouse has suddenly taken a commanding interest in the whole business of domestic horticulture. It’s my own fault, I have to admit. Last year, I filled the lawn spreader with a mixture of my own devising— essentially fertilizer, moss killer, rabbit food (initially by mistake, but then I thought, “What the heck?” and tossed in the rest) and a dash of something lively called buprimate and triforine. Two days later the front lawn erupted in vivid orange stripes of a sufficiently arresting and persistent nature to attract sightseers from as far away as west-central Massachusetts. So now I find myself on a kind of permanent probation.

  Speaking of which, I’ve got to go. I’ve just heard the hard, clinical snap of gardening gloves going on and the ominous sound of metal tools being taken down from their perches. It’s only a matter of time before I hear the cry of “Boy! Bring the barrow—and look sharp!” But you know the part I really hate? It’s having to wear this stupid coolie hat.

  In New England, a friend here recently explained to me, the year divides into three parts. Either winter has just been, or winter is coming, or it’s winter.

  I know what he meant. Summers here are short—they start on the first of June and end on the last day of August, and the rest of the time you had better know where your mittens are—but for the whole of those three months the weather is agreeably warm and nearly always sunny. Best of all, the weather stays at a generally congenial level, unlike Iowa, where I grew up and where the temperature and humidity climb steadily with every passing day of summer until by mid-August it is so hot and airless that even the flies lie down on their backs and just quietly gasp.

  It’s the mugginess that gets you. Step outside in Iowa in August and within twenty seconds you will experience a condition that might be called perspiration incontinence. It gets so hot that you see department store mannequins with sweat circles under their arms. I have particularly vivid memories of Iowa summers because my father was the last person in the Midwest to buy an air conditioner. He thought they were unnatural. (He thought anything that cost more than $30 was unnatural.)

  The one place you could get a little relief was the screened porch. Up until the 1950s nearly every American home had one of these, though they seem to be getting harder and harder to find now. They give you all the advantages of being outdoors and indoors at the same time. They are wonderful and will always be associated in my mind with summer things—corn on the cob, watermelon, the nighttime chirr of crickets, the sound of my parents’ neighbor Mr. Piper arriving home late from one of his lodge meetings, parking his car with the aid of his garbage cans, then serenading Mrs. Piper with two choruses of “Rose of Seville” before settling down for a nap on the lawn.

  So when we came to the States, the one thing I asked for in a house was a screened porch, and we found one. I live out there in the summer. I am writing this on the screened porch now, staring out on a sunny garden, listening to twittering birds and the hum of a neighbor’s lawnmower, caressed by a light breeze, and feeling pretty darned chipper. We will have our dinner out here tonight (if Mrs B. doesn’t trip over a rucked carpet with the tray again, bless her) and then I will lounge around reading until bedtime, listening to the crickets and watching the cheery blink of fireflies. Summer wouldn’t be summer without all this.

  Soon after we moved into our house, I noticed that a corner of screen had come loose near the floor and that our cat was using it as a kind of cat flap to come in and sleep on an old sofa we kept out there, so I just left it. One night after we had been here about a month, I was reading unusually late when out of the corner of my eye I noticed the cat come in. Only here’s the thing: The cat was with me already.

  I looked again. It was a skunk. Moreover, it was between me and the only means of exit. It headed straight for the table and I realized it probably came in every night about this time to hoover up any dinner bits that had fallen on the floor. (And there very often are, on account of a little game the children and I play called Vegetable Olympics when Mrs. Bryson goes off to answer the phone or get more gravy.)

  Being sprayed by a skunk is absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you that doesn’t make you bleed or put you in the hospital. If you smell skunk odor from a distance, it doesn’t smell too bad at all. It’s rather strangely sweet and arresting—not attractive exactly, but not revolting. Everybody who has ever smelled a skunk from a distance for the first time thinks, “Well, that’s not so bad. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

  But get close—or, worse still, get sprayed—and believe me it will be a long, long time before anyone asks you to dance slow and close. The odor is not just strong and disagreeable but virtually ineradicable. The most effective treatment, apparently, is to scrub yourself thoroughly with tomato juice. But even with gallons of the stuff the best you can hope for is to subdue the smell fractionally.

  A classmate of my son’s had a skunk get into her family’s basement one night. It sprayed and the family lost virtually everything in their home. All their curtains, bedding, clothes, soft furnishings—everything, in short, that could absorb an odor—had to be thrown on a bonfire, and the rest of the house scrubbed from top to bottom. The classmate of my son’s never got near the skunk, left the house immediately, and spent a weekend scouring herself with tomato juice and a stiff brush, but it was weeks before anyone would walk down the same side of a street as her. So when I say you don’t want to be sprayed by a skunk, believe me, you don’t want to be sprayed by a skunk.

  All of this went through my mind as I sat agog watching a skunk perhaps eight feet away. The skunk spent about thirty seconds snuffling around under the table, then calmly padded out the way it had come. As it left, it turned and gave me a look that said: “I knew you were there the whole time.” But it didn’t spray me, for which I am grateful even now.

  The next day I tacked the loose corner of screen back into place, but to show my appreciation I put a handful of dried cat food on the step, and about midnight the skunk came and ate it. After that, for two summers, I put a little food out regularly and the skunk always came to collect it. This year it hasn’t been back. There has been a rabies epidemic among small mammals that has seriously reduced the populations of skunks, raccoons, and even squirrels. Apparently this happens every fifteen years or so as part of a natural cycle.

  So I seem to have lost my skunk. In a year or so, the populations will recover and I may be able to adopt another. I hope so because the one thing about being a skunk is that you don’t have a lot of friends.

  In the meantime, partly as a mark of respect and partly because Mrs. B. caught one in the eye at an inopportune moment, we have stopped playing food games even though, if I say it myself, I was comfortably in line for a gold.

  Every year about this time, my wife wakes me up with a playful slap and says: “I’ve got an idea. Let’s drive for three hours to the ocean, take off most of our clothes, and sit on some sand for a whole day.”

  “What for?” I will say warily.

  “It will be fun,” she will insist.

  “I don’t think so,” I will reply. “People find it disturbing when I take my shirt off in public. I find it disturbing.”

  “No, it will be great. We’ll get sand in our hair. We’ll get sand in our shoes. We’ll get sand in our sandwiches and then in our mouths. We’ll get sunburned and windburned. And when we get tired of sitting, we can have a dip in water so cold it actually hurts. At the end of the day, we’ll set off at the same time as thirty-seven thousand other people and get in such a traffic jam that we won’t get home till midnight. I can make trenchant observations about your driving skills, and the children can pass the time in back sticking each other with sharp objects. It will be such fun.”

  The tragic thing is that because my wife is English, and therefore beyond the reach of reason where saltwater is concerned, she really will think it’s fun. Frankly I have never understood the British attachment to the seaside.

  I g
rew up in Iowa, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so to me (and I believe to most other Iowans, though I haven’t had a chance to check with all of them yet) the word ocean suggests alarming things like riptides and undertows. (I expect people in New York suffer similar terrors when you mention words like cornfields and county fair.) Lake Ahquabi, where I did all my formative swimming and sunburning, may not have the romance of Cape Cod or the grandeur of the rockribbed coast of Maine, but then neither did it grab you by the legs and carry you off helplessly to Newfoundland. No, you may keep the sea, as far as I am concerned, and every drop of water in it.

  So when last weekend my wife suggested that we take a drive to the ocean, I put my foot down and said, “Never—absolutely not,” which is of course why we ended up, three hours later, at Kennebunk Beach in Maine.

  Now you may find this hard to believe, given the whirlwind of adventure that has been my life, but in all my years I had been to American ocean beaches just twice—once in California when I was twelve and managed to scrape all the skin from my nose and chest (this is a true story) by mistiming a retreating wave as only someone from Iowa can and diving headlong into bare, gritty sand, and once in Florida when I was a college student on spring break and far too intoxicated to notice a landscape feature as subtle as an ocean.