The Partly Cloudy Patriot

by Sarah Vowell

  “Hundreds and thousands of people have eaten here,” Hodnett says, “and every one of them has said that that was one of their memorable things that happened in the cave. You talk to people now that are fifty, sixty years old and they will say, ‘I remember when we went through the caverns and we stopped and had one of those sandwiches.’”

  So when the National Park Service announced their plans to remove the Underground Lunchroom, the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce opposed them.

  Gary Perkowski is the mayor of Carlsbad. Like a lot of locals, he also worked in the Underground Lunchroom as a teenager. He was one of the people from Carlsbad who argued the lunchroom’s merits before one of New Mexico’s congressmen, Representative Joe Skeen.

  “I think Representative Skeen has always been on our side,” Mayor Perkowski asserts. “He works closely with the leaders of Carlsbad on numerous projects, and we just went to Washington, explained our position and what we thought. And he agreed with us.”

  “That’s it?” I wondered.

  “That’s basically it. He agreed with our position and did everything he could to make sure that was implemented.”

  I’ll say. Consider the following legislation prepared by Representative Skeen’s committee. According to H.R. 2217, the Department of Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2002, Section 307, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be obligated or expended by the National Park Service to enter into or implement a concession contract which permits or requires the removal of the underground lunchroom at the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.” That is the same language that has appeared in every Department of Interior appropriations bill since 1994, and what it means is that the National Park Service is barred from using federal funds to close down the Underground Lunchroom. (Calls to Representative Skeen’s office for comment were not returned.)

  The National Park Service is obeying the will of Congress, but you don’t get the feeling they’re all that happy about it. If the Park Service were a person, the Underground Lunchroom would be one of the dumb mistakes it made as a kid. It’s like Congress is telling it that not only can it not remove the tattoo it got one drunken night in the twenties but it has to invite 300,000 people a year to look at it. And that’s how a lot of employees think about it too, as a youthful gaffe.

  Cave specialist Ron Kerbo, who was one of the authors of the study calling for the lunchroom’s abolition, remembers going there when he was little: “Like any eight-year-old, I thought it was pretty interesting to be able to eat in the cave. And I particularly remember the pickles. They used to have these shelves with these small paper cups with pickles in them and you could eat as many of those as you wanted. So I was always fond of eating the pickles in the Underground Lunchroom.”

  Still, he says, there’s no reason for the lunchroom today. Food is available to tourists in a restaurant that’s just fifty-seven seconds away by elevator. And for all the visitors who enter the cavern through the elevator, the lunchroom is the first and last thing they see.

  “In that environment,” Kerbo says, “it seems to me, eating in the lunchroom mars the visitor’s experience in the cave.”

  “When you were eight years old, did you feel marred?” I ask him.

  “While, yes, as a child, I ate in there and I enjoyed it and I did remember it. But I have moved on. And the great thing that the national parks teach us is that if we are attuned to these natural processes, then we can move on. If your only memory of Carlsbad Caverns is eating in the lunchroom, then you have missed the essence of the experience.”

  Everything he says is true. But I found his reasoning frustrating because my only available counterargument is that the Underground Lunchroom is a lark. And what’s the dignity in that? I’m jealous of Kerbo’s certainty, which is both idealistic and logical. My small life in the surface world is a contradictory, hypocritical mess in which I scowl through newspaper articles about the abuses of the timber industry while sitting in my maple chair next to my maple bookcase. Isn’t that how most of us live in this country?

  I spent a couple of hours walking down through the caverns, and this is what I saw. I saw fourteen football fields of treasures—things with names like Witch’s Finger, Totem Pole, and Mirror Lake, formations described as popcorn and soda straws in places called the Boneyard, the Hall of Giants, the Big Room. How very human to measure nature in sports arenas, describe it as snack food, map its contours as if we’re drawing rectangles on the blueprint of an office building. I can’t do any better. I don’t know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world.

  So when I came to the end of the last trail, I wasn’t quite ready to say good-bye to the cave. I felt all dreamy, and I didn’t want the feeling to end. If only there were some way station, some transitional zone between this world and the surface world above, a place to sit and ponder my own insignificance.

  I sleepwalk to a picnic table in the Underground Lunchroom. When I first read about the lunchroom in the guidebook, I’d never suspected it could feel so contemplative. Then I rip open a bag of barbecue potato chips and listen to the sound of my own teeth crunching. I am capable of chewing and pondering at the same time.

  Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns’ ecology, I’d like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don’t have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoying a goof. I look up at the ceiling of the lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave. It looks so lunar I can’t help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971, Apollo 14’s Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face the profundity of the universe, this man brought sporting goods with him into space. Who can blame him? That’s what we Americans do when we find a place that’s really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.

  Wonder Twins

  In December 1999, the Associated Press released a photograph of Luther and Johnny Htoo, twelve-year-old twin brothers commanding a ragtag guerrilla army in the rain forest of Myanmar (formerly Burma). In the picture, the little boys are side by side. Johnny’s the serene one with the angel eyes. Luther, forehead shaved, is the smirking devil sucking down a cigar. For several weeks, I couldn’t open a magazine without seeing that photo of the twins, without reading of their bizarre cult of soldiers called God’s Army, of their attack on a Thai hospital in which they held some five hundred people hostage. Every time I saw the picture the first thing that popped into my head was this: I miss my sister.

  I am a twin. And to be a twin child is to always have another person in the picture. My mother made a halfhearted stab at keeping separate photo albums for each of us. But the distinctions are arbitrary. Amy is in most of the faded black-and-white snapshots in mine, and vice versa.

  Once I saw Luther and Johnny sharing the same frame, it hit me how much they have in common with my sister and me. The similarities are uncanny. Luther and Johnny were illiterate, Baptist, messianic insurgents struggling against the government of Myanmar, and my sister Amy and I shared a locker all through junior high.

  Some of my friends couldn’t stop talking about the Htoo twins. They would speak of them in a single breath—LutherandJohnny. “Did you see the photo of LutherandJohnny?” or “I’m obsessed with LutherandJohnny.” And I pine for that, that single name, especially now that my sister and I live so far apart. I miss the way I was never Sarah and my sister was never Amy, but we were together AmyandSarah. Unlike the identicals, who act as photocopies of each other, we’re fraternal. Which means that we’re not doubles so much as halves. We’re split down the middle. I’m a single careerist with a walk-up apartment in New York City; she’s a married, dog-owning mother in Montana with a, swear to God, white picket fence. People love that about us, love that I can’t sew on a button but she makes quilts. That’s
why people respond to the Luther and Johnny picture. They adore the contrast between the pretty, girlish Johnny and the hyena-faced Luther. Meet Joan of Arc and her brother Genghis Khan.

  Will Luther and Johnny’s memories meld? Up until around the age of ten, my sister and I often cannot remember who was doing what and who was watching, who got thrown from what horse, who got spanked for what trespass, who committed the trespass that led to the spanking. (Well, it was usually Amy, so ill-behaved. When I called her to talk about Luther and Johnny, she had seen the photo and knew what I was thinking. “I’m Luther!” she screamed into the phone.) So years from now, when Luther and Johnny look back on the exciting terrorist period of their lives, will Johnny ask Luther, “Was it you who threw that hand grenade on the government sniper or was it me?” Maybe Luther will say to Johnny, “Help me out here, but I can’t remember which one of us shot the papaya off that dumb orphan’s head.”

  In January 2001, the Htoo twins turned themselves in to Thai border guards, admitted they had no magical powers, and asked for their mommy. But while they still lived out there in the killing fields, Luther and Johnny had it easy twin-wise. In the bush, they didn’t have to deal with the aftermath of those periodic cable TV documentaries on twins. They’ve probably never been cornered at some dinner party with an HBO subscriber who quizzes them on “like the weirdest show I’ve ever seen about these freaks, I mean twins, who were separated at birth and everything and still held their cigarettes at the same angle even though they didn’t meet until adulthood and I was just wondering if when your sister feels pain you feel it too?” So Luther or Johnny will never have to hover over the lukewarm hummus and inform some only child that just because you’re a twin it doesn’t mean you’re some kind of life-size voodoo doll and that if you have some kind of psychic powers at all they have nothing to do with your twin but rather with peculiar celebrities, like when you dreamed you said hi to Kevin Spacey on the street and the next morning he received an Oscar nomination or the fact that you happened to be talking about the Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry the night he died.

  (Another dignified plus of being a twin without television is that Luther and Johnny have probably never watched the cartoon Superfriends, the one in which Aquaman and Superman and Wonder Woman teamed up to fight global crime. And thus, Luther and Johnny, unlike my sister and me, will never have to cringe at the memory of imitating the goody-goody, tights-wearing minor characters known as the Wonder Twins. Thus they’ll escape the embarrassment of having said the words “Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of … a straight-A student.”)

  The advantage of being a twelve-year-old guerrilla warrior in terms of twin self-esteem is not unlike the advantage of attending a private school—the uniforms. As American public school graduates, my sister and I know the trappings, the symbolism, of clothes. When we were toddlers, our mother dressed us alike. And if we weren’t wearing the same dress, we wore the same style in different colors. If she wore baby blue, I wore pink. If she wore navy blue, I wore red. Until the moment when we were maybe five and Amy informed our mother, “Mama, I don’t want my dress to be like Sarah’s.” In high school, she wore blue, I wore black. She wore pink and I wore black. Luther and Johnny, in their makeshift camo, will never go through that, the stereotyping, never know what it’s like to be labeled the gloomy, plain Jane or the girlie-girl blonde. Then again, they won’t crack themselves up by being the gloomy plain Jane and buying a red satin dress in front of Mom, just to see the look on her face. On the other hand, Amy and Sarah will never know the satisfaction of a job well done that comes with leading an army of children to their death.

  Someday, when Luther and Johnny are older—perhaps in exile—they’ll flip through their photo albums as my sister and I do at Christmas. Will they look fondly on the smoker-non-smoker snapshot the way we giggle over the Polaroid from 1974 in which Amy has thrown up on me in bed but I slept right through it and she thought it so hilarious she woke up my parents to get the camera and there she is, in color with the light on, smiling and pointing as I lie there peacefully, my Snoopy pajamas soaked in puke? Or the Sears portrait when we’re not yet two and I am blank and placid on the shag carpet fondling a plastic football and Amy’s a fidgeting glare, the light bouncing off her hot tears? Or perhaps Luther and Johnny, who reportedly cannot read, have never seen the photo and never will and so they’ll be less inclined to typecast each other the way everyone else does, the way I was the dark one and she was the blue-eyed blonde, the way I was the “smart” one and she was the “fun” one even though she’s really sharp and I’d like to think I’m not a total drag. Maybe, unlike someone who shall remain Amy, Luther is too caught up with training his blindfolded child followers in disassembling rifles to taunt Johnny with the fact that he was almost eight and still had training wheels on his banana-seat pink bike even though he, Luther, had been riding in the driveway solo since he was four.

  At twelve, Luther and Johnny probably already suspected twindom’s secret lesson. Namely, that no matter what they accomplished—who they trained, inspired, or killed—their greatest allure might be the circumstances of their birth. That to be a twin and to distinguish oneself besides is a bit of overkill. My sister and I were about their age when our family moved north. At our new school, we lived the preteen girl’s nightmare: we stuck out. We were not just new kids, and we were not just new kids with funny Okie accents. We were new kids with funny Okie accents and twins besides. It was more than our classmates could bear. The famous photo of Luther and Johnny catches them on the cusp of this twinly dread—of being too famous for too much too fast.

  Cowboys v. Mounties

  Canada haunts me. The United States’s neighbor to the north first caught my fancy a few years back when I started listening to the CBC. I came for the long-form radio documentaries; I stayed for the dispatches from the Maritimes and Guelph. On the CBC, all these nice people, seemingly normal but for the hockey obsession, had a likable knack for loving their country in public without resorting to swagger or hate.

  A person keen on all things French is called a Francophile. One who has a thing for England is called an Anglophile. An admirer of Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is called Pat Buchanan. But no word has been coined to describe Americans obsessed with Canada, not that dictionary publishers have been swamped with requests. The comedian Jon Stewart used to do a bit in which a Canadian woman asked him to come clean with what Americans really think of Canada. “We don’t,” he said.

  Keeping track of Canadians is like watching a horror movie. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers in slow-mo. They look like us, but there’s something slightly, eerily off. Why is that? The question has nagged me for years. Asking why they are the way they are begs the follow-up query about how we ended up this way too.

  There’s a sad sack quality to the Canadian chronology I find entirely endearing. I once asked the CBC radio host Ian Brown how on earth one could teach Canadian schoolchildren their history in a way that could be remotely inspiring, and he answered, “It isn’t inspiring.”

  Achieving its independence from Britain gradually and cordially, through polite meetings taking place in nice rooms, Canada took a path to sovereignty that is one of the most hilariously boring stories in the world. One Canadian history textbook I have describes it thus, “British North Americans moved through the 1850s and early sixties towards a modestly spectacular resolution of their various ambitions and problems.” Modestly spectacular. Isn’t that adorable?

  One day, while nonchalantly perusing the annals of Canadian history, I came across mention of the founding of the Mounties. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, called the North-West Mounted Police at its inception, was created, I read, to establish law and order on the Canadian frontier in anticipation of settlement and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In 1873, Canada’s first prime minister, John Macdonald, saw what was happening in the American Wild West and organized a police force to make sure Canada steered clear of America’s bloodbath.
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  That’s it. Or, as they might say in Quebec, voilà! That explains how the Canadians are different from Americans. No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead—Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It’s a mind-set of “Here I come to save the day” versus “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.” Or maybe it’s chicken and egg: The very idea that the Canadian head of state would come to the conclusion that establishing law and order before large numbers of people migrated west, to have rules and procedures and authorities waiting for them, is anathema to the American way.

  Not only did the Mounties aim to avoid the problems we had faced on our western frontier, especially the violent, costly Indian wars, they had to clean up after our spillover mess. In a nineteenth-century version of that drug-war movie Traffic, evil American whiskey traders were gouging and poisoning Canadian Indian populations. Based in Fort Benton, Montana, they sneaked across the border to peddle their rotgut liquor, establishing illegal trading posts, including the infamous Fort Whoop-up, in what is now Alberta. You can’t throw a dart at a map of the American West without hitting some mass grave or battleground—Sand Creek, Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee—but it’s fitting that the most famous such Canadian travesty, the Cypress Hills Massacre, happened because American whiskey and fur traders were exacting revenge on a few Indians believed to have stolen their horses. The Americans slaughtered between one and two hundred Assiniboine men, women, and children. Never mind that the horse thieves had been Cree. That was 1873. The Mounties were under formation, but they hadn’t yet marched west.