Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  AT THE OTHER end of Iceland, Grimsey Island feels like the last stop before the end of the world. This tiny tumour of rock, home to eighty or so hardy, self-contained souls, would be disregarded by the world at large were it not for a fluke of cartography: Grimsey perches neatly atop latitude 66°33’ N—the Arctic Circle. A road sign embedded in a cement block set exactly on the Circle displays the immense distances between Grimsey and anywhere else—16317 kilometres to where I grew up, for want of a better phrase, in Sydney; 4445 kilometres to my last assignment, in New York; 1949 kilometres to my home in London.

  Despite Grimsey’s windswept remoteness, I’m not keen to leave, for two reasons. One is that Grimsey’s windswept remoteness is rather beguiling: its subtle colours are delicately enriched by the late-night sunshine, and the clouds of arctic tern that eddy and swirl around the cliffs have a hypnotic compulsion about them, at least until they realise I’m standing within a mile of their nests and start going for my eyes—I suddenly understand why all the children on the island are wearing bicycle helmets. The other reason I don’t want to leave is that leaving is going to involve getting back aboard the plane I arrived on.

  Flying at the best of times—by which I mean sitting in a posh seat up the front with movies and video games in a nice big jet-engined aircraft on a calm, clear day—is about my least favourite thing in the world, comprised as it is of long periods of extremity-numbing boredom interspersed with moments of pure, sweaty-palmed terror. This is not the best of times. The daily flight between Grimsey and Iceland’s northern regional capital of Akureyri is a dice with the crosswinds that ensnare the island and befoul the Eyjafjördur fjord into which Akureyri airport’s runway juts. Yesterday, the pilot tells me, the twin-propeller, twelve-seater winged lawnmower that plies the twenty-minute route had been forced to turn back halfway. Our flight here had inspired in me an unprecedented interest in prayer, and had ended with an almost vertical dive onto Grimsey’s runway, which is carved out of the side of a hill. Since then, the wind has, if anything, picked up.

  “You know,” says the pilot, who has either been driven insane by the job or was born mad enough to apply for it, “sometimes we have to wait for the weather. Haha! Once, we couldn’t leave for two weeks! Haha!”

  Hilarious.

  “Haha! Yes! One of the passengers was supposed to be getting married! In Akureyri! You can imagine! Haha!”

  Perhaps you had to be there. Half a dozen of Grimsey’s cycle-helmet-encumbered children gambol up and down the runway, waving sticks and yelping, to clear the birds sitting along it.

  “Yes! Haha! They can get into the propellers! Cause big mess! Maybe even crash! Haha!”

  The children or the seagulls?

  “Haha! You are funny guy! Haha!”

  The flight back to Akureyri is the longest twenty minutes of my life; the only other occasion I can remember time limping by quite so agonisingly slowly, I was reviewing The Eagles’ reunion concert at Wembley Stadium. The tiny aeroplane pitches and lurches like a drunk man on a wonky footpath. The hoots and whines of the engine struggle to be heard over the hooting, whining wind, and the tormented creaks of the aircraft’s structure compete with periodic shrieks of “Haha!” that emanate from the cockpit. Approaching the runway, the plane bounces in mid-air with such violence that, my circulation-threateningly tight seatbelt notwithstanding, I crack my head against the ceiling, drawing blood. “Haha!” says the pilot.

  Five quid a pint or not, I’ve earnt a drink, and I head into town to see what Akureyrians do for fun of an evening. Unbelievably, what they do is drive their cars in slow, nose-to-tail laps of the tiny main street and the two car parks at each end of it. The waitress in the bar I’m watching this nonsense from explains that the ritual is called the runtur—a wheeled version of the Spanish corso, a sort of ritualised showing off. Unfortunately, only three of Akureyri’s young blades have got the kind of motors necessary for doing this kind of adolescent preening properly—the owners of the Dodge GTS, the Ford Mustang and the Corvette. Everyone else here is starring in their own private Icelandic Graffiti in Saabs, Hondas and Renaults.

  A LITTLE LESS than twelve months later, I’m back in Reykjavik, where it could not be said that Iceland’s geologic majesty is high on anyone’s list of priorities. A planeload of British press has been flown here by the Icelandic Arts Council, or someone, to experience an Icelandic Pop Festival, or something.

  It strikes me sometime after midnight on the Friday that this is probably the most confused, exhausted and disoriented I’ve ever been, at least since that Eagles gig at Wembley. Four days ago, on Monday morning, I woke up in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. I’d got back to London, via Islamabad, on the Tuesday afternoon. On Thursday night I was on a plane to Reykjavik. Friday morning, I’d woken up in a park near the hotel.

  And now I’m in a bar flooded with dazzling midnight sunlight, surrounded by Reykjavik’s improbably perfectly-formed populace and several rather less exquisite fellow journalists, all behaving like Russian submariners on shore leave. The music is deafening and dizzying, and the vodka cocktails are not helping. I keep thinking that a week ago I was urging a Kabuli taxi driver to step on it a bit, lest we be caught blundering through the powercut-darkened streets after curfew, and I keep wishing that I could have brought my Afghan translator here with me tonight, so he could get some idea of how completely his city had perplexed me. If I’d told him what it was like to be right here, right now, where literally everything happening would, in his home town, be punishable by public flogging, he’d have thought I was winding him up, again.

  “I have sent my boyfriend to the bar for some drinks,” she’s saying.

  Well . . . okay. Though it must be my round by now.

  “We have probably five minutes before he comes back. Let’s get out of here.”

  Outside, there are no taxis, just the amiable affray that is closing time in downtown Reykjavik. Still, she’s a woman as resourceful as she is determined. She flags down a passing car.

  “Where are you staying?”

  The kid behind the wheel thought he was taking his mates home, but he resigns himself to events as quickly as I have. I tell him where the hotel is, and she writes him a cheque for his trouble while he drives.

  We’ve made it as far as my room when something occurs to her.

  “The babysitter!” she says, retrieving her shoes. “My God! I must go home at once and pay her.”

  Okay . . .

  “In three weeks I will be in London. I have your number. I will come to stay with you.” She never rang.

  26

  MAGICAL MISSOURI TOUR

  Branson

  NOVEMBER 2008

  I WROTE SOMETHING elsewhere in this volume about my bafflement regarding, and/or horror of, holiday destinations. So it may seem nearly as peculiar to the passing reader as it did to me that when I visited a place that exists for no other reason than to be a destination in which people take holidays, I had about as fine a weekend as I can imagine enjoying.

  This was, granted, substantially to do with the company. A lot of the travelling I’ve done has been solo, and there is much to be said for that. Alone in an unfamiliar place, your perceptions are raw and immediate. Liberated from having to care overmuch what anyone else thinks of you, you’re more open to allowing yourself to be led even further astray than you already are: there is a wondrously whimsical aspect to sauntering along a city street secure in the certain knowledge that you are not going to bump into anybody you know. You could be anyone, and so could everyone else.

  That much acknowledged, an astute choice of travelling companion can make anywhere the only place you’d want to be—even, yes, Branson, Missouri (though possibly not Ashford, England—there are limits). Sartre was entirely correct when he observed that hell is other people, but he’d have been just as accurate—if much less appealing to subsequent generations of moody students in maladroitly applied eyeliner—if he’d observed that heaven is constructed of precise
ly the same material.

  And counter-intuitive though it may seem, Branson was probably as pure a travel experience as I’ve had. The place is, yes, a tourist trap of elephantine proportions. However, Branson is unusual among tourist traps in that it is only being what it is, rather than trying to be what it thinks visitors might want. Most tourist destinations, whether Caribbean resorts, Spanish hotel complexes, paradisical tropical islands the world over, labour to make their guests feel, essentially, like they’re still at home but someone has turned the weather up—encounters with the reality of the locality, if they must be endured, tend to be restricted to picturesque ruins and waiters in silly waistcoats. Branson, by contrast, is everything the self-conscious travel snob who ostentatiously abjures such places generally claims to seek—an unadulterated and authentic expression of a living native culture. Honestly, the only thing I’d change about the place is the volume of the thunderstorm sound effects at the indoor jungle-themed mini-golf course—Branson is a justly popular destination for veterans’ reunions, and I’m not sure the combination of dense foliage and sudden loud noises is a congenial one for all its visitors.

  The editor who commissioned this assignment, Rahul Jacob at The Financial Times’ travel section, instructed that I refrain from sneering at my subject, and quite rightly so. Branson, for all its indisputable—and utterly undisguised—foibes, and its breezy brashness, is an altogether unassuming place, and I didn’t meet a single person who wasn’t courteous, chatty, and hospitable. I would be appalled to learn that anyone who had read my dispatch was inspired to visit Branson in order to laugh at it. Laughing with Branson, of course, is fine—especially once you realize how wise, warm, and refreshingly lacking in malice the joke is. This one’s for my Huckleberry friend, without whom it would very likely have soared over my head.

  IN A SOUVENIR shop in Branson’s downtown district, I am given, with the most purehearted of intent, the least helpful directions I have ever received. “The post office?” says the woman behind the counter. “Go around the corner, walk three blocks, it’s the building with the big American flag out front.” In Branson, Missouri, this is approximately as helpful as saying “It’s the building”: everything has a big American flag out front.

  TO FOREIGNERS WHO’VE heard of it, and to many Americans, Branson is a punchline: a chintzy, cheesy, corny, hopelessly downmarket destination, an above-ground cemetery for has-been and never-will-be entertainers and those visitors whose critical faculties are sufficiently derailed by old age to appreciate them. It represents an America generally disdained and/or misunderstood by foreign tourists, who tend to gravitate to big cities on the coasts—and it’s the very definition of what metropolitan Americans mean when they snort, “flyover country.” Branson is a place altogether unburdened by the ironic, a place where one may—as someone has—open a theatre bar called God & Country, knowing that nobody will think this gauche, a place where all the applause is sincere. It’s also great fun, so long as your idea of fun includes jungle-themed indoor mini-golf, four-storey go-kart tracks and listening to lesser Osmond brothers singing Christmas carols on a Friday morning in November.

  Even if all those things are your idea of fun—and they are mine, or can be, given the right company and blood alcohol level—you still really have to want to go to Branson. The sole irony available in Branson is its location: though Branson exists almost exclusively for tourists, it is situated almost exactly in the middle of nowhere, tucked into the Ozark mountains along Missouri’s border with Arkansas. It has no airport of its own (though one is, at the time of my visit, scheduled for imminent opening, only half a century after the debut of Branson’s first live theatre show, The Baldknobbers’ Hillbilly Jamboree; according to the literature I have been emailed, this show is still going, though without, I’m assuming/hoping, much of the original cast). The nearest place I can fly to is Springfield, which has no connections to any of the major coastal hubs (I travelled from Philadelphia via Dallas). Even once I’ve made it that far, I’m still an hour by road from my destination, and there are no buses (most people who go to Branson do so in their own vehicles, or on the coaches provided by whichever old folks’ package tour they’ve booked). For a non-driving such as myself, the only option is to make some taxi driver very happy indeed.

  Fortunately, however, I do really want to go to Branson, and the billboards lining Route 65 from Springfield do nothing to temper my anticipation. Most of these advertise live performances by people I’d have assumed, had I given them any thought in the last three or four decades, were long dead: Roy Clark, Bill Medley, Paul Revere and the Raiders. Others boast truly treasurably crass copywriting and/or inadvertent prompts to ponder such interesting questions as why some disasters become entertainment, and others do not: Branson’s Titanic museum is touted as “a family experience,” which is not a billing anybody would bestow upon a memorial to the Hindenburg or the Lusitania.

  My lodgings in Branson are in the Hilton situated in the new Branson Landing shopping complex by Lake Taneycomo. Branson Landing is an attempt to combine the facilities of a modern shopping mall with the folksy charm of a small country town. Which is to say that Branson Landing is a reasonable approximation of hell. In a thoughtfully diabolical touch, muzak is broadcast through speakers mounted outside the shops—a looping selection of Yuletide standards punctuated, bafflingly, by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Up Around The Bend,” possibly a wry reference to where this soundtrack will swiftly drive a sane person. The racket is still audible in my hotel suite above the arcade, even after I’ve closed all the windows. It feels a bit like suffering the onset of a delusional psychosis in which one is convinced that one is receiving secret instructions from Mariah Carey, with specific reference to what she wants for Christmas.

  In the middle of Branson Landing, an American flag flies above a fountain fitted with a battery of ten flamethrowers. At sunset, the festive hits are mercifully, if temporarily, silenced and the speakers bellow “The Star Spangled Banner” as jets of water and eruptions of flame roar towards the pinking sky. And all the shoppers shuffle to a stop, and hold their baseball caps over their hearts.

  ALMOST EVERYTHING IN Branson is arranged along one road, a highway called Route 76, known locally as The Strip. A drive along The Strip offers sights including—but by no means limited to—a museum in the shape of the Titanic, a motel resembling a riverboat, a souvenir barn painted in the black and white patchwork of a Friesian cow, a replica of Mount Rushmore featuring the heads of John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin, a Veterans’ Memorial Garden festooned with yellow ribbons, a statue of a horse draped in the Confederate flag, and one theatre (specifically, the Dolly Partonowned Dixie Stampede) whose digital billboard promises a dinner show including ostrich-and pig-racing (to my sorrow, if not surprise, tickets are sold out).

  Two things are essential to the proper enjoyment of these and other attractions. One is resolve to appreciate Branson on its own merits—Branson is so disarmingly guileless that adopting any attitude of lofty aesthetic superiority, though the material to encourage same is abundant, would be as hollow a triumph as riffing wittily on the sandiness of the Sahara. The other is someone else: a course of three of Branson’s Christmas shows in one day is not something that can or should be undertaken without moral support. I am joined in this enterprise by a friend of mine who lives in Missouri, knows Branson well and indeed goaded me into pitching it to the Financial Times‘ travel section in the first place, so it seems like the least she can do.

  There’s a third, though obviously optional, item of psychological equipment which feels necessary to us: that somewhat dazed, dulled, impenetrably bemused mindset that one can only bring to bear on a day’s outing when one has prepared oneself carefully the night before by sleeping far too little and drinking far too much. Suitably fortified, which is to say burdened by hangovers which are a hazard to overflying birdlife, we report to the Branson Variety Theatre for the 10:00 AM performance o
f the Spirit of Christmas show (Branson theatres keep weird hours, to accommodate the schedules of tourist buses and the bedtimes of the city’s mostly pensionable visitors—not much happens after 10:00 PM, and many venues stage three shows every day). From the carpark behind the Branson Variety Theatre, I can see another venue, a gleaming leviathan called the White House Theatre, upon which is painted, in immense blue letters, the definitive, reductive Branson enticement: “SHOWS & FOOD.”

  The reasons we have settled upon the Spirit of Christmas show to the exclusion of everything else on offer—Branson, population 7,435, has 53 theatres, 207 hotels and 458 restaurants—are the guest stars: Wayne, Jay and Jimmy Osmond. The latter still enjoys a certain infamy back in Britain, thanks to his vexingly unforgettable 1972 hit “Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool.” Released when Little Jimmy Osmond, as he was then known, was just nine years old, it remains plausibly the worst UK Number One single ever: the sort of thing only grandmothers liked. It is a demographic that has remained loyal: an aerial shot of the pre-show throng in the lobby would resemble a crocheted quilt cover of blue and silver. It is doubtless in acknowledgement of the audience’s age, and the bodily aches that time engenders, that the concession stand sells aspirin along with popcorn and ice cream, but all things—and by “all things,” I mean temples throbbing like the bass guitar part in The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses”—considered, I am not ungrateful.

  Most of the Spirit of Christmas show consists of a chorus line capering to numbingly predictable Christmas favourites in exactly the costumes you’d expect them to wear. The dancers are competent at best, but their rather overlong routines at least allow plenty of time for whispered-behind-programme speculations about the cast—which backing hoofer is conspiring to overthrow the female lead, which is the impressionable sidekick abetting her in this treachery, which male dancer has most often prompted his father to declare that “the boy ain’t right,” etcetera.