Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  * * *

  ‘Little lamb, who made thee?’

  Feeding time.

  But will the sucker go on the tit? I do my best and manage to hook up about six sheep, but at the rate I’m going it will be time for evening milking before I’ve drained the last bag. It is the animals’ own blasted fault. It seems that every day a ewe must, like some rive gauche existentialist, reinvent herself daily and consequently she will have no idea what she did yesterday. She is frantic to be milked but cannot recall that the metal suction cups, far from being her enemy, are her friend and will bring her and her swollen udder nothing but relief. Such are the trials of being a Left Bank intellectual. Either that or she is very, very, very stupid.

  As a reward for my efforts, Brenda takes me to the outbuildings where the cheese-making takes place. Stirring the cream and adding the animal rennet that kickstarts the fermentation, that I can manage. I am even allowed a taste of their excellent cheese.

  Brenda’s farm does not use tractors or much modern machinery. She prefers carthorses and sledges to motorised transport and there is much to be said for it. I notice a pair of donkeys in the field.

  ‘They work too?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Brenda. ‘Security.’

  It seems that donkeys will scare off coyotes, wolves, humans–anything or anyone who comes close to the farm at night. Rather than patrols, electric fences, TV cameras or dogs, all a farm needs to keep its livestock safe is a pair of guard donkeys.

  I ride by horsedrawn sled to the neighbouring Amish farm, where there is some extra milk to be picked up. Two Amish men help me load churns onto the back of the sled.

  You are probably wondering why there are no photographs here of the Amish men. The Amish, members of a strict religious grouping descended from German and Swiss Mennonites, forbid electricity, telephones and–explicitly–photography. I found them charming, friendly, funny and kind, much more lively and high-spirited than I had expected of a people who live so old-fashioned a life: a life without formal education, television, radio, internet and cars. They speak a variation of German, the men grow beards without moustaches (an oddity they share with some fundamentalist Muslims) and their clothes are home made, as are their houses and barns. Their village was astounding beautiful and hauntingly quiet.

  Brenda and Dean tell me they are the perfect neighbours, kindly, helpful and strong, but also discreet, modest and completely unpushy.

  The Jensen sheep farm and cheesery.

  This part of Wisconsin is one of the few places I have visited in America where life feels simpler and more traditional than in even the remotest areas of Europe. And it is the first place in America I have visited where they get cheese. For that reason and that reason alone it will have a secure and permanent place in my heart.

  MINNESOTA

  ‘I catch a fish. And what a whopper. A sun fish that must have been nearly four whole inches. Possibly even four and a half.’

  In terms of temperature, Wisconsin, it turns out, was a mere John the Baptist to Minnesota’s Shivering Messiah of Cold.

  I arrive at the Twin Cities of St Paul and Minneapolis and have pointed out to me the enclosed pedestrian bridges above us. They link buildings across the streets at first-or second-storey level and there seem to be scores of them. They are called skyways and exist for one reason only. It is so unbearably freezing in winter that no one, no one, no matter how well wrapped up, wants to venture out onto the streets. The skyways allow the citizens to travel the city centre, shop, eat and work, without once exposing themselves to the arctic temperatures without. The car is in a heated garage at home, they drive to an underground car park (heated) and ascend by elevator to the office where they work or to the shopping centre they have come to visit. It means that in the coldest city in America most of the citizens go out in temperatures of -40 without gloves or a hat. The smart ones keep something in the trunk/boot, however. Just in case.

  Incidentally, you may be asking yourselves whether I mean Fahrenheit or Centigrade when I write -40º. Let me cause a frown of puzzlement to crease your pure and noble brow. It makes no difference. None whatever.

  Huh?

  Well, it just so happens that -40º is the temperature at which Celsius and Fahrenheit exactly meet. It’s one of those things.

  The simple traditions of ice-fishing.

  The Ice Hole: Augurs and Sonar

  Anyhoo, as they say up here in that Scandinavian-American accent made popular by Minnesotan natives Joel and Ethan Coen in their film Fargo. I am here to make the best of the cold weather. Those urbanite Minnesotans who avoid it in the Twin Cities have counterparts who embrace it.

  One of the most popular activities in the state is ice-fishing. In a ‘land of 10,000 lakes’, as Minnesota proudly calls itself, with winters in which the temperature often stays below freezing for months, you can devote almost half the year to an ice culture. Camper vans, tented villages, whole encampments grow up on the bodies of water that surround Minneapolis and St Paul. You can drive ten-ton trucks onto the ice, so thickly frozen it is.

  Viewed from the air (and I am lucky enough to get a plane ride over the city) these encampments can be seen to number in the hundreds. Mostly men. All devoted to fishing. And here we come close to the heart of the American character and its self-contradictory mosaic of oddities.

  Ice-fishing, as imagined by you and me, is a traditional sport, passed down from the Eskimos and Indians (we eschew the incorrect political correctness that would have us say ‘Inuit’ and ‘Native American’–they don’t say it themselves and they think we’re silly for trying). A traditional sport, but a simple one. A small hole is made in the ice. A little rod and line with a baited hook at the end is dangled in and we wait for our quarry to bite…

  Such a proceeding, ancient, primal and atavistic, is surely to be desiderated in a modern America of shopping malls and leaf-blowers? Time to wind down. To commune with a chilly but benign nature. To be at one with the wind and the snow and the frozen waters. A farewell to machinery and noise. Simplicity.

  If you think that, as I confess to having done, then it shows you still have much to learn about America. Principally about the American male, who is closer to Homer Simpson than ought to be allowed.

  Tools. Gear. Power machinery. Big trucks. Gadgets. Noise.

  I meet Tim at the bait and tackle shop where I buy my fishing licence. We drive in his enormous pick-up truck to the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The Minne element derives from a Lakota word meaning ‘water’. Minnesota means ‘clouded water’. If like me, as a child you were made to learn parts of Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’ (which is all set in Minnesota) you will remember the lines about Hiawatha’s lover: ‘Minnehaha, Laughing Water, / Handsomest of all the women’. Actually Minnehaha doesn’t mean laughing water, it means ‘curling water’, or waterfall, but I prefer Longfellow’s interpretation. Minnetonka, means ‘big water’ and driving around it to find Tim’s preferred fishing site, I could see that it was well named. It is nothing to Lakes Michigan or Superior, but its 140 miles of shoreline rather put Derwentwater and Windermere to shame.

  Hard to tell which is bigger, the pike or my mighty sun fish.

  Tim turns off the road and suddenly we are on the lake. We drive towards a huddle of tents and other trucks where Tim’s fishing cronies have already set up. I close my eyes and gulp a little. Of course Tim knows what he is doing. It is February and the ice is thick. It will not crack or melt. But that same part of me that cannot help thinking when the helicopter takes off or the plane bumps against the wind–‘Today is the day it all goes wrong. Today is the day I die’–that part of me is fully active. I can almost hear the ice creak beneath our preposterously huge tyres. ‘We are the straw that is breaking this mighty camel’s back,’ I whisper to myself. ‘It’s all over. Goodbye, cold world.’ The fact that I am writing this now shows how futile were my fears. Had I known what a battering the ice was yet to take I should have been even more timorous, howe
ver.

  While the fishing apparatus is taken down from the back of the truck I go for a ride on a Ski-doo. Strange machines and a little bumpier than my healing humerus would have preferred, but a style of travel that can certainly be described as fun. When I return, pink and frozen-cheeked, the equipment is ready to be put into operation.

  First there is the Icemaster King Power Auger. A pull on the start-rope and the sound of fifty chain saws rends the air. Tim grins widely. An American in heaven. He is a noble pioneer pitting his wits against nature and he has the plaid and the power tool to prove it.

  Within about forty seconds a perfect round hole has been made in the ice. Tim complains about the pile of slush that has to be kicked down into the hole before one can see it in all its perfection. It is natural that as the auger revolves and descends, slushy ice is sent up to the surface, like wood shavings or masonry powder when you drill. But there is a new piece of kit recently launched, which Tim will be buying next week–the Slusher. This attaches to a power drill and allows you to kiss goodbye to the misery of that pesky pile of slush. Instead of kicking it back down the hole (the work of a minute) you can now power it back down the hole. Bliss.

  So now we have a hole. But technology has more to offer. Down the hole is lowered a long tube at the end of which is sonar equipment. Yes. Sonar. The same sonar that was developed by the Royal Navy in the war to defend shipping against the U-Boat wolf packs.

  At the surface a screen reveals the results of the sonar’s soundings in green shapes that represent fish.

  Now Tim lowers a camera. A colour video camera.

  Finally I am handed a little rod which is weighted, baited and lowered.

  Ice-fishing is now a question of watching the sonar, which shows fish from some distance, and–as they approach the hook–turning your attention to the television monitor. When a fish swims into view you can twitch your rod a little to interest the fish in it and then–evil cackle–they are yours. Mwah-haha.

  Poor creatures. They really don’t stand much of a chance do they?

  Not much time passes, then, before I catch a fish. The first I ever caught in all my life. And what a whopper. A sun fish that must have been nearly four inches from head to tail. Four whole inches. Possibly even four and a half.

  * * *

  MINNESOTA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  MN

  Nickname:

  North Star State, Land of 10,000 Lakes, The Gopher State

  Capital:

  St Paul

  Flower:

  Pink and White Lady Slipper

  Tree:

  Red Pine

  State muffin:

  Blueberry

  Bird:

  Common Loon

  Motto:

  L’Etoile Du Nord (‘The Star of the North’)

  Well-known residents and natives: Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Frank Kellogg, Charles ‘Clinic’ Mayo, John S. ‘Doughboy’ Pillsbury, Charles Lindbergh, Kofi Annan, J. Paul Getty, Billy Graham, Robert Mondavi, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Robert ‘Zen’ Pirsig, Robert Bly, Anne Tyler, August Wilson, Charles ‘Peanuts’ Schulz, Garrison Keillor, Terry Gilliam, Mike Todd, William Demarest, Gig Young, Jane Russell, Tippi Hedren, Richard Widmark, E.G. Marshall, James ‘Gunsmoke’ Arness, Gale Sondergaard, George Roy Hill, Peter ‘Mission Impossible’ Graves, Mike ‘BJ in MASH’ Farrell, Jessica Lange, the Coen Brothers, Winona Ryder, Josh Hartnett, Vince Vaughn, The Andrews Sisters, Tiny Tim, Bob Dylan, Prince.

  * * *

  Tim’s friends at some neighbouring hole catch a pike that may be technically a little larger than my sun fish, but it is a lot less appealing. They return it to the frozen deeps, whilst I keep my sun fish. Naturally Tim has full cooking equipment: gas, pans, flatware and so forth. It is the work of a moment to sauté my fish in butter and share it around. Exquisitely delicious. The best fish I have ever had.

  What the huntsmen say is true: it tastes better if you have caught it, trapped it, shot it, netted it, harpooned it yourself.

  After all that excitement in the wilds of the lake, with nothing but engines, motors, heaters, snow machines, generators, computers, cooking equipment and trucks between us and raw, savage nature, it is time to return to the comforts of civilisation.

  Among the Hmong

  The next morning, before saying farewell to Minnesota I go to the Hmong market, to breakfast and to shop with State Senator Mee Moua, America’s first and only Hmong legislator.

  The Hmong, pronounced and sometimes spelled Mong, are a people who originated in China, but lived for many years in exile in Laos. They supported the US during the Vietnam War and many of them were settled in America during the 1970s, principally in Fresno and the Twin Cities of Minnesota.

  They thrived very quickly and their skills in agriculture and hunting were so impressive that they caused some resentment amongst established Minnesotans, who claimed they must be cheating and not obeying licensing and close season regulations. Despite not using two-stroke ice augers, wi-fi crossbows, motorised hunting knives, electric buttock-warmers and heat-seeking harpoons, the Hmong hunters seem constantly to outperform their European neighbours.

  Hmong food market

  Saint Paul.

  Blockbusters, Hmong style.

  This discomfort aside, the Hmong have integrated over the last generation or so to the extent that there is now some concern among their elders who are worried that the ancient language and traditions may be lost as Hmongs enter the army, serve abroad and generally enter mainstream life, indistinguishable from any other Chinese-Americans. Thus the cycle of insecurity and tension that has always characterised immigrant populations that join the great melting pot.

  My next state has faced fewer of these tensions than most. I am headed for Montana and the buffalo.

  THE ROCKIES, THE GREAT PLAINS AND TEXAS

  MONTANA

  ‘There is a lot of space here. A lot of space.’

  Not the most effulgent list of prominent citizenry, but while only Alaska, Texas and California may be larger in size than Montana, it is also true that only Alaska, Delaware and the Dakotas have lower populations. There is a lot of space here. A lot of space. And there is a line…a very famous line:

  I see a long, straight line athwart a continent. No chain of forts, or deep flowing river, or mountain range, but a line drawn by men upon a map, nearly a century ago, accepted with a handshake, and kept ever since. A boundary which divides two nations, yet marks their friendly meeting ground. The 49th parallel: the only undefended frontier in the world.

  From the prologue to the film 49th Parallel

  The phrase ‘49th Parallel’ is often used to describe the entire border between the US and Canada. Perhaps the title of that Powell and Pressburger film, starring Eric Portman and Laurence Olivier (wearing a moustache and one of his most absurd accents, that of a French Canadian trapper), contributed to this fallacy, for it is chiefly in the west that the frontier actually follows that line of latitude. Further east, cities like Toronto and Montreal are actually quite a long way south, on the 44th and 46th parallels. But here in Montana, all 550 miles of northern border are shared with Canada and follow–so much as the mapping technology of the nineteenth century allowed–the 49th line of latitude.

  As for the film’s claim that it is ‘the only undefended frontier in the world’…well, poor dear Canada may not have a reputation as a hotbed of insurgency and terrorism or arms, people and drug smuggling, but all American frontiers in the post-9/11 era are now guarded with a new and implacable urgency, so undefended it is not. Since 2002 the US Customs and Border Protection Service has been part of an overarching government body, the fearsome Department of Homeland Security. This status is reflected in new uniforms, a bigger budget and an even higher sense of patriotism and moral purpose.

  The Border

  I visit the border with patrolmen John and Alex, driving up from Shelby through the delightfu
lly named one-truck towns of Sunburst and Sweetgrass.

  And there she lies: the 49th Parallel. A fence. Not a formidable barrier, but a fence all the same. I watch with envy birds flying over without documentation or security checks of any kind. It is cold, very cold facing Canada in the northernmost part of Montana. It therefore comes as a shock when John tells me, with the smug air of one who knows that he is delivering a knockout blow, that here on the 49th we are on the same line of latitude as France. The line goes through Paris, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘So how come P-p-paris doesn’t get this c-c-c-cold?’ I ask, through chattering teeth. John has no answer for that. I have no doubt it has something to do with the Arctic (which is no nearer to us than it is to Paris, but no matter) and with mountains and winds and gulf streams. All the same.

  There is no action on the border. No would-be immigrants pressing their faces up against the wire.

  The following morning, when I fly over in a European AS350 A-Star helicopter (we are shown a grounded Black Hawk, but the rest were all in service, I am told) the same atmosphere of muffled winter hush pervades. This would be no time to attempt an illegal border crossing. Any human would be visible for miles. And there would be footprints that even I could track.

  * * *

  MONTANA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  MT

  Nickname:

  Treasure State, Big Sky Country, Land of Shining Mountains, The Last Best Place, The Bonanza State, the Stub Toe State

  Capital:

  Helena

  Flower:

  Bitterroot

  Tree:

  Ponderosa Pine