Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  Russell Means, Indian activist, writer and film actor.

  I have come to talk to Russell Means, a celebrated and controversial American Indian writer, activist and, latterly, film actor. I have been reading his autobiography, Where White Men Fear To Tread and am anxious to meet him.

  Means comes across gloriously like the noble and romantic Indian chief of one’s imagination: a mahogany face, hawk nose, hair braided into long plaits and a voice that summons drums in the mind. He is angry, however, and as he tells his life story, his rage at what the white man has done to the Indian surfaces. He tells of his early days, drifting around America at the whim of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, his political enlightenment and recruitment into AIM, the American Indian Movement which paralleled for the Indians what the Black Panthers were doing for the African-Americans. All this led to the sit-in of Mount Rushmore (on which he famously relieved himself) and the occupation of Wounded Knee, a 71-day siege that captured the attention of the whole world in 1973.

  Means’s rhetorical gifts, his genuine fury and his unquenchable energy make him a splendid subject for interview. He has some views which are unsustainable in fact and unorthodox to the point of lunacy: there are no Lakotan words for ‘war’ or ‘weapon’, he tells me firmly at one stage, adding that the whole idea of warlike Indians was invented by the Europeans. He overplays the spiritual ‘earth father’ card in that tiresome way that suggests all Europeans are emotionally constipated, materialist, bellicose, territorial and entirely without spirituality in their history or culture. Such exaggerations, distortions and wishful thinking do little to add credibility to his cause, which has now become the secession from America of the entire Lakotan people, whom he has declared a sovereign nation with rights over the Dakotas and large parts of the neighbouring Great Plains states, withdrawing his new nation from all existing treaties with the Unites States. He claims that some UN countries are interested in recognising this new state and he is dismissive of the majority of the Lakota people who have not followed him and whom he does not, in any political sense, represent, comparing them to the French under Vichy rule. For all his faults, vanities and bombastic overstatements, I admire Russell Means enormously. He has behaved with extraordinary courage throughout his life and been a passionate, eloquent and determined advocate for his people.

  Site of the massacre at Wounded Knee.

  Wounded Knee

  The next morning I stop off at Wounded Knee. I try to imagine being born an American Indian in today’s United States. Who am I? What are my prospects? A life of alcohol and sugar-rich junk food which my system has not evolved to process without the risk of alcoholism, obesity and diabetes and the grim spectre of almost permanent unemployment. I would have nothing to look back on but an outrageous history of cruelty, betrayal and neglect by the White Man, the heritage of such monstrous crimes as the Wounded Knee massacre and a sentimentalised view of the previous unsullied holy perfection of my own people. How terrible for my pride to know that much of my income comes from my mother and sisters making dream-catchers and beaded knick-knacks for white tourists on the very site of that massacre and that my best hope of prosperity is to leave the lands my ancestors fought so hard to retain and to try and make it as an integrated, miscegenated American in the big city. Why would I not feel victimised and oppressed, why would I not become bitter and angry?

  Mel, a Lakota deputy sheriff I meet, tells me that such negative thinking must stop. ‘It is time,’ he says, ‘for young Indians to shake off their sense of being victims and to take responsibility for who they are now. We can go on howling about the past or we can embrace the future.’ Mel is married to a white woman, Lisa, who happens to be the local tribal court judge. She lets me sit on a sad case of ‘elder abuse’.

  That evening I watch the children at Pine Ridge High playing ‘the hand game’, a traditional Lakotan betting game, I listen to the boys drumming and chanting and I sit in on a class in which traditional decorative beading is being taught. In another one-to-one class, a young boy called Jesse is being taught the Lakota language by his grandfather.

  Somewhere between Deputy Sheriff Mel’s insistence that his people must forget the past and the sight of young Lakotans enthusiastically connecting with their ancestral traditions must lie a future in which these proud and abused people can lead fulfilled modern lives without turning their back on their history or losing their unique identity.

  To be honest I had been dreading three nights on a reservation. In the end I enjoyed myself here as much as I have anywhere.

  The tribal court at Pine Ridge reservation.

  Deputy Sheriff Mel shows me his badge.

  NEBRASKA

  ‘I finally succumb and buy a hat, the kind of western cowboy hat that no Briton can wear without looking like ten types of dick.’

  Mile after mile after mile of grassy plain lies between Nebraska’s border with South Dakota and my destination, the town of Grand Island. They call this country the sandhills, where the plains undulate gently and the grey-green grass heaves and swells like the sea.

  Nebraska is a farming state: it was born of the great land grabs of the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government offered free land to whomever could scramble to it and claim it for their own. These homesteaders grew corn and raised cattle and lived a Great Plains life. Then came the Union Pacific railroad, which passed right through Grand Island, giving it quite a reputation as a place of high living and loose morals. The great days of the railroad are over of course, but Grand Island has since benefited, if that is the word, from having one of the great Interstate Highways run plumb spang through it.

  Highways and Byways

  It has taken me some time to get my head around the way the American road system works. There are words that anyone who has watched as much American cinema and television as I have is bound to be familiar with: interstate, highway, turnpike, parkway and so on, but what do all the numbers mean and how does it all connect up? Allow me to quote more or less directly from the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration website.

  * * *

  NEBRASKA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  NE

  Nickname:

  Cornhusker State

  Capital:

  Lincoln

  Flower:

  Goldenrod

  Tree:

  Cottonwood

  Bird:

  Western meadowlark

  State dance:

  Square dance

  Motto:

  Equality before the law

  Well-known residents and natives: Gerald Ford (38th President), Crazy Horse, William Jennings Bryan, Dick Cheney, Malcolm X, Gutzon ‘Mount Rushmore’ Borglum, L. Ron ‘Ludicrous Fraudster’ Hubbard, Warren Buffet, Harold Lloyd, Fred Astaire, Darryl F. Zanuck, Gordon MacRae, Henry Fonda, Robert Taylor, Marlon Brando, Dorothy McGuire, Montgomery Clift, Sandy Dennis, Ward Bond, James Coburn, David Janssen, Nick Nolte, Hilary Swank, Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, Ruth Etting, Max Baer, Andy Roddick.

  * * *

  America’s National Highway System consists of 160,000 miles of road. Within that there are the following subsystems:

  Principal Arterials: these are highways in rural and urban areas which provide access between an arterial and a major port, airport, public transportation facility, or other intermodal transportation facility.

  The Strategic Highway Network (the Orwellian sounding STRAHNET): a network of highways important to the United States’ strategic defence policy providing defence access, continuity and emergency capabilities for defence purposes.

  Major Strategic Highway Network Connectors: highways which provide access between major military installations and highways which are part of the Strategic Highway Network.

  Intermodal Connectors: these highways provide access between major intermodal facilities and the other four subsystems making up the National Highway System.

  The Eisenhower Interstate
System. I have no idea what the foregoing means either. I wouldn’t know an ‘intermodal facility’ from a lettuce leaf. The important fact for our purposes is that there is a whole separate network within the main Highway System, the Eisenhower Interstate System–the equivalent of our motorway network but more, so much more.

  The Eisenhower Interstate System

  You might blanch at the prospect of me enlarging any further on this subject, but–as they say in call centres–bear with me, it really is jolly interesting. It concerns, after all, the greatest public-works project in the history of our species.

  In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration released the budget and set in motion the creation of an enormous network of major roads, connecting all the great metropolitan areas of America. Those who fought in Europe had been mightily impressed by the German autobahn system and the American automobile industry, amongst other pressure groups, was desperate for the United States to have something similar. In today’s money the whole project can be estimated as having cost something in the region of half a trillion dollars: $500 billion. A bargain. America could never work the way it does without these roads: 46,000 miles of high quality, federally funded roadway connecting east to west, north to south in a vast network. As one who has travelled along what seems all of it, I can testify to the astounding quality; there are amazingly few cones, construction sites and contra-flows and while much of it passes through thoroughly boring, samey and uninspiring countryside, there are interstate sections as beautiful as any railway line in Europe, traversing mountains and forests and lakes and gorges and valleys of heart-stopping beauty. Sometimes an interstate is a two-lane road, sometimes three or, in cities, as many as four, five or six lanes wide. Sometimes the speed limit is 55 mph, sometimes 75. It will depend on the state.

  Bruce’s rig at the Boss Grand Island Truck stop, Nebraska.

  The numbering system is simple once you get the hang of it: east–west roads have even numbers designated to them and north–south get the odd numbers. Hence the monumental I-95, the east coast interstate from Maine to Florida or the I-70 from Utah to Maryland, which was the first interstate to be built in America.

  Which brings us back to Nebraska. The railroad which once dominated the economy of Grand Island has been replaced by the I-80, one of the great transcontinental roads, second only in length to the I-90 (Boston to Seattle).

  Interstate 80 begins life in downtown San Francisco and ends in the New York suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey. Or should that be it starts in Teaneck and ends in San Francisco? Who is to say?

  In the West and Midwest it passes through Oakland, Berkley, Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Lincoln, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, South Bend and Cleveland before heading off through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, crossing between those two states on the beautiful Delaware Water Gap.

  The I-80 also passes through Grand Island, Nebraska.

  All along such a great road, it goes without saying, there will be filling stations, eateries and motels, services encapsulated in the common sign ‘Gas Food Lodging’. For me in my taxi these are the scourge of my waistline. A three-hundred-mile journey along an interstate is only made tolerable by regular stops for diesel, beef jerky, Rees’s Peanut Butter Cups, trail mix, fizzy drinks and bottles of weird energy drinks that keep one awake at the price of tremblings and shakings and manic screechings at the wheel.

  But there are other road users for whom my piffling journeys are as nothing. I am talking about the long-haul truckers.

  For this legendary figure there has grown up an institution called the truck stop. Rarely glimpsed by the non-professional road user, I am to be given an insight today…if I can reach Grand Island in time, that is. My route south from the Dakotas is via slow state highways through the towns of Valentine and Broken Bow and I am anxious to arrive at the truck stop before sundown.

  Some truck stops are little more than diners with big enough forecourts for lorries to park in–not much different from our own transport cafés, but the Boss Truck Stop, is on a bigger scale entirely. There are shops, showers, truck-washing facilities, a variety of food outlets and a massive area for parking the rigs in herring-bone formations in designated bays. Motel rooms are on offer, but most truckers prefer to sleep in their cabins. There are also rumours of that legendary creature, the Lot Lizard, a prostitute who specialises in truckers. Naturally her existence is denied by all.

  Potions to help keep the sleepy trucker awake.

  My first stop is the main store, which sells everything: silver trucking mascots, dentist-style mirrors for checking under your vehicle, more of those judder-inducing energy drinks, all kinds of clothes. Having promised myself I wouldn’t be such an ass, I finally succumb and buy a hat. Not a ten-gallon Stetson, but unmistakably the kind of western cowboy hat that no Briton can wear without looking like ten types of dick. Oh well. I also manage to add to my collection of American state fridge magnets. By the end of my journey I should have them all. Time to go outside and pick up a trucker.

  Designed for checking under your vehicle, but handy for male-grooming too.

  Bruce shares the philosophy of the road.

  The European juggernaut has nothing on the great American trucking rig. The pride in the paintwork, the vertical chimney-style exhaust, the sheer scale is of another order entirely. I stand around hoping to fall into conversation with one of the drivers. It is close to sunset now and lorries are turning in from the highway at a rate of ten a minute.

  Finally I meet Bruce as he clambers down from his huge magenta cabin. He agrees to take me out on the road the following morning. He is headed for Pennsylvania.

  ‘Eight o’clock sharp,’ he says on his way to the main complex.

  ‘On the dot,’ I assure him.

  Someone in our crew oversleeps. We arrive at 8.20 a.m., Bruce’s engine is running and he is all ready to go. He is too American and therefore too polite to bawl us out but I can tell he thinks little of the professionalism of a film crew that can’t honour an agreed rendezvous time.

  We drive east along I-80, into the rising winter sun.

  Bruce is the perfectly imperfect interviewee–laconic and unsentimental. He comes from North Carolina and went into trucking because he likes to be his own boss and because, quite simply, he enjoys driving. I ask questions about the maverick status of the trucker, his ideals, his world view, his sense of himself and the great Open Road of America. Bruce vouchsafes little more than a grunt or an ‘I don’t know’ to what now sound like, in my ears, absurdly pretentious and irrelevant questions.

  He is a trucker. He drives a truck. He does this in America, so the distances are sometimes great. He likes to be punctual. He enjoys his work. He is a trucker, not a philosopher or a poet or a songwriter. He drives trucks. End of story.

  I respect that.

  KANSAS

  ‘Somewhere in the wilds of Shawnee County, past battered, storm-shattered shacks, I find Subterra Castle.’

  Is there a state in the Midwest that does not have the western meadowlark as its official bird? Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming have all chosen it. There are sandhill cranes which fly in stunning formations over the waving grasslands of Nebraska, why should the western meadowlark be so special? And now Kansas too has joined the unimaginative majority of Great Plains states in electing this bird, which is after all no more than a blackbird in fancy dress, to stand as avian ambassador for their state.

  If you were asked to look at a map of America and stab your finger down in the middle, the chances are it would land in Kansas. Authoratitive sources tell me however that ‘the geographical centre’ of the United States is in fact seventeen miles to the west of the town of Castle Rock in Butte County, South Dakota. To my eye that just looks wrong. Too far north, surely? You have a look at the map and see if I’m right.

  The geodetic centre of America, whatever that might be, is in Osborne County, Kansas–or at least was until 1983. It is all ve
ry odd. I am beginning to think geographers and cartographers are unseemly weirdos in need of a good slap.

  What comes to mind when we say ‘Kansas’? Tornadoes of course, thanks to Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz. Kansans suffer on average more than fifty serious episodes a year. Sunflowers–Kansas is America’s leading producer. ‘I’m as corny as Kansas in August,’ Nellie sings in South Pacific, revealing that corn too is a major crop, although in fact Kansas grows more wheat than maize. The state, like Noël Coward’s Norfolk, is very flat. Perfect for planting cereal crops no one can deny, but perhaps not the most geographically dramatic or aesthetically enticing experience that America has to offer.

  ‘Battered, storm-shattered shacks that look as though Dorothy and Toto might still be living in them.’

  Glen Campbell’s lineman came from Wichita, which is in Kansas of course, as is Smallville, Clark Kent’s beloved home town. I guess Siegel and Shuster chose Kansas for the Man of Steel because it is the precisely the state most Americans think of when they picture the Midwest. In other words, whether it is geographically and geodetically central or not, Kansas is in many respects the emotional and cultural heart of the Midwest, which is itself often referred to as America’s Heartland. All the downhome virtues and none of the metropolitan vices–that is the image.

  And where shall my journey to the heart of the Heartland take me?

  Why, underground. Deep underground. And back in time to the height of the Cold War.

  Subterra Castle, Kansas.