Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  The colours, the gorgeous costumes and the spirit of celebration completely overwhelm me. For all the negatives that I encountered on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, for all the righteous fury of Russell Means and others, it is clear to see that for many American Indians what comes first is pride.

  The Slaughterhouse Woman

  The next day is Easter Sunday, which I spend in Fort Collins, an attractive college town sixty miles or so due north of Denver. Our sound recordist, Adam, is so entranced by the atmosphere and charm of the place that he tells us all he is determined one day to come back and live here. Not since Ashville, North Carolina have we been in a town so refreshingly devoid of big-name chain restaurants and corporate franchise businesses and hotels. Adam is not alone in his delight. Fort Collins was voted Best Place To Live by Money magazine in 2006. Perhaps the presence of Colorado State University helps: certainly the profusion of pleasant, cheap restaurants and coffee shops bespeaks the student town.

  It is to the campus I come on Monday, to see Professor Temple Grandin, a person fully as remarkable as her name. My Easter Sunday day off has given me time to read her book Animals in Translation.

  Temple Grandin was born with autism. During her childhood the only diagnosis for this condition was ‘severe brain damage’. Possessed of a formidable will, a fine brain and an instinctive love of and connection with animals she grew up determined to use all those qualities. She has found the perfect job. She is–wait for it–America’s leading designer of humane slaughterhouses.

  With Prof. Temple Grandin at one of her cattle pens.

  Temple can ‘think like an animal’–that is to say she notices all the things that stress a stockyard animal during handling and transportation. When her work began she actually used to go on the walkways, crawl along the chutes and personally reproduce the journeys animals took from field to truck, from truck to yard, from yard to slaughterhouse. All rather grim. But she noticed everything. She noticed when rusty signs creaked, she noticed bright colours and reflections, she noticed blind turns, forbidding corners and spooky shadows. She instinctively understood the little things that freak animals out, little things that a ‘normal’ human would never pick up on. All these go together to create doubt, fear and stress, causing the animals to brace their legs and refuse to be budged, which congests the stock handling systems which in turn creates more congestion and more stress farther back down the line. Out come the electric cattle prods, the cattlemen zap and yell, further increasing the stress and further slowing down the system. Everyone’s day becomes increasingly hard and slow and strained, the profits go down (stress hormones prior to slaughter markedly reduce the quality of the meat) and no one is happy.

  Powwow celebrant, Denver.

  It used to be that people believed all this bother was inevitable. According to conventional wisdom, animals are ornery and dumb, they are hard to shift and hard to push round the stockyards and they always will be. Temple visited dozens and then hundreds of farms, ranches and slaughterhouses and was able to redesign systems and teach basic interpretative skills to the ranch hands and workers. The results were remarkable and Grandin is now Numero Uno in all of America when it comes to designing slaughterhouses, chutes, pens, walkways and the like. She also lectures regularly to veterinary students at Colorado State University. Quite an achievement for one labelled as ‘retarded’, ‘brain damaged’ and ‘unable to function in the world’.

  You may think that a person who loves animals would want nothing to do with systems designed for slaughtering them, but Temple is far from fluffy-bunny in her attitude to animals. Indeed, the whole point of her approach is to recognise how unlike us animals are. Their ideas of discomfort, unease and discontent are very different from ours. It is clear that her apprehension of what spooks, stresses and alarms an animal is extremely accurate: I wonder however if someone will come close one day to understanding what thrills, delights and pleases an animal? Do they respond to beauty in nature, for example? Can they detect, appreciate and value the difference between a dull urban sprawl and a mighty mountain landscape?

  * * *

  COLORADO

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  CO

  Nickname:

  The Centennial State

  Capital:

  Denver

  Flower:

  Rocky Mountain columbine

  Tree:

  Colorado blue spruce

  Bird:

  Lark bunting

  Mineral:

  Rhodochrosite

  Motto:

  Nil Sine Numine (‘Nothing Without Providence’)

  Well-known residents and natives: John Kerry, Horace ‘Go West Young Man’ Greeley, James Michener, Allen Ginsberg, Clive Cussler, Antoinette ‘Tony Award’ Perry, Ken Kesey, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Bill Murray, Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Don Cheadle, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, John Denver.

  * * *

  Stephens don’t ski.

  Aspen

  I defy any human not to be astounded and enchanted by a drive like the one I now take, from Fort Collins to Aspen. As we climb the switchbacks that girdle the Rockies it is easy to see why this region has become so desirable a winter destination and why resorts like Vail, Beaver Creek and Aspen have become so exclusive and so shatteringly expensive.

  Aspen, the best known town in this string of chi-chi ski resorts is about 7,890 feet above sea level, almost exactly a mile and a half: high enough for me to huff, puff and gasp and be glad that I gave up smoking a year ago.

  Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, David and Victoria Beckham, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman…Mariah Carey, Don Johnson, Jack Nicholson…Aspen is the Dubai of the North when it comes to glitzy residents, for many of whom Aspen will be the seat of their third or fourth residence, a little eight-or nine-million-dollar chalet–nothing fancy.

  They tell me the skiing is first rate, absolutely first rate. Stephens don’t ski, however, so this news is of little more than passing interest to me. I do like alpine resorts though; I enjoy the fresh air, the dazzling whiteness and the rumbustious rosy-cheeked cheerfulness of the adults and children. I have been on several skiing holidays where I have been content to get myself a ski-pass and be transported every morning to the highest café where I will sit writing letters, reading and sipping hot chocolate with rum in it while my friends fizz down the slopes. We meet for lunch and the whole thing is repeated in the afternoon.

  This morning in Aspen, I ascend the mountain, which adds another 3,000 feet or so to the elevation and also increases my breathless dizziness. Someone suggests a slug of Tabasco hot pepper sauce as a specific against altitude sickness. I fall for what is in my opinion a crude, cruel and childish practical joke.

  At the very top of the mountain I find a place which serves hot chocolate with a tot of rum, just the way I like it: the Aspen Mountain Club, annual subscription fees $175,000. Yes I know alcohol is the last thing one should have two miles above sea level, but fortunately my body doesn’t. I sip gently, taking away the taste of Tabasco and building up the strength to venture out onto the slopes. I am to join the resort’s Ski Patrol as they go about their duties and their training.

  The members of the patrol are what passes for Cool Dudes today–in other words they are skinny and sexless and skimpily bearded. They are entirely charming, however, and with great patience they drag me over the snow, pulling me on a sled until we reach an area where they are to set off a bomb. The idea is to prevent avalanches by starting small controlled ones. A klaxon sounds and we watch, from a safe distance, as a puff of snow blossoms out from the mountainside and, five seconds later, the sound of the explosion reaches our ears. No actual avalanche is precipitated by this detonation, which is apparently a good thing. I am most disappointed, however. I wanted a real show.

  The next thing to do is to find some children to bury. This is easily done. A bunch
of pert, intelligent and fabulously self-confident children bump into us and enquire about the cameras and sound equipment and, hey, wasn’t I in that film V for Vendetta?

  ‘I was, as it happens, yes,’ I tell them. ‘Perhaps you would like to be in this film?’

  ‘Sure. What’s the fee?’ Their father is a show-business agent in New York City.

  Once the negotiations have been agreed–which is to say once I have appealed to the children’s better natures and persuaded them to perform for free–two of the boys are taken off to be buried in the snow while I distract a sheepdog. The idea is that the dog will sniff around the snow, find out where the kids are buried and alert the patrol with a peal of frenzied barking. It would be cheating if the dog actually saw them getting into their hiding place, so I do my best to take its mind off the task ahead with cheerful prattle about sheepdogs I have known in Scotland.

  Snow patrol dog on the scent.

  Rescued!

  When all is ready, the dog is released and finds the children in their secret cache instantly, barking with joy at its own cleverness. Personally, I suspect it of peeping out of the corner of its eye while we were talking. We dig the children out and move on to the next job: piste maintenance. Aspen’s famous slopes are kept in their perfect condition by a fleet of specialised vehicles which comb, roll, tease, smooth and generally perfect the surface of the snow. Every night for hours and hours and hours the drivers of these snow cats groom the mountainside so that the rich and their children might slide happily down the mountainsides the following day. I try one of the vehicles out and, fun though it was, I decide not for the first time that work of this kind is best left to others. I return to the hotel and fall in with a couple of rich women who suggest I accompany them to a nightclub.

  I am faced then with two options: a) a nightclub filled with the rich, beautiful and famous or b) an early night alone in bed with a book. Never has any decision been easier.

  The book was gripping. I hope the girls had a nice time in their club.

  TEXAS

  ‘I cannot guess how many gallons of blonde colorant have been poured onto the assembled heads.’

  This entry is big, for Texas is big. Texas is very big. Everyone knows that. Nonetheless the Lone Star State likes to remind itself of this at all times. Commercials on TV and advertising hoardings talk of ‘Texan-size servings of beef’, ‘Enough space in the trunk of this car even for a Texan’, ‘Only one toilet paper is big enough for Texans…’ and so on. If ever a place mythologises itself that place is Texas.

  With its size, that tendency to self-mythologise, its iconography, its accent, its props, its cuisine and its history, Texas is able (and willing) to think of itself as a land apart more than any other state in the union (‘It’s a whole other country’ is the current state slogan). The Republic of Texas was a sovereign nation for the best part of ten years in the nineteenth century–its embassy in London was in St James’s and it remains memorialised to this day by a ‘cantina’ restaurant just off Trafalgar Square called The Texas Embassy.

  When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 it immediately claimed those lands we know today as Texas. Over the succeeding years European settlers and landowners, led by Steve Austin and Sam Houston (whose names live on in Texas’s capital and largest city respectively), prepared to secede from Mexico and claim independence. One day in 1835 Will Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie (of knife fame) and over a hundred other volunteers and regular soldiers came to defend the Alamo Mission in San Antonio from Mexico’s Generalissimo Santa Anna. A massacre and a defeat for the defenders, this action led to the Battle of San Jacinto in which the Mexicans were soundly beaten and Santa Anna was captured. The independent Republic of Texas was declared. By 1845 her experiment with nationhood was over and she joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state.

  Disgusting stuff…And my dear, the smell…

  The official slogan may be ‘Friendship before statehood’, yet one cannot but feel that for every true-born Texan the real state motto would be the words with which Sam Houston’s men went into battle at San Jacinto: ‘Remember the Alamo’. Statal pride is bigger here too.

  A cowboy state and an oil state: this image of Texas has continued right through history and through the thirteen-year run of the TV series Dallas. Oil is still important to the state, and in ways of which many Americans are not aware.

  Strategic Reserves

  Today I am visiting the federal government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves in Freeport, TX, just sixty-five miles south of Houston, right on the Gulf of Mexico.

  In the mid-seventies America and the rest of the world got one hell of a shock when the oil-producing OPEC countries not only began to push up the price of oil but also to embargo those nations that had traded with Israel. Rationing, mini-riots, hyper-inflation–the cost was disastrous and the United States government vowed that such a calamity would never happen again. And so they planned for the construction of vast sites where oil could be stored against any future shortage that might imperil the good order of the Republic.

  This being America and not Britain, all the data on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is instantly available. A quick glance at the Department of Energy’s dedicated site www.spr.doe.gov tells me that the reserve currently stands at 703.4 million barrels of oil, divided into 280.7 million of sweet crude and 422.7 million of sour. That is somewhere in the region of £90 billion dollars worth (though as I write the price of oil is rising daily). The full capacity is 727 million barrels, but this is deliberately being run down in order to help increase the amount of oil out in the market and therefore to reduce the price.

  There are four SPR sites: all of them are sited along the Gulf of Mexico and all of them employ the same technique for storing the oil. Essentially the oil is pumped into huge salt domes, natural phenomena that have formed over millions of years. The oil replaces the natural brine within and can remain in its salty caverns in tip-top condition, theoretically for eternity. Freeport is the largest of the US government’s facilities, capable of holding over a quarter of a billion barrels at any one time.

  I am allowed into Freeport’s heart after a fretful hour and a half’s wait in the most tigerishly fierce security area I have yet to visit in America. It took ten minutes to get on board the USS Springfield nuclear submarine in Groton, Connecticut, but here they really mean business. For some reason our director’s name and passport number had not been sent ahead and, despite the security guards believing in our bona fides, and the Freeport SPR press people being present to welcome us, we could not enter until the mystery of the director’s clearance was solved. He, poor man, got on the phone to Washington, in order to try and speak to the Department of Homeland Security PR person who had his official security clearance details and by a freak of good fortune he was wrongly put through to Alex, the very Border Patrol fellow who had escorted us to the Canadian border back in Montana, weeks ago. Words were spoken, faxes and e-mails sent and before another half hour had passed we pierced the perimeter.

  * * *

  TEXAS

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  TX

  Nickname:

  The Lone Star State

  Capital:

  Austin

  Flower:

  Bluebonnet

  Tree:

  Pecan

  Bird:

  Mockingbird

  Cooking implement:

  Dutch oven

  Motto:

  Friendship Before Statehood

  Well-known residents and natives: Lyndon B. Johnson (36th President), George H.W. Bush (41st President), George W. Bush (43rd President), Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Admiral Nimitz, Audie Murphy, Lady Bird Johnson, Sandra Day O’Connor, Jeb Bush, Ann Richards, John Wesley Hardin, Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, David Koresh, Katherine Anne Porter, Rex Reed, Patricia Highsmith, Horton Foot, Larry McMurtry, Kinky Friedman, Howard Hughes, Red Adair, Ross Perot, Michael Dell, Ro
bert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Tex Avery, Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Cyd Charisse, Debbie Reynolds, Dooley ‘Play It Again Sam’ Wilson, Sharon Tate, Larry Hagman, Dabney Coleman, Rip Torn, Farrah Fawcett, Gene Roddenberry, Shelley Duvall, F. Murray Abraham, Morgan Fairchild, Powers Boothe, Wes Anderson, Patrick Swayze, Sissy Spacek, Terrence Malick, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey, Kate Capshaw, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, Ethan Hawke, Forest Whitaker, Jerry Hall, Anna Nicole Smith, Robin Wright Penn, Jennifer Garner, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Carol Burnett, Steve Martin, Bill Hicks.

  * * *

  Jorge, the officer who was escorting us around the premises, explained to me the difference between sour crude oil and sweet. Sweet has fewer impurities and can be converted into gasoline cheaply, whereas sour needs to undergo extra refinement processes. Jorge even poured a flask of crude for me to inspect. Disgusting stuff: the smallest splash of it ruins clothes forever. What it does to the feathers of a seabird we know all too well from news footage of spills. And my dear, the smell…It is for this noxious, evil-textured stuff that wars are fought and fortunes made. It is somehow fitting that the black gold that fuels our entire civilisation is almost more disgusting than faeces.

  Donuts on Quintana Beach.

  Doing Donuts

  After an exhaustive and exhausting tour, my taxi and I feel like expending some of that vile substance in the most childish and politically unacceptable manner imaginable. Freeport, I have discovered, is only a few miles from Quintana Beach, one of only two in all America on which one is allowed to drive a private road vehicle without restrictions. The taxi and I spend a happy half-hour carving huge donuts on the sand. At one point I get a little overexcited and plough right into the surf–huge quantities of salt water invade the bonnet. I only hope there won’t be Consequences. Some of you reading this are doubtless thinking that they would be fully deserved. All I can say in my defence is…er…carbon offset. I promise. Honest.