Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

‘Really? Well…each to his own.’

  ‘See, if I can prove there are red tree voles nesting…’

  ‘Is it rare then, this red tree vole?

  Endangered?’

  ‘Not so much. Let’s put in here.’

  We beach the raft and clamber out. We start to walk through the forest. And walk and walk and walk.

  With Laura and Nate: Social embarrassment: we all chose the same top to wear.

  Black water rafting on the Rogue River.

  Vole poo captured on camera phone.

  After three or four miles, Nate returns to the subject of his voles. The red tree vole here in the Oregon woods forms the almost exclusive diet of the Spotted Owl. Unlike the vole, the Spotted Own is federally listed as endangered. Therefore, if Nate can prove that there are red tree voles in a tree, he is effectively proving that the whole area is Spotted Owl habitat and several acres around that tree will be posted as officially protected from logging. That is why most of Nate’s days are spent in climbing tall trees and searching for red vole droppings.

  We stop beside a lofty Douglas fir. While Nate and Laura attach ropes and pulleys to themselves, I lie down on a soft bank of earth for a well-earned slumber. Three minutes later I am hopping around trying to dislodge ants. Nature really is inexcusably rude and unkind.

  I entrust Nate with my iPhone: he will take photographs of any red vole faecal matter or fur.

  Up they go, quick as squirrels.

  ‘Yeah!’ A cry of triumph from Nate.

  ‘Don’t forget to take a picture!’ I yell up.

  And he does. And that patch of forest is now protected. Pity the poor logger that tries to pit his wits against Nate and Laura.

  Sasquatch

  Oh hell. Here I am driving out of Grants Pass with a Sasquatch spotter.

  Sasquatch is an alternative name given to Bigfoot, America’s very own Yeti, a large humanoid life form unknown to science, common sense or adult human beings. There is, however, a kind of rare (but not rare enough) infantilised western male which collects books on elite Special Services, is attracted by shiny trucks with huge tyres, thinks guns are great, asks only that a female be big-breasted and believes in nonsenses like Bigfoot. These really do exist.

  I meet just such a representative of this frightening species in the car park of a McDonald’s on the outskirts of Grants Pass. I have heard of them enough times to believe in the rumours about them, but never met one face to face before.

  It is at least six-foot-six tall, it is called Matt. It styles itself a ‘doctor of psychology’ (I should dearly like to know which institution accorded it this academic distinction) and it drives a truck whose bumper sticker ‘Oregun’ tells us that it is a member of the Oregon branch of the National Rifle Association.

  Look, I know I’m being all sneery and contemptuous and mean and snobbish, but really. I have to spend hours camping out with Matt, listening to completely unconvincing stories of Bigfoot sightings, accompanied by weird and inappropriately tearful mentions of his wife and children. His particular blend of aggressive family sentimentality, macho gun-toting and childish superstition is not something I find it easy to respect or like.

  * * *

  OREGON

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  OR

  Nickname:

  The Beaver State

  Capital:

  Salem

  Flower:

  Oregon-grape

  Tree:

  Douglas fir

  Bird:

  Western meadowlark

  Seashell:

  Oregon hairy triton

  Motto:

  The Union or Alis volat propriis (‘She flies with her own wings’)

  Well-known residents and natives: Herbert Hoover (31st President), Chief Joseph, Linus Pauling, John Reed, Raymond Carver, Ursula Le Guin, Ken ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ Kesey, Matt Groening, David ‘Se7en’ Fincher, River Phoenix, Tonya Harding.

  * * *

  I mention that there is no evidence whatsoever of apelike creatures aside from Homo sapiens anywhere in North America. No primates but man in the fossil record, no sightings other than those which rank alongside UFO and ghost sightings as unconvincing, uncorroborated or unverifiable. This cuts no ice with Matt.

  He has brought a whole basket of fruit along. Bigfoot especially likes bananas apparently, which he opens in the way humans do. We watch Matt leaving a pile of this fruit down in a dell. We continue to wait. Matt makes the cry of the Sasquatch. A noise that is more likely to attract a seal than anything apelike, but never mind.

  I would be the first to see the joke if I was squashed, mutilated, raped, eaten or savaged by a Sasquatch. But time passes and we are treated to nothing.

  It would be easy to point out that Matt and his ilk are law-abiding citizens who do little harm in the world. Mm. Perhaps. They do have a vote, however, a vote in the most powerful democracy in the world. If that isn’t a cause for worry, I don’t know what is.

  With Matt listening for signs of a non-existent primate.

  WASHINGTON

  ‘Here in Seattle, the city of Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks and grunge, I will bid farewell to the taxi.’

  At last. Such bitter joy, such happy pain. The forty-eighth and last of the contiguous states. Only disconnected Alaska and Hawaii await me now. Here in Seattle, the city of Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks and grunge, I will bid farewell to the taxi and to the whole continental USA.

  Washington, like the northwest areas of Britain, is known for its rainfall and Seattle does not disappoint. I arrive at the city’s Aquarium early on a damp grey morning. It is quite freakish how fortunate we have been in the weather, all the way from Maine. I have had to accuse the director of slaughtering white cockerels, lighting black candles, saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards and uttering sacrifices to the Dark One. There can be no other explanation. We have arrived in some states where the weather has been unprecedentedly cataclysmic until the day we crossed into it, and we have left others just before they were battered by record-breaking hurricanes, tornadoes and blizzards. All the while a zone of serene meteorological perfection has floated above us like a golden aura. On the very few occasions that it has been cloudy or wet it has not signified. Today is a perfect example. If I am to spend a morning in the company of sea otters, seals and fish, it really doesn’t matter what the weather is like.

  The staff at the aquarium love their marine mammals. Every day, in order to make life more interesting for the otters they package up their daily intake of fish in ice, taking great care to make the frozen meals varied, colourful and striking. This way the otters exercise their paws, claws and ingenuity to eat and don’t sink into a slothful expectation of soft, easy protein. In honour of our arrival a special fishy slab of ice in the shape and colour of the Union Jack has been prepared. I am given the responsibility of lobbing it onto the water. Sea otters like to swim on their backs with their food spread out on their tummy, which makes for one of the most appealing sights in nature. I could watch sea otters for hours. The rest of the aquarium offers harbour seals, river otters (I throw them a hard-boiled egg which they make an enormous mess of) and the more traditional underwater creatures like octopus and those fish that look like women who have overdone the makeup.

  ‘I could watch sea otters for hours…’

  * * *

  WASHINGTON

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  WA

  Nickname:

  The Evergreen State

  Capital:

  Olympia

  Flower:

  Coast rhododendron

  Tree:

  Western hemlock

  Bird:

  American goldfinch

  Vegetable:

  Walla Walla sweet onion

  Motto:

  Alki (Chinook Wawa Indian for ‘eventually’ or ‘by and by’)

  Well-known residents and natives: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Mary McCarthy, Raymond Carv
er, Frank Herbert, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Merce Cunningham, Gary ‘Far Side’ Larson, Edward R. Murrow, Bill ‘Science Guy’ Nye, Ted Bundy, Chuck Jones, Frances Farmer, Burl Ives, Adam ‘Batman’ West, Carol Channing, James ‘Scotty’ Doohan, John ‘Cheers’ Ratzenberger, Blair Underwood, James Caviezel, Dyan Cannon, Gypsy Rose Lee, Bing Crosby, Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Miller, Kenny G, Kurt Cobain.

  * * *

  Seattle is a city in which so many disparate American threads come together. Boeing and Microsoft typify as much as any two institutions could the astounding power of American technology and corporate muscle. Without the jumbo jet and Windows the world would be, for good or ill, a very different place.

  And then there is Pike Place Market, one of the finest food markets in the world where every horrible tenet of the American supermarket is disregarded: processed, packaged and homogenised food has no place here; here all is freshly and locally produced, laid out in European style stalls and free from the national branding and corporate badging that prevails in the rest of America. The sight of proper cheese and bread sends me wild with delirium. There are other street markets in the USA, but mostly they are either ethnically specific or species of small farmers’ market which, while growing yearly in popularity, do not come close to Pike Place in permanence or quality. Pike Place Market alone is, according to Seattle resident and media impresario Christoph Snell, reason enough to live in Seattle.

  With Christoph outside Pike Place market.

  A little way along the street facing the market Chris takes me to a coffee shop. It is called ‘Starbucks’. Crowds of tourists outside gibber excitedly and take photographs. For this is the first Starbucks coffee shop there ever was: the first of thousands. Well, in truth, the very first one perished in a fire, so this is ‘kind of the first’, as Chris puts it.

  Founded with the best of motives, to offer high-quality, freshly brewed coffee in a friendly, welcoming atmosphere, Starbucks would appear to have moved from being the solution to being the problem. Once the hero of students and those who value quality and atmosphere over sameness and sterility, Starbucks has become the defining sight in Everystreet, America and Everystreet Europe too; like Coca-Cola and Disney, Starbucks is now a metonym for the perceived evils of globalisation and American cultural imperialism.

  Chris moves me on and we talk of music. The band Nirvana, led by the doomed Kurt Cobain, poster child of grunge, came to stand for a wholesale rejection of the bourgeois comforts of American corporate life. Cobain committed suicide before he could see the full flowering of the success he could never cope with. His estate overtook that of Elvis in earnings last year. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, once an anthem for the alienated, disaffected, dispossessed and angry, is now, in original and covered versions, a routine soundtrack to the modern world in all its crass and comfortable venality.

  Seattle might be said to lay bare the self-contradictions that define America. Great conservative corporations, bullying, monopolistic, grey, disconnected and as capitalist as capitalist can be. Innovative, progressive, new and alternative businesses and movements that can recharge and revitalise the culture but which themselves transform over time into great conservative corporations, bullying, monopolistic, grey…

  I suppose America, above all is about change–progress and growth and change. Never sitting still. The majority of the population can claim ancestors who refused to stand still…they upped and left their shtetls and villages and their risk-taking restlessness seems still to reside in the American gene pool.

  You can bet that a new cultural energy will soon be with us, a new youth movement of one kind or another, and it will bring in its train a recrudescence in styles of music, eating, dressing and behaving. Those styles may not originate in Seattle, or even in America, but I should imagine that it is in American towns like Seattle that they will be transformed into small corporate entities, one or two of which will grow and grow and grow…and the whole weary work will need to be done again. Grow, mature, age, slash and burn, refresh, grow, mature, age, slash and burn, refresh, grow, mature…

  Peppers for sale at Pike Place.

  Relaxing with a good map.

  Cabaret

  Christoph, besides being an able and articulate companion for a walk around Seattle, is also a mover and shaker in the lively world of music and performance here. He runs a club called the Can Can which nightly offers European-style cabaret of the highest standard. Set on a tiny stage, witty, spiky, decadent, peopled by a chorus of jolies laides and muscular, athletic boys, the Can Can shows are a world more sophisticated, smart and intelligent than anything available in London. Expertly and amusingly MC-ed by Chris himself, the shows sell out every night to audiences who are clearly enraptured by the chance to sit and watch something strange and different while eating and drinking.

  All you need is a small stage and a group of talented people, Chris says. The audience will come because people are greedy for high-quality entertainment that challenges the sameness of pop and television. I urge him to come to London and sprinkle a little cabaret water in the dry desert of the West End. He smiles the smile of a man who is quite happy where he is.

  Bags of dried fruit bought in a crazed moment of health consciousness.

  Jewish bakery, Pike Place.

  Farewell Taxi

  Finally, then, the ceremony of farewell. We are on the wooden boards of a pier facing Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. We can go no further north or west and still be in the United States.

  Over the months I have collected fridge magnets in the shape of every mainland state in the union. They are not all to the same scale, unfortunately, but nonetheless I manage to put them together on the taxi bonnet in a shape that more or less resembles America. I gaze down at them unable to believe that there is not one I have not visited. In a fortnight’s time I will have said goodbye to Hawaii and be back in Britain. That chill end-of-holiday feeling is beginning to grip me.

  And speaking of chill, I return to my Pike Place hotel and pack the warmest clothes I can find. Alaska, I am reliably informed, is cold.

  ALASKA

  ‘None of us has ever experienced cold like it. I am beginning to revise my oft-repeated assertion that I would rather be too cold than too hot.’

  Texas is huge. From Amarillo in the northwest to Brownsville in the southeast is a distance of over eight hundred miles. Yep, Texas is mighty big. Yet Alaska is two and half times the size. The next two largest states in America are California and Montana. Alaska is bigger than both of them and Texas combined. Alaska is too enormous for the sane mind to grasp. You could comfortably fit seven United Kingdoms inside, or thirteen Englands. You may remember that Maine, the first state I visited on this trip, has three and half thousand miles of coastline. Well, Alaska has more coastline than Maine and all the other American states combined. Alaska is unexplorably big. The capital city Juneau is inaccessible by road: you have to take a ferry to get there. The interior regions in winter regularly dip below -52ºC.

  It is a three-and-half-hour flight from Seattle, Washington to Anchorage, Alaska. We fly over British Columbia, Canada, a reminder that Alaska, alone with Hawaii, does not border any other American state. It is technically an exclave of the United States. At Anchorage we catch a small plane to Kodiak. I have wanted to visit Kodiak Island for years. An arctophile like me is always keen to meet a new kind of bear and the Kodiak, a huge subspecies of brown bear, is well worth any trip. I have a bad feeling however, reinforced by reading up on the subject, that we may have arrived a little too early. It is the twentieth of April and the island of Kodiak has endured a hard winter. The bears time their hibernation carefully, ending it to coincide with the running of the salmon which, I am told authoritatively, are late this year.

  I manage at least to shake hands with the life-sized specimen that guards the harbour. The port of Kodiak is beautiful in a serene and surreal way I have never quite experienced before. Imperiously gigantic mountains loom above the bri
ghtly coloured wooden houses and a harbour filled with hundreds of boats, burgees tinkling and hulls slapping; dozens of bald eagles perch on the lamp-posts and eaves, gulls and gannets screech like witches as they follow the fishing boats home. All the riches, all the nutrient, protein and fat that exists in this part of the world can be said to come from the sea. It is true everywhere that colder water makes for tastier fish. Anyone who has visited Southern Spain and then followed the coast to Portugal will know of the extraordinary rise in quality when you turn from Mediterranean to Atlantic seafood. I have this proved to me here with the halibut I taste in a small restaurant overlooking the water. I have never tasted a better fish in all my life.

  Kodiak harbour.

  It is eight-thirty in the evening but as bright as three in the afternoon, all very confusing. A long-haired, bearded young man in a black cassock sits down at the table next to me. He introduces himself as Father Innocent, Orthodox priest and enthusiastic Jeeves and Wooster fan. Would I like to come to a Palm Sunday service tomorrow evening?

  ‘Palm Sunday? But surely that was weeks ago?’

  ‘On your Gregorian Calendar, maybe. But our church is still on the Julian Calendar.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Lee, me and an Irish Lord.

  Raspberry Island

  A float plane to Big Timber Lodge on

  Raspberry Island next morning. I suffer the indignity of being lifted bodily over the freezing waters that fringe the beach by Lee, our host. Lee then suffers the back spasms attendant on having lifted me. No one told me to bring waders. No one told him that I am over 250 pounds in weight.

  Lee’s wife, Lucinda, fills us with sandwiches and sends us on our adventure. The Lady L, named in her honour, is a customised boat that Lee uses to take tourists and adventurers around the islands on fishing and hunting trips. The plan is to scan the islands and look for signs of Kodiak Bear.