Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  ‘You never know,’ Lee says, ‘they might be waking up today. It’s a warm day.’ (This is a black lie. It is so cold that my eyeballs make crispy noises when I blink.)

  As we chug through the channels and straits between islands we encounter wild sea otters swimming around (on their backs of course) in large groups called ‘rafts’. They pop up vertically out of the water to check us out, rather in the manner of meercats. Once they are sure that we offer neither threat nor calorific content, they cheerfully ignore us. Instead of brightly coloured Union Jacks made of ice on their tummies, some of them are carrying cubs. It seems extraordinary that a warm-blooded mammal, basically a giant weasel, can spend its whole life in freezing waters; aren’t they, I wonder, attracted by the warmth of human habitations? Lee tells me that the sea otter’s coat, once greatly prized by hunters and trappers, is the thickest in the whole animal kingdom.

  ‘It likes it here.’

  He is right of course, but it is hard not to transfer your own feelings onto fellow creatures: I want to curl up by a fire, so surely any mammal would.

  Sea otters are very good at catching fish. Lee thinks it is time I tried to match that skill. He hands me a rod and some bait and I do the usual pessimistic dangling.

  I tell him about the enormous fish I caught ice fishing in Minnesota. By now, like all fishermen, I was exaggerating wildly and the Minnetonka sun fish had grown to at least five inches in length. But suddenly…a twitch on the line!

  I reel and reel and reel and heave and pull and yank until…behold! A grotesque creature of the deep arises from the surface. Mushroom and grey in colour, with coffee and caramel highlights, but strangely appealing in a disgustingly ugly way, with orange spines and the widest mouth imaginable.

  ‘What on earth…?’

  ‘That,’ says Lee, ‘is an Irish Lord.’

  ‘An eater?’ I enquire.

  ‘Absolutely not an eater.’

  We pose for the obligatory photograph before returning his inedible lordship to the deeps.

  No sign of bears, sadly. I survey the tops of hills, where an ursine outline would be easy to spot. Nothing.

  ‘Yes. Maybe you can stay for a week?’ Lee suggests. ‘They’ll be up and about then, for sure.’

  ‘If only,’ I sigh. But we have miles to go and promises to keep. Indeed I am promised at Father Innocent’s church this very evening.

  * * *

  ALASKA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  AK

  Nickname:

  The Last Frontier

  Capital:

  Juneau

  Flower:

  Forget-me-not

  Tree:

  Sitka spruce

  Bird:

  Willow ptarmigan

  Insect:

  Four-spot skimmer dragonfly

  Motto:

  North to the Future

  Well-known residents and natives: Herman of Alaska (Saint), Jacob of Alaska (Saint), a great many dog sledders and mushers.

  * * *

  Surprisingly Orthodox

  From the mid-eighteenth century onwards Alaska was part of the Russian Empire. By 1869, trappers and traders having brought many fur species to edge of extinction, the Tsar was done with this unprepossessing land and made it known to the United States that he was ready to sell. The American Secretary of State, William Seward got a price of $7,200,000, which worked out at about 1.9¢ an acre. You might think that the American people would be pleased, but the general view at the time was that Seward had been sold a pup, a ‘sucked orange’ as the New York World put it. ‘Seward’s Folly’ remained a joke until gold was discovered in Alaska just thirty years later (too late for Seward to have the last laugh: he died three years after the purchase). It was not until 1959 however that Alaska, with Hawaii, was finally admitted into the union as a full state.

  Signs of the Russian occupation are surprisingly easy to find in Kodiak. Street names ending in -off and -inski are plentiful, but the most obvious clues are the two Russian Orthodox churches.

  Father Innocent is priest of St Herman’s, named after Alaska’s greatest saint. I slip in the back to find the service already under way. With all due respect to the noble traditions of the Orthodox liturgy, this is just about the dullest service I have ever attended in all my life. So much chanting. So much repetition. They must have asked the Lord to have mercy three thousand times. I am not exaggerating. Either He is going to show mercy or He isn’t; simply nagging Him like children who want to be taken to Disneyland isn’t going to do the trick, surely?

  On the steps of St Herman’s.

  The smell of incense is pleasant enough, however, and the icons gleam effulgently in the evening light.

  Barrow

  The next morning we say our farewells to Kodiak and its slumbering bears. We are headed north now. Really, really north. Well within the Arctic Circle. Barrow is the northernmost town in the United States of America.

  As we wait at Barrow airport for our luggage to emerge from the plane, we take it in turns to put our heads out of the exit door and we instantly return giggling like schoolchildren. None of us has ever experienced cold like it. The wind is fierce enough to double the discomfort. I am wrapped in the thickest, most professional extreme cold-weather clothing I could find and still it is not enough. I am beginning to revise my oft-repeated assertion that I would rather be too cold than too hot.

  At half past ten at night it is still as bright as day. I wander about the town, taking in the sights, such as they are, before submitting to the fact that it will never be dark. The curtains in my hotel room are not thick enough to keep out the white light and I pass a fitful night.

  Henry the whaling captain: ‘a warm, friendly and very proud Inupiat’.

  Whaling

  In the height of Barrow’s summer it sometimes gets above freezing. That is the best they have to look forward to. The majority of the town’s population is made up of Inupiat Eskimos who subsist by hunting caribou, fish and whale. The federal and international authorities who govern these issues allow the Eskimos of Barrow (and yes, they do prefer to be called Eskimo here, not Inuit) to hunt twenty-two whales a year. The whales, principally bowhead and beluga, are shared amongst the whole community. In a land where fruit and fresh vegetables are not indigenous and hard to come by even today, whale meat, and especially the muktuk or skin and nasty bits, provide all the vitamins and nutrition that the Inupiat need. I have an appointment with whaling captain Henry, who invites me into his home to meet his bouncy and boisterous family. Henry is delightful: a warm, friendly and very proud Inupiat. He makes his own drums, he fashions his own tools, and he tries to live a life that his ancestors would approve of. He agrees to take us to see his whaling boat. The season is nearly upon us and it may be that whales will be spotted in the open seas. I am quite happy if we don’t see a whale, for it would mean a killing. While I fully respect the Inupiat’s traditional rights and while I recognise that their hunting techniques on oar-powered boats have never endangered the bowhead or the beluga, I am still reluctant to watch the slaughter of any whale, no matter how traditionally done it might be. As with the Kodiak, however, it seems we are a matter of days too early.

  No sign of a whale.

  Barrow, Alaska: northernmost tip of the United States.

  Barrow is a coastal town, which is hard to verify when the sea is frozen. Henry’s whaler is actually a mile or so out on the frozen Chuckte (as the Arctic Ocean is called hereabouts). He pulls us along on sleds, driving a Ski-doo. The blueness of the ice comes as a shock to me. I had not thought frozen sea-water could be so hauntingly lovely.

  We arrive at the whaler, which is not much bigger than an average suburban dining-table. A crew of eight, at a moment’s notice, can run the boat off the ice and jump into it just as it hits the water–water in which a human, no matter how fully dressed, could not survive for more than three minutes. They practise so hard that no one ever falls in. Once t
hey are afloat, however, the real work begins, for they have no source of power other than their own calories: the paddle power of eight land animals against a marine animal more than eight times bigger. At least it seems like a fair fight.

  The boat is handbuilt and made waterproof by stretching over it the skin of the Bearded Seal. It is very important, Henry tells me, to cure the hide of the seal for over a year. If not the polar bears will sniff it out as meat. A polar bear can reduce a whaling boat to a splintered ruin in minutes.

  Henry shows me his harpoons (which are armed with little internal bombs) which he assures me end the life of the whale instantly. The Inupiat take pride in never causing pain or distress to their quarry. Henry hands over a brass whale gun which. It weighs sixty pounds, and I can barely lift it to my shoulder.

  We stand where the frozen sea ends and watch the horizon. I am glad to say that I see no whales.

  I am at the northernmost point in America. Soon I shall be at the southernmost.

  HAWAII

  ‘“You taste like pork, apparently. ‘Long pig’, that is what we used to call the white man,” says Titus, serving out a second helping.’

  Who would have thought Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler were both born in Hawaii? And who would have thought that Keanu Reeves wasn’t? It turns out that despite his Hawaiian name (which means something like ‘cool ocean breeze’) he was born in Beirut. Barack Obama is quite a boast too: he was born in Hawaii and received a private prep-school education here.

  I was so looking forward to Honolulu and Waikiki Beach. I grew up on TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and Magnum, P.I. and for years From Here to Eternity was one of my favourite books and films. And now finally I am here.

  What a horrible, what a grotesque, what a shattering disappointment. Of all the unspeakably vile tourist hells I have ever visited, this has to be one of the worst. At least Alicante and the Costa del Sol know what they are: Waikiki seems to be labouring under the delusion that it is still a glamorous and elite paradise. I dare say it once was, but decades of thoughtless hotel construction have destroyed any beauty, charm or individuality.

  From the moment you get on the plane to Honolulu to the moment you leave, the word ‘Aloha’ is rammed down your throat. It is a greeting of course, but it is supposed too to mean a spirit of welcome and friendliness and warmth. I find no evidence of this Aloha in Honolulu, despite seeing the word everywhere, in neon, plastic and concrete. I go to bed cursing myself for the naïvety with which I expected anything else.

  I turns out that I did not need to be quite so disillusioned for the morrow would bring better things.

  Oahu North

  Honolulu and Waikiki are in the south of the island of Oahu. Perhaps things will look less grisly in the north? They do!

  Here at last is the beauty, the paradisiacal splendour, the botanical variety and the genuine warm kindliness of the Aloha spirit. So naturally the first thing I have to do is go out into the sea and swim with sharks.

  The purpose of this trip was to make a BBC documentary series and to furnish you, the reader, with a lavish and beautifully presented book that you will treasure and cherish for ever. It was never, so far as I can tell, the aim of this journey to test me, to put me in touch with my lost virility, to explore the limits of my courage and daring, to push me beyond the bounds of endurance until I reached That Place in which I could face my demons and finally call myself a Man. Was it?

  I find myself in a boat heading out from the shore to a place where sharks are known to congregate. As someone who recently broke his arm in a clumsy ship-to-ship transfer I am more than usually careful as I move off the back of the boat and manoeuvre myself into a cage around which the sharks will swim. It transpires that this is the most dangerous part of the entire adventure, for the Galapagos Shark, I come to realise, is no threat to humans at all. As they circle the cage in search of food which has been dropped in the water I realise that the only reason this tourist attraction works is because the Galapagos Shark, entirely dopey, harmless and uninterested in human flesh, nonetheless closely resembles that fearsome killer of the deep, the Great White.

  The sharks circle.

  Unharmed!

  North shore, Oahu.

  Were I less of a manly man of course, I would not have let slip this information and I would have allowed you to live the rest of your lives believing me to be dashing, heroic and valiant in the extreme, but fortunately I have no need to prove my manliness. The only reason I go on to buy an ‘I Swam With Sharks!’ T-shirt and wear it around the island is because the colours go with my shorts.

  Sunset Elementary

  Next I have a chat with Kim Johnson, wife of the musician Jack, the Hawaiian-born singer-songwriter whose popularity appears to be growing every month. Kim and I sit in the garden of Sunset Elementary School, where Jack went as a boy and where his and Kim’s children will soon be going too.

  ‘We started up this foundation,’ says Kim. ‘The idea is to get the kids to love and understand nature and the unique wildlife that surrounds them.’

  ‘Doesn’t that happen naturally?’

  ‘It should. It used to, but the island language, the culture, traditions and identity are all under threat…’

  ‘The hypnotic attractions of mainland movies, TV, internet, sport and music?’

  ‘Right. Plus there used to be cash crops like sugar and pineapples which kept people in the countryside here. Not ideal, but they provided job security.’

  ‘And they’ve gone?’

  ‘Yup. The lower wages and costs in the Philippines were pretty much irresistible to the growers. There’s a Dole Pineapple Plantation museum down the road, but that only employs a handful.’

  ‘I passed it on my way here. What about more tourism?’

  ‘Yeah, but at what cost to the island itself? If the north became like the south it would be a disaster. That’s why Jack and I think it all starts here…’ she points at the school buildings behind us. ‘The hearts and minds of Hawaiian children. If they love their islands enough they will stay and the islands will be healthy and prosperous.’

  I hope she is right.

  Terry, P.I.

  Back in Waikiki, which I like a great deal more now that I know the whole island of Oahu isn’t like that, I meet up with Terry, a private investigator. He tells me stories of the seamier side of life here.

  ‘Few years ago it was the policy of certain municipal authorities on the mainland to give their hobos, winos, druggies and dead-beats a one-way ticket to Honolulu.’

  ‘You mean they’d just put them on a plane?’

  ‘Sure. So a bum from Chicago or Little Rock for example, he’d wake up from the flight and find himself in a city where you can sleep outdoors all year round and where rich tourists are–how can I put it?–more kindly disposed to pan-handling than the citizens back home.’

  ‘So they would stay?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  We walk on along the beach. The sun is setting behind the silhouettes of surfers riding in the last of the light.

  ‘I was once called by a rich, a very, very, very rich Texan family,’ says Terry. ‘They had a drug addict son who had suddenly disappeared from the mean streets of Dallas. He used to hang out there with his fellow junkies. His family used to keep a discreet watch on him, using private detectives and one day the detectives call to say the kid’s disappeared off the radar. They think he was given one of these one-way tickets to Hawaii. So the family ask me to look for him here. They email over a photo and the boy’s aunt calls me. “He may be worth a fortune in his own right,” she says, “but he has what the French call nostalgie de la boue. You’ll find him wherever lowlifes gather.” So I come here straight away. First place I think of.’

  * * *

  HAWAII

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  HI

  Nickname:

  The Aloha State

  Capital:

  Honolulu

  Fl
ower:

  Hawaiian hibiscus

  Tree:

  Kukui nut tree (Candlenut)

  Bird:

  Hawaiian goose

  Motto:

  Ua Mau ke Ea o ka Aina i ka Pono (‘The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness’)

  Well-known residents and natives: Duke Kahanamoku, Barack Obama, Jack Lord, Bette Midler, Nicole Kidman, Jack Johnson.

  * * *

  Terry points out the sights of Honolulu.

  We have arrived at a large banyan tree by a bronze statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic gold medallist who did more than anyone else to popularise surfing. Under it is gathered a collection of street kids and hobos.

  ‘And sure enough, there was the kid, just there, where the lady with the shopping cart is now.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Told him that his parents wanted him back. That because he had turned twenty-one he was now worth fifteen million dollars.’

  ‘Oh my heavens.’

  ‘He knew what he was worth but he refused to return and collect his money. Far as I know he is still here, living on the streets. That’s Hawaii, Steve. Being a Honolulu bum is worth more than fifteen million in the bank.’

  Kauai

  The farthest north and westmost of all the Hawaiian islands is Kauai. It is also, in real-estate terms, the most desirable. Many moguls, movie stars and musicians have homes in the north of the island, along a stretch called the Na Pali Coast.

  ‘How about you stop humming the Hawaii Five-O theme tune?’

  The Kalalau Trail is a strenuous eleven miles of clambering and scrambling that attracts thousands of tourists bolder than I am. I meet up at the trailhead with local surfing dude and proud Hawaiian, Titus, one of the men who has popularised the old-fashioned art of long-boarding. We manage about a mile up the hill before coming down again.