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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Oct. 25. Hello, Friends: So you thought you’d had the last of those mailbox-jamming Lydia B logs? Sorry! I’m on the road again – this time quite literally. I’m Chevying my way into the heart of the United States. Today’s lunch was Stamm’s turkey breast with stuffing, mashed potato and coleslaw (was it coleslaw? Americans load everything with sugar – even the coleslaw), eaten in a Chevy van by a parking meter off the main street of Carlisle, wet and dark with autumn mist and wintery rain. I have to say, though, a la usual US, this gas-guzzling (5.7 litre) van is fitted with fully-carpeted luxury including fridge, cooker, TV/video, air-conditioning and the rest. Not exactly camping in the raw. And no – not Carlisle, Cumberland, England – my native north English town where I’ve just been re-visiting family and good friends. This was Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, USA. Stamm, a thick-set, crotchety old man apparently single-handing his lunch menus in an off-street but cheerfully yellow-painted little café, and bent double with some back pain that forced on him a tetchy yet warm smile, offered me some thick, whitish gravy for my turkey. Not liking thick or white gravy, I opted for butter instead and attempted to develop the relationship by asking how Carlisle, Pennsylvania got its name. Total blank, I’m afraid. Stamm didn’t seem much bothered; so I made do with the turkey, packed in a polystyrene to-go box, keeping some left-overs to heat up in the frying pan later the same day 150 miles further north. I’ll return to Carlisle’s origins in a minute. I’m on the way to Quebec, Canada, to visit a friend from home, recently Canadianised and married. Then some other places. I’ve deserted Lydia B, alone ashore at Deltaville Yacht Yard in Virginia (uncomfortably close to Richmond, Washington and those mad shootings. Richmond’s where I bought my Chevy. They caught them at an interstate (motorway, to us English) rest area. My life for the next few weeks will have much to do with rest areas, and it’s just a little uncomfortable some nights as I settle down to another dark autumn night alone. I have a bear-spray – a high-powered pepper spray – an arm’s length from my Chevy bed). Rachel’s now back in Wisconsin. So, back in Carlisle Penn., I called first on the Carlisle History Society, in an imposing, turn-of-last-century building off the high street. A local woman I met at a petrol station on the way into Carlisle told me the town was modelled on my Carlisle, but it isn’t really (except perhaps for the sandstone, castellated town jail, which clearly resembles the courts at the top of Botchergate in the old place. Americans just can’t make quiet little things; Carlisle Penn’s a lovely town (more trees than Carlisle Eng – but then Pennsylvania all over has more deciduous trees than England had in the 17th century. Right now they’re gloriously autumnal red and yellow. The maples are especially stunning). The population at 18,000 is a quarter that of my home town; but the buildings, especially the official ones like the old and new courthouses, and the churches, are bigger in just about the same reverse proportion. Anyway, I drew a blank at the History Society. Nobody knew how Carlisle, Penn., got its name. Maybe, they said, the Penn family who started Pennsylvania just liked the name ‘Carlisle’. I’d so much wanted to hear that centuries ago a pioneering – or maybe fugitive – Carliol got nostalgic for home, as I was a bit this grey, damp and unseasonably cold day, tramping solo round the streets of a foreign, even though it’s an English-speaking, town. I daresay, though, in my traveling garb – t-shirt and blue Berghaus fleece, pants, socks and sandals, I’m not so recognizably non-native as I was in Central America on the Lydia B bit of this epic. Discretion’s a pretty valuable asset when you’re digging for impressions in a new place. So, just having got some cash from a high-street sidewalk (pavement) hole-in-the-wall, I accosted the next customer, a man of about forty, trilbied and rain-coated, thick-rimmed specs, lean-faced and one of those black stubbles that appear two-and-a-half minutes after you’ve shaved. He leapt back with his hands in the air defensively, and I was instantly mortified at my assault. He’d no doubt heard of the arrest of the two Washington snipers but was still in alarm mode. I photographed a sheriff’s car, just for the “Cumberland Sheriff” on the side, and the sheriff’s officer came running over and I thought he might reach for his gun. Sometimes I feel all of America’s in permanent alarm mode. “I’m from Carlisle, England, and I just wanted to ask…..” I hurried, and the man at the hole-in-the-wall beamed a big, American smile. He was a local free-church pastor, he’d been to Carlisle, Eng., that’s wonderful! and I really should visit the Baptist church in Carlisle, Penn., the one with the big spire just over there. So I go to St John’s Episcopal Church, Carlisle, Penn., and am taken inside the large, 19th-century building, with beautiful, cobalt-blue stained-glass, Norman-arched windows lining the nave to see a piece of sandstone set in the wall. The brass plaque beneath it says it’s from the tower of Carlisle, Eng., cathedral. A stone from my own town! I touch it. All the way from home! In the church office two ladies tell me St John’s and Carlisle, Eng., cathedral are sister churches and the stone came eight or so years ago. Talk to the resident St John’s priest, they say; he knows a lot about the church. But I have to push on north. It’s three-o’clock in the afternoon when I drive the Chevy out of Carlisle and onto Interstate 81 North, heading for New York state in fading light and end-of-the-day temperature. It’s still raining. Sunday, Oct 27, Vermont. This is one of those US eastern states they all talk about. It’s late now, but the autumn tree-colours are stunningly beautiful. Thinking I have time to spare despite the fading late afternoon light, I stop at Bennington, the first town I come to in Vermont, my furniture-maker’s eye caught by a side-of-the-road craft complex in some stunning old barns. I think it used to be a maple syrup farm. These states – Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine -- are where all the furniture-making trees are, and I’m intent on spotting them as I drive along. At last there are big oaks; and, of course, eastern maples all over the place. And many others I’m unfamiliar with. But their leaves, about to fall, are resplendent with colour, even to my dubious colour vision. Bennington’s crafts are a disappointment, mostly knick-knacks and no sign of the first-class furniture-making I know is here. Then up into the mountains over Vermont’s bottom leg, and all of a sudden the landscape is white with snow and I’m in ski-ing country. Snowmobiles are parked outside every house. Sooner or later, after I’ve driven across North America to friends in British Columbia and head south down the Rockies and the Pacific, I’ll be back in warmth and sunshine. What an immense place north America is! Love & best wishes, Ian. PS: (Once again, if anyone would like not to receive this log, please don’t hesitate to let me know. I hope, incidentally, I’ve found a solution to the garbled text some recipients have reported. I believe it had something to do with Miscrosoft Word on my computer. Please let me know how this one goes).
Malta, Montana, November 8. Hello, Friends: So you don’t believe in good fairies? Read on! We’re parked for the night, the Chevy van and I, on a piece of gravelly waste ground behind a petrol station in the town of Malta, Montana, U.S. It’s dark, damp, only a few of those ubiquitous American trucks are on the street and the forecast says there’ll be snow tomorrow. The Big Sky, as this prairie state of vast rolling grasslands is known, has been sunlit and dry further east today, but more cold weather’s on the way in. California and Colorado way south have had very heavy snowfalls after a Pacific storm. I’m hurrying to get over the Rockies before the next snow comes, though I’m doubtful if I’ll make it. Already in the last two weeks since I left Lydia B in Virginia I’ve travelled over 3,000 miles through this larger-than-life country, through the leafy New England states of Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont to Quebec, then to a wintry Montreal to see friends from home and on down the beautiful Rouge River valley to Ottawa, where the Ottawa River divides Canada’s capital city into French- and English-speaking halves as neatly as if it was the English Channel. Then into the US mid-west heartlands of Michigan and Wisconsin and the southern shores of Lake Superior. They’ve just had one of their coldest late October/early Novembers in recent times, and fresh-water lakes, ponds and sloughs, important haunts of many migrating waterfowl, are beginning to freeze over. The wind’s dry and penetrating. I choose Highway Two, the old main road in the north now replaced by an Interstate route further south, to cross Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. It’s been fascinating, from the black, wheat and corn-growing soil further east to the cattle ranges on the western grasslands. Big vistas, big tractors, big sky. Space is what this place is all about. Surprisingly though, the farmsteads are small – modest wooden houses and a few sheds protected from the bitter winter winds coming down from the arctic by stands of scrubby trees. Winter’s a game of survival here. If you’re in this environment, you just can’t avoid it. So here I am; darkness has fallen, it’s a black, drizzling night and I’m driving on, dodging the glare of oncoming headlights on the narrow road, having wasted half the day in Grand Forks, just inside the Montana border from North Dakota. I was at Radio Shack in Columbia Mall, trying to resurrect my dead cell-phone. I’ve given up. They couldn’t do anything for me. At least I’ll make some miles and get within striking distance of Vancouver. By ten o’clock I’m tired. To keep myself awake I’ve been singing “Three wheels on my wagon….” You know – “Three wheels on my wagon – And I’m still rolling along – The Cherokeeee are after meee……etc……and I’m singing this happy song”. Actually, it was Sioux country I’ve just passed through. Anyway, the lights of Malta appear and I’m rolling slowly up the main street, past an assortment of diners, motels and casinos, peering for somewhere to park for the night. I hear a clunk, clunk, clunk from underneath the van. Oh, no --puncture? I get out and take a look. No flat tyre. I start off again, and there’s more clunking. I stop in a side road and look again, and still nothing. But the clunking won’t go away. It sounds like wheel noise. Or is it a broken bearing? I find an off-street spot by the tourist information office, behind a friendly petrol station, and call it a day. I’m cold and tired. Just one last look underneath the Chevy with the torch – and there it is. The right rear wheel is hanging on, eccentrically, with one nut. Four out of five wheel studs have sheared and gone. I do a double-take and check the other three wheels. No doubt – they’ve all got five studs and the right rear has only one. I’ve just been hurtling in the dark across endless miles of open prairie and the Chevy’s collapsed, believe it or not, fifty yards from the door of the Malta Tyre Company. As Johnny, Malta Tyre’s technician-manager, said next morning: “I think you lucked out!” I phone Bruce in Victoria BC and pour myself a whisky-and-ginger. Next day at eight sharp we get Joe’s wrecker (that’s the Americans’ less than confidence-inspiring name for a breakdown truck) and haul the Chevy into the repair bay. I’m on my way again in a couple of hours, all wheels checked, still shaken by a hair’s-breadth escape from serious accident and an uncanny good landing. Johnny and friends map out my route. Despite roads that are now snow-covered and icy, I’ll head north for Canada to cross the Rockies and down into British Columbia. On the way through the north-west corner of Montana, over the Canadian border at Sweet Water and into southern Alberta I’ll pass some of the most breathtaking winter scenery of prairies and mountains I’ve ever seen, and sight huge skeins of migrating snow geese heading south at 500 feet out of the setting prairie sun, their brilliant white plumage picked out by black wing-tips as they pass, with a clamour of anxious chattering, directly overhead. The sky’s filled with them. I’ve never seen snow geese before. They’re awesome. I just couldn’t stop in time to get a photograph. If my wheel hadn’t nearly fallen off, I’d have missed them. Three wheels on my wagon? Still say there are no good fairies? Love & best wishes, Ian. PS: I’m now back in British Columbia after crossing the Rockies from Alberta in frost, fog and snow. Warm air’s now coming in from the Pacific and the great globs of ice accumulated under the Chevy in Montana and Alberta have melted and dropped off. It’s an utterly spectacular ride from the prairies up through the wintry mountains and down to the sea. When I get to Vancouver Island I’ll have completed a circle round America since sailing from Brentwood Bay in Lydia B in September last year.
Brentwood
Bay, Victoria, BC. Dec 17, 2002. Hello, Friends. I think I've been watching too many spy films. It's hard, the way things happen, not to feel I'm in the plot. Is it Key West all over again? I'm still in British Columbia, at friend Bruce's, thinking about continuing this land journey southwards as soon as Christmas is over. Right now the afternoon light's fading to grey and I'm sitting in Bruce's kitchen overlooking Saanich Inlet and Anglers' Anchorage, the home-from-home dock north of Victoria where I first brought Lydia B three-and-a-half years ago, then spent the happiest of times with many Canadian friends before sailing south in September 2001. It's been quite a thing meeting them all again. The place hasn't changed much, thank goodness. But strange, walking down the dock with no Lydia B to step onto. I'm missing her. The Chevy van I drove across America is parked outside. They're good, vans -- but they don't have personalities like boats do. Crewing on Bruce's Sea Bear for the Sidney parade of lights a couple of weeks ago stirred the need to take Lydia to sea again. I'll be back in Virginia in the spring, say good-bye to the United States and set out across the Atlantic for Maryport, my home port, in May. Imagine it -- sailing up the Irish sea with a beam wind, a clean shirt and Natalie McMaster's Nova Scotia fiddle turned up loud! And what after all this? Now, there's the question. Why does it take so long to discover that the world really is an oyster? But back to yesterday. My head's moving on from BC. I need a space to disappear to and do some serious writing. This is the 26th edition of Lydia B's log; I need to pull together the events of the last two years. Maybe in the mountains of New Mexico, among the Navajo Indians I studied as a student social-anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Not exactly yesterday! Remembering how things are between me and the United States Immigration Service since my summary ejection at Key West in June (they warned me, as they filed my finger-printed record into the bad-boys computer system, that henceforth I'd have a hard time whenever I entered the United States. And so it's turned out, with a grilling at Washington Dulles airport and a 'random' search at Sault Sainte Marie on Lake Superior) I thought I'd better think ahead to next March, when my US visa expires. You see, I can't start out across the Atlantic until May, so I'll need a visa extension. Better enquired about early in Victoria, the BC capital, I thought. I just need to know the form. So I search the Victoria phone book for US Immigration numbers in Canada. There's one on Wharf Street. I know just where Wharf street is, down by Victoria harbour -- the most beautiful harbour I've ever seen. See how maudlin I'm getting about Canada? I phone them -- and get an answerphone. Same thing again. And again. Seems it's only a number to leave messages on. Nobody wants to talk. Don't the Americans want floods of visitors spending money, for heaven's sake?There's a Vancouver number -- long distance from Vancouver Island -- that says there's no charge for calling. No charge for calling? I call the Vancouver number and hear a recorded message. I can indeed talk to a United States Immigration officer -- for a dollar fifty US (a pound sterling) a minute. Perhaps they're raising funds to bomb Iraq? I'm thinking now. There are US immigration officers down at the Coho ferry. That's the rolly old ferry that crosses Juan de Fuca Strait twice daily between Victoria and Port Angeles. I know because I took it a couple of weeks ago to stay with friends at Gig Harbour for Thanksgiving. Twenty-one of us sat down to a turkey dinner. I thought as I emerged from dense fog into sunshine on the drive back past the Olympic mountains what a lovely place northern Washington state is. Anyway, I drive the Chevy down to the harbour, put four quarters in the parking meter outside the ferry office, run up the steps and find a male clerk picking his fingers behind the window. The place is deserted -- next ferry's three hours away. The clerk's big, crew-cut, middle-aged, bored, unshaven and dressed as though he's just done a sweaty day digging the vegetable allotment. A compatriot's slouched over the day's paper at a table. I'm not too hopeful. But I explain my visa situation and say I'm having trouble talking to a real live US Immigration service officer. Friend looks wanly up from his newspaper; both nod knowingly that they're not surprised. I'm getting the picture. It tallies with what I'm seeing and hearing more and more as Americans -- the ones whose job it is, that is -- wind up their border security fever in the light of Iraq and terrorism. I'm keeping the word 'paranoia' in reserve. Crew-cut clerk, though, turns out to be helpful, in a nonchalant, slow sort of way. He makes a phone call. "See the Visitor Information Office in the corner of the harbour?" he says, elbow on his desk, pointing across the passenger hall, out through a window and over the water. I see it, puzzled. But it's a Canadian office. What’s that got to do with US immigration? No matter. "There's an immigration officer in there. Go up the stairs. She's waiting for you." And what's the office called?" I ask. "How do I know it?" "Don't ask. There's no name on the door, but it's the only one," says the big guy with the crew cut. I don't think I'm supposed to ask for any more details.The picture's filling out. Finding a US Immigration officer to talk to is like finding hen's back teeth. They've gone to ground. Maybe it's because, unlike US-based immigration officers, the ones in Canada aren't allowed to wear their guns. I remember when I sailed on the Coho two women US Immigration Service officers wore something hinting at a smile instead. They were chaparoned by armed Canadian police. Are they afraid of getting attacked abroad? Now there's a cultural observation! So I walk round the harbour to the information office. I still don't believe it. Inside I ask the (Canadian) girl behind a stack of visitor information leaflets if she's heard of a US Immigration office here. "Come this way," she says, and lifts the counter flap. I go behind and follow her, round a corner and down some stairs, past doors with no writing on them. The last one's locked, so I press the bell. It's still unidentified. Through the glass I see a tall, wavy-haired, middle-aged man in civvies -- no US Immigration Service black uniforms with yellow "Inspector" flashes on the shoulder. The door buzzes and I'm let in and am immediately confronted by tall man's pallid, unsmiling face. Is is fear, or in-your-face? Each time I see these faces -- and I've seen plenty on my travels through the United States -- I'm unnerved. My guilt complex about Key West and panther lady takes charge. I sign the book and go through the whole visa explanation again. The man says to wait there and takes my passport into a back room. Five minutes later he's back. Has he checked me on that computer? There's a pause while he searches for the words. "You know when you're pulled over for speeding in the United States," he starts. "Sometimes the cops book you, sometimes they give you a warning....." Good grief! They locked the door behind me! "Well," the man goes on. "What I'm trying to say is, there's a right way and a wrong way to deal with this. Some of us in this office would just tear your current visa-waiver out of your passport and give you a new one for six months. Simple as that. Some would do it the right way, so you'd have to apply in the United States. Maybe Phoenix, Arizona." I think I'm getting the drift. I don't think he wants money. I might be free to go soon. "When you leave Canada and come by here, ask for Russell or Fred. If you're lucky and one of us is here, you'll be alright." Tall man seems to be reaching out through verbal handcuffs from this point on -- though when he hears about my boat voyage he wishes me the best of luck. I exit the no-name door, up the steps and back into the legitimacy of the Canadian Visitor Information Centre. I think I've just had the privilege of meeting a sentient United States official struggling to make sense of White House heat on border security. At the end I sensed a smile, even if I couldn't see it. Have
a Happy Christmas and New Year,
Winnemucca, Nevada, Jan 7. Hello, Friends: Enormous. That's the word I've repeated to myself over and over these last two days. And still it scarcely does justice to the scene I've been travelling through since I left British Columbia in the Chevy last Saturday, heading south down the western United States; eventually -- via New Mexico -- back to Lydia B in Virginia. Right now it's a quarter to eight on Tuesday night. Darkness is well in charge and the temperature here in the high Nevada desert's plunging. Despite the heat of today's unclouded winter sun there'll be frost on the ground tomorrow morning. I'm tucked into a flat, sprawling rest area just off Interstate 80, my only companion in the acres of white lines a large container truck and trailer. These things keep their big engines thumping away all night for heat in their sleeper cabs. These are long-distance travellers. No matter -- it's nice to have company. I've had supper and edited today's bag of digital pictures, gasping in astonishment as the images remind me of what I've just passed through. I'm not yet sure how I'm going to send this e-mail; I'll look for a phone line somewhere along tomorrow's route through the Nevada mountains. To start nearer the beginning, though. Remember Fred? Fred the US immigration officer, that is. Well, Fred -- as arranged -- nodded me safely onto the Coho ferry in Victoria and into Washington State on Saturday. My new visa's good till June and I'm here legit. I doubt if I'll forget Key West and Panther Woman, but she's faded a bit. A quick visit to friends at Gig Harbour to collect a cell-phone Fed-Ex'd there by Verizon (that's a whole other story) and I'm off down Interstate 5, the traffic-laden freeway down California and the Pacific. It's grey and damp. I haven’t really settled in yet. My Gig Harbour friends have urged me to go to Bend, Oregon. We've spent an evening enthusing about future plans and places. So at Portland, Oregon, I leave I-5 and head eastwards up the Columbia River gorge, parking the Chevy just short of The Dalles.(That's a city, not a soap).In the morning light I clamber up The Dalles' steep bluff for a bird's eye view of an extraordinary industrial scene plonked in the middle of extraordinary mountain, river and valley scenery. Massive dams, factories, businesses, roads and Union Pacific railyards sprawling, unkempt, clanking and rusty. But it's working. A few yards away on the unpolluted (?) river there are busy fisheries. America keeps stopping me in my tracks. It's full of contradictions for this Brit, used to precious little scenery carefully segregated from the mess of industry, and to quieter, deferential ways. (And above all, most days as I listen to the news about Bush and Saddam, wondering what really drives these people to be so at loggerheads with the Muslim world. Or is it the world outside America?). I'll get a report on winter road conditions across the middle of the Oregon high desert and start the climb through dense fog and white hoar-frost up 4,000 feet towards Bend. In the next few days I'll be driving on mid-winter roads reaching well over 7,000 feet, through the snow-covered Cascade mountains and their off-shoots and vast high prairies of sage, juniper, wheat, alfalfa and black beef cattle. And thousands of little shacks, trailer-homes and bleakly isolated, ramshackle farmsteads plonked into the middle of all this gigantic nowhere.The lesson on America's in full swing. Size is what matters. And doing things to survive, no matter where, no matter what mess it makes. After Bend, a smart little town handy for the ski-slopes, I head off further south-east into Oregon's interior towards Burns, driving off the long, straight road reddened by the setting sun and parking the Chevy in the desert at 4,500 feet. By morning it's 34 degrees inside the van and I'm soon out of my two sleeping bags to a chorus of desert coyotes, making a cup of tea and off. We've got another cloudless day and the new sun quickly burns the frost off the road. The scenery just goes on getting bigger and more astonishing. In Burns I pass a huge wood-mill. At the petrol station I'm told all the timber it gobbles comes from Canada. Oregon's own timber is a shadow of what used to be. My friends in British Columbia, plundered by US timber giants and now struggling against a 27 percent levy imposed by the United States on timber from Canada, will love that. At the book-shop run by the wife of the newly-arrived chief of Burns police I look for a better map of interior Oregon. These backwoods places get under my skin. More high desert, turning to sand now and again, and then I'm across the Oregon border into Nevada, home of Reno, Las Vegas, marriage, divorce and gambling, and -- here -- Piute and Shoshone Indians. Sure enough, not a hundred yards inside Nevada, the first petrol station I pull into has a row of three fruit machines. Outside large bill-boards advertise casinos down the road. Billboards are ubiquitous roadside culture in Nevada. I spend a dollar at a Napa store on a couple of fuses for my camera battery-charger, served by a cheerful blonde white girl -- the only non-Indian I saw here; they're all about size 18 and up. Then off across more high desert to where I am now, the similarly sprawling, haphazard industrial town of Winnemucca, miles from (almost) anywhere, though it straddles an east-west interstate highway. The day-time sun's really strong now and the dry desert air's markedly warmer than back north, though it chills suddenly at dusk. It's
a new agenda of impressions. How like their subjugated,
problem Indians these Americans are, dropping their rusty
throwaways whereever they fall, and spreading out into more space.
That's just the point; there's so much of it. Looking at the sprawling
cabin and trailer homesteads of Paradise Valley, though it's 2003 it
seems a stone's throw from the pioneering rush.Covered wagons have
turned to SUV’s and big four-wheel drive trucks. If you're a State
Department official in far-away Washington, Burns and
Winnemucca must seem almost as far away Baghdad. Doesn't Iraq have
desert and SUV's too? ----------------- Morning. My one neighbourly overnight truck has swelled to six. That's six night-long thumping engines. I wake with a headache, probably from carbon monoxide exhausts. I switch to 640 metres KFI, from southern California, boasting the thinking man's talk radio. On the menu are a condemned murderer's interview tapes, a man in court dressed in a white robe and an American flag, protesting about something I didn't catch, and the latest poison story from London. Some north Africans have been arrested in possession -- "well, north Africans are Arabs, you know!" This is America. Love and best wishes, Ian. PS:
So I'm in the deserts of western America, telling you how vast this
place is. What are the chances of bumping into somebody you know? You
aren't going to believe this next bit.
Introduction 0 - Inside Passage and northern British Columbia 1 - British Columbia to El Salvador 2 - Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama 3 - San Blas to Florida 4 - Intra-Coastal Waterway to Washington DC 5 - Brentwood Bay BC and Chesapeake 6 - Virginia & Atlantic to Azores 7 - Azores & Ireland to England 9 - Chevy through the US - 2
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