Things we like about America

Sunday 12th September, 2010. 12,127 miles, day 694. 38° 57’.33 N, 75° 09’.91W. The Delaware River.

All good things have to come to an end, and we are now motoring up the grey and formless Delaware River, in a grey and form-shrouding mizzle. If it wasn’t for the occasional moored tanker looming out of the gloom, it would be hard to believe that we were moving. Hats and socks and neck-scarves have been dug out, smelling fustily of bilges, from the deep lockers they were stored in after our Biscay crossing. Autumn is on our heels.

We are on our way to the Chesapeake, to lay Tomia up and do some weeks of hard work on her, before heading back to England in early October. In addition to manual labour, I shall be working hard on Chatty Parrot, our new networking site for yachties and travellers. It is coming along well, after a change of designer, and the first couple of beta testers are giving very useful feedback.

Meanwhile, while I try to get our experiences into some sort of coherent form for retrospective blogs, here are some of the things we like about America.

Americans themselves take pride of place. Welcoming, engaged, interesting, intelligent, outgoing, easy and open: we have met some truly gorgeous people. They have overwhelmed us with their hospitality and kindness, and given us many happy memories. We have spent golden days with new BFFs, fallen instantly in love over a dinner table with friends of friends, or cousins or second cousins twice removed of friends, been embraced into warm family households, been cared for by complete strangers. Sailing and the Corinthian Yacht Club have provided us with a new group of like-minded people, whose generosity has made us feel at ease wherever we went. Even in Manhattan, strangers are polite and helpful.

Next is the papers. Even leaving aside the wonderful New Yorker, which belongs in a category of its own. Anybody who thinks British newspapers set the standard that the rest of the world yearns to emulate should have a look at the New York Times or the Washington Post; compare them to the British broadsheets, and hang their head. These two papers, along with many others with a more regional focus are what English papers used to be: quite simply, densely packed with objective, fact based reporting. The international news fronts up the paper, and takes up nearly half of it. The Op-ed (comment) pages cover different points of view and let them slug it out. The paper doesn’t give a damn about the private lives of slebs or sportsmen. The front page has a photograph that illustrates the news, not the opening of a new film. Just good plain informative journalism, which seeks to inform and stimulate, not to entertain.

That said, even the New York Times has a good line in bloopers. I posted the one about yachting a few weeks ago; here is one from last Sunday’s coverage of the US Tennis Open, where a young player, Beatrice Capra “attended a financial-planning session organised by the WTA” and learnt about “the financial volubility of life on the spotlight’s periphery”. Well, they always say that money talks …

Members of the MCC and those who have their own personal cricket clubs should look away now: baseball is rather a good game. It’s pacy, plenty happens, there is all the catching and getting out and general drama you could want, and it’s all over within a couple of hours. The basic rules are simple and easy to learn, but there are enough complexities to keep a teenage boy in statistics for several summers. The wonderful Arthur and Patty took us to the Yankee Stadium, to see the game played at its highest level, a great treat.

Then we got to meet two real, professional baseball players, Brett and Londell, staying for the summer with in Pete and Cheryl’s family, while they go through the rigours of their first years in the farm team system, playing for the Connecticut Tigers. They were delightful, and we went to watch them play three times. Knowing people on the team, and desperately wanting them to have a good match, gives a whole extra level of interest. A good game is interesting, but when Londell slides triumphantly onto the base a few milliseconds ahead of the fielder, or Brett makes a hit that runs two other team members in, it is thrilling.

We’ve finally cracked American food in all its delicious and varied guises – you aren’t supposed to eat it all. Now we know that restaurants will happily split a dish between two people, and expect, even in the high-end places, to provide a plastic box for the half you couldn’t eat, our clothes have stopped shrinking. The sweet and juicy Maine lobsters and the Maryland crabs have been the highlights – oh yes, and the corn on the cob. My father grew this in our walled kitchen garden, and I never thought that anything could equal the memory of those fresh sweet cobs. The season is coming to an end, and each time we have more corn, we know it may be the last time this year; having been exposed to perfection, the merely good won’t do for us any more.

And one more small good thing about life in America : they give you programmes for free in the theatre. How civilised. Oh, yes, I also should confess to a shameless attraction to Mountain Dew and Cream Soda. And Anthony has a thing for saltines and Triskets.



Now, to balance things off, here are a couple of things we aren’t in tune with yet: the first one being feet.

Americans use their feet for all sorts of things, just like Europeans: American feet are recipients of nail polish and pedicures, wearers of shoes from sneakers to sandals, lovers of massages; they can be jogged on, or hiked on in the wilderness, or used to power bicycles – but not, apparently, used for walking. At least, not in the sense of everyday transportation from A to B. If you want to get around, you take a car. If you don’t have a car, you hire a cab. If you are poor – or a yachty – and you are in an unusually public-spirited town, there might be a bus. If you want to walk – “Walk? On your feet?!” is the normal response. In Newport, we asked a bright girl in the Historic Society’s museum about how to get to one of their houses. “Oh, you can’t walk there!” she said, in tones that made us think the route led through a combination of a ghetto and a nuclear waste dump, “it’s over a mile!”

To take to your feet to go more than a few hundred yards is to lay yourself open to charges of eccentricity, and to seriously increase your chances of ending up as road-kill.

The problem is that grocery stores (supermarkets) and hardware stores, and chandlers, and just about anything other than tourist shops selling T shirts, salt-water taffy and decorative glass-ware, are in malls, and malls are not in towns. Moreover, malls are normally set along the edges of busy roads. The walk to the mall itself isn’t a problem, a mile or so there, and what seems like three miles back with a rucksack laden with a week’s worth of milk and potatoes – it’s the last few yards that normally cause the difficulty. In the land of the ten lane highway and the 5 acre house-building plot, room has rarely been found for a sidewalk (pavement) on more than one side of the road, and there is definitely no space among the two thousand car parking lot for an underpass, a bridges, or even an island in the middle of the road. A pedestrian is a small and insignificant dot, waiting for a gap in the onrushing traffic, taking their life in their hands for a dash across the road. I suppose designers of shopping malls just can’t envisage that somebody who doesn’t have a car could possibly have enough money to buy things.

The other thing we don’t quite get is air-conditioning. Not the concept, just the level. Our first visit to New York in July coincided with a heat wave. Temperatures up in the 90s, humidity the same. We wandered the streets in a damp fuggy daze, carting the tourist paraphernalia of guide books, subway map, camera, water bottles – and my thickest pashmina. Because when you come in to any building: restaurant, cinema, shop or museum, you are met by a blast of chilled air, initially as refreshing as a drink of spring water, but quickly feeling as if it is freezing the sweat on your skin into tiny droplets of ice. On our most recent visit to Manhattan, we made an unplanned trip to the theatre, and only had with us what we had needed for a day on the beach. We spent the second act huddled together, like the Babes in the Wood, under our brightly-coloured bathing towels.

It’s a wonder they don’t all get pneumonia.