So Goodly a Land

In 2012, to celebrate being seventy, an old friend and I crossed North America. She wished to deliver her Ford Explorer from Pasadena, California to Reading, Vermont. Apart from that practical objective, we wanted to revisit our country to gain some sense of the whole. She had never left. But I had long ago moved to Australia—and my Yankee perceptions had been radically modified.

“Thelma and Louise” they called us. But we were older, not running away from violent husbands, not about to shoot anyone—and certainly not motivated to drive off a cliff.

We compared ourselves to John Steinbeck, who in 1960 set out from Sag Harbour, Long Island, “in search of America”. He drove north, west to California and back through the South. Noting the disappearance of old speech patterns, dialects and idioms, he lamented the changes he had seen over thirty years. Racism was not only alive but rampant. He became disenchanted.

We were looking forward to what lay ahead. We sensed a vibrancy around us. I thought Steinbeck had left too late his run to rediscover his country. He expressed the views of an old man.

We followed the famous route he called “The Mother Road”, Route 66, where desperate battling farmers in the Midwest once left a “dustbowl” for new life in California. Steinbeck’s admiration for those hard-working stoical people inspired his finest writing.

A flourishing trade route then, Route 66 is now an historic but neglected highway of defunct buildings, abandoned restaurants and vacant blocks. Dubbed “Main Street of America”, the subject of a hit song and television show, time and the US Interstate Highway System have passed it by.

Entering the Mojave (pronounced Mo-ha-bee) Desert in Southern California, we crossed the San Andreas faultline. Here continental plates can move together. A railcar ran continually along a track, checking for echoes of movement …

The arid land, resembling Australia more than other parts, thrust up bright yellow “Indian Candles”, ancient creosote bush and Joshua trees. The thick “cactus” arms of the Joshua grow only in Mojave at 4000 feet. In numbers they make a strange outer-space forest.

After the heat and dryness, the Colorado River brought a wonder of green—and the border into Arizona. We stopped at Needles, named after a group of pointed granite rocks with names like “Ivor Unchained”, “Thin Ice”, “Romantic Warrior” and “Titanic”. Despite record summer temperatures of forty-nine degrees Celsius, they attract climbers.

Needles was memorable also for its long, fat carpet-snake trains. Engines at front and back pulled and pushed over 120 freight cars. Their rumblings shook the headboards of our motel beds at night, and made me dream of trains and how they revolutionised the transport of stock and goods in the 1860s. Roads followed trains and commerce flourished. Trains still thunder across the plains day and night, carrying a part of the nation’s economy. They reach out to the nostalgic minds that hear them.

Before railroads, land west of the Missouri River was an unknown wilderness. Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore “Oregon”. British, French and Spanish traders competed for this north-west coast where beaver, sea otter, raccoon and mink furs were lucrative. Jefferson wished to claim the area for America. It was after all a part of “their” continent.

Another route west was established by Mountain Men. They were tough, stoical, inventive men who somehow survived their harsh environment. How they returned to civilised life many years later is a conundrum. They laid down the “Santa Fe Trail”, connecting Franklin, Missouri, with New Mexico. Indian trade and goods delivery to the South-West developed the region. But the fourteen hundred miles of arid plains, desert and mountains presented the risk of thirst, famine, lightning, rattlesnakes, bears and Indian attack, the most terrifying threat of all.

Indians were nomadic, predatory and warlike. When they acquired horses and later guns, their destructive power multiplied. They stole horses, goods, boats and weapons. They scalped and disembowelled, killed women and children. Capricious and dissembling, they fawned and cringed if threats didn’t work.

Not all Indians were savage. The Nez Perce and the Flatheads were peaceable, reliable and loyal for sixty years. Sacajawea, a Snake squaw, helped Lewis and Clark over the continental divide and acted as interpreter.

The Indians had much to lose with the coming of the “white tops” (covered wagons). The settlers were as cruel, in their way, as the Indians, who were pushed back onto miserable reservations. Before the white man arrived, one million Indians in 600 tribes from parts of the country lived in balance with nature. After centuries of warfare with Spain, France, England and the colonies, they were reduced to less than 400,000.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe (an Indian “Napoleon”) was promised a return to his birthplace. He met President Theodore Roosevelt, who failed to honour the agreement. He was forced onto a reservation. Recorded in history are his words: “Hear me, my Chiefs. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing … My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

After defeat, two Indians, Geronimo and the half-caste Parker heralded the new order. They became farmers and Geronimo dictated an autobiography.

The naivety of our childhood games, the pow-wow, war dance, whooping, folded arms, the peace pipes, smoke signals, war cry, and arrowhead hunts seem poignant now next to the reality. We acted out our childish simplification of history.

Names of individual Indians and tribes capture the tone of those early pioneer days: Twisted Hair, Looking Glass, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Man Afraid of his Horses, Standing Elk, Black Kettle, Three Knives and Swift Bear came from tribes such as the Kickapoo, Chickasaw, Blackfoot, Mohican, Apache, Navajo, Shoshone, Pawnee, Crow, Winnebagoe and Chippewa.

Places too, tell stories, not all about Indians: Two Guns, Twin Arrows, What Cheer, Independence, Liberal, Prairie Du Chien, Muleshoe, Hope, Loving, Rodeo, Gallup, Boulder, Congress, Little America, and Truth or Consequences. Town and city names across America are a mixture of Indian, Spanish, French and British.

Centres are linked by a massive fishing net of roads, junctions, entrances and exits. Drivers cannot afford to nap.

From Needles we looped north to the Grand Canyon. The monotonous landscape of piñon pine and juniper did not prepare us for the cathedral of air and rock that was “the Canyon”. Two-billion-year-old rose and ochre buttresses revealed half our planet’s lifetime. No fence protected us from the abyss, from the layer upon layer of eroded metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rock uplifted by grinding tectonic plates. All this was exposed and weathered partly by the tiny Colorado River below.

Hostile, impenetrable though it seemed, native “pueblo” Americans lived here 4000 years ago. The Spanish “discovered” it, then the trappers and traders. Prospectors and miners followed. Finally “heritage awareness” preserved it.

We continued through Arizona and New Mexico’s dry open country where the sky was as big as an Australian sky. Turning north-east, we kissed Texas, touched the panhandle of Oklahoma and entered Kansas. Lone oil rigs hammered the ground like metronomes and simple white lines of wind farms belied their two-million-dollar value. Irrigation created huge green circles of crops. Wheat stretched yellow to the horizon.

Kansas boasts the Guinness trivia that Americans seem to love. One town contained the “World’s largest ball of sisal twine”, another, “The World’s largest hand dug well”, while another celebrated the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum and the role it played in the West.

In Smith Field, north Kansas, lay the “Geographic Center of the Conterminous USA”. A flag, a monument, and a small church displaying an open Bible, mark the exact geometric centre of the “lower forty-eight” states.

Nebraska, the shape of a charging buffalo’s head, lay over the border. And long before we drew into the town of Red Cloud, we met the prairie, known also as “The Grasslands”. Best described as a “sea”, it has the same infinity of emptiness. Matt Field, on the Santa Fe Trail, wrote: “the distant wagon becomes the sail … the green grass the green sea … and the roving herds, monsters of the deep”.

The American novelist Willa Cather wrote: “That shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion that I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and curse of my life.” Cather set her early novels My Antonia and O Pioneers! on this prairie where she had grown up. She created characters who were formed by the harsh but evocative environment. Their sod homes were built in the shelter of the “draws” (gullies) to escape the fearsome wind.

In Cather’s heritage bed-and-breakfast, we learned more about her—that she had altered her birth date in the registry, that she planned to be a doctor but decided in her small bare bedroom to be a writer, that her most significant lifetime relationships were with women. Having studied Cather in college, I felt the rounding out of my life’s circle, the coming back to what I used to do and think.

The “Wide Missouri” bridged into Iowa’s flat agricultural land. Small towns announced themselves with silos, railroad tracks and rusty farm machinery. Three-storeyed, shuttered, A-roofed, front-porched timber houses took on a remembered “eastern look”. At McGregor we ferried across the Mississippi River, mother of all rivers. It divides the country in half and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Indelibly connected with Huckleberry Finn and “The South”, Samuel Clemens is said to have taken his pen-name “Mark Twain” from what the boatmen cried out sounding the depth of this river.

Mark Twain likened the Mississippi with its islands to a woman with hair. You can love a woman with hair much more easily than a woman without, he said.

We crossed Lake Michigan (Indian for “Great Water”) from Manitovic, Wisconsin, to Ludington, Michigan. The S.S. Badger, still coal-driven, originally designed to transport railroad cars, now transported automobiles and tourists in the summer season. A surreal quality endowed this dark deep lake, with its quartz beaches and winter icebergs.

The western shore fell away and in two hours time it became a sea with all the sea’s uneasy vacancy. Knowing the halfway point, passengers craned their necks to see the “other side”. Sure enough, up it came, imperceptibly at first, over the curvature of earth. We had lost an hour somewhere in the middle.

Other unseen lines bisect the country besides its time zones. The continental divide in New Mexico defines the line where “all the rivers run” west or east. A point at Smith Field gives away the secret centre. A patchwork quilt of borders create states: Florida, Oklahoma and Texas with their handles, the small box borders of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Delaware, the giant geometric squares of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona. And rivers, lines of rivers Australia doesn’t have—the Platte, Arkansas, Colorado, Little Blue, Snake, the Rio Grande, Missouri, Columbia, the Mississippi …

Close now to the eastern states of New England, we were coming home, my friend to her second home in Vermont, myself to the Atlantic seaboard where I once lived. Where once I knew no other place. Where since, I have had another life.

Vermont was dotted with farmhouses and red barns; robed in forests of oak, ash, birch and pine, maple and beech. Picturesque and natural as it was, it hemmed me in. There was no horizon. Even the sky seemed crowded. I had lived too long in Australia’s open spaces.

After thirteen days we had driven 3412 miles, from the Pacific almost to the Atlantic, through the South-West north to the Prairies, through the agricultural Midwest to the Great Lakes, across Lake Michigan, to the long body of New York state and finally to New England.

Never had I seen so much at once, or had so many small familiar and unfamiliar impressions.

I cherished the differences I saw between my two countries. Diversity is a spice. Small differences of accent, idiom, trees, houses, signage, food, brand names, currency and tipping were common.

Size seemed important. Motels like Hampton Inn, Best Western, Holiday Inn resembled country manors, surrounded by large grassy artificial space. Restaurant meals were big, drinks big; flags the size of king bed sheets rippled from poles. Even cookies offered at reception to make you feel “at home”, were big. Houses of the affluent were big. Only cars were no longer big. But trucks, postal service vans, construction vehicles, buses and motorbikes often blocked the streets. Bare-headed motorcyclists on chrome platforms roared past. They looked so vulnerable.

Sentimentality can be extreme in this land of extremes. The worst commercialism is marketed in the idea that deceased relatives can send birthday and Christmas cards to their bereft families from the grave.

The kangaroo and the bald eagle testify to the fact that nationality is passionately identified in native species. The novelty of seeing deer, chipmunk, woodchuck, skunk, fireflies, raccoons, prairie dogs and turkeys described for me another difference, with the added strangeness that once they had been commonplace.

Australians would be surprised to learn that out of respect for animals some Americans expect their government to remove roadkill from the highway.

Hummingbirds can be the size of bumblebees. They fly at 54 kmh, and migrate from the northern tip of America to the southern tip of Chile. By rotating their wings, they hover, fly up, down, forwards, backwards and sideways. In flight they have the highest metabolism of any animal.

The more pesky woodpecker varies from seven grams to 600 grams. With a brain adapted to drumming and eyes protected from flying debris, they drill holes in trees … and houses. Their beaks are equal to metal, plastic gutters, television antennae and stucco. Coming across the sound of their tap-tap-tapping in the woods is to hear the heartbeat of the country.

Throughout Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin the red-winged blackbird flashed its scarlet epaulettes. The barred owl hooted its eight syllables, “Whoo … Whoo … Who’s cooking for you-oo?” in the Vermont woods.

If these are small national differences, what are the larger ones?

Willa Cather wrote, “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.” The men and women who originally came to America and Australia had different ambitions and conditions. Affairs of the world at the time affected them both. In the 1600s Puritans fled persecution and looked for religious freedom outside a hostile England. They brought with them zeal, belief, conviction and values of hard work. They pitted themselves against a harsh new landscape. But they were free. Their religious ardour and love of freedom are still there. The individual and his rights are still extolled. Gaining independence, they have been a wholly separate nation.

It is said that the American “character”, uninhibited, optimistic, idealistic and patriotic, has been moulded by the American “dream” as well as by religious destiny. The dream’s founding was built on relief after a perilous sea voyage, as expressed by William Bradford:

After many difficulties … we espied land … the appearance of it much comforted us, especially seeing so goodly a land and wooded to the brink of the sea. We rejoiced together and praised God that had given us once again to see the land.

Great good luck fell upon the colonies with the Louisiana Purchase. Their territory more than doubled when the French sold it cheaply to pay their war expenses. America had much to live for. Later, the promise of the West with its gold, fertility, furs and fish, the many rivers, forests and estuaries, the proximity to Europe, built up an energy, a spirit of opportunity, as well as a resulting insularity, that is thought of today as “American”.

By contrast, the English settlers found Australia a barren land already rejected by the Dutch and French. Pressed for space at home, England regarded it as an outpost they might later “use”. Surprising Englishmen back home, the “colony” took hold and grew, becoming an independent coastal nation. But dreams of inland riches faded with the discovery of dry rivers, dry lakes, non-existent seas, and desert. Place names tell the story: Mount Hopeless, Disappointed Hill, Ephemeral Lakes, Salvation Well, Heartbreak Ridge, Jam Tin Yard.

Such a geographic and political history has not made Australians pessimists, but has coloured their outlook, given them a sense of irony, edged their humour with cynicism. Down-to-earth, reserved, laconic, doubtful, ready to mock, they used to like to “take the mickey” out of Americans. Perhaps they still do.

Of course comparing countries and generalising leads to oversimplification. My only recourse is to quote Mark Twain, who said: “All generalisations are false, including this one.”

Have I rediscovered America at seventy? That quest somehow misses the point. I am left with a kaleidoscope of impressions: geographical, natural, social, historical and philosophical.

I’ve lived in a different era than John Steinbeck, less intensely, and do not rue the changes as he did.

I have added thoughts and impressions to my inner life, making it richer. Seeing this country reinforces my belief in the power of place. Place satisfies the need to belong, as people satisfy it.

I’ve spent thirteen days in the comfort of a friend’s company. We have been surprised, amused, impressed, bored and appalled together.

I’ve seen how fine-tuned she is to her land. The Nebraska farmer’s drought is her drought. She goes out of her way to visit the pristine original grasslands of the pioneers. She reads their literature. She knows and loves each tree on her Vermont farm.

And although I am an Australian of forty-eight years, I’m reminded that all this history, these changing landscapes, animals and plants, these people who made a difference and who didn’t, are also where I come from, and are what I am.