Coast to Coast (5 page)

But the most attractive and memorable of all the individualistic characters of the East is the American Yankee, what is left of him; descended, as often as not, from good old English families, a living reminder of the first brave settlers, with a reputation, resolutely upheld, of taciturn boldness and financial discretion. He is of distinctive appearance—very tall and upright, long-limbed and big-chinned, with fair hair and blue eyes. One or two distinguished New England families perpetuate these characteristics almost to the point of caricature; so that some of the Saltonstalls, for example, might stand as personifications of the Yankee tradition. The Yankees have always been famous as sailors, as masters of clippers and whalers, and the memory of their sea-going heyday is still alive everywhere in maritime New England.

Their real shrine, though, is the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, where in 1775 a handful of Yankee minute-men fought the first real battle of the Revolutionary War. It is a beautiful and moving place. The Concord River flows between meadows, and a lane lined with tall trees runs down to the bridge across it. All around, just in sight between the foliage, are handsome old colonial houses, with tall chimneys and shutters. To anyone who has seen the process of British withdrawal from some imperial responsibility or another, the little action that occurred at this spot is easy to envisage—the redcoats, withdrawing across the bridge, pulling up planks after them under the guidance of some stoic and disinterested sergeant; the eager Minute Men gathering behind the bushes on the other side (“Bloody wogs! Wot wouldn’t I give for a cuppa char!”); the first tentative shots (Isaac Davis of Acton was the first to die); and the fusillade. Often and again, in distant and disagreeable dependencies, such a first fusillade has led eventually to a convulsion and a reluctant withdrawal, the last ceremonies on the quayside, the troopships sailing gallantly elsewhere, and the establishment of yet another Independence, Emancipation or Evacuation Day.

“The minute-men did not pursue their advantage at first,” we are told, “but crossed the river and waited behind the Jones house until the British company returned from the Barrett farm and the whole body started to return to Boston. At Meriam’s corner, however, reinforcements started a running attack from behind houses and stone walls, and soon the British were in a disorderly rout.” Citizens of Concord watched the engagement from chinks in their shuttered windows. It was a lively little skirmish, which must have been (if it is not irreverent to say so) lots of fun for its participants.

An American engaged me in conversation while I stood at the Concord bridge, and was amused to find that I was English. “Don’t take it

to heart,” he said, “they were all Englishmen anyway.” In this mellow spirit we looked together at the celebrated statue of the Yankee minuteman, standing nobly beside his plough with his gun in his hand, in an open-necked shirt. Below him is the famous inscription: “Here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.” As an expression of the times there are some better lines on a monument at Lexington, a few miles away, which begin: “The Die was Cast!!! The Contest was Long, Bloody and Affecting.” In 1875 James Russell Lowell was asked to write some lines for the common gravestone of the British soldiers killed in the fighting at Concord. How noble an opportunity for generosity, for soothing old squabbles and ending recriminations! But the American can still be unpredictable, and the pangs of creation brought forth:

So there they lie, those poor profane soldiers, half of ’em liars and half of ’em thieves, commemorated in stone by four lines of lumpish verse, libelled in print by talk of disorderly routs, dominated by the minuteman and his air of unspeakable virtue, the first of a whole multitude of pedestalled colonials.

Nevertheless they must have been a splendid people, the original Yankees, and the remaining specimens are splendid still. I met one at Gloucester, Massachusetts, who admirably looked and sounded the part. Gloucester is a famous fishing port, whose ships sail to the Newfoundland Banks, the Arctic, and many another far-flung fishing ground. I once saw a Gloucester boat tied up at Key West, the tropical port at the southern extremity of Florida. Not long ago the Gloucester boats were graceful two-masted schooners, such as Kipling described in
Captains
Courageous
;
now they are all diesel craft, and not a single schooner remains at work.

My Yankee was a watchman at a boatyard overlooking the grey shambles of the harbour. I had been told that one of the marine railways in Gloucester (used for hauling ships on to slipways) was powered by an engine originally installed in the monitor
Merrimac
,
the celebrated Civil War iron-clad; and more from sentiment than from any passionate interest in marine engines, I made a tour of the yards to find it. It was Saturday afternoon, and this particular yard was deserted except for the watchman, a tall and sinewy man, who was standing at the
end of the pier looking fixedly at the water. His body was somehow wreathed in languorous coils, as if all his limbs were double-jointed, and his hat was tilted to the back of his head. “I jest don’t know,” he murmured as I approached him, “I jest don’t know if I can make it. It’s a terrible, fearsome thing to ask a man to do!” It was his first week in the job, and he was finding it inexpressibly tedious. “It’s a terrible imposition! There ain’t no work, and there ain’t no play, and that’s the truth. When I was fishing we used to spend 300 days of the year at sea, and really at sea, that was, in the old sailing days. Now? I take a boat across the harbour there each morning to fetch the papers, and that’s all! That’s the day’s work! And I ask you, what’s in the papers when you get ’em? Nothing but women and gory murders! And they call this living!”

His views on the Gloucester fishing fleet were mournful, as befits a man who has seen such changes. None of the old-style American skippers were left, he said; most of the fishermen now were Portuguese or Italians, and you could “walk a mile in this town and see nobody but Dagoes”. They were a different breed, said he, from the classic skippers. “My father now, he was a schooner skipper, and he was a well-read man (like me). He brought us up on the encyclopedia, and he read all the magazines, and the reviews and such. These Italians, all they read is the comic strips.
And
that’s
all
they’re
fit
for
!
”

We went inside to look at some engines. He had never heard of any
Merrimac
connexion, and he was consumed with disbelief. One of these engines, he happened to know, had been working at the yard for a hundred years or more; but he asked you, how could a thing like that drive a ship? It wasn’t the right way up. I could see that for myself, couldn’t I? He had never heard such poppycock, coming there bothering him on a Saturday afternoon, as if he hadn’t anything better to do than answer tomfool questions.

But ah! Gloucester in the old days, when the graceful sailing ships would slide in and out behind the breakwater. Often schooners would be lost at sea, and many families would be in mourning (between 1830 and 1950 nearly 5,000 Gloucester fishermen were drowned); but it was a proud place in those days, it had self-respect, you see. It was a real port, then. Now it was all artists and tourists and such. He remembered very well when Josh Slocum’s boat (the one he sailed round the world) was tied up at that very quay. And Dr. Cook’s boat was there for a long time, being repaired. “Dr. Cook?” I queried. “The one who claimed to have got to the North Pole when he hadn’t done anything of the sort?” “The same,” my crusty friend replied: “and I know he was an imposter, and
I know they put him in jail for forging cheques, and I know all about him, so you needn’t say. I’ll tell you this, and you can believe me
if
you want to: he was a real gentleman to talk to.”

A good man, the old-fashioned Yankee, who keeps his sturdy independence in good repair (Dagoes, diesels and such-like notwithstanding).

V
iolence is an ever-present element in American life, even in these Eastern States. We were once travelling through New York State, not far from the Shaker colony, when warning arrived of an impending hurricane, Edna or Fiona, Georgina or Harriet, I forget what they christened it. It had battled its way up from the South Atlantic and raged along the beaches of the Carolinas, before swinging inland towards the Great Lakes. The newspapers and the radio kept us informed of its detailed movements, and I resolved to experience its fury not snug in a warm bed, nor safe in a shuttered tavern, but on the banks of the Niagara Falls. I drove there accordingly, and stood in the dark beside the cataract while the storm passed by.

The night was very black and the rain teemed down in a wall of wet. I stood in a little park overlooking the American Falls, huddled in a raincoat, desperately holding a flapping umbrella. I was alone, and all around me the trees were swaying and hissing. Sometimes my feet squelched into the drenched turf, and the mud oozed horribly over the tops of my shoes. The wind was howling, but occasionally through its din I could hear the sounds of hammering and clattering; the townspeople were barricading their windows and securing their doors. Now and then a branch would fall, with a harsh tearing noise, somewhere in the surrounding woods. It was desolate, damp and awfully depressing.

In front of me, though, there was a very different scene. Swept by the great wind, swollen by floods, the Niagara river rushed down its narrow and crag-strewn channel, all white and foaming, passing with a perpetual roar only a few feet from my watching-place. The water was moving with dizzy speed, dragging tree-trunks and branches and tumbling boulders, shining like phosphorescence in the darkness; between wooded banks and stubborn little islands; until with an indescribable crash it leapt over the precipice of the falls, to rebound in a vapourish cloud of spray. Niagara is a sort of show nowadays, like a freak or a circus turn, and the falls were bathed in light from powerful searchlights; so that while the plunging water was brilliantly white, the void
beyond was black, only relieved by a few blurred lights from the Canadian shore. I have never seen anything so bursting with elemental power as the Niagara Falls; they are the most satisfying of the great American wonders, and they are probably at their most tremendous on a rainy night in winter, with a hurricane passing by.

Violence is the very essence of Niagara. It is not the beauty of the falls that makes them so fascinating, but their unyielding ferocity. Year after year, night and day, the water hurls itself over these cliffs, only stilled for a few weeks in a decade when the severity of winter freezes it. There is a frenzy about the flying spray, and (however sweetly suburban they make the surrounding parks) a heartless sweep to the flow of the river. Whirlpools and dangerous sluices abound in the channel, and in the winter the ice is sometimes 100 feet thick. Even the history of Niagara is bloody, associated not only with barrels, tight-ropes, suicides and honeymoons, but with wars and Indians too. (Once, during the war of 1812, some American soldiers were playing cards at an inn near Niagara. “What are trumps?” one of them asked, and was startled to hear an unmistakably British voice answer him through the window. “Gentlemen,” it said nastily, “bayonets are trumps”; whereupon a platoon of rough English troopers burst into the room and bayoneted all present, pinning the innkeeper ignominiously to the wall of his own tap-room). Only a short time before I stood on the edge of Niagara, there had been a titanic landslide on the American shore; in one morning 750,000 tons of rock and masonry broke away from the bank and fell into the river, with what one can only imagine to have been an almighty splash.

The whole of American life is tempered by the threats or presence of such overwhelming natural excesses. Hurricanes and floods, droughts and storms and heat waves are disconcertingly common; and in almost every State there are turbulences of scenery, grotesque formations or things of feverishly exaggerated size. You must be prepared for savage vagaries of climate when you are travelling in America. When I set off on one journey to the extreme South I was pursued by a series of vicious rainstorms, the water beating down so thickly and endlessly that the puddles came splashing up between the floorboards, and the moisture seeped in between the cracks of the dashboard, until the whole car was dank, and I was shivering with the chill, and the cases fastened to the roof were pulpy from the rain. In a matter of hours I was in the swampy country of the Everglades; so hot now that the sweat was pouring through my shirt, so thirsty that from time to time I stopped and ate a whole pineapple like an icecream, plagued by myriads of mosquitoes.

Earthquakes of a minor degree of awfulness are not uncommon. My wife and I were once sitting at a drive-in cinema when we felt a sudden curious vibration. The car began to shake and sway ominously on its springs, and wondering for a moment if by some oddity of spontaneous combustion the engine had started itself, I jumped out to investigate. I found that the whole ground was ticking over, so to speak, but a cheerful voice from the next car said: “Don’t worry, it’s only an earthquake!”; and thus comforted I sat down again, wondering over what range of amateur seismography these mild shudders would extend. (The earthquake swallowed a farmhouse, not so far away, but hardly achieved a headline in the local Press.)

We arrived in the wake of a tornado at Vicksburg, Mississippi, during one journey into the interior. When we reached that modest town, perched on a bluff above the Mississippi, we found it disfigured by great mounds of rubble, like a bombed city. Whole blocks of rickety houses had been torn down, and steep streets on the side of the hill were closed with barricades. More than forty people had been killed by the tornado. It had come swirling suddenly up the river from the south, slashed its way through the town, and blown itself out on an uninhabited island across the Mississippi. There had been no warning. Many women were caught shopping, and a number of children attending a matinee were trapped in a cinema. All over the town roofs were damaged and windows blown in, but the people took it stoically. Well they might, for during the Civil War Vicksburg was besieged for forty-seven days by General Grant’s forces, and the population lived in caves, eating mule-meat and rats and printing newspapers on the back of wallpaper. A survivor, whose children may well be living in Vicksburg now, told Mark Twain of those unhappy troglodytes: “Hunger & misery & sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don’t know what, all got so loaded into them that none of them were rightly their old selves after the siege.” But this same man’s summing-up of the experience may well illustrate the surprising American resilience to disaster. He said: “It got to be Sunday all the time.”

In the East one becomes accustomed to reasonable standards of public efficiency; to test this American resilience one must have a comparison to judge it by. I found an opportunity at the town of Eagle Pass in Texas (also with Civil War memories, for there the last unsurrendered Confederate force threw its flag melodramatically into the Rio Grande). I reached the place at a time when the river had overflowed its banks, demolishing the bridge that connects the United States with Mexico, destroying large numbers of adobe houses on both sides, and swamping
both Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, in Mexico. I first flew across the river by helicopter to see how the Mexicans were retorting to the catastrophe. The scene was chaotic. Crowds of homeless townspeople had gathered on the bleak hills above the town and were sheltering in little ragetty tents or erections of sticks and blankets. They had little food and practically no medical supplies. In the town, the Army was in dubious control. Platoons of dirty soldiers, unshaven and armed to the teeth, patrolled its watery streets, and gaudily embellished officers held court. In the emergency hospital there were no beds; the injured lay on school desks placed side by side. There was a general air of hopeless flurry, and my most vivid memory of the place is of three small dogs seen from the returning helicopter, trapped on the roof of a flooded house, alone among a waste of mud, rushing to and fro in an agony of fear and hunger.

It was enlightening to return to Eagle Pass, for there (although the physical conditions were much the same) all was calm and orderly. The streets were piled high with mud, left by the subsiding waters, blocking alleys and gateways, seeping into shops, like a soggy blanket. Through this mess the Americans moved with relaxed determination. Machines were sucking the mud away through pipes, and men and women were clearing the buildings by dogged hard work. Where the pavements were free of muck, the storekeepers had brought their stock outside to wash it down. As in Piedras Negras, the military was in control; but the National Guard, a genial force, looked like a collection of able and benevolent farmers in mild fancy dress. Doctors were active, inoculating people against typhoid; helicopters and private aircraft were taking off frequently with supplies for the Mexicans; the local newspaper was humming; the hotel regretted that the water might be a bit funny, but offered beer instead. There had never been a flood like this before, in all the recorded history of the Rio Grande; but fierce strokes of fortune are in the blood of Americans, and they accept them (whether in Texas or in Delaware) without much fuss.

It is doubtless partly because of this tigerish environment, and partly because of historical circumstance, that a strain of violence emboldens the American character. The clash of arms and forceful opinion sounds through so much of American history, for the nation was built on revolution and on the bold movement to the West. The fearful Civil War, in which one out of every four participants was killed, was so recent and so near at hand that people still relive its battles and inherit its perilous prejudices. There were Indian wars within the memory of living men. Britain has lived by exerting the strength of her arms in
foreign countries and distant seas; but until our times American history was made chiefly at home, with bloody skirmishes and flags, brawls and evictions and arson. Scarcely a great American city has not been, at one time or another, ravaged by dreadful fires. It is only thirty years since prohibition was greeted across the country with a wave of unbelievably vicious and conscienceless crime.

So in America, and not least in the East, you are never far from brutality; it is part of the stimulation of the country that the old arguments of force are still, so often, tacitly valid. It is not only that crimes of violence are still so common, that feuds and acts of cruel revenge are recorded in the papers almost every day, that nuclear war is still commonly accepted as a practicable instrument of politics; the whole national conception of self-advancement and perpetual competition presupposes an attitude of no-holds-barred. Most Americans are accustomed to violence. Elderly ladies will drive their cars undaunted through the ghastly shoving turmoil of city traffic, readier to push than be pushed; on the frantic highways leading into the great metropolises they demand no courtesies if they stall or take the wrong turning, but simply barge back into the race again, brazenly. Indeed, Americans enjoy violence more than most people. I remember a moment in a big stockyard when, pressed to inspect the slaughtering process, I had turned away sickened at the sight—only to see a pretty young mother in a white hat holding up her child for a better view. Extortion and corruption is a common-place (at least by hearsay) to most Americans. Mild shopkeepers in the industrial cities of the East will admit without excitement that they pay protection money to gangsters or crooked policemen. In New York not long ago it was announced that no less than one-quarter of the city’s mobile police force had been involved in a system of organized bribery.

You can sense this underlying savagery, restrained, of course, but present, at many gatherings of respectable business people; among the Elks or the Kiwanis; at the dinner-tables of the ambitious; at any military assembly; anywhere in America where you feel the slogan of philosophy to be: “If you don’t want to get on, move over, bud, and make way for a guy who does!”