I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  Yesterday, under the pretense of doing vital research, I drove over to Vermont and treated my startled feet to a hike up Killington Peak, 4,235 feet of sturdy splendor in the heart of the Green Mountains. It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow— flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.

  Forgive me if I seem a tad effusive, but it is impossible to describe a spectacle this grand without babbling. Even the great naturalist Donald Culross Peattie, a man whose prose is so dry you could use it to mop spills, totally lost his head when he tried to convey the wonder of a New England autumn.

  In his classic Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Peattie drones on for 434 pages in language that can most generously be called workmanlike (typical passage: “Oaks are usually ponderous and heavy-wooded trees, with scaly or furrowed bark, and more or less five-angled twigs and, consequently, five-ranked leaves ”), but when at last he turns his attention to the New England sugar maple and its vivid autumnal regalia, it is as if someone has spiked his cocoa. In a tumble of breathless metaphors he describes the maple’s colors as “like the shout of a great army . . . like tongues of flame... like the mighty, marching melody that rides upon the crest of some symphonic weltering sea and, with its crying song, gives meaning to all the calculated dissonance of the orchestra.”

  “Yes, Donald,” you can just about hear his wife saying, “now take your medication, dear.”

  For two fevered paragraphs, he goes on like this and then abruptly returns to talking about drooping leaf axils, scaly buds, and pendulous branchlets. I understand completely. When I reached the preternaturally clear air of Killington’s summit, with views to every horizon soaked in autumn luster, I found it was all I could do not to fling open my arms and burst forth with a medley of John Denver tunes. (For this reason it is a good idea to hike with an experienced companion and to carry a well-stocked first aid kit.)

  Occasionally you read about some academic who has gone out with the scientific equivalent of a paint chart and announced with a grave air of discovery that the maples of Michigan or the oaks of the Ozarks achieve even deeper tints, but this is to completely miss the special qualities that make New England’s fall display unique.

  For one thing, the New England landscape provides a setting that no other area of North America can rival. Its sunny, white churches, covered bridges, tidy farms, and clustered villages are an ideal complement to the rich, earthy colors of nature. Moreover, there is a variety in its trees that few other areas achieve: oaks, beeches, aspens, sumacs, four varieties of maples, and others almost beyond counting provide a contrast that dazzles the senses. Finally, and above all, there is the brief, perfect balance of its climate in fall, with crisp, chilly nights and warm, sunny days, which help to bring all the deciduous trees to a coordinated climax. So make no mistake. For a few glorious days each October, New England is unquestionably the loveliest place on earth.

  What is all the more remarkable about this is that no one knows quite why it all happens.

  In autumn, as you will recall from your school biology classes (or, failing that, from “Mr. Wizard”), trees prepare for their long winter’s slumber by ceasing to manufacture chlorophyll, the chemical that makes their leaves green. The absence of chlorophyll allows other pigments, called carotenoids, which have been present in the leaves all along, to show off a bit. The carotenoids are what account for the yellow and gold of birches, hickories, beeches, and some oaks, among others. Now here is where it gets interesting. To allow these golden colors to thrive, the trees must continue to feed the leaves even though the leaves are not actually doing anything useful except hanging there looking pretty. Just at a time when a tree ought to be storing up all its energy for use the following spring, it is instead expending a great deal of effort feeding a pigment that brings joy to the hearts of simple folk like me but doesn’t do anything for the tree.

  What is even more mysterious is that some species of trees go a step further and, at considerable cost to themselves, manufacture another type of chemical called anthocycanins, which result in the spectacular oranges and scarlets that are so characteristic of New England. It isn’t that the trees of New England manufacture more of these anthocyanins, but rather that the New England climate and soil provide exactly the right conditions for these colors to bloom in style. In climates that are wetter or warmer, the trees still go to all this trouble—have done for years—but it doesn’t come to anything. No one knows why the trees make this immense effort when they get nothing evident in return.

  But here is the greatest mystery of all. Every year literally millions of people, genially and collectively known to locals as “leaf peepers,” get in their cars, drive great distances to New England, and spend a succession of weekends shuffling around craft shops and places with names like Norm’s Antiques and Collectibles. I would estimate that no more than 0.05 percent of them stray more than 150 feet from their cars. What a strange, inexplicable misfortune that is, to come to the edge of perfection and then turn your back on it.

  They miss not only the heady joys of the out-of-doors— the fresh air, the rich, organic smells, the ineffable delight of shuffling through drifts of paper-dry leaves—but the singular pleasure of hearing the hills ringing with “Take Me Home, Country Road” sung in a loud voice in a pleasingly distinctive Anglo-Iowa twang. And that, if I say so myself, is definitely worth getting out of your car for.

  If I am looking a little bloated and sluggish today, it is because Thanksgiving has just finished, and I haven’t quite recovered yet.

  I have a special fondness for Thanksgiving because, apart from anything else, when I was growing up it was the one time of year we ate in our house. All the other days of the year we just kind of put food into our mouths. My mother was not a great cook, you see.

  Now please don’t misunderstand me. My mother is a wonderful person—kindly, saintly, ever cheerful—and when she dies she will go straight to heaven. But believe me, no one is ever going to say, “Oh, thank goodness you’re here, Mrs. Bryson. Can you fix us a little something to eat?”

  To be perfectly fair to her, my mother had several strikes against her in the kitchen department. To begin with, she couldn’t have been a great cook even if she had wanted to. She had a career, you see—she worked for the local newspaper, which meant that she was always flying in the door two minutes before it was time to put dinner on the table.

  On top of this, she was a trifle absentminded. Her particular specialty was to cook things while they were still in the packaging. I was almost full-grown before I realized that Saran Wrap wasn’t a sort of chewy glaze. A combination of haste, forgetfulness, and a charming incompetence where household appliances were concerned meant that most of her cooking experiences were punctuated with billows of smoke and occasional small explosions. In our house, as a rule of thumb, you knew it was time to eat when the firemen departed.

  Strangely, all this suited my father, who had what might charitably be called rudimentary tastes in food. His palate really only responded to three flavors—salt, ketchup, and burnt. His idea of a truly outstanding meal was a plate that contained something brown and unidentifiable, something green and unidentifiable, and something charred. I am quite sure that if you slow-baked, say, an oven glove and covered it sufficiently with ketchup, he would have declared, after a ruminative moment’s chewing, “Hey, this is very tasty.” Good food, in short, was something that was wasted on him, and my mother labored diligently for years to see that he was never disappointed.

  But on Thanksgiving, by some kind of miracle, she pulled out all the stops and outdid herself. She would call us to the table and there we would find
, awaiting our unaccustomed delectation, a sumptuous array of food—an enormous golden turkey, baskets of cornbread and Parker House rolls, glistening vegetables that you could actually recognize, tureens of gravy and cranberry sauce, exquisitely fluffed mashed potatoes in a bowl so vast it took two hands to lift, two kinds of stuffing, and much else.

  We would eat as if we had not eaten for a year (as, in effect, we had not) and then she would present the pièce de résistance—a plump, flaky-crusted pumpkin pie surmounted by a Matterhorn of whipped cream. It was perfect. It was heaven.

  And it has left me with the profoundest joy and gratitude for this most wonderful of holidays—for Thanksgiving is the most splendid of occasions, make no mistake.

  Most Americans, I believe, think that Thanksgiving has always been held on the fourth Thursday of November and that it has been going on forever—or at least as near forever as anything gets in America.

  In fact, although the Mayflower Pilgrims did indeed hold a famous feast in 1621 to thank the local Indians for their help in getting them through their first difficult year and showing them how to make popcorn and so on (for which I am grateful even yet), there is no record of when that feast was held. Given the climate of New England, it was unlikely to have been late November. In any case, for the next 242 years Thanksgiving as an event was hardly noted. The first official celebration wasn’t held until 1863—and then in August, of all months. The next year President Abraham Lincoln moved it arbitrarily to the fourth Thursday in November—no one seems to recall now why a Thursday, or why so late in the year—and there it has stayed ever since.

  Thanksgiving is wonderful and for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, it has the commendable effect of staving off Christmas. Whereas in Britain the Christmas shopping season seems nowadays to kick off around about the August bank holiday, Christmas mania doesn’t traditionally begin in America until the last weekend in November.

  Moreover, Thanksgiving remains a pure holiday, largely unsullied by commercialization. It involves no greeting cards, no trees to trim, no perplexed hunt through drawers and cupboards for decorations. I love the fact that at Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball and then go and watch a game of football on TV. This is my kind of holiday.

  But perhaps the nicest, and certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that it gives you a formal, official occasion to give thanks for all those things for which you should be grateful. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I can’t believe that it hasn’t been picked up by more countries. Speaking personally, I have a great deal to be thankful for. I have a wife and children I am crazy about. I have my health and retain full command of most of my faculties (albeit not always simultaneously). I live in a time of peace and prosperity. Ronald Reagan will never be president again. These are all things for which I am grateful, and I am pleased to let the record show it.

  The only downside is that the passage of Thanksgiving marks the inescapable onset of Christmas. Any day now—any moment—my dear wife will appear beside me and announce that the time has come to shift my distended stomach and get out the festive decorations. This is a dread moment for me and with good reason since it involves physical exertion, wobbly ladders, live electricity, hammers and nails, and the collaborative direction of said dear spouse—all things with the power to do me a serious and permanent injury. I have a terrible feeling that today may be that day.

  Still, it hasn’t happened yet—and for that, of course, I give my sincerest thanks of all.

  When I left you last time, I was expressing a certain queasy foreboding at the thought that at any moment my wife would step into the room and announce that the time has come to get out the Christmas decorations.

  Well, here we are, another week gone and just eighteen fleeting days till Christmas, and still not a peep from her. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

  I hate doing the Christmas decorations because, for a start, it means going up into the attic. Attics are, of course, dirty, dark, disagreeable places. You always find things up there you don’t want to find—lengths of ominously gnawed wiring, gaps in the roof through which you can see daylight and sometimes even poke your head, boxes full of useless odds and ends that you must have been out of your mind ever to have hauled up there. Three things alone are certain when you venture into the attic: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped lavishly over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.

  When I was growing up, my friend Bobby Hansen had a secret stairway in a closet leading up to the attic, which I thought was the classiest thing ever. I still do, come to think of it, particularly as our house in New Hampshire, like all the other houses I have ever lived in, offers access to the attic only through a hatch in the ceiling, which means you have to get a stepladder out each time you want to go up there. Now the thing about putting a stepladder directly beneath an open attic hatch, I find, is that when it comes time to go back down you discover that the ladder has mysteriously moved about four feet toward the top of the hall stairs. I don’t know how this happens, but it always does.

  In consequence, you have to lower your legs through the hatch and blindly grope for the ladder with your feet. If you stretch your right leg to its farthest extremity, you can just about get a toe to it, but no more. Eventually, you discover that if you swing your legs back and forth, rather like a gymnast on parallel bars, you can get one foot on top of the ladder, and then both feet on. This, however, does not represent a great breakthrough because you are now lying at an angle of about sixty degrees and unable to make any further progress. Grunting softly, you try to drag the ladder nearer with your feet but succeed only in knocking it over with an alarming crash.

  Now you really are stuck. You try to wriggle back up into the attic, but you haven’t the strength, so you hang by your armpits. Plaintively, you call to your wife, but she doesn’t hear you, which is not just discouraging but inexplicable. Normally, your wife can hear things no one else on earth can hear. She can hear a dab of strawberry jam fall onto a white carpet two rooms away. She can hear spilled coffee being furtively mopped up with a good bath towel. She can hear dirt being tracked across a clean floor. She can hear you just thinking about doing something you shouldn’t do. But get yourself stuck in an attic hatch and suddenly it is as if she has been placed in a soundproof chamber.

  So when eventually, an hour or so later, she passes through the upstairs hallway and sees your legs dangling there, it takes her by surprise. “What are you doing?” she says at length.

  You squint down at her. “Hatch aerobics,” you reply with just a hint of sarcasm.

  “Do you want the ladder?”

  “Oh, now there’s an idea. Do you know, I’ve been hanging here for hours trying to think what it is I’m missing, and here you’ve figured it out straight off.”

  “Do you want it or not?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then say please.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Say please.”

  You hesitate, sizing up your position—which is not, in all candor, terribly strong—and say please.

  “And who is the loveliest person in the universe?”

  “Oh, don’t do this to me,” you beg. “I’ve been hanging here so long my armpits have a wood grain.”

  “And who is the loveliest person in the universe?”

  “You are.”

  “Infinitely lovelier than you?”

  “Infinitely.”

  You hear the sound of the ladder being righted and feel your feet being guided to the top step. The hanging has evidently done you good because suddenly you remember that the Christmas decorations are not in the attic—never were in the attic—but in the basement, in a cardboard box. Of course! How silly not to have recalled! Off you dash.

  Two hours later you find the decorations hidden behind some old tires and a b
roken baby carriage. You lug the box upstairs and devote two hours more to untangling strings of lights. When you plug the lights in, naturally they do not work, except for one string that startlingly, and in a really big way, goes WHOOOOMP! and hurls you backward into a wall with a lively jolt and a shower of sparks, and then does not work.

  You decide to leave the lights and get the tree in from the car. The tree is immense and lethally prickly and impossible to grasp in any way that does not result in deep pain, loss of forward vision, and tottering imbalance. As branches poke your eyes, needles puncture your cheeks and gums, and sap manages somehow to run backward up your nose, you manhandle it to the back door, fall into the house, get up and press on, fall over, get up and press on. And so you proceed through the house, knocking pictures from walls, clearing tabletops of knicknacks, knocking over unseen chairs. Your wife, so recently missing and unaccounted for, now seems to be everywhere, shouting confused and lively instructions:“Mind the thingy! Not that thingy—that thingy! Oh, look out! Go left! Left! Not your left—my left!” Then eventually, in a softer voice, “Are you all right, honey? Didn’t you see those steps?”

  By the time you reach the living room the tree looks as if it has been defoliated by acid rain, and so do you.

  It is at this point that you realize you have no idea where the Christmas tree stand is. So, sighing, you hike up to town to the hardware store to buy another, knowing that for the next three weeks all the Christmas tree stands you have ever purchased—twenty five in all, one for each Christmas of your adulthood—will spontaneously reappear, mostly by dropping onto your head from a high shelf when you are rooting in the bottom of a closet, but occasionally taking up positions in the middle of darkened rooms or near the top of the hall stairs. If you don’t know it already, know it now: Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.