by Bill Bryson
Under “Personal Expenditures,” itemize all cash expenditures of more than $1, and include verification. If you have had dental work and you are not claiming a refund on the federal oil spill allowance, enter your shoe sizes since birth and enclose specimen shoes (right foot only). Multiply by 1.5 or 1,319, whichever is larger, and divide line 3f by 3d. Under Section 912g, enter federal income support grants for the production of alfalfa, barley (but not sorghum, unless for home consumption), and okra WHETHER OR NOT you received any. Failure to do so may result in a fine of $3,750,000 and death by lethal injection.
If your children are dependent but not living at home, or living at home but not dependent, or dependent and living at home but hardly ever there AND you are not claiming exemption for leases of maritime vessels in excess of 12,000 tons deadweight (15,000 tons if you were born in Guam), you MUST complete and include a Maritime Vessel Exemption Form. Failure to do so may result in a fine of $111,000,000 and a nuclear attack on a small, neutral country.
On pages 924–926, Schedule D, enter the names of people you know personally who are Communists or use drugs. (Use extra pages if necessary.)
If you have interest earnings from savings accounts, securities, bearer bonds, certificates of deposit, or other fiduciary instruments but DO NOT know your hat size, complete Supplementary Schedules 112d and 112f and enclose with all relevant tables. (Do not send chairs at this time.) Include, but do not collate, ongoing losses from mining investments, commodities transactions, and organ transplants, divide by the total number of motel visits you made in 1996, and enter in any remaining spaces. If you have unreimbursed employee expenses, tough.
To compute your estimated tax, add lines 27 through 964, deduct lines 45a and 699f from Schedule 2F (if greater or less than 2.2% of average alternative minimum estimated tax for last five years), multiply by the number of RPMs your car registers when stuck on ice, and add 2. If line 997 is smaller than line 998, start again. In the space marked “Tax Due,” write a very large figure.
Make your check payable to “Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America and to the Republic for Which It Stands,” and mark for the attention of Patty. On the back of your check write your social security number, Taxpayer Identification Number, IRS Tax Code Audit Number(s), IRS Regional Office Sub-Unit Zone Number (UNLESS you are filing a T/45 Sub-Unit Zone Exclusion Notice), sexual orientation, and smoking preference, and send to:
Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America
Tax Reception and Orientation Center
Building D/Annex G78
Suite 900
Subduction Zone 12
Box 132677-02
Drawer 2, About Halfway Back
Federal City
Maryland 10001
If you have any questions about filing, or require assistance with your return, phone 1-800-BUSY SIGNAL. Thank you and have a prosperous 1999. Failure to do so may result in a fine of $125,000 and a long walk to the cooler.
Ten years ago this month, I got a phone call from an American publisher telling me that he had just bought one of my books and was going to send me on a three-week, sixteen-city publicity tour.
“We’re going to make you a media star,” he said brightly.
“But I’ve never been on TV,” I protested in mild panic.
“Oh, it’s easy. You’ll love it,” he said with the blithe assurance of someone who doesn’t have to do it himself.
“No, I’ll be terrible,” I insisted. “I have no personality.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll give you a personality. We’re going to fly you to New York for a course in media training.”
My heart sank. All this had a bad feeling about it. For the first time since I accidentally set fire to a neighbor’s garage in 1961, I began to think seriously about the possibility of plastic surgery and a new life in Central America.
So I flew to New York and, as it turned out, the media training was less of an ordeal than I had feared. I was put in the hands of a kindly, patient man named Bill Parkhurst, who sat with me for two days in a windowless studio somewhere in Manhattan and put me through an endless series of mock interviews.
He would say things like: “OK, now we’re going to do a three-minute interview with a guy who hasn’t looked at your book until ten seconds ago and doesn’t know whether it’s a cookbook or a book on prison reform. Also, this guy is a tad stupid and will interrupt you frequently. OK, let’s go.”
He would click his stopwatch and we would do a three-minute interview. Then we would do it again. And again. And so it went for two days. By the afternoon of the second day I was having to push my tongue back in my mouth with my fingers.
“Now you know what you’ll feel like by the second day of your tour,” Parkhurst observed cheerfully.
“What’s it like after twenty-one days?” I asked.
Parkhurst smiled. “You’ll love it.”
Amazingly he was nearly right. Book tours are actually kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you actually are, you can eat steak three times a day at someone else’s expense, and you get to talk endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch. Is this a dream come true or what?
It was an entirely new world for me. As you will recall if you have been committing these pieces to memory, when I was growing up my father always took us to the cheapest motels imaginable—the sort of places that made the Bates Motel in Psycho look sophisticated and well appointed—so this was a gratifyingly novel experience. I had never before stayed in a really fancy hotel, never ordered from room service, never called on the services of a concierge or valet, never tipped a doorman. (Still haven’t!)
The great revelation to me was room service. I grew up thinking that ordering from the room service menu was the pinnacle of graciousness—something that happened in Cary Grant movies but not in the world I knew—so when a publicity person suggested I make free use of it, I jumped at the chance. In doing so I discovered something you doubtless knew already: Room service is terrible.
I ordered room service meals at least a dozen times in hotels all over the country, and it was always dire. The food would take hours to arrive and it was invariably cold and leathery. I was always fascinated by how much effort went into the presentation—the white tablecloth, the vase with a rose in it, the ostentatious removal of a domed silver lid from each plate—and how little went into keeping the food warm and tasty.
At the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, I particularly remember, the waiter whipped away a silver lid to reveal a bowl of white goo.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Vanilla ice cream, I believe, sir,” he replied.
“But it’s melted,” I said.
“Yes it has,” he agreed. “Enjoy,” he added with a bow, pocketing a large tip and withdrawing.
Of course, on book tours it’s not all lounging around in swank hotel rooms, watching TV, and eating melted ice cream. You also have to give interviews—lots and lots of them, more than you can imagine, often from before dawn until after midnight—and do a positively ludicrous amount of traveling in between. Because there are so many authors out there pushing their books—as many as two hundred at busy periods, I was told—and only so many radio and TV programs to appear on, you tend to be dispatched to wherever there is an available slot. In one five-day period, I flew from San Francisco to Atlanta to Chicago to Boston and back to San Francisco. I once flew from Denver to Colorado Springs in order to do a thirty-second interview that—I swear—went approximately like this:
Interviewer: “Our guest today is Bill Bryson. So you’ve got a new book out, do you, Bill?”
Me: “That’s right.”
Interviewer: “Well, that’s wonderful. Thanks so much for coming. Our guest tomorrow is Dr. Milton Greenberg, who has written a book about bedwetting called Tears at Bedtime.”
The whole point, as Bill Parkh
urst taught me, is to sell yourself shamelessly, and believe me, you soon learn to do it. Since that initial experience I have done six other book tours in America, four in Canada, three in Australia and New Zealand, two in South Africa, one in continental Europe, and eight in Britain. That’s not to mention all the literary festivals and other such events that become part of your life if you write for a living and would kind of like people to buy your stuff.
I suppose all this is on my mind because by the time you read this I will be in the middle of a three-week promotional tour in Britain. Now I don’t want you to think I am sucking up, but touring in Britain is a dream compared with nearly every other country. To begin with, distances are shorter than in a country like America, which helps a lot, and there is a lot less very early and very late radio and TV to get through. That helps a lot, too. Above all, members of the British reading public are unusually intelligent and discerning, not to mention enormously good-looking and generous in their purchasing habits. Why, I have even known people to throw down a Sunday newspaper and say, “I think I’ll go out and buy that book of old Bill’s this very minute. I might even buy several copies as Christmas presents.”
It’s a crazy way to make a living, but it’s one of those things you’ve got to do. I just thank God it hasn’t affected my sincerity.
(This was written for a British audience, of course, but I would just like to say here that American book buyers are also unusually intelligent and discerning, not to mention enormously good-looking and generous.)
One of the most arresting statistics that I have seen in a good while is that 5 percent of all the energy used in the United States is consumed by computers that have been left on all night.
I can’t confirm this personally, but I can certainly tell you that on numerous occasions I have glanced out hotel room windows late at night, in a variety of cities, and been struck by the fact that lots of lights in lots of office buildings are still burning, and that computer screens are indeed flickering.
Why don’t we turn these things off? For the same reason, I suppose, that so many people leave their car engines running when they pop into a friend’s house, or keep lights blazing in unoccupied rooms, or have the central heating cranked up to a level that would scandalize a Finnish sauna housekeeper— because, in short, electricity, gasoline, and other energy sources are so relatively cheap, and have been for so long, that it doesn’t occur to behave otherwise.
Why, after all, go through the irksome annoyance of waiting twenty seconds for your computer to warm up each morning when you can have it at your immediate beck by leaving it on all night?
We are terribly—no, we are ludicrously—wasteful of resources in this country. The average American uses twice as much energy to get through life as the average European. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we consume 20 percent of its resources. These are not statistics to be proud of.
In 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the United States, along with other developed nations, agreed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2000. This wasn’t a promise to think about it. It was a promise to do it.
In the event, greenhouse emissions in the United States have continued relentlessly to rise—by 8 percent overall since the Rio summit, by 3.4 percent in 1996 alone. In short, we haven’t done what we promised. We haven’t tried to do it. We haven’t even pretended to try to do it. Frankly, I’m not sure that we are even capable of trying to pretend to try to do it.
Consider this: In 1992, Congress decreed that before the end of the decade half of all government vehicles should be able to run on alternative fuels. To comply with this directive, the Postal Service bought ten thousand new trucks and, at a cost of $4,000 each, modified them to run on ethanol as well as gasoline. In May 1998, the first of 350 such trucks ordered for the New York City area began to be delivered. Unfortunately, none of these vehicles is ever likely to use ethanol for the simple reason that the nearest ethanol station is in Indianapolis. When asked by a reporter for the New York Times whether anyone anywhere at any level of government had any intention of doing anything about this, the answer was no. Meanwhile, the Postal Service, along with all other federal agencies, will continue to spend $4,000 a pop of taxpayers’ money modifying trucks to run on a fuel on which almost none of them will ever run.
What the administration has done in terms of greenhouse emissions is introduce a set of voluntary compliance standards that industries are entirely free to ignore if they wish, and mostly of course they so wish. Now President Clinton wants another fifteen or sixteen years before rolling back emissions to 1990 levels.
Perhaps I am misreading the national mood, but it is hard to find anyone who seems much exercised about this. Increasingly there is even a kind of antagonism to the idea of conservation, particularly if there is a cost attached. A recent survey of twenty-seven thousand people around the globe by a Canadian group called Environics International found that in virtually every advanced nation people were willing to sacrifice at least a small measure of economic growth for cleaner air and a healthier environment. The one exception: the United States. It seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed that the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy.
Even President Clinton’s cautiously inventive proposals to transfer the problem to a successor four terms down the road have met with fervent opposition. A coalition of industrialists and other interested parties called the Global Climate Information Project has raised $13 million to fight pretty much any initiative that gets in the way of their smokestacks. It has been running national radio ads grimly warning that if the president’s new energy plans are implemented gasoline prices could go up by fifty cents a gallon.
Never mind that that figure is probably inflated. Never mind that even if it were true we would still be paying but a fraction for gasoline what people in other rich nations pay. Never mind that it would bring benefits that everyone could enjoy. Never mind any of that. Mention an increase in gas prices for any purpose at all and—however small the amount, however sound the reason—most people will instinctively resist.
What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if we merely modified our extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.
Take hot water. Nearly every household in Europe has a timer device on its hot water system. Since people clearly don’t need hot water when they are at work or fast asleep, there isn’t any need to keep the tank heated, so the system shuts down. Here in America I don’t know how to switch off my hot water tank. I don’t know that it is possible. There is piping hot water in our house twenty-four hours a day, even when we are far away on vacation. Doesn’t seem to make much sense.
According to U.S. News & World Report, the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used—lights burning in rooms that are unoccupied, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.
In England, we had something called an off-peak energy plan. The idea was to encourage users to shift some of their electricity consumption to nighttime hours, thus spreading demand. So we bought timer devices and ran our washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher in the middle of the night and were rewarded for this small inconvenience with big savings on the electricity consumed during those hours. I would be pleased to continue the practice now, if only some utility would offer it to me.
; I am not suggesting that the British are outstandingly virtuous with regard to conservation—in some areas like recycling and insulation their behavior is nothing to write home about—merely that these are simple ideas that could be easily embraced here.
It would be really nice, of course, to see a wholesale change in direction. I would dearly love, for instance, to be able to take a train to Boston. Every time I travel to Boston now, I have either to drive myself or sit in a cramped minibus with up to nine other hapless souls for two and a half hours. How nice it would be to speed across the New England land-scape in the club car of a nicely appointed train, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Once, not so long ago, it was possible to travel all over New England by train. According to a body called the Conservation Law Foundation, the whole of the rail system in northern New England could be restored for $500 million. That’s a lot of money, of course, but consider this: As I write, Burlington, Vermont, is spending $100 million on a single twelve-mile loop road.
I don’t know how worrying global warming is. No one does. I don’t know how much we are imperiling our futures by being so singularly casual in our consumption. But I can tell you this. Last year I spent a good deal of time hiking the Appalachian Trail. In Virginia, where the trail runs through Shenandoah National Park, it was still possible when I was a teenager to see Washington, D.C., seventy-five miles away, on clear days. Now, in even the most favorable conditions, visibility is less than half that. In hot, smoggy weather, it can be as little as two miles.
The forest that covers the Appalachian Mountains is one of the richest and loveliest on Earth. A single valley in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park can contain more species of native trees than the whole of western Europe. A lot of those trees are in trouble. The stress of dealing with acid rain and other airborne pollutants leaves them helplessly vulnerable to diseases and pests. Oaks, hickories, and maples are dying in unsettling numbers. The flowering dogwood—one of the most beautiful trees in the American South, and once one of the most abundant—is on the brink of extinction. The American hemlock seems poised to follow.
