I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  This may be only a modest prelude. If global temperatures rise by four degrees Centigrade over the next half century, as some scientists confidently predict, then all of the trees of Shenandoah National Park and the Smokies, and for hundreds of miles beyond, will die. In two generations one of the last great forests of the temperate world will turn into featureless grassland.

  I think that’s worth turning off a few computers for, don’t you?

  Our subject today is convenience in modern life, and how the more convenient things supposedly get the more inconvenient they actually become.

  I was thinking about this the other day (I’m always thinking, you know—it’s amazing) when I took my younger children to a Burger King for lunch, and there was a line of about a dozen cars at the drive-through window.

  We parked, went in, ordered and ate, and came out again—all in about ten minutes. As we departed, I noticed that a white pickup truck that had been last in line when we arrived was still four or five vehicles back from collecting its food. It would have been much quicker if the driver had parked like us and gone in and gotten his food himself, but he would never have thought that way because the drive-through window is supposed to be speedier and more convenient.

  You see my point, of course. We have become so attached to the idea of convenience that we will put up with almost any inconvenience to achieve it. It’s crazy, I know, but there you are. The things that are supposed to speed up and simplify our lives more often than not actually have the opposite effect, and this set me to thinking (see, there I go again) why this should be.

  Americans have always had a strange devotion to the idea of assisted ease. It is an interesting fact that nearly all the everyday inventions that take the struggle out of life—escalators, automatic doors, elevators, refrigerators, washing machines, frozen food, fast food, microwaves, fax machines—were invented here or at least first widely embraced here. Americans grew so used to a steady stream of labor-saving advances, in fact, that by the 1960s they had come to expect machines to do pretty much everything for them.

  The moment I first realized that this was not necessarily a good idea was at Christmas of 1961 or ’62 when my father was given an electric carving knife. It was an early model and, like most prototypes, was both bulky and rather formidable. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, but I have a clear impression of him donning goggles and heavy rubber gloves before plugging it in. What is certainly true is that when he sank it into the turkey, it didn’t so much carve the bird as send pieces of it flying everywhere in a kind of fleshy white spray, before the blade struck the plate with a shower of blue sparks, and the whole thing flew out of his hands, and skittered across the table and out of the room, like a creature from a Gremlins movie. We never saw it again, though we used to sometimes hear it thumping against table legs late at night.

  Like most patriotic Americans, my father was forever buying gizmos that proved to be disastrous—clothes steamers that failed to take the wrinkles out of suits but had wallpaper falling off the walls in whole sheets, an electric pencil sharpener that could consume an entire pencil (including the metal ferrule and the tips of your fingers if you weren’t real quick) in less than a second, a water pick that was so lively it required two people to hold and left the bathroom looking like the inside of a car wash, and much else.

  But all of this was nothing compared with the situation today. We are now surrounded with items that do things for us to an almost absurd degree—automatic cat food dispensers, electric juicers and can openers, refrigerators that make their own ice cubes, automatic car windows, disposable toothbrushes that come with the toothpaste already loaded. People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire.

  There is almost nothing, no matter how ridiculous, that won’t find a receptive audience so long as it promises to provide some kind of relief from effort. I recently saw advertised, for $39.95, a “lighted, revolving tie rack.” You push a button and it parades each of your ties before you, saving you the exhausting ordeal of making your selection by hand.

  Our house in New Hampshire came replete with contraptions installed by earlier owners, all of them designed to make life that little bit easier. Up to a point, a few actually do, but most are just kind of wondrously useless. One of our rooms, for instance, came equipped with automatic curtains. You flick a switch on the wall and four pairs of curtains effortlessly open or close. That, at any rate, is the idea. In practice what happens is that one curtain opens, one closes, one opens and closes repeatedly, and one does nothing at all for five minutes and then starts to emit smoke. We haven’t gone anywhere near them since the first week.

  something else we inherited was an automatic garage door. In theory, this sounds wonderful and even rather classy. You sweep into the driveway, push a button on a remote control device, and then, depending on your sense of timing, pull into the garage smoothly or take the bottom panel off the door. Then you flick the button again and the door shuts behind you, and anyone walking past thinks: “Wow! Classy guy!”

  In reality, I have found, our garage door will close only when it is certain of crushing a tricycle or mangling a rake and, once closed, will not open again until I get up on a chair and do something temperamental to the control box with a screw-driver and hammer, and eventually call in the garage door repairman, a fellow named Jake who has been taking his vacations in the Maldives since we became his clients. I have given Jake more money than I earned in my first four years out of college, and still I don’t have a garage door I can count on.

  You see my point again. Automatic curtains and garage doors, electric cat food dispensers and revolving tie racks only seem to make life easier. In fact, all they do is add expense and complication to your existence.

  And therein lie our two important lessons of the day. First, never forget that the first syllable of convenience is con. And second, send your children to garage door–repair school.

  Sometime in the early 1930s, Richard Hollingshead of New Jersey bolted a motion picture projector to the roof of his car, climbed into the front seat, and began watching movies that he projected onto the door of his garage.

  Goodness knows what he was thinking or where the idea came from, but the sight of flickering images on his garage door intrigued people on his street and they came over to have a look. Soon people from all over the neighborhood were dropping in to watch movies on Hollingshead’s garage door.

  In 1933, Hollingshead patented the idea and later that year opened America’s first drive-in movie theater in the nearby town of Camden. It was not an immediate success. For years the concept languished, but in the 1950s, as Americans became increasingly mobilized, the idea suddenly took off in a big way. From virtually nothing in 1950, the number of drive-in movie theaters grew to six thousand by late in the decade.

  At their peak, they were almost as numerous and popular as conventional movie theaters. Teenagers could do things in cars they could not with propriety do in a normal theater. Parents with young children were spared the expense of engaging a baby-sitter because they could put the kids in the back in their pajamas. Moms could nurse babies. Some drive-ins even offered special services like laundering. You would drop off a bag of dirty clothes as you entered and pick it up washed, dried, and folded when you left.

  And then, almost as quickly as they arose, America’s driveins began to fade away. Today they have largely vanished from the American landscape. Drive down almost any two-lane highway in the country and one thing you can almost certainly count on seeing at some point in the day is a derelict drive-in movie theater.

  Not far from us, just over the Connecticut River in Vermont, is one of the last remaining drive-ins. It is open just on Friday and Saturday nights in summer, and I daresay that when the current owner retires it will go altogether. Impetuously,
a few nights ago I suggested that we go for the evening.

  “Why?” said my youngest daughter with great dubiousness.

  “Because it will be fun,” I explained.

  I was astonished to realize that not only had no one in the family been to a drive-in movie, but they weren’t even clear on the principle behind it.

  “It’s simple,” I explained. “You drive into a field with a big screen, park beside a metal post with a speaker on it on a length of wire, and hang the speaker on the inside of your car door for the sound.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you watch the movie.”

  “Is it air-conditioned?” asked my youngest son.

  “Of course it’s not air-conditioned. You’re outdoors.”

  “Why not just go to a real movie theater where there’s air-conditioning and comfy seats?”

  I tried to think of a compelling answer, but the reasons that leapt to mind—because you can smoke and drink beer and smooch extravagantly—didn’t seem to apply here. “Because it will be fun,” I repeated again, but with less conviction.

  Our two teenagers excused themselves at once, arguing that they would sooner have a disfiguring skin disease than be seen at a public entertainment with their parents, but my wife, two younger children, and my son’s friend Bradley—a precocious eight-year-old whom I would happily leave at a turnout in the Nevada desert if the opportunity ever presented itself—reluctantly agreed to give it a try.

  And so we drove over the river to our venerable drive-in. Almost at once I began to remember why drive-ins went into such a precipitate decline. To begin with, it is not remotely comfortable to sit in a car to watch a movie. If you are in the driver’s seat, you have a steering wheel in your lap the whole time. If you are in the back, you can’t really see at all. Unless you had the foresight to clean the windshield before you set off, you will be watching the picture through a smear of squashed bugs and road dirt. The sound quality from the little speakers is always appalling and tinny and makes every character sound as if he is speaking from the inside of a gym locker. In a place like New England, the evenings invariably turn cool, so you shut the car windows to keep warm and then spend the rest of the evening wiping condensation from the inside of the windshield with the back of your arm. Often it rains. Above all, daylight saving time means that it isn’t dark enough to see the movies until about 10 P.M.

  So we sat for ages, one of only about half a dozen cars in a field large enough for 250, and squinted at vague, shadowy images on a distant screen.

  “I can’t see the picture,” came a voice from the back.

  “That’s because it’s not quite dark yet,” I said.

  “Then why are they showing it?”

  “Because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to start it until after 10 P.M., and nobody would come.”

  “But nobody has come.”

  “Who wants a treat?” I said, cannily changing the subject.

  I took the children to the refreshment booth and bought enough food to feed a medium-size community for six months. By the time we returned to the car, it was almost dark enough to make out the images on the screen. However, our speaker kept cutting out. So we moved to another position. In the process, Bradley spilled his popcorn, a 24-ounce soda, and a box of malted milk balls.

  So I got out and mopped him down with an old blanket I found in the trunk. Then my son announced that he needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Would you like to come too, Bradley?” I inquired sweetly.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re not going to tell me you need to go as soon as I get back?”

  “Nope.”

  I took my son to the toilet. When we returned, Bradley announced that he needed to go now. “Real bad,” he added for emphasis.

  So I took Bradley. By the time we completed our toilet rounds, the film was half over and no one knew what was going on. It also turned out that the new speaker was even worse than the previous one had been.

  So I started the engine again, instructed the kids to hold tight to their drinks and popcorn, and backed out of our position. There was a horrible wrenching noise.

  “You should probably put the speaker back on the post before you drive off,” observed Bradley sagely.

  “You’re quite right, Bradley,” I agreed. “Still, this cord might come in handy if I need to garotte anyone.”

  Bradley announced that he had spilled his drink again and needed to go to the bathroom. So I gave Bradley yet another wipe-down and took the kids for more refreshments. By the time we got back, the movie was finishing. Between us, we had watched seventeen minutes of it, about eight minutes with sound.

  “Next time you want to waste twenty-two dollars on some harebrained notion, let me know and I’ll send a check in the post, and then we can stay at home and watch TV,” my wife suggested.

  “Excellent idea,” I agreed.

  I’m not even going to begin to tell you about the frustration of trying to get a foreign-born spouse or other loved one registered as a legal resident in the United States because I haven’t the space, and anyway it is much too boring. Also, I can’t talk about it without weeping copiously. Also, you would think I was making most of it up.

  You would scoff, I am quite sure, if I told you that an acquaintance of ours—an English academic of high standing— sat open-mouthed while his daughter was asked such questions as “Have you ever engaged in any unlawful commercial vice, including, but not limited to, illegal gambling?” and “Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?” and—my particular favorite—“Do you plan to practice polygamy in the U.S.?” His daughter, I should point out, was five years old.

  You see, I am weeping already.

  There is something seriously wrong with a government that asks such questions of any person, not merely because the questions are intrusive and irrelevant, and not merely because inquiries into one’s political affinities fly in the face of our treasured Constitution, but because they are such a preposterous and monumental waste of everyone’s time. Who, after all, when asked if he intends to engage in genocide, espionage, multiple marriages, or any other of an extremely long and interestingly paranoid list of undesirable activities, is going to say: “I certainly do! Say, will this harm my chances of getting in?”

  If all that was involved was answering a list of pointless questions under oath, then I would just sigh and let it be. But it is infinitely more than that. Acquiring legal status in America involves fingerprints, medical examinations, blood tests, letters of affidavit, birth and marriage certificates, employment records, proof of financial standing, and much else—and all of it must be assembled, validated, presented, and paid for in very specific ways. My wife recently had to make a 250-mile round trip to give a blood sample at a clinic recognized by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service even though one of the finest university-affiliated hospitals in America is here in the town in which we live.

  There are endless forms to fill out, each with pages of instructions, which often contradict other instructions and almost always lead to the need for more forms. Here, exactly as written, is a typical fragment of instructions regarding the presentation of fingerprints:

  Submit a complete set of fingerprints on Form FD-258.... Complete the information on the top of the chart and write your A# (if any) in the space marked “Your no. OCA” or “Miscellaneous no. MNU. ”

  If you don’t have form FD-258 (and you don’t) or aren’t sure which is your MNU number (and you aren’t), you can spend days repeatedly dialing a phone number that is forever busy, only to be told by a weary, overworked-sounding voice when you finally do get through that you must call another number, which the person tells you once in a mumble and you don’t quite catch, so that you have to go through the entire process again. After a while you begin to understand why flinty-eyed cowpokes
in places like Montana turn their ranches into fortresses and threaten to shoot any government officer fool enough to walk into the crosshairs.

  And it’s no good just filling in the forms to the best of your ability, because if anything is even a jot out of order, it is all sent back. My wife had her file returned once because the distance between her chin and hairline on a passport-sized photograph was out by one-eighth of an inch.

  This has been going on for two years for us. Understand, my wife does not want to practice brain surgery, engage in espionage, assist or collude in the trafficking of drugs, participate in the overthrow of the American government (though, frankly, I would not stand in her way), or take part in any other proscribed activity. She just wants to do a little shopping and be legally resident with her family. Doesn’t seem too much to ask.

  Goodness knows what the holdup is. Occasionally we get a request for some additional document. Every few months I write to ask what is happening, occasionally imploring to be put in touch with a real person, some actual human who will surely see that it is a ridiculous waste of government money and everyone’s time to infinitely prolong a process that ought to be routine, but I never get a response.

  Three weeks ago, we received a letter from the INS office in London, which we thought must be the official approval at last. Good joke! It was a computer-generated letter saying that because her application had been inactive for twelve months it was being canceled. Inactive! Canceled! Show me to the gun cabinet, please.

  All this is a very roundabout way of getting to a story concerning some British friends of ours here in Hanover. The husband is a professor at Dartmouth. Eighteen months ago, he and his family went back to England for a year’s sabbatical. When they arrived at Heathrow airport, excited to be back home, the immigration officer asked them how long they were staying.