Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  * * *

  WEST VIRGINIA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  WV

  Nickname:

  The Mountain State

  Capital:

  Charleston

  Flower:

  Rhododendron

  Tree:

  Sugar maple

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  Motto:

  Montani semper liberi (‘Mountain men are always free’)

  Well-known residents and natives: General Stonewall Jackson, Pearl S. Buck, Bill Withers, Brad Dourif, Morgan Spurlock, Jennifer Garner, Booker T. Washington, Chuck Yeager.

  * * *

  The shift stops at an assembly point for prayers. This might sound very peculiar to us but Americans do not seem in the least embarrassed about this kind of thing. Given too the danger lurking around every corner I suppose the faithful reckon they could do with a little help from above, further above even than management. An average of seven West Virginian miners a year die in accidents, though last year was an especially bad one. The Sago Mine Disaster further upstate claimed twelve lives all on its own. Down here they do not say ‘Goodbye’ or ‘See you later’ when they leave for their various individual work stations, they say to each other ‘Work safe’ or ‘Go safely’. I have been in places before where safety is said to be paramount, but never where it was quite so clearly meant. Bob is very proud that his mine has an unimpeachable record, but he knows that he cannot rely on that. Every day is the first day and every day is dangerous. Aside from the possibility of a structural collapse there is the ever-present danger of explosion, which will in itself trigger a fall. There is high-voltage electricity down here, there are huge hydraulic vehicles, there are the manbus railways and miles and miles and miles of conveyor belt that carry the coal to the surface, there is the mining machinery itself. All of these can generate sparks. An atmosphere impregnated with methane and coal dust, the notorious firedamp that caused so many deaths in British mines, is a permanent potential hazard that has constantly to be monitored.

  Upright at last.

  ‘…most gracious heavenly Father…please watch over us, heavenly Father, keep us safe, watch over our children as we’re here…please bring our service people home cos they need us so dearly. We ask all these things in His holy name. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ echoes Bob. ‘Guys, be safe. Be safe, Franchise.’

  ‘Franchise?’

  ‘Most of the miners got a nickname,’ says Bob. ‘This here’s Trigger, and Franchise…’

  Unashamed by lack of moustache.

  I am reminded that the ceiling could collapse at any point.

  ‘Trigger, yes, but Franchise?’

  ‘It’s too long of a story…’ says Franchise. ‘Work safe.’

  When we arrive at the face itself I am astonished to find that the whole mining operation is carried out by one man with a PlayStation-style game controller in his hand.

  ‘This is Brian.’

  ‘I thought you said all miners had nicknames?’

  ‘That’s right. His real name is Tim.’

  Brian stands just to one side of a colossal snaking, spitting, thrashing, grinding machine, which looks horribly alive, like something out of a dystopian science-fiction movie. It tears with ferocious grinding claws at the face, up and down, up and down, a frenzied systematic gnawing directed by Tim with his joysticks; the water that sprays like saliva from its tubes to calm the dust only reinforces the image of a giant armoured insect drooling as it feasts. The machine feeds by hurling the coal back into itself while a docking procedure at its rear mates it with another long, long hydraulic vehicle which transfers the coal into its own violently shaking, rolling interior and then roars off to the internal belt system half a mile away. In this way coal is being torn from the mountain and conveyed to the surface at all times. Always, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  I gulp in the fresh air with gratitude when at last I can escape to the top without looking like too much of a wimp.

  I add miners to the list of people I tremendously admire but would rather die than emulate.

  Bob shakes me by the hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Hell of a tour.’

  ‘Go safe,’ says Bob.

  Don’t be deceived: I am actually fast asleep.

  KENTUCKY

  ‘To be honest, by the time I’ve inhaled all those fumes from the vats and tasted the liquor in its various stages of ageing nothing much sinks in.’

  The Commonwealth of Kentucky (the last of the four Commonwealths we shall meet on our travels) seems to be bordered by more states than any other. You might say the Kentucky spirit is part Missouri, part Illinois, part Indiana, part Ohio, part West Virginia, part Virginia and part Tennessee. In other words as much Midwest as Southern. Of course the Kentucky spirit is really bourbon whiskey and I am on my way to find some.

  Mind you, the state’s split personality does seem crucial to understanding Kentucky. You might look at the Civil War as a dispute between the two opposing sides of her identity: Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln, President of the Union, versus Kentucky-born Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. When I ask a Kentuckian if Kentucky is the South, they reply, somewhat gnomically, ‘Kentucky is a southern state, but we are not in the South.’ Hm.

  Woodford Reserve

  First, I must go to Versailles, which as everyone knows, is just outside Paris. Only this Versailles is pronounced ‘Vairsails’ and lies about thirty miles west of Paris, KY, the county seat of Bourbon County. Hidden off Route 60, behind white rail fences and tucked low down in a valley beneath the green rolling fields of prime Kentucky horse country I finally discover a charming grey stone building that reminds me instantly of the many Scotch whisky distilleries I have happily visited in the past. This is Woodford Reserve, the place where sour-mash fermentation was invented by one Dr James Crow back in the 1820s.

  Chris Morris, the present-day Master Distiller, shows me round. Everything here is done the old-fashioned way–the traditional copper stills were custom-built in Glasgow; the barrels are coopered, charred (for colour and flavour), labelled, filled and bunged by hand. Bourbon differs from Scotch in that it must by law be made mostly from maize–corn as they call it here–with barley, rye and wheat making up the rest if desired. Sour mash refers to a fermentation process in which the pH value of the yeast enzymes is regulated by the addition of acid, as in the making of sourdough bread. Something like that anyway: to be honest, by the time I’ve inhaled all those fumes from the vats, drilled some weep-holes, sucked in my portion of the angel’s share in the cellar and tasted the liquor in its various stages of ageing nothing much sinks in. I look down at the bubbles coming up from the vat.

  ‘That’s carbon dioxide,’ Chris explains.

  ‘CO2? Not very environmentally friendly of you.’

  Chris laughs moderately.

  A cat wanders past.

  ‘Do you think that cat might be alcoholic?’ I ask. ‘All those fumes.’

  ‘He’s an employee, one of our mousers. So he better not be drinking.’

  I laugh immoderately. The fumes are definitely getting to me.

  ‘Time,’ says Chris, ‘to do some tasting.’ He makes it sound as if a terrible chore awaits us.

  I add branch to my first glass. I have heard this called for in bars up and down America. ‘Gimme a bourbon and branch.’ Branch actually just means plain water, but it once meant water from a branch, or tributary stream, of a river. A tiny amount just takes the hottest peak of fire from the drink.

  While I rapidly neck three glasses of the 1995 Chris talks about the spectrum of flavours: apricot, cinnamon, burnt coffee, vanilla and dusty oak.

  ‘You see raspberry juice is just raspberry juice, but the action of yeast in bourbon creates over 200 separate flavour elements.’

  ‘Nobody really understands me…’

  ‘So the number of actual flavour combinations possible is 200
times 199 times 198 and so on. Billions. Many of them beyond human sensory reach of course…’

  ‘My mummy understands me. My teddy bears understand me.’

  * * *

  KENTUCKY

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  KY

  Nickname:

  The Bluegrass State

  Capital:

  Frankfort

  Flower:

  Goldenrod

  Tree:

  Tulip poplar

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  Instrument:

  Appalachian dulcimer

  Motto:

  United We Stand, Divided We Fall

  Well-known residents and natives: Zachary Taylor (12th President), Abraham Lincoln (16th), Jefferson Davis (President of the Confederacy), Kit Carson, Judge Roy Bean, Robert Penn Warren, Hunter S. Thompson, Larry Flynt, D.W. Griffith, Tod Browning, John Carpenter, Gus van Sant, Victor Mature, Patricia Neal, Warren Oates, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton, George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Rosemary Clooney, Billy Ray Cyrus, Colonel Harland Sanders (yes, that Colonel Sanders. Who else?).

  * * *

  Chris offers me a handkerchief. The uncontrollable sobs turn to uncontrollable giggles and I am led away hiccoughing.

  Woodford Reserve is proud to be the ‘official bourbon’ of the Kentucky Derby, America’s most prestigious, glamorous and celebrated horse race. In fact, Lexington, where I am taking my drunken self to bed, is the capital of America’s racing industry. In many ways it can be regarded as the racing capital of the world. If my hangover doesn’t prevent me, I shall find out more tomorrow.

  Branding

  You have to admire the branding people–you know, those advertising PR professionals who are paid fortunes to come up with slogans and logos for corporations, councils and other institutions. Kentucky is best known for bourbon whiskey and for horses. I think you’ll agree with me that for once the design and branding people earned their money. This is what they came up with:

  Kentucky: unbridled spirit.

  You’ve got to hand it to them. Genius. Just two words, but they say it all.

  Yeast enzymes at work.

  Pretty Run and Keeneland

  Nursing a gently nagging head, I head out for Pretty Run, a very well named brood mare farm owned and (prettily) run by Tom van Meter in the heart of Bluegrass Country. I pick that bone with him straight away. The grass is green. Green as anything.

  ‘From a distance in the spring,’ says Tom in a heart-melting Kentucky drawl, ‘the blue seed heads of the poa grass give a kind of azure tinge to the fields.’

  I take his word for it, but cannot help feeling let down. I was so looking forward to seeing genuinely blue grass.

  I have noticed the name van Meter just about everywhere in the Lexington area and it turns out he is one of a family that have lived and worked here for eight or nine generations. I watch spirited mares, all of them pregnant, frisking and skittering about the fields, tossing their manes, shivering their flanks and acting as thoroughbreds will–leaping in eye-rolling panic at the sight of just about anything in other words. Especially Stephens. I can spook a dead donkey. I don’t know what it is that our four-hoofed friends see in me, but whatever it is they don’t like it.

  Persuading Griff van Meter to show me his buttock.

  Unbridled spirit.

  Tom buys mares, pays stud farms to allow him to bring them to be ‘covered’ by a stallion and then finds himself to be, as nature takes her due course, the proud owner of a brand-new thoroughbred foal, which he will sell as a ‘weanling’, a foal that has just stopped suckling. Mostly he does this on behalf of owners. The skill is to understand dam’s and sire’s bloodlines and form, which is to say the pedigrees and racing histories of the parent mare and stallion, well enough to create a foal that will grow into a winning racehorse. Those with a lot of money are prepared to pay huge sums for the most glamorous and dazzling bloodlines.

  ‘They sold a mare at a local sale last week for ten million dollars,’ Tom tells me.

  ‘Ten million!’

  ‘The Dubai and the Irish–they pay big money. See, me, I’d take more pride in buying a mare for twenty thousand that gives birth to a foal worth a hundred thousand than I would in buying a mare for one million that mothered a foal worth two. One is a five-fold increase, the other only two-fold. Wanna come and see me try and sell some of my horses?’

  The ‘local sale’ turns out to be Keeneland’s November Breeding Stock Sale, the largest thoroughbred horse sale in the world. Tom has a couple of mares selling there today, so we drive over to take a look. British racing has Tattersalls, the elegant sales ring in Newmarket, Suffolk and America has Keeneland, Kentucky, equally elegant but on a much, much grander scale.

  I am all for racing. It is pretty. People dress up and enjoy themselves. Yes, there is gambling, but it somehow seems a great deal less squalid than at the Trump Taj Mahal (mind you, everything on the planet is less squalid than the Trump Taj Mahal). Racing is also a sporting passion. The jockeys and horses seem happy enough and money is generated for local and national economies.

  However. Wrong of me, no doubt, but none of the bloodstock equine business that takes place today interests me anything like as much as the sound the auctioneers make.

  I am sure a true scholar of the turf would have found much more to excite his or her curiosity in the sales ring of Keeneland but–call me shallow, call me silly–for me it was all about the hypnotic, thrilling, hilarious, impressive and jaw-droppingly skilful auction chanting.

  Impossible to reproduce satisfactorily on the page, American auctioneering is all about ‘filler words’ as Justin Holmberg, one of the Keeneland auctioneers, was kind enough to tell me. You go to auctioneer school and learn the basic art of spotting bidders and talking lots and so on, but you also learn to develop your own chanting style.

  As I understand it, you state the amount that has been bid and the amount you would like to hear bid next and in between those two sums you place your filler words or phrases: ‘bid me up’, ‘will ya give me’, ‘bid it up now’. Sounds simple enough, but the auctioneer’s song never ends. He is talking all the time in a percussively twanging drone that is not unlike that of Native American songs blended with bluegrass banjo plucking.

  ‘Twenty thousand bid-it-up-now thirty, twenty bid-it-up-now thirty, thirty bid-it-up-now forty, forty bid-it-up-now, bid-it-up-now fifty, forty bid-it-up-now fifty, fifty bid-it-up-now sixty’ and so on.

  I leave Kentucky after meeting a member of the tenth generation of van Meters, Tom’s son Griff, a charming rogue of a youth, whose raffish playboy manner revealed hidden depths in his love of Kentucky and his desire to redevelop and invigorate Lexington’s dilapidated downtown area. He revealed something else hidden too. A tattoo of Kentucky on his buttock. Statal love can be no greater.

  ‘What is so great about Kentucky though?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘She’s everything America should be. She’s a rural farming paradise, but she has a great city in Louisville. She may be landlocked but there’s twelve hundred miles of shoreline on one lake alone. She’s mixed in race, but she’s tolerant and neighbourly. Neither right wing nor left wing, neither Yankee nor Dixie, neither Midwest nor Eastern. Kentuckians are polite, charming and friendly but without overdoing that Southern graciousness thing. Kentucky. Greatest state in the union.’

  All that and unbridled spirit too…

  TENNESSEE

  ‘…well it has to be said they really do resemble a most outrageously old-fashioned casting agency’s idea of hillbillies.’

  Agriculture and Commerce? That is their motto when they can boast Johnny Cash, Tina Turner, Bessie Smith, W.C. ‘the Father of the Blues’ Handy, Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin, Carl Perkins and Elvis Aaron Presley? Well, I dare say the state government up at Nashville know best…does seem a little weedy for a motto though.

  Memphis is the biggest city in Tennessee and is of cours
e home to Graceland, one of America’s most popular tourist attractions, indeed after the White House the second most visited residence in America. The capital Nashville, with its legendary music hall the Grand Ole Opry, styles itself the Home of Country Music, but I am headed to the mountains of Tennessee to fulfil a lifelong ambition and hear another kind of American music. I want to hear the Appalachian mountain men play.

  Bluegrass!

  My passion for bluegrass, a loose but good enough name for the style of music I am in pursuit of, began when I fell in love with Lester Flatt’s and Earl Scruggs’s theme tune for the American sixties sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. I only dimly remember that show as a child but years later I bought an album featuring Flatt and Scruggs who had gone on to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. On that album, ace banjo-picker Scruggs performed his immortal ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ and I was hooked for life. Some time after that I went to the cinema and saw John Boorman’s Deliverance, one of four or five films that completely changed the way I looked at everything–at cinema, people, myself, the world. It has a great moment (no, not the ‘I’m gonna make you squeal like a pig’ scene–another) known as The Duelling Banjos, in which Ronny Cox (playing a guitar, as it happens) faces off against a local, rather inbred-looking youth who turns out to play the meanest, fastest banjo in the South.