by Stephen Fry
Ed Peden and SF play with the original missile control panel.
A Castle in Kansas
Somewhere in the wilds of Shawnee County, twenty-five miles or so from the state capital Topeka, past battered, storm-shattered shacks that look as though Dorothy and Toto might still be living in them, I find Subterra Castle, the home of Ed and Dianna Peden. They look like what they are, gentle ageing hippies who could do with a good steak and kidney pie and a pint of ale inside them. How strange then that they should choose to live in a place that was designed to be able to deal out remote megadeaths at the push of a button.
The Pedens were the first people to buy and convert an American underground missile launch complex into a home. The first? You mean others followed? You bet. A missile bunker, you would imagine, is a cold, concrete place, inimical to cosy domesticity and vibrant hippie values and yet somehow this remarkable and kookily likeable couple have created as comfortable and desirable a pad as you can imagine.
The American military built the complex in the early sixties at a cost of around $4 million–a vast sum in those days. The Pedens bought it for $40,000 twenty years later in 1982. It was constructed originally to house a 78-foot-long Atlas missile–essentially a long rocket with an A-bomb built in. Everything about this place is massive. The main door weighs 47 tons and the walls are 18 feet thick–all designed to withstand a nuclear blast.
The rocket would lie on its side and be ‘erected’–Ed enjoys the innuendo of this and repeats it in various forms many times until I take pity on him and laugh–into an upright position, so the chamber, as you might imagine, is more than double height. Below is a deep pit, designed to take the heat and flames from the thrusters on take-off. There was something similar on Tracy Island for the Thunderbird rockets, I seem to remember.
* * *
KANSAS
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
KS
Nickname:
The Sunflower State
Capital:
Topeka
Flower:
Sunflower
Tree:
Cottonwood
Bird:
Western meadowlark
Song:
Home on the Range
Motto:
Ad astra per aspera (‘To the stars through hardships’)
Well-known residents and natives: Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th President), Bob Dole, Marlin Fitzwater, Gary Hart, John ‘body lies a-mouldering’ Brown, Amelia Earhart, Clyde ‘Pluto’ Tombaugh, Carrie Nation, Erin Brockovich, Walter Chrysler, Clyde Cessna, Damon Runyon, William Inge, William Burroughs, Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Hattie McDaniel, Ed Asner, Dennis Hopper, Don Johnson, Annette Bening, Kirstie Alley, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Wendell Hall, Samuel Ramey, Melissa Etheridge.
* * *
Exorcising the negative energy of the militaristic past with tabors and bongos.
The control room and its panel of instrumentation is still there, together with the tunnels and signage and other evidence of the complex’s first use. But Ed and Dianna have managed to lay over it a rich fog of patchouli, hippie ornament and happy vibe. Ed’s plan was always to counter the ‘heavy negative energy’ of the place with his and Dianna’s ‘positive energy’. They are unreconstructed and proud peaceniks and it is hard not to agree with them: their possession and conversion of this sinister place is a kind of victory over war and militarism. I cannot imagine what the buzz-cut military figures who first occupied this place would think if they knew it would one day resound to the etiolated guitar strums, bongos and flutes of New Age music. How would they react if the space–time continuum somehow got confused and they were to walk round a corner and encounter a nude Ed and Dianna, smoking weed and humming mantras?
There may be little natural light down there in Subterra, but these places are warm in winter and cool in summer. They are, Ed maintains, the modern equivalent of castles, secure, dramatic, prestigious and desirable. Remote cameras, operated by joystick allow them to see who their visitors are and to sit out the blizzards, supercell storms and tornadoes that rage impotently overhead.
For all their blithering about energy and their sweet natures, Ed and Dianna are true Americans and therefore equipped with the focused minds of hard-headed entrepreneurs. They now run a business that advises those who want to live a similar life. No one will ever get such a bargain again, of course, but many are prepared to pay fabulous money for a decommissioned Cold War complex. Americans. Even within the fluffiest hippie there will beat the cold heart of an unsentimental businessman.
‘This town is coming like a ghost town’: with White Cloud's local historian, Wolf River Bob.
Ghost Town
The next place I visit could do with an even bigger makeover yet. White Cloud is in Doniphan County, in the top right-hand corner of the state, right on the Missouri River. It is now a ghost town and I walk through with Wolf River Bob (aka Bob Breeze) the local historian and a White Cloud citizen who can remember the glory days.
Where once there was a prosperous river port, churches, saloons and a thriving community now there is next to nothing. No shops are open, despite signs inviting me in for ice creams and sodas. Another sign points to a lookout on the hill from where, on a clear day, four states can be seen: Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa.
In a land so huge not every town can be connected to mainstream America. It seems that a river port like White Cloud is too far from the interstate and the railway to stay prosperous in the modern world. It has no USP, as they say in business these days, no unique selling point which can bring business or tourism flocking to it. White Cloud is just another town and despite Bob’s efforts, it looks as though its decline is permanent. Maybe that is where its future lies. A little more dilapidation, some artful sagebrush and tumbleweed and he could have a heritage ghost town on his hands…
The day is ending: I drive to my Topeka hotel and collapse on a hammock. Tissues must be restored and energies recharged for the long journey south into neighbouring Oklahoma.
OKLAHOMA
‘When they start the rodeo itself, it is all I can do not to cry out in joy and wonder.’
Only New Mexico and Arizona of the forty-eight connected or ‘contiguous’ states, were admitted to the union after Oklahoma. Gore Vidal’s grandfather, the blind Thomas Pryor Gore, was a founding senator when it finally achieved statehood in 1907. Before that time it had been a territory for the displaced American Indians who had been booted out of their ancestral lands in the southern states. Their enforced journey is known in Indian lore as the Trail of Tears. As agricultural real estate became more valuable in the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, the tribes were ejected yet again when white settlers came over for the famous Land Run, a first-come first-served scramble for farmland. Those who broke the rules and grabbed their land before the official time were known as ‘sooners’, which gave the state its nickname. Out went the Indians, in came the homesteaders and statehood for okla humma, which means, with cruel irony, ‘land of the red man’.
Nature exacted a harsh revenge on those white homesteaders in the early 1930s when drought, high winds and poor agronomy came together to curse the land and create the notorious dustbowl. Thousands and thousands of poor farmers upped sticks and headed for California. John Steinbeck’s character Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath came to stand for this kind of downtrodden Okie. Henry Fonda in the John Ford film adaptation of the novel made famous a speech of Joad’s which has since become a kind of fanfare for the common man:
One of the Oklahoma homeless with one of ‘the cheerfullest and sweetest natured kitchen staff you could ever hope to meet’.
I’ll be all around in the dark–I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look–wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids
laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build–I’ll be there, too.
It is no coincidence that around the time of the dustbowl, Lynn Riggs wrote the play Green Grow the Lilacs, which looks back to a time when the Oklahoma Territory, just before statehood in 1906, seemed like a kind of agricultural paradise. In 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein turned the play into the hit Broadway musical Oklahoma! Coming only three years after the John Ford film, Oklahoma must have felt like the most examined state in the union around this time.
But it wasn’t all dustbowl, depression and doom for the Okie. Oil made Tulsa one of the richest cities in the country from the 1920s onwards and today the state is amongst the most prosperous in America.
Salvation
Which is not to say that there are no poor. I am in a Salvation Army hall in downtown Oklahoma City this afternoon. Every week they feed the homeless with meals cooked up by the cheerfullest and sweetest-natured kitchen staff you could ever hope to meet. Today, which is Good Friday, sees an especially big crowd lining up outside.
I talk to Captain Vance Murphy, an officer of the Salvation Army. They really do mimic the military with their ranks and hierarchies. Maroon epaulettes on his clean white shirt bespeak his rank as clearly as a silver gorget on a Lifeguard. As one who abominates religion and most religious organisations, I have always had a soft spot for the Salvation Army. They are so resolutely unsexy, so affably unhectoring, so charmingly unconditional in their kindnesses. They just get on with feeding and clothing the poor while expecting nothing in return. The only hint of preaching is confined to a rather hopeless but good-natured moment of biblical exegesis which is delivered by one of the officers as the ‘clients’ eat. Nobody appears to be paying much heed, a few of the homeless women nod their heads encouragingly enough for the officer to pick up a guitar and sing. A ghastly rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’, predictably enough, but a small price to pay for what looks like truly excellent hot food on a cold March day.
I speak to Terry, one of the homeless, and to a companion of his whose name I never quite catch. They like this place. They respect the lack of interference and religiosity. Terry’s companion finishes his meal and gets up from the table to help the Salvation Army kitchen staff stack chairs. It is his way of saying thank you.
The spokesperson for the Salvation Army (old-fashioned as they are, they have succumbed to the twenty-first century mania for PR people) who is there to facilitate our filming is a sparky, pretty and amusing young blonde called Heidi. She reveals, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, that she is a belly-dancer. There is not a hint of eastern blood in her–but every week she belly dances professionally in restaurants and nightclubs around Oklahoma City. None of us in the film crew is prepared to let it go at that. We make an appointment to come and film her that evening. But first, one of the great American institutions awaits us: the rodeo.
Rodeo
The Central Oklahoma Junior Rodeo Association, COJRA, holds its meetings several times a season in the Tyler Blount Memorial Arena in Guthrie, OK. It is possible that this is the juiciest slice of American pie that I have yet tasted. The sight of young children wandering around in cowboy hats and boots is endearing enough, but when they start the rodeo itself, it is all I can do not to cry out in joy and wonder.
The event is open to any single boy or girl who has never been married and is 18 years old or younger. There are five divisions, according to age: 14–18, 10–13, 7–9, 6 and Under and 4 and Under. When you have seen a three-year-old child in a Stetson trying to rope a steer or ride a sheep, you have seen it all.
* * *
OKLAHOMA
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
OK
Nickname:
The Sooner State
Capital:
Oklahoma City
Flower:
Oklahoma rose
Tree:
Eastern redbud
Bird:
Scissortail flycatcher
Waltz:
Oklahoma Wind
Motto:
Labor omnia vincit (‘Work conquers all’)
Well-known residents and natives: Geronimo, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Wiley Post, Belle Starr, Pretty Boy Floyd, T. Boone Pickens, Sam ‘Walmart’ Walton, Lynn Riggs, Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Gene Autry, Lon Chaney Jr., Will Rogers, Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Vera Miles, Dale Robertson, Walter Cronkite, Dan ‘Laugh-In’ Rowan, Blake Edwards, Jennifer Jones, Tony Randall, James Garner, Chuck Norris, Gary Busey, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ron Howard, Brad Pitt, Woody Guthrie, Chet Baker, J.J. Cale, Eddie Cochran, Roger Miller, Tom Paxton, Garth Brooks.
* * *
The rodeo begins (and I have been in America now long enough not to be surprised by this) with the National Anthem. Hats are doffed and placed over hearts as a young man rides round the arena bearing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. I am, much to my own annoyance, deeply and inexcusably moved. I console myself with the thought that I would be just as emotionally stirred by the Bulgarian National Anthem being played at an archetypally Bulgarian event. I am of course fooling no one but myself by imagining this.
We kick off with ‘Goat Undecorating on Foot for 4s and Under’. How do you undecorate a goat? Well, first a supervising adult has to decorate one, in other words they have to attach a ribbon to it. At the sound of the bell the child then runs up, holds the goat between its legs, detaches the ribbon and runs back. Quickest time wins. A wealth of comedy is concealed in that simple phrase ‘holds the goat between its legs’, for while each child may be clear about the rules of the game, the goat is not and there is much chasing and falling over to be gone through before it will consent to be undecorated. As it is the same goat in each instance, the proceeding becomes more and more fraught each time as the goat grows increasingly impatient at the whole proceeding and begins violently to wish itself elsewhere.
Goat undecorating and lassoing at the Junior Rodeo.
For 6 and under there is an added wrinkle: ‘Goat Undecorating on Horse’, which is essentially the same but mounted. This is no trivial addition, for goats and horses do not get on well. It all adds to the broad comedy, however, and by now I am red, watery-eyed and wheezy from laughter.
Mutton Bustin’, Goat Tying and Steer Riding all follow. Mutton Bustin’ isn’t quite as alarming as it sounds. The wild horse and the bronco are considered too much for toddlers to cope with, even here in laissez faire, libertarian, devil-may-care cowboy country, and so the youngest age categories are given sheep to ride. The longer they can stay on without being thrown the better. They may be dressed in protective clothing, but for all that these are brave little cowboys and cowgirls. Their determination and seriousness is marvellous to behold.
The sun sets, the moon rises and the older children show off their skills, which are much greater but so much less appealing.
‘Mutton bustin’.
You cannot attend such an event without reflecting on the contingencies of life, birth and destiny.
America has its millions of urban children, ghetto children, born to gangs and drugs and guns and violence and abuse. And it has these children, raised in the countryside, born to goat undecorating, mutton bustin’, lassoing and riding. The two kinds of child will probably never meet in all their lives. Will they ever respect each other, learn about each other or even consider each other? Probably not. There were children eating in the Salvation Army hall this afternoon who may well never see a horse, unless it is a police horse, in all their lives.
Belly
Whether children from either side of the tracks will ever see belly dancing is another question altogether. From Guthrie to a kind of rodeo of human flesh in the Shishkabob Restaurant, Oklahoma City. Our old friend Heidi is dancing with a girl who is by day a staff sergeant in the United States Air Force. I tuck a dollar bill into an area that I can look at without blushing and head for bed.
&nb
sp; COLORADO
‘Someone suggests a slug of Tabasco hot pepper sauce as a specific against altitude sickness. I fall for what is a crude, cruel and childish practical joke.’
A vast rectangular slab, the boundaries of Colorado were determined not by its rivers, valleys, mountains or other natural features, but by mankind’s arbitrary lines of latitude and longitude. For all that, one cannot but think of natural features when contemplating this grand and beautiful state. Here the Rocky Mountains climax into their highest peaks, indeed Colorado is everywhere above 1,000 feet, the capital Denver being at an elevation of precisely 5,280 feet, thereby accurately earning its nickname of the ‘Mile High City’.
Powwow
It is to the capital I come first, to witness one of Denver’s regular events, the annual March Powwow (that’s March the month, not march the military strut or political demonstration). A powwow is a Native American gathering, any kind of intra-tribal or inter-tribal conference. These days, large-scale powwows like Denver’s are opportunities to celebrate American Indian music, costume, history and culture. From all over North America the tribes people come: Black Foot, Crow, Cree, Apache, Comanche, Cherokee, Choctaw, Ojibwa, Lakota, Navajo, Hopi, Passamaquoddy and dozens and dozens of others.
Denver’s downtown Coliseum Convention Center is enormous and at the climax of the powwow its main arena is entirely filled with thousands of men, women and children in their traditional buckskins, beads and feathers. The whooping and stamping are precisely like the ‘war path’ scenes of cowboy movies. Hollywood used ‘real live Indians’ in its movies of course, so there is no reason for the authentic dances and moves to be any different from what I’ve seen in westerns, but nonetheless it gives me a shock.
