by Stephen Fry
Anyway. Moving on.
The Galleria
It would be madness to cover the United States without having investigated a little more deeply than one usually does the phenomenon of the Shopping Mall. In Europe we are used enough to these monstrous entities by now, but to visit one of the first and largest is nonetheless instructive.
The Houston Galleria calls itself a city within a city: it has an ice-rink, car parking for 14,000, 400 shops, 11 beauty salons and two hotels. Over 24 million people a year come here. It is the fourth-largest mall in America and proudly caters for the high-end shopper with outlets including Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Gucci, Macy’s, Tiffany & Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Bvlgari and Nordstrom. And, to make me happy, an Apple Store. I wander about under the enormous glass roofs in a delirious daze. Two Texans in cowboy hats tell me that they and many friends come here just as you might to an art gallery. To look and to wonder.
A proportion of the richer people who come regularly to the Galleria would count as members of Houston’s ‘social register’. For all its ‘good ole boy’ image, Texas like much of America has its class system, its roster of the rich, ritzy and respectable. To be fair to this elite, they almost only ever assemble en masse for the sake of charity.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Gala
I have been invited this evening to a gala (pronounced the same way Durham miners do: ‘gayla’) in aid of the Houston Society for the Performing Arts. I arrive at the reception and am immediately served a tumbler of enough whiskey to knock out a bison. The theme of the evening is the great American musical and the women here have gone to great lengths to look sensational and glamorous in the American mode, a mode which involves a great deal of facial make-up and careful attention to hair. I cannot guess how many gallons of blonde colorant have been poured onto the assembled heads. Perhaps there is a Strategic Clairol Reserve in Houston. It has always struck me as bizarre that when in Europe American women should be so loud in their praise of the elegance and beauty of Parisians and yet be able to go back home and do exactly the opposite. Plainness, simplicity and restrained elegance are not to be numbered amongst the accomplishments of the rich Houstonian dame. I do not want to sound bitchy, however. They welcome me with charm and warmth. The price for my supper is a small speech, which they receive very kindly.
The battle of the cheekbones.
Those of us who don’t dance, sit and talk.
The ladies I sit with attend a dinner/ball/rout/gala of this kind at least once a week in the season. Endowment and philanthropy are enormously important. The rich are expected to choose at least three or four pet charities and to be extremely generous to them. The beneficiaries of this evening’s party are a large number of institutions directly funded by the Society of Performing Arts. Any assumption that rich Texans are automatically philistine, right-wing and crass is instantly contradicted. These people value culture in all its forms, including a theatre whose practitioners often bite the hands the feed it:
‘Honey, I ploughed so much money into a play you would not believe. Wonderful young writer, but oh dear me he does so hate us all.’
Yes, on one level you could look at the sea of dyed hair and blushered cheeks and listen to the tortured vowels of refined Southern speech and cry ‘Vulgar! Self-satisfied! Rich! Vain!’ but you would be dishonest not to acknowledge also the unconditional generosity, open-mindedness, hard work and charm with which these people live their highly privileged lives.
How much easier America would be to understand if it conformed simply to all our snootiest, snobbiest and most sneering expectations. Instead it does conform, but not simply. It conforms with ambiguity, contradiction and surprise. Maybe that is why I love it so.
Border Patrol
The frontline in America’s war against illegal immigrants is the Mexican border. I come to El Paso, where many of the fiercest frontline battles in that war are daily fought. Mexico has influenced Texas hugely; their respective cultures have combined to form a very particular style of Tex-Mex food, drink, music and architecture. But while Mexican music, beer and quesadillas may be welcome in the United States, its people are less so.
There is a class of vigilante volunteer who patrols the southern border off his own bat. Not officially sanctioned or funded, these people’s vigils are fuelled entirely by their personally felt enmity towards ‘illegals’ and by what they would describe as their own patriotism. They call themselves the ‘Minutemen’, a title borrowed from the militias of the Revolutionary Wars who declared themselves ready to face the enemy (in that case the British) at a minute’s notice.
I join Minuteman Shannon, in the frontier town of Fabens, about an hour from El Paso. He drives us along the borderline in his pick-up, pointing out places where illegals are known to try and cross. Every now and again we pass a genuine government Border Patrol vehicle. They are on friendly terms, Shannon assures us, for the Federal Agents know the Minutemen are law-abiding and would never tackle an illegal themselves, they would radio the information to the proper authorities. Are there British ‘patriots’ who are so incensed by illegal immigration into the United Kingdom that they would set up their own border patrols in like manner? Shannon strikes me as more sad and lonely than dangerous. He has that slightly obnoxious and overstated pride in his obedience to the law and his respect for proper authorities characteristic of the self-righteous patriot. I ask him whether he has any sympathy for the Mexicans whose lives are so poor and who look out daily across a river to a land of riches and plenty? He evades the question by referring once more to the law.
the Mexican side of the border. Poorer, but better dressed than their gringo neighbours.
With Agent Romero on the American side.
Scratching out a living.
Incidentally, I say that the Mexicans look out over a river, and it may be that you already know that I am referring to the Rio Grande, which for much of its course forms the natural border between America and Mexico. Illegal immigrants are often called ‘wetbacks’ on account of their having had to swim that river. You may imagine my surprise then when Shannon showed me the Rio Grande. Not a river at all, but a drain, a dry ditch. Further along it swells into a small stream, I am told, but here it is no more than a trickle.
The following day I join the official United States Border Patrol in the city of El Paso itself. Agent Romero drives me along the fences on the US side of the border and we see, over the dribble that is the Rio Grande, Mexicans in the city of Juarez gazing across at us. Helicopters fly overhead and we pass dozens and dozens of other Border Patrol vehicles. The budget for this level of security must be colossal.
There were a few moments of high-intensity action when we are sped towards spots where illegals are actually crossing, according to our in-car shortwave radio. We arrive at one place in time to see a pair of elderly Mexicans being led away. Often, Agent Romero tells me, they will be paid to try a bold and ridiculous crossing in order to create a diversion that is cover for a more serious incursion somewhere else along the frontier. As often as people, it is drugs that are smuggled across. I ask him the same question I asked Minuteman Shannon. Does he, as a Latino-American especially, feel any sympathy for those trying to get in? He returns the same answer. It’s the law. They must not break the law.
‘If the law was different I would feel different,’ he eventually confides. A very odd thing for a free human being to say in my opinion, but I suppose a government agent being filmed is not, in the usual sense, free. Illegal immigration has become a huge issue in America, much as it has in Britain, and perhaps he feels that if he is caught on camera expressing even the smallest degree of understanding or fellow-feeling his job will be forfeit.
I climb into a ‘sky box’, a preposterous, hydraulically lifted mobile sentry box in which the poor agent tasked to it has to stay for eight-hour shifts. Either side of the river lie the two enormous cities of El Paso and Juarez, and I can see them clearl
y from my high vantage point. The difference in prosperity is all too apparent. The only way to stop people wanting to migrate from Juarez to El Paso, it seems to me, is for Mexico to become as prosperous as the United States. In recent years Mexico’s economy has grown, certainly, and it continues to expand at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps the day will come when it is American illegals who try to swim the Rio Grande? Not in my lifetime, I think, but perhaps one day.
Since Montana and the Canadian border I have trailed the Rocky Mountains southwards. It is here that they end, in the pass (El Paso) where their southern journey through Mexico as the Sierra Madre begins. I sit in an old cantina, sipping Mexican beer and being treated to Mexican music and I contemplate the next leg of my journey which will take me back north–as far north as America goes. The frozen seas of the Alaskan Arctic seem a long way away from the warmth of southern Texas.
Living and loving the cliché…
THE SOUTHWEST, PACIFIC NORTHWEST, CALIFORNIA, ALASKA AND HAWAII
NEW MEXICO
‘There are pueblos in New Mexico as old and as continuously inhabited as the oldest European villages.’
It is something of a surprise to learn that New Mexico, a land that is mostly flat, arid, sparse and scrubby, should also be so ethnically diverse, so culturally rich. America’s largest Hispanic and fifth-largest Indian populations bestow unique characteristics upon the state. There is a brand of ‘New Mexico Spanish’ with its own words, a blend of archaic colonial Castilian and Native American vocabularies. There are pueblos in New Mexico as old and as continuously inhabited as the oldest European villages. This mix of cultural integrity and diversity has attracted over the years hundreds of thousands of countercultural, alternative lifestyle Americans–hippies, peaceniks, eco-warriors, artists and musicians.
Santa Fe and the Pueblos
I begin my exploration of the state in its capital, Santa Fe, a town that has kept its historic feel like few other American cities. Or has it? In fact it is all very false and more than a little self-conscious. The city was originally laid out by the first Spanish settlers (it had been a series of Indian pueblos since the eleventh century) with streets radiating from a central square, or plaza. By the time New Mexico was admitted to the Union in 1912 (despite the Oscar-winning Judy Garland song, the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe railroad never actually reached Santa Fe, which was served by a branch line) this system had been overrun by standard American architecture and the City Fathers determined that Santa Fe, which had precious few other routes to prosperity, should be made over in the traditional style and become a tourist centre. To that end the city was–wait for a gorgeous new verb–pueblofied.
Pueblo is a word which does so much service in so many directions as to need a little clarification. It is the Spanish word for town or village. When the Spanish arrived in Nuevo México they saw that the Native American populations lived in villages, unlike their more nomadic brothers and sisters in the Plains for example. The colonists therefore called these tribes pueblo Indians. The kinds of house the tribes built–dried mud adobes–were called pueblo also. Thus pueblo means:
A Native American people
The villages lived in by the above (there are twenty-one federally recognised pueblos)
The style of architecture of the above
The decision to pueblofy Santa Fe has resulted in an artful city. Literally. It is artful in its artifice and it is filled with artists and their work. Indeed it has the third-largest art market in America, after New York and Los Angeles. The adobes are attractive, no question: in a climate like New Mexico’s you can dry mud, fill it with a few husks and straws and you have a magnificent building material. The classic pueblo colour is brown, which sounds dull but suits the landscape well. Pinks, yellows and whites are also common, giving a pleasant marzipan and icing-sugar feel.
I spend the morning wandering around. One whole side of the main plaza is taken up by sellers of jewellery and other artefacts: blankets spread out before them are covered in silver and turquoise brooches, belt buckles and hair slides. Many of them are ageing hippies. I find it all very depressing and I am not sure why. I see a woman of sixty with long, long silver hair. She looks a little grouchy and not very well nourished. I picture her coming here with a boyfriend. She is twenty, serene and beautiful. It is 1968. A new life of peace, love, beauty and joy awaits them here. Over the years reality bites. Sexual infidelity, betrayal, desertion, angry children, drugs, money troubles, the dissipation and destruction of a dream. Maybe my imagination is running away with me, but the atmosphere of Santa Fe depresses and distresses me in equal measure.
I am cheered up, perversely, by the sight of a plaque in the back yard of a tourist shop in East Palace Road.
* * *
NEW MEXICO
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
NM
Nickname:
Land of Enchantment, Tierra Encantada
Capital:
Santa Fe
Flower:
Yucca
Tree:
Two-needle piñon pine
Bird:
Great roadrunner (Meep, meep!)
State insect:
Tarantula wasp
Motto:
Crescit eundo (‘It grows as it goes’)
Well-known residents and natives: Cochise, Geronimo, Bill Richardson, Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Conrad Hilton, Clyde ‘Pluto’ Tombaugh, Georgia O’Keefe, Ernie Pyle, Bruce Cabot, William ‘Barbera’ Hanna, Ronny Cox, Val Kilmer, Demi Moore.
* * *
The plaque commemorates the site as being the office out of which grew the Manhattan Project, the code name for the design, construction, testing and delivery to the air force of the world’s first atomic bomb. This address was the PO box to which all correspondence was sent for the duration of the Bomb’s development. The actual site was too secret to allow its address to be known to anyone. It is well known enough today however: Los Alamos.
Drooling over a microscope with lab director Terry Wallace.
The Quark Bar, Los Alamos.
Los Alamos
The Los Alamos site, a converted school high up on a mesa twenty miles from Santa Fe, is now even bigger and busier than it was in 1944 when Robert Oppenheimer led his team of physicists and engineers towards the nuclear age.
I said it was perverse of me to be cheered up by the thought of the Manhattan Project, and of course much about it was terrifying, tragic and wholly lamentable. However I have always been excited by Big Science, by the minds, insights and achievements of great physicists. After a morning of faded hippies, bad art and tacky artefacts, it comes as a relief to know that the discipline and hard-headed reality of science have their place in New Mexico too. One of my all-time heroes is the Nobel Prizewinning Richard Feynman: my heart beats faster and my eyelids flutter at the very mention of his name. He worked in Los Alamos in the late forties as a very, very young man. In one of his essays he writes about taking a cab through New York on his way back from Los Alamos to Princeton. He sees men working on new skyscrapers and wants to shout out at them, ‘Don’t bother! The whole world is going to end soon. There’s no point building anything!’ These men and women knew what they were creating, but most of them were Jewish and knew what they were fighting too. It was believed by everybody (rightly as it turned out) that Hitler was working on nuclear fission himself. Luckily, the Nazi contempt for Jewish science had led them down the wrong path and the war ended before they could harness the power of the atom.
The Earthship has landed.
Los Alamos today remains one of the most important centres for scientific research in the world. I am shown around a piece of incomprehensible testing machinery by Director of Science Terry Wallace. The passion with which he speaks and his pride in the achievements of the laboratory are infectious. He talks to me of self-healing materials for bridges and buildings, of carbon atoms being drawn into cylindrical shapes that can store power…ending the capacitance crisi
s that forces us still to rely on antiquated battery technology. My mouth is open so wide that drool hits the floor.
They still manipulate the atom here, but in less sinister ways than those of Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Terry shows me a series of hydrogen atoms that have been aligned to spell LANL, Los Alamos National Laboratory. How scientists manage to keep their brains straight at this altitude is quite beyond me. We are a mile and half up here and it is beginning to get to me.
There is time to lunch in the Quark Bar (named after a species of subatomic fermion particle) under photographs of Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Oppenheimer himself.
Taos and the Earthships
My next stop is Taos, a place so hippie-shabby that it makes Santa Fe seem like Beverly Hills, which to the average Taos citizen it probably is. There is a certain charm to the town, but I am headed for an area outside it, beyond the pueblos (which are closed to visitors at the moment, it being a holy time of year). I am looking for earthships.
Earthships were first constructed outside Taos in the early seventies, a long time before ecological considerations were as mainstream as they are today.
With Mike Reynolds, a founding father of the Earthship movement.
What are they? Well, they are eco-homes. One side is made of tyres and rammed earth, the other side is open to the sun, which will power solar panels and photovoltaic cells and warm the greenhouses and conservatories. Everything about them is designed to be as self-sustaining and environmentally friendly as possible–and today of course you can add the phrase ‘carbon neutral’ to that list.
