Middle America may be universally canned, but there is still something charming about the land of the free and the people who inhabit it. Oh, and the blueberry pie is pretty good too.
Cortez is a town in the south-west of Colorado. It sprawls in an unconcerned just-got-up kind of manner between the Navajo and Ute Indian reservations and the high Pine Mountains and the aspen-fringed meadows of the San Juan. Colorado is a square box that contains some of the most good golly gosh astonishing scenery in the world. If you think of Europe as being classically nature, Asia impressionist, Africa expressionist, Australia naïve, then America is nature’s great big romantic period. America is all strings and trumpet. It has the soaring emotion of high romance and also moments of visual diabetes – just too much syrupy brilliance.
All students of international politics should come and see the great American interior. Most of us are people who made their countries, but Americans are people who are made by their country. If you go out west you begin to understand what makes Americans the way they are. I’ve always had an unfashionable and unironic respect and fondness for what is universally and dismissively known as Middle America. It contains a lot of immensely admirable people. Self-reliant, optimistic, determined, stoical, hardworking, rigorously honest, in fact, rigorously everything. And most of all, they’re the kindest, most helpful folk I’ve ever come across. They are, it must also be said, prone to depression, possess a dull single-mindedness and a willful uninquisitiveness about anything they can’t touch, smell, eat or tinker with. They’re people whose horizons are broad but fixed, whose questions are few and answers simple. I like them. Clemenceau, the French politician, famously said that America went from barbarism to degeneration without an interval of civilisation. I bet he said it all the time. It has that smooth feel of a fond Gallic rudery. I bet he got a knowing laugh in all the Old World salons after dinner with that one. As with most glib French things – it’s just plain wrong.
American civilisation is the cocktail of barbarism and decadence. This has been the look, sound and feel of our culture for the past 100 years. What is more true about America is that it went from austere hardship to immense comfort without an intervening thought for good taste. Comfort and ease, softness, smoothness, warmth, wrinkle-free, cosy, huggable things are what Americans like to surround themselves with. Relaxed is the aesthetic choice. The idea that you should suffer some inconvenience or mild discomfort for the sake of a look or an effect is an incomprehensible anathema. In this wide open space the elasticated lifestyle is all.
Towns like Cortez always look temporary, as if they’re still auditioning for a place in the landscape. One morning you might drive past and find it’s all gone, been blown away or swallowed up in the night, and it wouldn’t be that surprising. All over Colorado there are remnants of communities that didn’t quite make it, the ghost towns of defunct businesses and mines. The Pueblo Indian remains perched high up in the cliffs from tribes that were extinct even before the Navajo and the Apache got here. For the most powerful nation on earth there is a distinct sense of impermanence about life on the land, as if it were all on probation. And coming from the Old World where the market towns and villages, the churches, manors and castles all seem as immutable and resolute as the hills and rivers, I find this exciting and refreshing. Because if a mining or cattle town can spring up and die in the architectural blink of an eye then, also overnight, the prairie can sprout a Kansas or Chicago, the desert can suddenly grow Las Vegas.
All over the US west there are communities made up entirely of trailer caravans set in neat rows on tree-shaded culs-de-sac plugged into the umbilical comfort of utility, but they look like pieces on a Monopoly board, waiting to be moved on, swept up by the story of the nation. These trailers, so easily dismissed as white trash, as the burrows of enigma and underclass, can also be seen as the descendants of the covered wagon that first came and prised open this vast nation, adding states a piece at a time. America was only finished as a geographical entity in my lifetime. It’s been like some kind of gigantic jigsaw puzzle waiting to fall into place. The drama of America can never compete with its own set. It is dwarfed by the land, the jagged height of the mountain, the heat of the desert, the ferocity of the thunder. Why try to build a house as beautiful as the prairie or as permanent as a canyon? There’s no beauty that can compare with the beauty of nature. You can see how easy it is for this land to become a fundamental cathedral, a huge amphitheatre parable of the might of an elemental heaven and the minute insignificance of individual humans. I think this is one of the reasons that Middle America has such an oddly resistant view of global warming and environmental crisis; it’s because it’s so difficult to see it making a difference on this scale. The forces of nature are so unarguable compared to all human vanity and hubris.
And the nation itself was built on overcoming nature. Americans don’t live in their country, they live despite it or perhaps with its benign disregard. The west is full of tourists trundling around in caravans imitating wagon trains, again, settling down in defensive circles in laybys and almost all of them are American. They never cease to be awestruck tourists in their own country. It’s a much-bandied truism that only less than 20 per cent of Americans have passports. The assumption from outside is that this is because they’re frightened or ignorant or too lazy to care how the rest of us live. But that’s not the truth. Well, it’s not all the truth. They’re still getting to know their own backyard. In three generations America has quadrupled in size. It’s still fresh from the oven. I travelled through a little town with one street of clapboard houses, a café, a liquor store, a petrol station, a few trailers. We stopped to eat cheeseburgers, they recommended the blueberry pie. This is where they once mined plutonium for the nuclear deterrent. This tiny blink of a place was the well for the Cold War, the arms race, the great game of global politics for 50 years. Now the holes in the rock are filled in, the spoil bulldozed over, the river runs muddy, boiling yellow alongside the road, the red earth canyons blister in the sun. It’s as if it all meant less than nothing. The pie was surprisingly good.