Читать книгу Breakfast at the Exit Cafe - Wayne Grady - Страница 8
ОглавлениеWASHINGTON looms across the border from British Columbia at the end of a long line of cars and buses. As we await our turn at customs, we watch a man playing with his young son on the wide stretch of grass between two parallel roads, the one we are on leading into the United States and the other disappearing behind us into Canada. The man is tossing his son into the air and catching him on the way down, and the child is laughing hysterically, obviously frightened out of his wits. The man keeps throwing him higher into the air and catching him at the last minute, the boy’s head swinging closer and closer to the ground each time. We watch with resigned fascination until we arrive at a stop sign a few metres from the border, beside a placard that reads Canada This Way, with an arrow pointing behind us.
We are driving into America.
Border crossings always unnerve me, which, as Merilyn says, is an odd and tiresome thing, because I have crossed this and many other borders in my life and ought to know what to expect. I have no particular reason to expect to be unnerved. But to me, crossing a border is a harrowing experience, perhaps because I grew up in a border city—Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, Michigan. The saying in Windsor was that the light at the end of the tunnel was downtown Detroit, and it was meant as a positive thing.
Every year before school started, my parents would whisk my younger brother and me through the tunnel to the United States because everything was so much cheaper on the other side. They’d drag us up and down Woodward Avenue, into all the really cheap department stores, with their dark, uneven hardwood floors and sticky, glass-fronted cases, buying us cheap shirts and sweaters and pants and socks and windbreakers. At a designated spot between Woodward Avenue and the Detroit Tunnel, my father would pull the car over and my mother would frantically cut the price tags off all the pants with a pair of nail scissors, pull all the cardboard stiffeners out of the shirts, stuff all the bags and tags and cardboard and tissue paper and shoeboxes into one of the shopping bags, and toss the whole thing into a garbage pail practically within hearing distance of the customs shed. Then she would make us put on all the clothes we’d just bought, to hide them from the customs official, who, if he spied an overlooked price tag or caught the whiff of new denim, would yank us from the car and make us take off all our clothes and then arrest my parents. In my family, “duty” was something one paid if one were caught wearing two pairs of pants.
Now I watch nervously as the guard comes out of his tiny kiosk, pistol jutting from a little holster that looks like a miniature leather jockstrap, and leans over to ask what the hell I think I’m doing, trying to get into the United States. What business do I have going into his country? Because things are cheaper there, is that it? Well, buddy, things aren’t cheap in America so that foreigners like me can come in and buy everything up. Do I imagine that Americans work as hard as they do at keeping prices down for the benefit of non-Americans? I can think of no answer to such a question. In fact, it seems like sound economic theory to me. All of us in this line—they should turn us back, close the border. We’ll ruin America. Besides, the mouthy literalist in me wants to add, I don’t like your country. I think your country is too big and plays too rough, like a sulking adolescent with divorcing parents, and I am certain my thoughts are written all over my face, like price tags sticking out from the collar of a brand-new flannelette shirt.
“Where are you coming from?” the guard asks politely, taking our passports.
“Ontario,” I say.
“Vancouver,” Merilyn says, simultaneously.
“Oh,” I say, “you mean today? Yes, Vancouver.”
“And where are you going?”
“Ontario,” I say, stupidly.
“Seattle,” says Merilyn.
The guard looks at me. “I mean we’re taking the long way home. Down the coast, and”—I feel Merilyn’s elbow jabbing me in the ribs; she has warned me about saying too much at borders, it’s the first thing they look for—“through Seattle,” I add lamely.
The guard smiles and hands me our passports. “Welcome to America,” he says.
IT’S THE twentieth of December. Merilyn has spent the past three months as writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia while I stayed home in Ontario looking after, in reverse order, the gardens, the house, the cat, and myself. We’ve both had time to get used to being alone, a rarity for a couple who usually eat, sleep, and write in the same house. We’ve probably become rugged individualists, more American than Canadian. I flew to British Columbia so that we could drive home together, thinking the trip home would give us time to rediscover our communal selves before settling in for the winter.
We could head back straight across Canada, but the weather is making us cautious. High winds have been buffeting Vancouver, with heavy snow causing power outages and trees falling like drunks in Stanley Park and across the city’s streets. Climate change is making Vancouverites freeze in the dark. No snow on the Prairies yet, but Saskatchewan and Alberta are known for sudden changes in weather. And everyone expects a white Christmas in Ontario. Even if it doesn’t snow, the Trans-Canada will be cold, icy, and treacherous. Driving home through the southern reaches of America seems to us a better bet.
The terrors of the border are balanced, too, by the appealing thought that we’ll be able to just get lost for a few weeks. Not lost in the literal sense of not knowing where we are, for we are travellers in an age of cellular phones and wireless Internet access. No, I mean lost in a more ancient sense, the way Thoreau meant lost when he advised packing a few vittles in a sack and disappearing into the woods for a few weeks, “absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” Or in Paul Theroux’s sense: after a trip to Africa, he wrote, “The word ‘safari’ in Swahili means journey—it has nothing to do with animals. Someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.” For the next month or two, we would be on safari.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit asks an important question: “Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”
Well, one way is to take the old self into unknown territory and see what happens. To lose ourselves in America.
MADLY, without forethought or direction, we are speeding into America. It’s the week before Christmas, the day before the winter solstice. Any other year, the children, and their children, would be getting ready to come home. I would be baking shortbread and unpacking ornaments. Instead, I’m sitting in this little green Toyota, feeling restless. Restless for stasis.
We left Vancouver in a rush, anxious to be on the road, deciding at the last minute to head south, away from the snow, instead of east. The back seat is piled with coats and bags of shoes and what I could salvage of my office. “How will we convince customs that we didn’t buy all that stuff in the States?” Wayne moaned, already anticipating crossing back into Canada. So I packed up most of my things and shipped them home, but I refused to be parted with the manuscript I’ve been working on for months. “Come on, who’s going to think I bought that?”
I reach back and jostle the bags and the box that holds the novel. Establishing a little order, is what I tell Wayne, but really, I just want to touch my things. I set a small jar of hand cream, a handkerchief, and my asthma puffer in the handhold of the passenger door. I open the glove compartment, which Wayne oddly insists on calling a glove box, and straighten the emergency manual, the car registration, our passports. I add the mileage book, the small pad I bought to keep track of our expenses, a new Sudoku, my Palm. The novel I’m reading and my notebook go into the door pocket.
I gather the various state maps and brochures that arrived just as we were leaving, and arrange them under my seat. I dig a highlighter and a Sharpie out of my purse and clip them to the MapArt book that condenses the continent of North America to a series of neat, brightly coloured squares. Across the first few pages, a yellow line rises up out of Ontario to flatten across the Prairies, the Rockies, and British Columbia, coming to a stop at Vancouver—a record of our drive west in September, 5,001 kilometres, door to door.
I rest my hand flat on the open map and look out the window, suffering a moment of horizontal vertigo, the kind of dislocation that comes in a moving vehicle when you take your eyes from the landscape, then look up, miles later, uncertain where you are. The last thing I saw was the low grey obelisk jutting out of the grass beside the car as we inched toward customs. It looked like one of the posts that surround the old prison quarry back home where convicts once did hard time. In the grassy stretch between the twin roads moving into and out of the two countries stood an oddly Grecian monument, Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity carved on the side facing us as we headed to the United States. I turned and craned my neck to see what drivers heading into Canada would see: Children of a Common Mother. How strange, I thought. Canadians were brethren as they entered the United States, kids when they returned. What kind of Faustian bargain were we making, crossing this border?
“There’s a plaque, too. I’m going to go read it,” I said, jumping out of the car as Wayne looked on, aghast. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back before we move another inch.”
The brass plate was framed by two women, each extending her country’s coat of arms to meet in the middle. An eagle and a rampant lion: a scavenger and a predator. The scavenger I understood, but Canada, predatory? Not exactly how I think of my country. Where was the beaver, that amiable, trepidatious rodent that warns his fellows, then dives for cover at the faintest threat?
The words flanked by the women were optimistic: More than a century old friendship between these countries, a lesson of peace to all nations.
I peered at the two women. They were hardly more than girls. The American was fine-boned and pretty. In one hand, she cradled a cornucopia overflowing with vegetables and fruit. The Canadian girl was muscled, as if the sculptor intended to carve a man, then thought better of it and added breasts. She was lugging a huge sheaf of wheat, her arm clearly broken in some agricultural mishap and poorly set.
None of it fit. Our two countries were brethren, or children, or women: which was it? And what kind of friends are we? Squabbling kids who trade loyalties like baseball cards? Men who, like Wayne, play hockey together for years without ever knowing the names of each other’s wives?
No, I thought, as I headed back to the car. The plaque had it right. It’s a women’s friendship. Never an easy thing, especially if one of them is outgoing and pretty.
We’ve left the monuments behind and are zipping over the tidal flats where the United States and Britain drew their final line in the sand. Here, the distinction between one country and another seems arbitrary, inconsequential. The landscape refuses nationality. The same sandy loam sifts on either side of the border; the same clouds scuttle overhead. The birds, looking down, recognize no boundaries. Even I, staring out at the low bungalows along the roadside, at the cars that pass by—the usual mix of American cars and imports, as many BC plates as Washington State—have trouble discerning any difference.
Yet there is a difference. Not out there, beyond the windshield, where a steady drizzle is fingering horizontal lines across the glass, but in here, inside me.
“What do you love about the States?” I ask Wayne.
“The New Yorker, baseball, Star Trek, bourbon, L.L. Bean, John McPhee, Amazon.”
I rhyme off my list: The New Yorker. Sex and the City. The Coen brothers. Richard Ford. Martin Luther King, J r. Sweet potato pie. Oprah. “And what do you hate?”
“Reality TV, Coca-Cola, Homeland Security, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Rifle Association. And you?”
“The CIA, the bomb, aerial spraying, Tommy Hilfiger, Ugly Americans, the fact that they think they own the world. Oh, and Oprah.”
How on earth will we ever see past all that?
“Good travel is like good reading,” Wayne says. “It sucks you into a world and holds you there.”
“Long enough for us to really see?”
He shrugs. “That’s the idea.”
I uncap the highlighter and set the point on the map, on the city of Vancouver, then drag it half an inch south, past the border, the first indication that this line might, at some point, become a unifying circle.
WE stop for a late breakfast in Fairhaven, a settlement on the shore of Bellingham Bay that was once a village in its own right but has been swept into the greater urban embrace of the city of Bellingham. It is a quaint little place, its brick buildings recently sandblasted, its pitted woodwork filled and repainted. It has a persistent, nineteenth-century look about it. Rather than allow box-store malls to suck the life out of its core, Bellingham passed a municipal design bylaw requiring new buildings to be constructed to look old. The instant nostalgia seems to be working; even in late December, in the rain, Fairhaven’s quaint streets are swarming with shoppers. The storefronts along the main street are filled with Christmas goodies: gingerbread men, old-fashioned sleds tied in red ribbon. A recipe for mulled wine is posted on the window of the wine shop in front of which we park the car.
We ignore the seasonal frippery and head for Village Books. We’ve been here before: it’s an establishment worth whipping down from Vancouver for, its shelves burdened with books, both new and used. On either side of the door, plaques embedded in the red brick advise: A Room Without Books is Like a Body Without a Soul (Cicero) and Some Books Leave us Free and Some Books Make us Free (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
“What does that mean?” Merilyn says, puzzled before the Emerson quote.
“Damned if I know.”
Heading for the nature section, I buy Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone and Ann Zwinger’s Wind in the Rock, both about the American desert, which I am looking forward to seeing. In the mystery corner, I pick out Michael Collins’s Death of a Writer.
“Do you carry Canadian books?” I ask the man behind the order desk on the second floor, a pleasant-looking bookman with short, greying hair and studious glasses. His card says he is the Consignment Coordinator.
“A few,” he says. “Lots of Canadians come through here, and we go up there, too, of course. But fiction, nature, books about Canada—there’s not much interest. Not really. A few break though the barrier, the Margaret Atwoods, the Alice Munros, but not many. I don’t think Americans are very interested in other countries.”
Looking through the shelves, though, I notice several books by Canadian writers: Ron Wright’s A Short History of Progress, Bill Deverell’s April Fool, Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, and Tree, the book I co-wrote with David Suzuki. We are not identified as Canadians; it seems Americans are consuming foreign culture without knowing it. As they say in the ads, Don’t tell them it’s good for them.
Merilyn and I take our loot next door to the Colophon Cafe, which looks like a 1950s diner. There is a framed citation on the wall above our heads: Best Use of Poultry, 1998.
“I think I’ll have the chicken,” I say.
“Nineteen ninety-eight was a long time ago,” Merilyn warns. “Besides, this is breakfast, remember?”
She’s right. And I love diner breakfasts. Merilyn orders the quiche “made nightly by our own bakers.” I scan the menu for bacon and eggs and order the closest thing to it: the Truly Decadent California Croissant, which consists of scrambled eggs, Swiss cheese, avocado, and tomato on a flaky French pastry. Merilyn looks at me askance.
“Why not?” I say defensively. “We’re headed for California.”
At the table across the aisle, a woman and a much younger man are sharing a bottle of wine. Suddenly, I’m a censorious moralist. What’s an older woman doing having a bottle of wine with a young man at twelve-thirty in the afternoon? A Wednesday afternoon? Maybe it’s her son; the boy has that surly, I-wish-I-were-anywhere-else-on-the-planet look about him, and he clearly isn’t used to drinking wine. He holds his glass with his long fingers curled around the bulb and his thumb hooked over the rim.
“No, no, I don’t think that’s why she did it,” the woman is saying animatedly. “I can’t see her thinking that.”
For a moment I think she must be his literature tutor; they are discussing motivation in Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. Then the boy says, “I need to walk around a bit, stretch my legs,” and he gets up and goes into the bookstore, where I can see him pacing back and forth with his hands thrust in his pockets. As soon as he leaves, the woman’s jaw sags, her eyes look nervously about her, and she sets down her wine. She seems to have aged in an instant. When the waitress passes her table, the woman plucks at her, like a troll from under a bridge, and asks for the check.
By the time our own check comes, I have constructed an entire story around the couple. Several stories, actually. She’s his mother and he’s depressed, which I call the Canadian version. She’s his high school English teacher, trying to seduce him or, having already seduced him, trying to hang on to him (the British version). Or she’s his father’s new wife, wanting to win him over (the wine) and yet smart enough to know not to say anything against his mother (“She’d never do anything to hurt you”). This sparse scenario seems quintessentially American to me, a little mini-drama about the breakdown of the nuclear family. It reminds me of Gary Snyder’s remark, in his essay “White Indians,” that “the modern American family is the smallest and most barren family that has ever existed.” I’d like to see how it turns out, but as with the tossing of the child into the air at the border, the finale remains a mystery as we climb the stairs from the cafe and make our way back to the street.
MEGALOPOLIS. That’s what demographers call this part of the Pacific Northwest. After we leave Fairhaven, signs along the I-5 point to a succession of towns—Mt. Vernon, Arlington, Marysville—but the urban sprawl is more or less continuous. A conurbation. A megacity.
Most of the population of the Pacific Northwest is concentrated here, clustered like crystals in a supersaturated solution on this thread of an interstate that dangles south from Vancouver through Seattle to Portland. Nine million Americans, almost a third as many people as live in the entire country of Canada, occupy the thin strip of land between the coastal mountains and the sea, as if those who surged west across the United States during the last century were suddenly stopped in their tracks by the ocean, piling up on one another, nowhere else to go.
A trip never really begins until you put some distance between yourself and home, so we are speeding through the landscape at sixty miles an hour, which is the speed we usually drive at home, though it’s legal here. I take note of these subtle differences, trying to feel like an explorer in a strange land.
“Do you suppose there is some international agreement that regulates the colour of highway signs?” I muse, as we whip past blue Adopt-a-Highway signs, green exit signs, exactly what we would see at home.
“Canadians probably order their signs from American companies,” Wayne says. “Just like our computers, which keep telling us we’re spelling ‘colour’ wrong.” He’s still tense from the border crossing, though it was the driver ahead of us who was handed the orange card and directed to the covered bays, where cars and trucks and RVs had their doors flung wide, like prisoners being strip-searched, and men with knee pads crouched, strafing the undercarriages with beams of light.
“Adrenalin can take up to seventy-two hours to dissipate,” I say, patting his knee.
We’re crossing a long bridge over yet another river. The body of a dead deer is slung over the railing. Wayne looks at it bleakly and mutters, “Compared to him, I’m fine.”
On the political map of the United States, this part of the country is painted Democrat blue, which I always find confusing, since we Canadians paint our Liberal ridings red. Abortion, gay marriage, women’s rights: all the items on the left-wing agenda have been taken up with enthusiasm here in the Pacific Northwest, even the right to die by your own hand. It’s always had a reputation as the home of radicals. At the turn of the last century, this part of the world was a stronghold of the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World. Anarchists set up communes all along this coast. One of the longest-lasting was Home, started by three men who, in the summer of 1895, rowed into Puget Sound in a boat they’d built themselves and bought some land around an isolated bay, and within a few years dozens of anarchists, communists, food faddists, and freethinkers were living there.
These humid, forested slopes tucked up into the far corner of the country seem to attract people of an independent mind, or maybe people are transformed once they get here. It’s true that humans have an impact on a landscape, but it works the other way, too. We are like Darwin’s finches, whose beaks change shape almost annually depending on the food supply: there’s no reason to expect humans to be any less susceptible to the place in which they find themselves.
I think of something Byron wrote in Don Juan: “As the soil is, so the heart of man.” It’s a Romantic notion, I suppose, that landscape can influence character, but observation makes me think it’s true. When driving through Europe one autumn, I noticed how differently farmers in each country cured their hay: in bales, in stooks or stacks like enormous hives, layered on wooden ricks. John Ruskin tried to prove the principle in The Poetry of Architecture, using variations in cottage design to illustrate the effect of landscape, which he called a “gigantic instrument of soul culture.”
The people who settled this landscape sit between a metaphorical rock and a hard place—between the turbulent ocean and the Cascades, which are part of the volcanic Pacific Rim of Fire. Easterners who ended up here from their cozy New England villages and sprawling Great Plains farms had a choice: tough it out, or leave. It’s a form of natural selection. The stubborn and the single-minded stayed, reproduced, and proliferated.
Wayne and I are birdwatchers, observers of nature. We’re inclined to think of humans not as civilized beings but as just another species. When we travel, we look at all the populations—feathered, furred, clothed—with a curious eye.
So, thinking about the kind of people who ended up here, I expect them to be self-reliant and freethinking, something Americans claim as a national birthright. Historically, Americans seem always to be running from home, whether from England or New England, resolutely heading into the setting sun, away from family and tradition, looking for places to survive on their own. But once they arrived here in the Northwest, they became social-minded. Not only did they elect the first woman mayor and erect the first Hispanic college, but this is the home of consumers’ co-ops, mutual aid societies, and publicly owned utilities. Internet cafes, emblems of both real and virtual connectivity, were spawned here. They may have the lowest rate of church attendance and the highest percentage of atheism in the country, but social conscience runs high: three of the ten greenest communities in the United States are part of this I-5 megacity. And the two biggest online magazines devoted to environmental sustainability are produced out of Seattle. Maybe that’s because they still have an environment to save—over half of the land mass of Washington, the Evergreen State, is still covered with forest.
At least, that’s the way it looks on the map. From where I sit, though, gridlocked in traffic in the endless urban sprawl that is Seattle, this could just as easily be Mississauga or Washington, D.C. Fifty years ago, when John Steinbeck approached Seattle after decades living away from the Pacific, which he called his home ocean, he wrote that he “remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage—a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land.”
The highway is twelve lanes wide now, and we can hardly see the earth for houses. We certainly can’t see the matchless harborage: skyscrapers block the view. Wayne counts twelve building cranes rising above the downtown high-rises. The rain pours down. The traffic is going nowhere. Clouds settle like tired Sasquatches onto office tower roofs.
“Let’s just drive on,” Wayne says. He would rather be moving. Something about sitting behind the wheel of a car sucks the curiosity out of him. He’s not venturing through new territory, he’s locked in a video game, earning points for every car he passes. Sitting still is not sitting well with him.
“How about going into Fremont?”
“What’s that?”
“The Artists’ Republic of Fremont. It’s the old hippie part of Seattle.”
“An artists’ republic?” he says, lighting up. “I thought Plato kicked artists out of the republic.”
We ease off the interstate and down past small, cottage-like houses pressed into the hillsides. I watch for the sign that says Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Back Five Minutes. Or the one that advises Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Forward Five Minutes.
“Maybe somebody stole them,” Wayne suggests. He seems to like the idea. “Or maybe they disappeared into the temporal shift when everyone changed their watches.” He likes that idea even better.
We do find a pole stuck with arrows painted in Neapolitan-ice-cream shades. They point every which way: Timbuktu 10,029 mi. Bermuda Triangle 3.75. Xanadu, East of the Sun. Dinosaurs 3 Blocks. Troll 2 Blocks. The pole itself is striped with an arrow that points straight down: Center of the Universe.
We get out to stretch our legs and stroll past a sixteen-foot bronze statue of Lenin; a rocket mounted on the side of a building, blowing smoke as if trying to blast off; a corral of life-size dinosaurs shaped from living hedges. Tucked under the highway overpass, someone has shaped a giant troll in ferro-cement, a real VW Beetle crushed under the weight of its left hand. A block away, three billy goats gambol across a yard, cut-outs in rusting steel. But these are relics of a quirky past. The stores that line the short main street sell souvenirs made in China, bins of organic vegetables, and vintage clothing arranged by colour on chrome racks.
“Do artists still live here?” I ask a young woman wearing a heavy brown khaki jacket and pants and a Peruvian woollen cap. In one hand she holds a bouquet of brushes and balances a palette; with the other, she dabs at the painting on her easel. It’s a reasonable likeness of the troll.
“No way, it’s too expensive. There’s lofts in old warehouses south of the piers,” she adds after some thought. “Some artists live there.”
“Is that where you live?”
She hesitates. If I’d brought a pair of gloves, I’d give them to her; her fingers are blanched from the cold.
“No,” she says. “I live with my parents.”
Fremont’s motto may still be “De Libertas Quirkas,” but clearly, the freedom to be peculiar is not what it once was. The artists have crept back into Seattle, leaving painters to paint each other’s art. And the hippies are history, just another part of the Fremont brand.
History, it seems, is malleable. Fremont, indeed all of Seattle, is in King County, which was named in 1852 in honour of a plantation owner from Selma, Alabama, a certain William Rufus DeVane King, who was a United States senator, a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850, which extended slavery into new states and territories. At the time, William Rufus King was vice-president-elect of the United States. A hundred and thirty-four years later, in 1986, the county councillors decided they were no longer comfortable living in a place named for a slave owner, so they passed a resolution denouncing Rufus King and replacing him with Martin Luther King, Jr., “renaming” the county for this other King, who embodied “the attributes for which the citizens of King County can be proud, and claim as their own.”
“The King is dead,” Wayne says, as he manoeuvres out of the parking space. “Long live the King.”
I read the story of the Kings in a brochure I picked up in a coffee shop, where Wayne bought a T-shirt: Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe: throw away your watch. We ask store clerks and waiters and the concierge of the downtown hotel where we take a room for the night; they’ve all heard of the Fremont signs, but no one has ever seen one, which strikes me, in an odd way, as perfect.
Chatting with the concierge, I have a hard time remembering we’re in a foreign country. The hotel is a chain: we’ve stayed in dozens exactly like it back home. The Stars and Stripes is nowhere in evidence. The people we meet speak in the same flat tones as we do, they dress like us, drive the same cars, buy the same snacks in convenience stores, drink our favourite coffee. It may be that we all watch the same TV shows and buy goods from the same manufacturers, or maybe it’s because for seventy years after the American War of Independence, Washington, like Canada, was still part of British North America.
And then we see the sign on a post going into the hotel bar: No knives. No guns.
We have entered a different country, after all.
WHAT’S that yummy smell?”
After checking into our hotel, Merilyn and I have gone for a walk—our favourite urban pastime—and now find ourselves outside the Pike Place Fish Market, on the corner of Pike and Post Alley, in downtown Seattle. The marketplace is crowded, people milling about, bent over tables of produce, pinching lettuce leaves, peering into the eyes of fish. Fresh Pacific salmon bask on crushed ice, hosed-down organic greenery drips from every stall. An Asian woman smiles at us from behind a counter covered with wooden dinosaurs; another sells woollen baby bonnets knitted to look like strawberries. I inhale.
“Caramel,” I say.
“Caramel popcorn,” corrects Merilyn, sniffing suspiciously as we carry on past the meats and cheeses, the chili peppers, and the apples. “It’s everywhere. They must pipe it in.”
Merilyn and I are a lot less naive than Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who visited New York in 1986. Like most outsiders, he wandered among the towers of Manhattan expecting to be overwhelmed by meaning and significance. Instead, he was overwhelmed by absurdity and fakery. His disillusionment reached its peak when he complained to the workers in a bakery that the cinnamon rolls he’d bought there the day before had lost their flavour by the time he got them home. The bakery workers laughed at him. “They explained that the heavenly cinnamon smell that made you long for the sweet rolls the moment you walked into the bakery was actually an artificial fragrance they pumped into the store.”
The “bakery,” it turned out, did not even have an oven on the premises. The rolls hadn’t lost their flavour; they hadn’t had any flavour to begin with. It was fake-’n’-bake. Like this aroma of caramel popcorn, although here there is not a kernel of popcorn to be seen. At least the bakery sold cinnamon rolls.
What astounded Pamuk was not that so much of America was fake but that everyone knew that everything was fake and they loved it anyway. It was like Dorothy finding out at the beginning of the movie that the Wizard of Oz was a little old man behind a screen and going along with the gag for the fun of it. Americans, Pamuk suspected, may even love things because they are fake. The fake Gothicism in New York’s architecture, the fake ice cream in the ads, the fake smiles on the faces of the people in the elevators and on the streets—nobody believed in any of it, but they still wanted it. Why? “Why do they keep smiling at me, why are they always apologizing, why are they so solicitous?”
Pamuk found the whole experience Orwellian. Americans behaved the way they did not because they were happy or sorry or cared about Turkish politics and customs, he said, but because they had collectively agreed to forget “the old philosophical distinction between appearance and reality.” They didn’t want buildings that were featureless and functional—the Soviets had those—or bakeries that smelled of diazinon and blocked drains. Or, apparently, vegetable stalls that smelled like vegetables and fish markets that reeked of fish. They wanted the appearance of civility, of artistry, of benevolence, solicitude, whimsy. For if they had the appearance of them, and if they didn’t make fine distinctions between appearance and reality, then they would have the reality of them, too.
Jonathan Raban found the same thing when he visited New York a year later. In the first part of his book about America, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, he spends considerable time trying to deconstruct Macy’s department store. When it was just a department store, it was going broke, like Gimbels, which finally crumbled during the Reagan years. But when Ed Finkelstein took over its management in 1974 and turned it into a glittering showcase of designer clothing and high-end consumer goods, when Macy’s started marketing fashion and home furnishings instead of clothing and pots and pans, people flocked to see its “emptily fantastic” displays, to marvel at its “elaborate cunning.” Finkelstein, Raban writes, turned Macy’s into a place where “customers were now spectators of an unrolling fantasy about the goings-on of an imaginary haute bourgeoisie.” And they believed in the fantasy. Watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with its giant Snoopy and Garfield balloons, Raban comments drily: “Here was America going by.”
Not that Canada is unaffected by the hype. There’s a Macy’s in downtown Seattle, and when Merilyn and I walked through it, expecting to be dazzled by the Christmas displays, what struck us most was that it was exactly like any big department store in Toronto or Vancouver. Ralph Lauren perfume and polo shirts, Jones New York dresses and suitcases, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, saleswomen made up like supermodels, looking less alive than the mannequins. Raban could have gone into any outlet of the Bay or Holt Renfrew in Canada and said with equal accuracy: “Here was America going by.” We have a prime minister, after all, who does not believe there is any such thing as Canadian culture, that there is only some amorphous, conglomerate thing he calls “North American culture.”
But Canada doesn’t seem to have embraced the fakery as thoroughly, as desperately, as the United States. We have retained an attitude of bemusement toward it. If appearance and reality are two sides of the same flipped coin, in Canada we most often call reality. I see this in our respective film industries. Canada makes documentaries—in fact, the word “documentary” was coined by a Canadian filmmaker, John Grierson, ten years before he was hired to start up the National Film Board in 1939. He was writing in the New York Sun, praising the “documentary value” of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 film Moana. Documentary, as he defined it, was the creative interpretation of reality. America had already opted for Hollywood, the Disneyland of the film world. I think the difference between documentaries and feature films goes a long way toward defining the difference between the two cultures. Recently, America has become infatuated with what it calls “reality TV,” but of course there’s nothing real about reality TV: it offers only the appearance of reality. Coke may be the Real Thing, but nobody ever asks what, exactly, is “real” about it.
America’s is essentially an entrepreneurial culture: the sizzle is the steak, because, after all, if you buy the sizzle, the steak comes with it. Canada’s, in contrast, is a primary-producing culture: we’ll buy the steak and hope to get a little sizzle with it. But we know we can’t eat sizzle.
AS MERILYN and I leave the market and walk along 1st Avenue toward our hotel, we pass six Starbucks locations, including the first one, opened thirty years ago—Ground Zero of the North American coffee explosion. I don’t think there is a spot in Seattle where you can’t see at least one Starbucks, often two or three. Even the coffee packets in our hotel room are from Starbucks. Eventually, we come to an interesting-looking restaurant; through the mullioned windows we can see dark wooden booths and mirrors and small rooms with white tablecloths, heavy silver, and art deco lamps. The kind of place that looks like an old Seattle landmark. At last, I think. The real thing.
“Let’s stop for dinner,” Merilyn says, and in we go.
When Merilyn enters a restaurant, it is never a simple matter of being shown to a table. First she asks to see the menu, which she reads with the concentration of a medieval prioress checking a handcopied manuscript for signs of satanic influences. Then she goes on an exhaustive tour of the establishment; she wants to see all the rooms, scrutinize the staff, possibly look into the kitchen, inquire about the ingredients in the sauces. Finally, she selects a table. I follow her around, and the little maîtred ’ trundles behind, holding the menus against her chest defensively. When we’re seated, Merilyn asks her about the specials of the day.
“Your server will be with you shortly,” the maître d’ says, smiling, and then vanishes.
“This is a great place,” I say, looking around. A long mahogany bar runs down one side of the room, with stools and place settings. Behind it scurry waiters in white shirts and ankle-length aprons tied at the waist, very Cafe-du-Nouveau-Monde. “I’ll bet it’s been here for years.” I can already imagine myself telling friends back home and hearing them say, Oh, you went there!
Meanwhile, Merilyn has found the brochure propped between the salt and pepper shakers. “It’s a chain,” she says despondently. “There are eighty of them, all across the States.”
“No.”
“Yup. Started in Portland in 1977.”
“Eighty? But it looks so authentic!”
“It isn’t,” Merilyn says. “It’s all fake.”
But it’s not like Orhan Pamuk’s fake bakery, I tell myself, wanting to believe. Look at the wait staff: they’re really bustling, they care. Our waitress is very pleasant. The food isn’t bad. And, I remind myself, I’ve never minded eating in a British pub back home in Ontario.
It’s no use. The lustre is gone. The portions are too large, the sauces thickened with cornstarch, the waitress too pointedly chipper as she asks, “And how are your first bites?” then scurries off before we have time to answer. Now I hear our friends when we get home saying: Oh, you went there?
MORE than anything, almost, Wayne and I like books, so it’s no surprise that we end our first day on the road in another bookstore. Elliott Bay Book Company anchors a corner of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, down by the water. It is a sprawl of wooden shelves, bins, and passageways lined floor to ceiling with enough books to last a lifetime.
Wayne heads for the travel section. I look around at the other book lovers. Bespectacled, lean for the most part, mostly female, but not all middle-aged, people with backpacks and cloth shopping bags, sensible lace-up shoes, most of them quietly peering at titles, a few of them chatting, some exclaiming, but no one is pushy, no one is what my mother would have called “loud,” which implied much more than the volume of their voice. If I were teleported into this room, would I know I was in the United States? I don’t think so. I used to say to Wayne that I could tell a Frenchman or a German before they spoke by the shape of their mouths, but these people speak English, with pretty much the same accent as me.
I try to remember my first American. I was born in Winnipeg, just across the border from North Dakota. I grew up in southwestern Ontario, scarcely an hour’s drive from Buffalo. My mind reels back, before school bus trips to Niagara Falls, back before Seventeen magazine and Father Knows Best, before television came to our house, back to when there was only radio and Canada’s Happy Gang, and I realize with a start: until the age of five, I had not seen a single American, not heard an American voice.
The fall I turned five, my father took me by train to Detroit. I don’t remember much about the trip except the train’s diesel snout pointing west, snorting like a beast with a scent. Then me smiling on the steps of my Aunt Mabel’s house. There is a photograph of the two of us standing there, in some Detroit suburb, so maybe it’s not a memory at all, though I do remember her kitchen, the white oak cupboard she called a Hoosier.
“What’s a Hoosier?” I asked.
“A cupboard,” she laughed.
“Why don’t you call it a cupboard?”
“Because here it’s a Hoosier.”
This was my introduction to the foreign language of America and that American specialty, branding. Aunt Mabel’s pantry cupboard— described as “the woman’s workbench” in the Eaton’s catalogue—was about four feet wide and six feet tall, with cupboards above and below an enamelled counter. The largest manufacturer of these efficient baking stations was the Hoosier Manufacturing Company of New Castle, Indiana, which is why such cupboards are Hoosiers to Americans (Indiana being the Hoosier State), just as tissues are Kleenex and all colas, Coke. This is the reward the United States offers for entrepreneurial success: linguistic immortality.
But still no bona fide Americans. My aunt was Canadian. She moved to Detroit to marry her cousin Wheeler, who was dead by the time I went to visit her. Her story strikes an iconic note for Canadians, one that the director Sandy Wilson explores in her poignant coming-of-age film, My American Cousin. There is something seductive and faintly sinful about those people to the south who look like us, talk almost like us, seem to come from the same places, from common mother countries, and yet we desire them, and despise them, too, because after all, they’re family and that’s what we do in families, love and hate in extreme.
Then suddenly I was seven, and Americans were everywhere. I was in New York City, at Radio City Music Hall, in the front row of a balcony overlooking the stage of The Garry Moore Show, where commercials for soap flakes and vacuum cleaners were acted out live on either side of the main action at middle stage so you could see all the parts of the show at once, something that ruined me forever for television.
“The little girl in the green dress in the balcony.” Garry Moore was pointing up at me, at the hand I’d thrust in the air. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
I said something in the end, I have no idea what, and sat down amid a hot rush of laughter. I was alone at the edge of the balcony: my family was leaning back and away, as if I’d brought them shame by pushing myself forward. Just like an American, my mother said.
It was my father who loved Americans. The American multinational that bought the factory in our small Canadian town regularly summoned my father to its headquarters in Niagara Falls, New York (properly pronounced as one long, important word), trips from which he would return to us boasting about the computer that filled a whole room, drinks that no one in Canada had heard of yet, hotels that really knew how to make a man feel at home.
When we moved to Brazil, where my father was to start another factory for the American company, his love affair with the United States intensified. As our ship sailed past Cuba, where Che and Castro were waging war on Batista from their caves in the Sierra Maestra, my father drank Cuba Libres, but it was Americans he raised his glass to, saviours of the world.
In Brazil, I went to American schools, learned the states of the Union and their capitals before I knew the names of the provinces of Canada. I pledged allegiance to the flag of America every morning and sang, “Oh say, can you see . . .” I wish I could say that, like Jimmy Carter, I lusted only in my heart, that I never actually mouthed the words, but I did. I belted out “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “America the Beautiful” at the Fourth of July picnics where all the ex-pats brought their apple pies and baked beans and fried chicken and corn on the cob— food I grew up thinking of as American, though it is the gastronomic heritage of my birth country, too. Everyone at those picnics wore red, white, and blue (also the patriotic colours of Canada’s flag of the time). They talked about how wonderful life was stateside, where roads were smoothly paved (not a string of dusty potholes) and where you could count on your workers to show up on time (not like these lazy South Americans). This is ex-pat patter, I know that now. Americans don’t have a corner on it. I’ve heard Germans in Canada and Canadians in France and Swiss in Italy go through the same loving litany of home disguised as a whiner’s rant.
The Brazilians mistook my family for Americans. The Americans knew better—I entered the schoolyard each morning to taunts of “Canadian bacon”—though the distinction was lost on the coffee-skinned boy who opened his pants and peed on my feet, cursing me as I stood there astonished, stuttering, “Mas no estou Americana!”
I worried my family had become American by association, which, given my dampened shoes, did not seem like such a good thing. Didn’t we beg our friends to send us sticks of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and Hershey chocolate bars in their letters? Wasn’t it Pat Boone and Elvis Presley my sisters shimmied to on their beds?
I realized we’d escaped with our identity intact when we boarded the Air Canada flight for home. I was a teenager by then, but I felt what a baby must feel when, after being handed around, it finds itself safe in its mother’s arms. The stewardesses cut their vowels short and round, the way we did. They were reserved and polite and seemed pleased that we were, too. They didn’t gush, which was a relief. No one talked too loud. Everyone said “Excuse me” and “Sorry,” even when they hadn’t done anything wrong.
There were Americans after that, but they were on my turf, which made it easier to look down my nose. My father still adored everything stamped Made in America—I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, the Rose Bowl Parade—but when I looked south, I saw only racists, warmongers, and assassins. The Americans I admired—John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.—seemed not to rise from that country’s soil so much as hover above it, where they were blown to smithereens. On a cold October day in 1969, I stood on the Ambassador Bridge, which spans the river between Windsor and Detroit, the busiest border crossing on the continent, and pounded my fists on the hoods of cars lined up to enter the United States, denouncing the war in Vietnam, the treatment of blacks in the South. I was in a permanent rage.
Now, thirty-five years later, I’m cruising the shelves of a bookstore in one of America’s biggest cities. I feel oddly at home, bending sideways to squint at the titles, moving through fiction to biography, past the children’s section.
That’s where it comes to me. My first Americans were two kids: a blonde girl in a pink dress and a brown-haired boy in shorts. They had a dog, Spot, and a kitten, Puff, and a baby sister, Sally. I loved them with all my heart. They ran through the pages of the first book I ever read, exuberant, laughing. I admired them even when they wept, for they weren’t afraid to cry. Maybe they knew, as Americans seem to, that things will work out for them in the end.
“Fun with Dick and Jane!” I exclaim. Wayne looks at me over the shelf, as if unsure whether to acknowledge me. But it’s too late to sidle away. I’m pulling at his sleeve. “I figured it out, and wouldn’t you know it? My first Americans were characters in a book.”
