Here and There Read online

  We are left with our lives, someone said to me. All the other stuff, the poisonous foreign stuff, the stuff that makes us jealous and empty, is being taken away and, like children when the toys have to go back in the box, we’re feeling sorry for ourselves a little. But now we’ll fish and cure mutton and make skyr (a particularly fine hybrid of cheese and yoghurt). You British have money, another older man said to me. You like it, you are comfortable with money. We weren’t. All our history is the story of poor people surviving. We’re good at that. There is a pride in that.

  And there is a lesson here. While the rest of the world prints money to stave off the consequences of having spent too much, and borrows more to mitigate the borrowing, so the Icelanders are settling into their penury like men who’ve come back from a holiday slipping into their old threadbare coats, taking comfort in familiarity and pleasure in being relieved from avarice.

  I drove out one night away from the city until all the terrestrial lights had vanished and there was only the great blackness and the pinpricked sky with its fluster of heavy cloud, and the ear-biting air was full of the chuffing wind and the shingly hiss of the shore, and the place was as full of ancient awe and keening sagas and bitter serenity as the end of the world.

  There’s no place like home

  When it comes to humour and holidays, familiarity breeds contempt.

  American newspapers have begun to cull comic strips. Readers are being asked whether Peanuts or Love Is … should get the comic cut. Don’t all shout at once. America invented the comic strip (as well as the crossword). In fact, they invented the newsless newspaper. Most rags have accumulated dozens of ’toons, sometimes as many as four pages’ worth. The reason for giving them the bullet/ falling piano/exploding cigar/sudden cliff/brick wall – they say – is rising print costs and falling advertising. But anyone who’s travelled through the States recently will have caught a sniff of the real reason, heard the warning bark. America is losing its sense of humour.

  Now, the American joke is rather like the American car. It’s big and comfortable and slow and oversprung. It’s probably got wings and it helps if you’ve drunk a lot. The great American joke and its sister, the great American dream, are confirmations of the greatness of America. The specific content is not important – either of the joke or the dream. It’s having one and sharing that’s American. And it’s gone. Or rather, it’s become hard and brittle, bitter and spit-flecked. The huge fraternity of the set-up and the punchline has become the snarl and exhaust of the bumper sticker. America is a fair-weather goodtime joker. It doesn’t do what the rest of the world does, and laugh at adversity. America panics at adversity. It panics in slow motion with a straight face.

  The airport thing is only the start. That dull, plodding suspicion, the zero-tolerance rigmarole of welcome that make you think that, having invented powered flight, the locals have come to regard it as a mechanism of the devil, dabbled in only by deviants and the combustible. It’s not that all visitors are looking for auguries and visible symbols of wartime change in the States, it’s that the Americans themselves are not just suspicious – they’re superstitious-suspicious. A nation with so much faith, it doesn’t know how to stop believing in things. This is not a time to make jokes; a joke can get you arrested, a joke can get you deported. This is a time to go and read your horoscope and look stern.

  I’ve just been travelling through Maryland, a state that is a suburb of Washington, home to professional apparatchiks. It’s where you park your porky backside if you have your nose in the trough. It’s also got Baltimore, home of Francis Scott Key and the American national anthem, and Annapolis, the naval college, and Chesapeake Bay, and not much else. A border state between north and south siding, after much anguish, with Lincoln and the angels. It feels like the North. It doesn’t have that foxy, inbred sense of danger and carnality you get in the South.

  Mostly Maryland is a place beside the sea. You drive through the now-ubiquitous fields of corn – when did America decide to grow only one thing? – like a bushy yellow monobrow. At the roadside, farmyard stalls sell garden peaches, goitred, livid tomatoes and huge, husky heaps of sweet corn, but you sense that this is a place that farms backdrops and vistas for the serenity and cosy good nature of the four-wheel drive mums and weekend ruralists.

  I was headed for Ocean City, a town on the sea. One of the obliquely good things about America is that outside of New York, nothing is designed, sold or made for foreign tourists. Foreigners aren’t a market – they’re a threat, or they’re busboys. But then most Americans are tourists in their own country, so almost everywhere that has two diners and a local specialty has a big welcome for guests. Ocean City is built on a long spit of sand. These bars and slim islands run like morse code up the east coast, making some of the nicest seaside destinations on the Atlantic. Ocean City isn’t one of them.

  Ocean City is gaudily hellish. Three broad streets wide, and a hundred or so cross-streets long, it’s a strip of economy high-rise hotels and greater-economy motels of the sort that make you think of suicides, underage sex and men who dress up as their mothers. These are interspersed by economy beachwear shops selling towelling shellsuits and novelty T-shirts, and all-you-can-eat restaurants and giveaway churches.

  One of the other odd things about Americans is that they take so few holidays – and in such parsimonious increments. Families chug into Ocean City in desert-storming SUVs having driven across three states to spend a short weekend having economy fun. Everything needs to be accessible on an American holiday, so resorts come on naked, like strippers who haven’t got time to strip. Americans approach beaches as if for the first time. Ocean City’s beach is nothing to write home about, nothing to wish-you-were-here on. A long motorway of sand with a cold, grey aggressive Atlantic in front and the cold, grey passive hotels behind.

  The families stagger with armfuls of paraphernalia, like proud Cortés, coming upon the sea with an exhausted yet wary awe. They sit on their fold-out chairs under their fold-out umbrellas and hats and sunblock and suck a litre of latte, eat a Danish or three, read a magazine. And then they stare at the ocean, and the ocean ignores them, so they stare at the lifeguards. There is a lifeguard on a highchair every 20 yards (Ocean City has a museum to lifeguarding). The lifeguards unpack their sunblock and their hats and their rubber rings and their floats-on-ropes and then they do semaphore to each other. Up and down they wave their arms, like train signals in a gale. Who knows what they’re saying? ‘Does my bum look big in these?’ perhaps.

  When the holidaymakers have stopped looking at the lifeguards they look at each other for a bit, and then they stand up and get antsy. Something isn’t happening. Something is missing. Is there a show? Is there a band? Is there lunch? A parade? Fireworks? Is there magic? When does the beach do its thing? Americans are not good at doing nothing. America wasn’t built by people who could do nothing with ease. It isn’t a nation that relaxes, or rewards relaxation. It’s a get-up-and-go place, so they get up and they go. They pack up their umbrellas and seats and head back to the strip, where they play novelty golf.

  I didn’t mention the golf before because I was saving it. I hate it so much. Ocean City has nine kids’ golf courses. Families come and play them like the majors, all in one weekend. They start with the pirates and go through the sci-fi monsters, then they do the dinosaurs and the cowboys. They can’t get enough of putting around corners. And then they go and eat crab cakes and go back to their hotel rooms and watch exactly the same television they get back at home. And know that their towels won’t be stolen from the balcony railings. And I know what they’re doing, what America’s doing. It’s turning its back – turning its back on everything.

  They’re coming here to play novelty golf and eat crab cakes and stay in these hokey, tacky low-rent, low-crime resorts because it reminds them of somewhere else. Some place past. Some safe past place that you see in pictures or glimpse in the afternoons on cable TV. There are teenagers here, tough hip-hop, bagg
y, gangbanging teenagers, queuing up for their putters and a ball because everyone needs a weekend away from orange alerts and politics and being frightened, even crack dealers and car thieves. And if you can’t laugh, at least you can get nostalgic and buy a T-shirt with a flag on it.

  When they asked the readers which comic strips they should get rid of, they all chose the modern ones – the sharp, sarky, ethnic, smart-arse ones. They wanted to keep the strips they’d read all their lives – the old hokey familiar ones. The ones that aren’t funny.

  Between the lines

  Mapmakers speak a language of contours and borders, but this lexicon says nothing of the relationship between geography and people. And they’ve missed Greenland completely.

  What’s the biggest island in the world? If you answered, Australia, you effete pommy know-all, well I’m sorry – go and face the wall by the nature table. If you said Tasmania, go and sit on the nature table. Australia is a continent and therefore doesn’t count as an island, and if continents were eligible as islands, then America would be the biggest. The biggest island in the world is Greenland, which makes Denmark the biggest country in Europe, because Denmark owns Greenland. Except that it isn’t, because geographically Greenland is part of North America. It’s separated from Canada by about as far as an angry girlfriend can throw your copy of Call of the Wild.

  I’ve just returned from East Greenland, and there’s not a lot of people for whom that proximity is a reality. Even for most of the people in West Greenland it is cheaper to fly from East Greenland to Reykjavik and then on to New York than to fly across the country. It’s that big. It’s four time zones, without a single clock in two of them. Greenland is twice the size of the next biggest island, which is either Borneo, Madagascar or New Guinea. Well done those of you who said New Guinea.

  It makes you think a lot about whether size matters. Despite its massive size, Greenland barely registers a blip on the world political, economic or social consciousness. In fact, none of the top four big islands are exactly what you’d call movers or shakers. On most maps, Greenland is shoved to one side or cut in half, effectively squeezed to the edge of the world. Indeed, being up there in the permanent daylight it feels like the edge of the world.

  Geography is all about size. Kids who like geography in school are the ones who like lists, like to know the heft and the girth of things. I liked geography. The hottest place in the world? The record temperature is in the Libyan desert, though it might be Ethiopia. The coldest? Lived-in or uninhabited? Uninhabited, the South Pole. Inhabited, Greenland, where there is a dry wind that comes off the ice cap and blows harder than a hurricane. God knows what its wind-chill factor is. The wettest place, the driest, the highest capital? That would be Lima, wouldn’t it, or perhaps La Paz? Capital furthest north? That’s Reykjavik. Rivers, mountains, basins, plains, plateaux, distances. We keep on and on trying to understand the globe by its statistics, by its facts, but really it’s like trying to know a stranger by his laundry list.

  Size has another effect on people. In Greenland, the Inuit only live at the very edge of the country. In 4000 years, they’ve ebbed and flowed up and down its vastness, but haven’t ever really got off the beach. You feel all this great empty howling, keening space stretching away behind you, the infeasible, unimaginable pristine freezing whiteness. There’s a similar sense in Brazil. Again, almost everyone lives on the coast; behind them the steaming, dripping green and fetid dense land, lurking with not entirely loving attention.

  Size intimidates, and it informs the national character. Though Inuits and Brazilians couldn’t be more unalike, they’re both people who are made by their landscapes. Now coming from a relatively small island such as Britain or Japan, or indeed Iceland, gives you a very different sense of who you are. We make the landscape in our own image. It’s a tame and malleable place. Our geography is raw material; it’s a stroll, a hike, a summer holiday. We think of the world as being an eventually manageable benign place. We come from humanised, human-sized countries.

  There are people who are inspired by the size of their countries, like Americans. That ability to pick up sticks and start all over is central to Americans’ idea of themselves. The open road, the new horizon, the ripe and unending bounty of the country. Then there are people who are confined by their geography, who will feel crowded and claustrophobic. The Swiss, the Cubans. Always looking over the fence. King Leopold bought the Congo specifically because he despised the small-town, little-nation bourgeois beer-and-chocolate mentality of his Belgian subjects. He felt that they could do with getting out a bit more. The Russians all need to get out a bit more, and then when they do, you wish they’d all go back.

  Maps don’t tell you the things that would be really useful to know about the world. The most boring place, for instance – East Germany. The rudest? Israel. The best-looking men? Cuba. And women? Somalia and Uzbekistan. The best breakfast? Paris and Hanoi. The best lunch? Sicily and Belgium. The best dinner? Bombay and Singapore. Maps should also tell you the most optimistic landscapes, and the most depressing. More of the world is on the move now than in any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. Millions and millions of slow unromantic odysseys, looking for something, for safety, for opportunity, a wife, a tan, a thrill, a chance, a decent night’s sleep. How we see a journey is not measured by where we think we’ll end up, but from where we start off.

  Maps are static things. Greenland is the only place in the world that is uncharted. Look at it: it’s an outline with a blank white interior. No one has ever made a map of it, no one’s been to mark its contours and ravines, its plains or its peaks. It is the most spectacular landscape I’ve seen for a long time. The air is so clear you can see for hundreds of kilometres, and it’s not mapped because there’s no point to mapping it. Nothing lives in the middle. Nothing survives there. A map is a diagram of interest and expectation. And there is none in Greenland, and that makes it extraordinary.

  The anonymous white, the enormous white is the world’s largest lump of ice, the world’s biggest, greatest reserve of water. And it’s melting. Last year the pack-ice wasn’t thick enough to take the weight of the sleds and the Inuits’ dogs starved. When the ice all melts, it will re-draw the map of the world. Countries will vanish, cities drown, borders will be meaningless. Every atlas and globe that has been settled for a thousand years will be obsolete. And a country that no one ever thinks of, that barely makes it to the back of the picture, will have redrawn the world.

  Head space

  The world we imagine is almost always different to the reality, and our grand imaginings of destinations inevitably affect the experience.

  Every place is three places. A trinity, separate but indivisible. A place is first the place you imagine, then the place you see, and then finally the place you remember. They are all distinct, they’re related, all different, though none of them remain the same. The place you imagined is changed by the place you see, and that in turn changes as everywhere does. And memory is as ethereal as a performance that alters with every retelling. This all may seem a little esoteric, a little French-drawing-room, but I’ve been thinking about it because I’m going back to Haiti.

  The world we imagine, we remember, is seen in a circus mirror. Whole continents shrink to mere specks. Some places are just blurred outlines, others grow disproportionately large. The centre of the universe may be a random but memorable city: the place of your birth, somewhere you were happy, where your family emigrated from, like those Dark Ages maps where the world revolves around Jerusalem. And there are fanciful lands full of monsters and misbegotten beasts. And that’s what I feel about Haiti. In my personal topography, it’s vast, a huge place inhabited by mythological creatures and fierce folk. When I finally walked across the tarmac to leave Port-au-Prince, I realised I’d spent a week with hunched shoulders expecting a blow. I have never before or since had the physical experience of a weight being lifted from my shoulders, and as I stepped onto the plane, I said, ‘Thank God, I’
ll never have to come back here again.’ You should not only be careful what you pray for, but about what you’re thankful for.

  I imagined Haiti as a darker Caribbean island, a mixture of James Bond and Graham Greene. It was so much more compellingly grim than that, more frightening, an example of what destitution, despair and hysterical imaginations can conjure up. Imagine John the Divine crossed with Keyser Söze crossed with the man pushing the shopping trolley who shouts at the traffic, and that’s how I remember Haiti. Now, of course, the reality has been severely challenged by tectonic plates. Although I found the time I spent in Port-au-Prince testing and mostly terrifying, it’s remained with me, loomed large in the reverie of my bespoke world. I can conjure up the smells, the men with yellow eyes, the hymn-singing from high windows, the shrieks that came out of the dark. It proves a glib travellers’ rule that the places that stay with you, that are the most memorable, are rarely the most pleasant.

  This brings me to space. Because whilst I was having my anxiety attack about going back to Haiti, I also considered going to the moon because someone had just told me that Buzz Aldrin – the Buzz Aldrin – is going to be doing a reality show on TV about dancing. It doesn’t matter whether this is a real show or if it’s the real Buzz Aldrin – the point is it could be; I believe it is. You could believe that Buzz Aldrin was going to do a reality show about dancing and then fall on his arse in a flamenco shirt. This is how we will remember the second man who ever stepped onto the moon.

  Space travel has been promised as a tourist destination for about 20 years, but apart from a couple of American millionaires, it hasn’t happened. Virgin Galactic is still taking bookings for passengers for the destination with less atmosphere than Starbucks. Soon, they’ll be asking journalists to go on freebies, and I’m thinking, would I rather go to Haiti or into orbit with five American millionaires whose favourite film is The Right Stuff and who all want to be Chuck Yeager?