The Rockets’ Red Glare

 

When people have asked me, recently, whether or not this was my first Fourth of July, I’ve told them of course it wasn’t. It was my twenty-seventh Fourth of July, it was just the first time I’d seen people making such an almighty fuss over it.

Independence Day is fun. While Thanksgiving is typically American through its sentimentality, with its focus on hearth, home and family (and turkey), the Fourth finds its American-ness in its bombastic, extrovert, in-your-face, up-your-nose and down-your-throat attitude. If Thanksgiving is about motherhood and apple pie, the Fourth of July is about fireworks, hot dogs and beer. And frankly, as is so often the case here, if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.

Local celebrations should be taken with a respectably large pinch of salt. If you dig too much into the history of these things, which one is apt to do as an outsider, it unravels spectacularly and you don’t get the best out of the celebration. In Catholic parts of Germany- the West and the South- the beginning of Lent is celebrated with parades, parties and copious amounts of alcohol, very much like Mardi Gras.

I remember seeing pupils, from a school that I worked at, parading through the streets  during Karneval, as it is called in western Germany, as part of their local scout troop and all dressed as penguins.They waved their flippers at us, and we teachers waved back, and then we went to the pub. If one tried to explain this beginning with the story of Jesus having to go into the wilderness for forty days, and continued via an explanation of the ritual habits of medieval European Catholics, you will almost certainly lose the narrative thread between there and the point at which a bunch of ten-to-fourteen-year-olds parade through the centre of Limburg-an-der-Lahn, dressed as penguins .

Similarly, getting hung up on the historical background of Independence Day gets you nowhere much.  Congress voted for the independence of the thirteen colonies on July 2nd, 1776. This point is one which, today, is somewhat moot. Even if not-President-quite-yet John Adams wrote to his wife:

“The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

Whoops. I’m personally devastated for the bloke. If you look at what he thought should happen, he’s absolutely bang on the money, 225 years later. But the only reason we remember this letter now is because he was two days out. You can almost hear Adams’ ghost screaming down the centuries “It was two days, two and a quarter centuries ago, you pedantic bastards!”. Or something.

What IS a slightly entertaining fact, if you are apt to be entertained by such things (in which case, welcome to the Dork Squad; we have t-shirts) is that Adams died on the fourth of July 1826, exactly fifty years (and two days) after Congress declared independence from Great Britain, and exactly fifty years after they approved the Declaration of Independence. Not only that, but his great friend and rival, Thomas Jefferson, spent the same day doing exactly the same thing, i.e. dying. Not only that, but they had been the only two signatories of the Declaration of Independence who later became President of the United States.

But this, while geekily pleasing to know, is useless on the day itself unless you want people to raise their eyebrows at you, and edge slowly away. The celebration of the Fourth of July has very little to do with the reasons to founders broke away from Britain. The day is not spent debating the meaning of liberty, decrying the excesses of absolute monarchy and denouncing taxes found to be unjust. Except possibly for the last one, but it sometimes seems that pretty much all taxation is seen as unjust in America; hardly a day goes by without somebody having a good old denounce.

In America, today, as Adams predicted, it’s a holiday spent the way a Summer holiday should be spent. His prediction was pretty darn accurate. For instance, Cayucos Community Church advertised their “Festival of Freedom, including ‘God Bless America’” for weeks in advance. There are parades held nationwide, one starting at the end of our street. The population of Cayucos goes from 3,000 to 30,000 over that weekend, as visitors come from more parade-deprived areas to get a look at ours here.

Having an opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge before it all went completely mad, we did so. We spent it at the cabin we were married at, by a usually tranquil lake which was packed with boats all trying hard to avoid one another. It was 35°C (95°F) and the chance to swim was a welcome one, even if it meant swimming through the waves created by the wakes of an unusual amount of lake traffic. There was a boat parade on the lake, however, and as you can see, some folks got deeply into the spirit of the thing.

The cabin was dolled up to the nines with flags and banners, and we baked a pretty good berry cake, which was photographed going into the oven, and looking decidedly more patriotic than when it came out, and whose recipe was therefore not included (right). The lake was illuminated by a proverbially huge firework display, whose roars echoed and reverberated (is that a tautology? Possibly. I’m not sure I care.) from the surrounding mountains. The pictures are below; do enjoy. The one thing Adams missed off his list was barbecues. It’s the done thing. His ghost almost certainly approves. We had grilled hot dogs. We’re being a bit more adventurous this weekend with baby back pork ribs prepared overnight with the following dry rub recipe, lifted from Cook’s Illustrated American Classics:

Dry Rub for Barbecue

4 tbsp. sweet paprika
2 tbsp. chilli powder
2 tbsp. ground cumin
2 tbsp. dark brown sugar
2 tbsp. salt
1tbs dried oregano
1tbs granulated sugar
1tbs ground black pepper
1tbs ground white pepper
1-2tsp cayenne pepper

Mix all these together, and store in an airtight container. Rub the mixture into the surface of the meat and allow to marinate for at least one hour before cooking. For more flavour, rub it in the day before, cover the rubbed meat in cling film and put it in the fridge overnight.

July 4th 2011 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The Corn Chip Aisle

 

I arrived in America nearly three weeks ago I’ve been struggling to make the choice as to what to write about. I’ve had too many options.

For example, since achieving my temporary ambition of becoming a mix of house-husband and unemployed layabout, I have been walking on the beach at Cayucos once or twice a day. I have enjoyed the warm and blustery weather, as have the kite surfers and the fellas that zoom about on those kite buggy things. So I was going to write about beach sports but I have too much to learn yet to launch into the topic as if I know something. Perhaps later.

The wildlife has been a topic. For example, the Sherriff posted neon pink signs near all the beach access points this week reporting a shark sighting, and telling people to keep out of the water, which everybody, especially the kite surfers, promptly ignored. There was also what can only be regarded as an incident involving photos of a dead skunk being eaten by a Turkey Vulture, which I posted on Facebook (the photos, not the Vulture, were posted, for those of you allergic to dangling modifiers.) One friend, in an outburst of extraordinarily narrow-minded vitriol, called me a “sicko” and asked if I’d been affected by “the Americans” already. Well, you know who you are, and I’m telling “the Americans” you called them all names. Considering one of this friend’s dearest ambitions is to, as she put it, “rollerblade down Venice beach” you’d think she’d be a bit nicer to “the Americans.” She was just kidding, I’m sure. Personally, I’d pay hard cash to see her try and rollerblade on Venice beach. Perhaps a kite would help.

But there is nothing really HAPPENING to the wildlife here. There is wildlife. What more can you say? There will be an opportunity at some point to write about it and post some nice photos. But not yet. Another potential topic was the hedonistic debauchery of the Santa Maria Strawberry Festival, but I’d missed it by a week. I’d been looking forward to it; perhaps next year.

There were topics aplenty; but none of those which floated around in my head really seemed significant enough to be really gone into in depth as my first blog post from the New World, until several conversations I had had with various people started to string themselves together. Time and time again I had the same conversation with new acquaintances. If I could boil down and distill the essence of these conversations, it would go something like “How are you different to us?” And this question was asked out of enthusiasm and friendly curiosity, out of Americans’ desire to learn about America.

The more I talked about it, the more the topic of this post emerged. Newsflash, it should read, America is a foreign country. English speakers in today’s world might be fooled into thinking they know America, through pop culture and linguistic familiarity. We know they drive on the right here and don’t put a ‘u’ in ‘behavior’. But this, shock horror, is not all there is to it.

For instance, when Stacey’s cousin Tyler talked to me about guns, I did not feel in any way out of my depth. He knew we have gun control laws in the UK, and asked me if I had ever fired a gun, and if not, was it something I intended to do now I was here. Now, I know about the right to bear arms (which is not the same as this) being protected in the Bill of Rights. I know how, love them or not, guns have a place in the past history and present day culture of the United States in a way they don’t have in Britain. It was one of those nice, easy, obvious cross-cultural exchanges which I had already thought about and, although the topic was an emotive and polarising one whose basic principles are deeply rooted in the political philosophy and pragmatic needs of the eighteenth century, Tyler and I knew what we were still able to have a sensible conversation about it.

Contrast, if you will, the far less politically-charged issue of tortilla chips. We needed food, so we went to Albertsons in Morro Bay. In need of a maize-based salsa delivery mechanism, I headed to the snacks aisle to pick up a bag of Doritos.

Culture. Shock.

Instead of finding a supermarket aisle stacked neatly with crisps, cashews, pork scratchings, peanuts, pretzels, Pringles, corn chips, Twiglets, Wotsits, Quavers and Space Raiders, I was confronted with the Corn Chip Aisle. That’s all there was. An entire aisle devoted to salsa delivery technology.

Did I want triangular or round? Yellow, white or blue corn? Scooping or flat? Triangular or round? Salted, slightly salted, plain? Nacho cheese, chipotle, lime or sour cream flavours? Made with canola oil or sunflower oil? Oh, and which brand? I went into psychological meltdown at the overwhelming range of choice. How did I know, when I picked a bag up, it was the one I wanted? Was I sure? Did I not want salted, rather than slightly salted? Was I sure I was sure? I just wanted a bag of tortilla chips…

By the way, the crisps, cashews, pork scratchings, peanuts, pretzels, Pringles, corn chips, Twiglets, Wotsits, Quavers and Space Raiders or their American counterparts all had their own place under the hallowed roof of Albertsons.

The reasons that Albertsons in Morro Bay has a Corn Chip Aisle are at least as complex as gun control. Other Albertsons stores elsewhere in the U.S. will not sell as many different varieties because they serve communities with different needs and expectations. Clearly, Californians expect corn chips, and multitudes thereof. In Britain, we’d have maybe three different producers of corn chips available in a supermarket. Doritos, probably Kettle Chips, probably the supermarket’s own brand. Here, there is an aisle full. Isn’t it ironic that here of all places, a small producer can make a local impact without needing to fight against corporate monoliths? America’s big. There are a lot of people buying tortilla chips. They don’t all buy Doritos.

So what have we learned today, class?   Perhaps, that the thing about culture shock is that you don’t know where it’s going to come from. The obvious is, well, obvious. There are guns in America? No way! You’ll be telling me they drive on the right-hand side of the road next! You can’t tell which of the many and varied layers of history and culture of a foreign place are going to come into play at any one time. Perhaps, that there really is such a thing as blue corn.

Perhaps, that buying biscuits freaked me out nearly as much as buying tortilla chips. Don’t get me started.

It rhymes with “mucus”….

 

Cayucos, California will be my new home as of two weeks’ time.

I consider myself extremely fortunate for many reasons, but moving to Cayucos surely counts among them. It’s the town in the background of the photo behind this text. It nestles at the north end of Estero Bay, roughly halfway between L.A. and San Francisco. The pushpin on the map shows where, but only roughly. You could be dropped at a location covered by the pushpin on that map and still have a two-day walk to Cayucos.

Actually, it’s not the world’s best map. You have to appreciate that the distance between Cayucos and L.A. is the same as the distance from London to York. That cartoon drawing pin is probably about half the size of Wales. Well, probably not, but probably about thirteen-seventeenths the size of Rutland. Bigger than your average drawing pin, anyway.

Here (right) is a more useful scale map. Here you can see Cayucos in the top-left, at the north end of the bay, playing book-end to the slightly larger town of Morro Bay further south. Actually, Morro Bay has four times the number of inhabitants of Cayucos. The considerably larger university town of San Luis Obispo is off to the east. Even by the standards of small-town California, Cayucos is a fairly small place.

The town website calls it the ‘Last of the California beach towns’. Obviously this isn’t literally true. It’s at the other end of the beach from Morro Bay, for a start. But Cayucos, more than perhaps anywhere else, has retained the style and character of a real American small town.

Bill Bryson once went looking for “Amalgam, USA”- the perfect small town of the films of his youth. This was in the 1987 and 1988, following the death of the author’s father and, in his view, Reagan’s America compared poorly to Eisenhower’s. Bryson had yet to mellow into the cuddly, professorial uncle of his later books, and while his jokes were funny he was nothing if not acerbic in his criticism. He never did find anywhere resembling Amalgam, where

“Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on abike and those two smartly striding men.”

                                  -The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

But I always feel that he’d have been slightly less disappointed if he’d spent any time in Cayucos. It’s a town of 2,000 people; there’s next to nothing there. A few shops and restaurants. But the charm seems to seep up from the cracks between the paving stones and makes the whole world look better. The town was founded by Captain James Cass, a Bristolian by birth, who came to California via New England in 1867. His house, reputedly haunted, is now a rather classy-looking restaurant. If Bryson shifted his gaze a decade later into the twentieth century, and looked for somewhere where the protagonists in the Beach Boys’ songs might get around, possibly looking meet a California girl who’s had her driving privileges revoked, then he’d do worse than to take a stroll along the beach at Cayucos.

This place has an almost mythical quality in my imagination. Or rather, my memory. The sand is pale and almost powder fine. Just walking along it makes the soles of the feet perfectly smooth. Occasionally a bit on the black and sticky side too; natural tar, seeping from the sea bed in pleasantly mineral-smelling lumps, is washed ashore, melts in the sun and clags to the feet of walkers who may or may not care.  I do know that it’s the most remarkable public beach to simply walk along and watch wildlife from. The pelicans treat it as their own and I believe I had been there four or five times before the dolphins failed to put in an appearance.

The place absolutely oozes quirk from every pore. Having decided today, for example, that taking a crappy, half-plastic ukulele halfway around the world is not an efficient use of space on an oceangoing freighter, that I shall be able to replace it at Alternate Tunings Ukuleles? Oh, on closer inspection it seems they only do lessons and re-stringing now. Never mind- I can console myself by indulging in a bit of retail therapy at Bugga Boo Clothing, a shop selling "Tie dye baby clothing specializing in onesies and tees for ages newborn to 2 years old." Who knew?? 

And so we’ve managed to find a place to rent there. When I say "we", I do mean, of course, that Stacey was the one who did the hard work of finding the place, sorting out the lease and moving all the furniture down over a period of weeks. It’s a fair assumption that any time someone achieves something in concrete terms, it’s going to have been Stace rather than me. It’s small, but there’s just the two of us and the cat. There is an antique marble worktop whose stand needs painting. The grass needs cutting and the garden needs a bit of attention generally. There are shelves which need putting up, but I think Stace might just have saved them for me to do as a sop to my masculine pride after she shifted all the furniture.

I can’t think of a better place for two people who’ve been apart for far too long to settle down. I defy you to look back down the pier here and tell me I’m wrong.