Month: September 2006

Week Fifty-Two: A Year in the US of “Eh?”

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I often wondered this past year how I would feel at the end of it, how I would sum up my first year living, as James Brown once famously remarked before Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago, in America. Would I be all Uncle Sammed and Spangled with Stars, or would I be all stewing with homesickness, huddled in front of the TV watching DVDs of British shows and following the BBC news with vigilance? Well, lately I’ve certainly been in the second category, and I doubt I’ll ever be in the first; trumpeting patriotism was never for me even back home. So I ask myself, how has a year in California changed me?

I began the year by throwing a pumpkin. This rite of passage allowed me to get into the minds of small-town ruralitarian America, and I’ve been in there ever since, in a way. Davis, with its middle-brow community and progressive-greenist outlook, is not necessarily a typical town, but it tries very hard to be how people imagine such places. I’ve become a cyclist, but haven’t yet succumbed to the American love of the automobile, and have as yet never had a driving lesson (something that sooner or later will have to be remedied, if we are to stay in the States for good). I haven’t gone organic, in fact I am sad to say I eat much more fast junk food here than in London, simply because it’s so readily available. Of course, I don’t go down the pub anywhere near like I did in London, mainly because my old (and greatly missed) friends are not here, but also because the culture here is too different. Buying alcohol is an ordeal in itself, but the relaxing local pub just isn’t there, it’s all sports bars or ‘bar and grill’. So this much has changed: I almost never go out to the pub. Which for one thing means no more falling asleep on the Night Bus and waking up in darkest Essex.

I feel lucky that I came to an interesting State. California has so many different landscapes and places to visit, and it’s the place eveyone always wants to come to from other places. It’s green, yellow, gold, blue; right now, in the wine country, it is orange and burgundy, as the Harvest season kicks in, and the smell of wine-grapes floats on the mist. I juts couldn’t imagine we’d have moved if it had been to somewhere like Nebraska or Idaho (I’m sure they have thier attractions, but give me California). But I still miss that proximity to the diversity of Europe; the languages, the cultures, the people, the cities. It took me a while to become a ‘European’, and I am loath to give that up readily. I am, as noted in the recent beer / safeway incident, still having trouble accepting the idiosyncracies of the culutre here, such as the very un-European parcity in holiday time. And don’t even mention the War. I find that my blood is made to boil every time I listen to Mr Bush and his buddies appear on the telescreen chipping away reality like the Ministers of Truth, a feeling that may be amplified because I’m in liberal peace-preferring California.

Nevertheless, I am not unhappy here. I have a good job, live in a nice friendly town and am lucky enough to have the most excellent and wonderful wife. I complain about most places I’ve lived. My love affair with London, the city I know intimately, whose history I have studied closely, whose streets I have guided camera-snappy tourists around in blistering rain and pouring sun, well, it soured gradually as I discovered that living in smaller places might be better than enduring the Underground, and when it attacked me and scarred me I felt I couldn’t stay; yet I came back, and though I found a new love for the city, I think I discovered I needed to be somewhere with several million fewer people; but London is a part of my family, and always will be. I complained about life in Aix, the red tape of the French, the lunchtime closing, but it remains one of the places I’d live again the most. I certaily complained about Charleroi, in Belgium, the endless grey sky, the doomed-to-failure shadow on every building, the rotten shells of a dying heavy industry, but it will always be in the heart of Pete, as will the taste of her beers and the warmth of her people. However much I complain about California, it is already a part of me, and whether we stay or whether we go, to Europe or Canada or anywhere, little corners of Davis will stay inside me forever.

So after a year, how do I feel? The breeze is picking up, the blue skies are slowly being peppered with invading October clouds, the summer heat is evaporating, and I’m already nostalgic for previous times in Davis, such as when I was jobless and sad, strumming my elctro-acoustic and drawing faces on eggs and potatoes. This past week has been probably the busiest and stressful of the past fifty-two, and I can’t pretend that a night in a London pub with my closest amigos would not have helped. But I know that, truthfully, my time here has just begun, that while part of my soul will always remain on Greenwich Mean Time, the rest of me, the part that is living and experiencing, is out here on the edge of America, in the land of my wife, and that’s good enough for me. I began the year by throwing a pumpkin; I’m absolutely not ending it by throwing in the towel.

Week Fifty-One: What D’You Gotta Do to Get a Drink Round Here?

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Last Friday I popped into the local Safeway (yes, they still have Safeway over here, not a Morrison’s in sight) to get my reward for a tiring and stressful week, some fresh soup and a couple of beers. I got to the checkout (I mean, the register), and was asked if I was over 21. I don’t always get asked this; it’s a good while since I looked that youthful. However on this occasion I was actually refused my two beers, not because I looked too young, not because I didn’t have government-issued ID, but because – and only because – my ID didn’t have a written phsyical description on it. “You what?” I asked, utterly non-plussed. After all, my ID – a Permanent Resident Card – has my photo clearly printed on it. It has my name, my fingerprint, my age (surely the most imporant bit) and a special biometric chip containing who knows what. If you ran this card through a Homeland Security check it would probably tell you my GCSE results.

“No, it needs a physical description on it, or we can’t accept it,” came the cashier’s uncompromising response. I half expected her to say, “computer says no,” and cough on me. I asked to see the manager. He even admitted he thought I was over 21, but said that the store couldn’t sell me beer if I didn’t have an ID with a physical description on it. “But I’ve bought beer here loads of times!” I pleaded, my fake Hugh Grant Brit accent morphing slowly back into my very real Grant Mitchell London accent. The manager, who also looked younger than me, did not care, saying that it was the law and that if they sold me beer they would be prosecuted. Not only that, but every other time I’d bought beer there had been illegal. Even though I had a federal government ID card that not only proves my age but is good enough for me to get onto an aeroplane with. I told him it was discrimination against non-Californians, and people who do not hold driving licenses. He told me to look up the law. I did.

Sure enough, it says that the ID needed to prove your age needs a written description of the person. The list of ‘acceptable’ IDs included State-issued ID cards, California driving licenses and military ID cards. It did not include Permanent Resident ID cards or Passports (the only offical ID card most British visitors have). However, neither did the list of unacceptable forms of identification (which include such things as work ID cards and photo-less driving licenses). But the most interesting thing was that I discovered that it is not illegal to sell someone who is over 21 alcohol. It is illegal if someone is under 21, but not over. Safeway would not have been breaking the law by selling me beer, particulary as the manager acknowledged I was over 21. Many stores and bars have policies that mean they check the ID of everyone under thirty. Many take it further and card everyone that simply looks under thirty (you’re supposed to be flattered, not offended, apparently). And others still have a policy of carding everybody under forty. Forty!

Most Americans accept this. They don’t really care, they know that they’re just doing their job and it’s no skin off of their nose. Because I’m from a different culture I find it a little ridiculous most of the time, but as I’ve never been refused in a year of living here, it’s not been that big an issue. But to be refused two beers by someone who barely looks over 21 themself, because of a fairly minor technicality? Because they don’t recognise Permanent Resident Cards and Passports as identification? It does discriminate against non-Californians. You’d expect a tourist to have a passport; you wouldn’t expect them to have a California driver’s license. The Safeway incident showed a complete lack of judgement on the part of the store, and an interpretation of the law that was based on no common sense. Yet to be fair, in a college town, all they are doing is covering themselves. They are so fearful of legal retribution that they would forfeit selling beer to thirty-year old Brits. The local Police put enormous amounts of pressure on them. It is the American mix of law and drinking that has made them so.

Some think that the stringent drinking laws of the United States are a relic of the Prohibiton era. It may be part of the traditionally puritan nature of the American nation. A quick look at the list of minimum drinking ages around the world puts the US at the top, alongside places like Egypt and Malaysia. Britain’s own recently-repealed licensing laws date from World War I, when pubs were told to close early so that munitions workers didn’t come to the factory with a hangover. Most places ban drinking the drinking of any alcohol outside (boosting sales of brown paper-bags). Some counties (in states such as Oregon) are designated ‘dry counties’, places where the sale of alcohol is actually illegal. Davis itself was ‘dry’ until fairly recently; until the 1980s it was not available to buy anywhere outside the bars, due to a three-mile exclusion zone around the university campus. I shouldn’t be so surprised, I suppose. Next week will be the first anniversary of my arrival in this strange Land of the ‘Free’. I wonder if I’ll be allowed a glass of champagne to celebrate.

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” -Benjamin Franklin

Week Fifty: All Along the Foggy Coast

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We hit the road again, this time for a trip down the romantic Californian coast; we were celebrating two years since our wedding. We left the hazy Davis sunlight behind and stepped into the whispering fog of Monterey Bay. We queued up beside excitable children with their excitable parents for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, possibly the most well-known collection of marine life in the world (other than the actual Ocean, of course). We saw a great white shark, several hammerheads, a couple of giant octopuses, and some really ugly eels. We really enjoyed the playful antics of the sea otters; before we knew it, we’d been there almost four hours.

We dined at the Jack London pub in the pretty town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the clean and chain-store-free town where Clint Eastwood was formerly mayor. We ate until we were full, and I had a local Carmel wheat beer (it’s important to go local). We fell asleep early, and woke up to bright sunshine, whihc turned into intermittent grey patches of fog as we drove along the 17-mile drive down to the golf course at Pebble Beach, passing the much-photographed ‘lone cypress’ tree that has perched at the Ocean’s edge for three-hundred years. We stopped by the Carmel Mission, on the centuries-old Camino Real (King’s Highway, along Route 101), a glowing reminder that quite a lot of California’s European settlement began way before the Gold Rush, and that more than just Spanish names remain. We came across a large group of cyclists, who had gathered en masse to take the spectacularly Californian road that we were about to embark upon: Highway 1, along Big Sur.

We were not disappointed; Big Sur rises high above the Pacific, and drops to crashing waves below. We drove through patches of fog that swept in like an army of ghosts (though I noticed that at times it looked more like a fake special effect than real fog), and through incredibly colourful sunshine, as the wild crags threatened to push us off the edge and out of America. We ate wraps and grapes on the beach at Pfeiffer, watching dogs play in tide pools and waves thunder against giant rocks, producing great cinematic displays of power. We saw Pelicans and Cormorants, large Gulls and sleeping Elephant Seals, lying among the ruins of driftwood and seaweed. We reached Cambria by late afternoon, and had a romantic meal at the Brambles, beneath a painting of Venice, the city where we got engaged.

We left the Ocean the next day, but not before visiting Hearst Castle, the unbelievably opulent former home of William Randolph Hearst. We were guided through immense, grand rooms filled with Hearst’s massive collection of European art, mostly dating from the medieval and renaissance periods, mostly from the Mediterranean. We weren’t allowed to touch the marble pillars by the Neptune pool, which features original sculptures dating back to Imperial Rome; there is even a statue from ancient Egypt, far from home, watching the Californian sunset. We drove inland to Paso Robles, stopping at a winery for a little local tasting, before making the long journey back home. We didn’t want to come back to the Valley; the lure of the Sea is too strong for us. We uploaded our photos, and reluctantly got back to our real and busy lives.

Week Forty-Nine: Gold Rush

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While this week was laborious for New Labour in the UK, it was Labor Day in the US, a three-day weekend of shopping deals, sunshine and the last-chance for those Americans dictated-to by fashionistas to wear white. The whole ‘don’t wear white after Labor Day’ rule is a mystery to me; what do Ku Klux Klan members do, for example? Asa we enter the autumnal months, as the nights get longer and the heat starts to migrate further and further south, surely it woule make sense to wear more white, as firstly you’d be easier to see by motorists after dark, and secondly when it snows you would be perfectly disguised from the threat of polar bears (not that you get many of them in California).

Having gone across the Yolo Causeway bought my new guitar amplifier, I decided to spend Labor Day in Old Sacramento, where they were having some sort of event celebrating the Gold Rush days, the historic period that pretty much created the State of California as we know it. The old riverside downtown in California’s capital is pretty much the city’s main tourist pull, a collection of old cowboy-era buildings preserved in time, with dusty boulevards and wooden sidewalks. It grew up near the old Sutter’s fort, and these days is officially preserved as a state park. The builidngs mostly house souvenir shops and candy stores, as well as a few decent eateries. The bars are full of paraphernalia – Fanny Ann’s for example is dressed head to toe in old americana such as license plates and old carts hanging from the rafters, as well as a surprising collection of antique British Rail station signs. From the outside they look like old saloons; you half expect some unshaven whiskey-soaked wreck to come flying through the doors and into the horse-trough, followed by raucous jeering and a visit from the sheriff.

For the Gold Rush celebrations, the cobbled roads were covered in dirt, hay and horse-muck and lined with people in Wild-West costume. I felt almost naked not wearing a Cowboy Hat. There were horses and stagecoaches parading all over, mostly carrying packs of young serious-faced children. Tourists crowded outside the saltwater taffy stores to watch wrinkly old gunslingers with names like ‘Doc’ and ‘Earl’ shoot slugs of imaginary justice into weasly villains, much to their whooping delight. I suppose it makes a change from the real-life gun-fights on the streets of parts of south Sacramento. The Wild West never went away down there.

There was definitely a bit of Back to the Future III in the air. The sun was beating down hard, but there was a nice breeze down by the Sacramento river. There’s an old steam-engine that chugs down the waterfront to its terminal in Old Sacramento, a relic of the days when the great iron railroads first united the States of America to its mythical, golden West. On the river itself there is an old sternwheel riverboat, the Delta King, which makes you think more of the slow broad waters of the Mississippi than the rattlesnake west, but then Sacramento is known as the River City. Nearby stood old-time stalls and tents treated tourists to ‘authentic’ blacksmiths, gun-makers and an old Injun practising the ancient native art of making balloon-dogs. I’m glad I wasn’t around in the Old West. Sure there was money to be made panning for gold in tham thar hills, but I just couldn’t live in a historic period where everybody made me think of George W Bush. Hang on a minute, no, I’m confusing the Westworld of the past with the Planet of the Apes of the future.