All Gone to Look for America (24 page)

For a long time, however, monorails maintained a strangely magical grip on the human imagination: witness the episode of the
Simpsons
in which the people of Springfield, encouraged to build this extravagantly expensive piece of technology to get one up on neighbouring Shelbyville, go into a crazed song and dance routine chanting, ‘monorail! monorail!’ In fact, monorails do exist all over the world nowadays but rarely as anything more than short-distance transits; airport terminal shuttle transfers spring to mind. Seattle’s monorail starts on the third floor of a modern downtown shopping mall, which must have replaced one – or at least something of the same height – that was here back in 1962.

The monorail itself is, inevitably, a bit of an embarrassment. It is obviously painfully old, and despite the fact that its total length is not more than a couple of hundred yards at most it still requires a driver, unlike London’s
computerised
Docklands Light Railway, itself already more than a quarter century old. And the monorail can’t even leave the single rail it straddles.

Unfortunately, because up until now I’ve been impressed with this low-key user-friendly city, the Seattle Center at the other end is not much better: the usual sad, sorry collection of run-down amusement: a rickety roller-coaster, roundabout with flaking paint, tacky ice-cream parlour and cafeteria serving greasy food. I’m dismally reminded of a run-down British seaside pier
stubbornly
harking back to its Victorian glory while resolutely running to seed. Perhaps there is simply nothing more ephemeral than a purpose-built tourist attraction. And then I think of the Eiffel Tower and even the giant wheel of the London Eye, both of which – the former in particular – have gone on to outlast their creators’ expectations.

Seattle’s ‘Space Needle’ must indeed offer fine views of the city, I concede, though having just experienced an overview vastly more impressive – and exciting – than anything it can offer, I’m far from tempted to join the queue. I have the recent memory of my Sears Building experience in Chicago engrained in my brain like an acid scar. But looking up at this extraordinary and
essentially
useless concrete spire I realise that if there is any merit in these curious mid-twentieth-century failed visions of the future, it is as grandiose follies, a more modern version of Victorian mock-Gothic turreted towers. To me it looks faintly embarrassing, like a 1970s hairstyle. But then I know people who say I’ve still got one of those. In any case Seattle is not quickly going to be rid of it: what else would they put on the T-shirts?

Unless of course, it’s The Japanese Gourmet, or probably any one of several dozen other excellent eating houses. I make no excuses for describing another meal in Seattle, if only because it was probably the best sushi I have ever had. The Japanese Gourmet is a relatively small, mid-priced eating house back down near Pike Place, but, I reason, anything that serves raw fish next to one of the world’s outstanding fish markets can’t be all bad. And it’s not. In fact, it’s wonderful.

Never have I tasted better, fresher, more melt-in-your mouth tuna –
tonbo
, fresh albacore, not easy to get at all in most places. Then hunks of juicy cooked snow crab leg meat, bound on to the sushi rice by strips of seaweed. A
succulent
piece of
tai
snapper is marred – for me – only slightly by a more than usually nostril-searing dose of wasabi.

But then ‘heating up’ sushi is the chef’s speciality here, as he demonstrates by offering me his latest creation, a maki roll he nicknames ‘Ring of Fire’. I’m not at all sure I really see Johnny Cash as having been a big sushi fan, but hey, if it was meant to challenge the Man in Black, I can take a stab at it.

‘Hot hot hot,’ he warns, describing it, less helpfully than I’m sure he intended, as ‘Nagi Hama topped with red tuna served around siracha pit’.

This turns out to be a variation on what is loosely known in the sushi world as an ‘inside out’ roll. The core is, the chef explains,
hamachi
– yellowtail – with chilli seeds and sliced spring onion, wrapped in
nori
seaweed, with the sushi rice outside and the whole wrapped with a slice of red tuna held in place with a little wasabi. Then just to add that extra bit of spice: a heap of fiery red chilli sauce, delicately served on the side on top of a half lemon so you could use as much – or as little – as you wished.

Little turns out to be the right choice; to have used none at all would have been to turn down the challenge. The Man in Black would have considered me little better than a Bee Gees fan. So adding just the merest drop of the bright red condiment, I pop the whole thing – as best Japanese tradition dictates – into my mouth. And explode as quietly as possible. The Ring of Fire has to go down as one of the most extraordinary sado-masochistic sensual pleasures of the culinary world: an eye-wateringly spectacular blend of textures, flavours and tongue-tingling titillation. A gastronomic wipe-out in one bite.

It is also the most classic demonstration in my experience that the mastery of a sushi chef’s job lies not just in ensuring the freshness of the fish and the precise firmness of the rice, but in conjuring up combinations that both appeal to the eye in terms of composition and colour while at the same time
challenging
and expanding the repertoire of the taste buds. I am sure there are simpler and more refined treats on offer in Japan, but as an example of a red-blooded Japanese-American take on tradition, this was a masterpiece.

A masterpiece like that, however, gives you a taste for a cold beer or two. Thankfully Seattle is one of those places where that is not a problem. It is time to check out the nightlife on Pioneer Square, the oldest part of town, down by the railway station as it happens. This is where I came in. It was also, when the railroad was the main means of getting here from California, where most people arriving in Seattle for the first time came in. Hence the name. And it was, when things went wrong, as they often did for gold prospectors, where people often ended up. The usual grid-like street pattern of central Seattle skews as it tilts towards the oldest part of town. It also tips downhill so that the incongruous Venetian clock tower on top of King Street station becomes a useful orientational landmark. In the nineteenth century a lumber merchant called Henry Yesler used to keep his depot down here, and the street today is still called Yesler Street. It didn’t have that name in his day, or any other name. It was the rough and ready road down which labourers rolled their felled timber to the sawmill. If your gold mine had failed to deliver, your ship failed to come in or if for any reason you just couldn’t get another job, your best chance was
to hang out on the road where they skidded the lumber down. They called it Skid Road.

Early in the twentieth century a fiery local nonconformist pastor would preach about the loose morals and evils of the district that the area round
Yesler’s
Yard soon became. Instead of a skid road for lumber it had become a ‘Skid Road down which souls skidded into hell.’ A twist of the tongue later and the English language had a new colourful metaphor: Skid Row. And people across the planet have been landing on it ever since.

The past half century has seen various attempts to drag this original Skid Row back uphill. Metaphorically at least. It is only now that they are seriously beginning to show signs of potential success. The Central, opened in 1892, is Seattle’s oldest pub, and still going strong. But it, like so many of its
neighbours
, has fallen into the modern trap of age exclusivity. Anyone is welcome but if you’re much over 30, you’ll soon start to feel your age.

Once upon a time the American Cowgirl must have had a different name. Whatever it was, that incarnation has long been forgotten in the
metamorphosis
into a raucous bar that anywhere in Europe you would describe as for teenagers, were it not for the fact that in the US – incredibly – the minimum drinking age is 21 (a piece of Puritan lawmaking that has made almost every teenager in America a criminal, possessed of some form of fake ID – another major own goal in the ‘war against terror’).

The American Cowgirl is what old farts like myself call a ‘meat market’. And the meat is queuing up at the door: a group of six girls, just piled out of their car – who I can’t help wonder is the ‘designated driver’? – all shedding their thick outer jackets in the process to reveal virtually identical black sleeveless, bare-shouldered spangly tops. In a flash their naked flesh erupts in a pimply ocean of goose pimples. This is still Seattle. They didn’t invent grunge here for nothing, girls!

On the advice of a taxi driver – yes, in a district given over to late night bars, you can actually find them on the street – I head for somewhere more
convivial
for someone not shopping for rare veal. The driver deposits me outside The Hop Vine in a university and residential district. This is a man who knows his mark: inside I find a reassuringly heterogeneous crowd of local regulars, couples popped in for a pint and maybe a bite to eat, students merrily arguing away the troubles of the world over jugs of flavoursome ales.

When I finally stagger out into the night I find additional reassurance in the fact that my own innate fashion sense owes more to Seattle grunge than sparkly tops: typical Northwest weather – drizzly, cold and blustery.

But walking into the night through the streets of an American city on a more human scale – or was it just with a more humane face? – than any I have yet encountered, I head happily for bed. Sleepless in Seattle? Not me.

OF ALL THE EXOTIC NAMES
Amtrak gives to the routes plied by its otherwise identical trains, the Coast Starlight has to be one of the most
deliberately
romantic. Rattling down almost the entire length of the western
American
seaboard, if you board it mid-morning in Seattle you can, if you choose, still be on board 35 hours later as it pulls into Los Angeles.

I had a somewhat different route in mind. But as we rolled out of the
mock-Venetian
folly on King Street, along the rugged Pacific coastline until veering inland, into the depths of the great forests of Oregon it came home to me that I was at last California-bound.

For a start the dining-car attendant was called José and was the first Amtrak employee I’d come across who very definitely preferred speaking Spanish to English. And then there was the sign at the end of each coach: ‘Smoke-free zone: including the restrooms and the spaces between cars. Anyone who is caught smoking will be removed by law enforcement at the next station stop.’

Britain is just as bad – or good, depending on your viewpoint – these days, but the first stone in the war against smokers was definitely thrown in
California
, which is a bit of an irony given the attitude of its governor, as I am to discover. But then this is the state that gave the world hippies and health farms, as well as not just ‘nuclear-free zones’ but also – in Sausalito, north of San
Francisco
– a ‘cholesterol-free zone’.

The California clichés slowly start to multiply after I ‘detrain’ in bright sunshine early the following morning at Sacramento’s lovingly restored old station. The rubbish bins are labelled ‘Recycling Facility: Please separate trash accordingly’. Then I walk out of the station and catch sight of the tall palm trees swaying gently in the balmy breeze, so implausible given that it’s not a week since I was shivering in below freezing temperatures in Montana. Shades of the Mamas and the Papas roll out California Dreamin’ on a Winter’s Day.

And then I spot a flotilla of traffic wardens rolling along silently in
three-wheeled
electric cars. Wearing plastic cycle helmets. Yep, this has to be
Sacramento
! The capital city, no less, of the Golden State.

Sacramento may get sniffed at – and it does – by the metropolitan,
metrosexual
elites down in the much more famous cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, as a northern provincial town where out-of-touch state
legislators
meet to further loosen their grip on reality. Which is perhaps why in 2003 they turned out a relatively sensible if conventional politician as
governor
and instead sent them an Austrian body-builder turned movie star best known for playing a killer robot. And this is the seat of his government. Arnold Schwarzenegger, nicknamed ‘The Governator’ on black T-shirts they try to sell to the tourists (successfully in my case) has his HQ in Sacramento. How fitting then, that the world’s first transcontinental railroad terminated here!

You could, of course, also say it began here. It was from the spot where I am standing, just a few yards from the existing Amtrak station, in front of a line of buildings now restored to their mid nineteenth-century appearance at the junction of Front and ‘K’ streets that the Chinese coolies broke the ground on 8 January 1863, to begin the western section of what would be the world’s first transcontinental railroad. Not the line I came in on, but the line I intend to leave by, up and over the spine of the Rocky Mountains, a route that cost a fortune to build, claimed thousands of lives, and created a superpower.

It is to Sacramento that California owes its statehood, and therefore
arguably
that the United States as we know it owes its existence. This is where the gold rush started, back in 1849, a year after the first flakes were found at the sawmill owned by a Swiss emigré called Johann, later John, Sutter, a short, tubby businessman of dubious character from Burgdorf in Switzerland, whose route to California had been anything but straightforward.

After doing a runner from his native Switzerland to escape debt in 1834, Sutter made his way via New York to St Louis, still very much a frontier
settlement
, to deal in trade from Santa Fe, but when that didn’t work he once again fled his creditors, this time out along the Oregon Trail to the Pacific coast. In case that wasn’t far enough he then took ship for Hawaii where he made such an impression on King Kamehameha of the Kanaka tribe that he gave him eight of his men. Sutter then headed back to the North American mainland ending up in the town of Sitka, in the still Russian territory of Alaska, before drifting down the coast to the warmer climes of Mexican-owned California.

Intent on establishing himself as a merchant he persuaded Governor
Alvorado
to give him a generous land grant. Hoping to rely on cheap native labour
he took out a loan and built himself a baronial estate at the confluence of two rivers, the American and the Sacramento, which had been named by Spanish explorers after the Holy Sacrament. Sutter called his estate New Helvetia in honour of his homeland. He set to work building up a farm, fort and various trading companies, but his incompetence was such that the local Indians he had hoped to exploit ended up stealing from him. His agricultural skills were nil and his crops failed. Then to cap it all his fur trading business fell apart when he discovered his own employees had been selling off valuable beaver pelts to the rival, British-owned Hudson Bay Company.

When the territory was ceded to the United States he briefly considered flying the French flag, but was persuaded otherwise by the arrival of a battalion of US troops. To keep his head afloat Sutter went into partnership to build a sawmill in the lowest foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It turned out to be the most significant thing he ever did, albeit purely by accident, because one morning in January 1848 his partner James Marshall discovered some sparkly flecks in the mill water which turned out to be gold. It says much of Sutter’s naivety that he initially hoped their discovery could be kept a secret. Within months the gold rush had begun and Sutter found his land overrun by squatters, miners and would-be settlers who considered his property as much up for grabs as anything they might find in the streams or mountains.

Under pressure, Sutter did what he always did: tried to pretend it wasn’t happening and shift the problem elsewhere, in this case onto the shoulders of his son, and retreated to a modest farmhouse. His son, meanwhile, had seen that despite the fact that the land around the Sacramento and American
riverbanks
was a muddy quagmire in winter and a dusty plain in summer, and the fact that the water was undrinkable, that was where the influx of fortune hunters continued to arrive.

He teamed up with a couple of builders, apportioned a chunk of land facing the Sacramento River into 10 lots and auctioned them off for more than enough money to settle his father’s remaining debts. On the banks of a river named for the Holy Sacrament, Sutter Jr gave the influx of miners everything they desired; buckets and spades, beer and bordellos. His motto was to drive an expansion without precedent: ‘Build it and they will come.’ And come they did! Almost without noticing it, Sutter Jr had founded the city that was to become the capital of California.

Sutter’s town was laid out on a perfect grid pattern, which the oldest parts of the modern city still adhere to. Before long it had become a riotous river port of miners, traders and whores. But it was also by far the most important
place in California and in 1854 was designated the new state’s capital, which to the bemusement of San Franciscans and Los Angelinos it remains today. It is also the reason I shan’t be getting to San Francisco itself on this journey: the trains don’t go there. The closest you can get, on the magnificently-entitled California Zephyr which runs along much of this historic route each day from Chicago, is the less-magnificently named Emeryville, a rather dull industrial city town on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay.

I might, however, have been able to get that far, had my accommodation for tonight still been fulfilling its original role. The
Delta King
riverboat, a
beautifully
restored old paddle steamer now permanently moored by the riverside in ‘Old Sacramento’, in its heyday back in the 1930s used to ply the river from here down to San Francisco every evening, a 10-hour trip which cost $3.50 – or just a buck if you brought your own blanket and opted to sleep on deck. Its popularity was unsurprising: in the days of Prohibition it was one of the few places where you could not only gamble but get a drink! Out of service since the Second World War, during which it served as a floating hospital in San Francisco Bay, the thing actually sank in 1981 and lay on the bottom before being salvaged and undergoing a five-year restoration. I went out onto the aft deck and drank a late morning beer in the old girl’s honour as I surveyed the picture-postcard ‘Olde West’ townscape laid out in front of me: Old
Sacramento
in all its glory.

Unfortunately ‘Old Sacramento’ is probably the newest part of town. At least the most perfectly polished. The shops and stores have signs painted on them that say things like ‘Saddlery and Ironmongery’, or ‘Mining
Supplies
, Dynamite,’ when actually what they sell is scented candles and designer humbugs. They all sparkle pristinely with fresh bright paint, as they might have done on some mythical day back in the 1840s in the midst of the gold rush when they had all just been newly erected. Except, of course, that the gold rush was a rush and the river shores would have been heaving with people and dirt and horses and carts and oil and grease and sweat. And some buildings would have been going up while others would have been falling down.

A good proportion of them indeed did subsequently fall down or get torn down, and although some of those that make up Old Sacramento today have indeed been lovingly preserved – or more accurately heavily restored – a fair proportion have also been completely reconstructed ‘true to the original’. Old Sacramento is pretty, but it’s picture-postcard pretty and about as authentic as Disney’s Magic Kingdom. There is an ‘authentic replica’ – completely
reconstructed
– of the 1876 Central Pacific Depot and on weekends in summer you
can catch a steam train from it for a six-mile jaunt along Feather River Canyon.

The real city of Sacramento is separated from the Disneyfied waterfront by the inevitable freeway, which has to be crossed by the inevitable concrete pedestrian underpass. Even here, in sedate Sacramento, I’m prepared for the worst: the usual gaggle of drunks and beggars. But no. Hey, maybe California is different. The underpass certainly is. For one thing it’s painted in bright – if this were still the sixties I’d call them ‘psychedelic’ – colours. For another there was piped music playing. Not supermarket muzak, but syncopated jazz. Only in California?

I’m headed for the governor’s mansion, helpfully marked on a tourist map picked up on the paddle steamer. It’s a bit of a tramp away towards the edge of the grid that marks the older bit of the real, as opposed to the waterfront, city. But with the tall palms swaying and the sunshine beaming down with
Mediterranean
warmth, for once a ‘bit of a hike’, as I’m learning Americans refer to anything more than a stroll round the garden, is a not unappealing prospect.

A few streets in from the tourist trap, however, and Sacramento is
beginning
to look depressingly less unique: a concrete ‘Downtown Plaza’ area filled with the usual fast-food joints and chain stores. Then, a couple of blocks further I come across a delightful open green area that proclaims itself Cesar Chavez Park. This is where I embarrass myself. Okay, American readers laugh now: this is your chance to get one back on all that supposedly sophisticated Worldly knowledge Europeans have tried to patronise you with over the years. The name of the park has got me wondering what sort of political revolution is going on in northern California. How can it be that the nicest park in the state capital is named after George W. Bush’s bitterest enemy, the crypto-communist anti-American president of Venezuela?! Yes, I can hear you chortling already. It gets worse. In my blissful naivety I actually go up and ask the question – as
delicately
as I can – of one of the nice girls in bright yellow suits wearing badges that proclaim them willing to offer information to visitors.

They smile, look at each other, look at me – they may be checking here to see if I am mad or just a leg-puller – and then one of them says, calmly, politely, as if talking to a small child: ‘It’s
Cesar
Chavez. Right?’ And they walk away, not exactly quickly but quite clearly not wanting to hang around someone so obviously off his trolley. For a second I’m left standing there, wondering what’s up and then it dawns on me that the president of Venezuela – much as he might like to have been named after Julius Caesar – actually labours under the first name of Hugo. It’s only later – quite some time later and thanks to
Wikipedia
– that I learn who Cesar Chavez was: one of the most widely revered
Mexican-Americans who founded a farm workers’ union and whose birthday is a holiday in eight American states. For British readers, just in case there are any out there as ignorant as I am, a comparison might be if I had gone up to Tony Blair’s adviser Jonathan Powell and asked if he wasn’t still a bit
embarrassed
about that ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

I’m still unaware of the extent of my gaffe, however, as I plod onwards in search of Arnie’s pad. It’s only by the time I get there – or where the map says it ought to be – that I really notice how the streets en route have got just that little bit dingier and neglected – this is California dingy, mind, not Buffalo dingy, dingy with sunshine and palm trees – but no longer quite the chocolate-box Sacramento of the riverside.