All Gone to Look for America (32 page)

It doesn’t have to be ancestors either. Controversially, those whose deceased spirits have been offered a posthumous chance to get to know the Mormons’ ‘Heavenly Father’ are Christopher Columbus, Methodist founder John Wesley, several American presidents, the original signatories of the
Declaration
of Independence. And Adolf Hitler. Even mass murderers are given a chance to repent. You sort of have to admire the generosity of spirit, if perhaps not the political nous.

The FHL building is outside the walled confines of the Temple Square and if you have taken the trouble to turn up yourself, use of its remarkable facilities is free. No questions asked. And any questions they can possibly answer will be answered. Also free. With enthusiasm and patience. When I explained that my roots – indeed my family – were Northern Irish, I was given into the care of a bright-eyed red-haired woman called Miranda with green horn-rimmed glasses who immediately directed me to a typed index book of the records they held from the Public Records Office in Dublin, which is where all important
Irish documents prior to partition in 1921 were kept. Unfortunately, during the Irish Civil War the archive was blown up and vast numbers of priceless
documents
destroyed, including many registers of births, deaths and marriages. The tragedy is that we didn’t have a genealogy-obsessed religious group around back then to do what the Saints subsequently did in the early 1950s, which is to send someone to sit in the archives day after day for more than three years, photographing every single remaining page to put it all on microfilm. They’ve done the same job for most of Britain too!

Despite the gaps in the Irish records, guided by Miranda I spent the next several hours winding reels of microfilm onto the spindles of readers – they are in the process of digitising the archive but that may take at least as long as it did to film it for the last generation’s bulk storage technology. I’m not a family tree buff, but if the lacuna in the Irish records hadn’t blocked my route, I could have spent a week there, poring into the lives of my ancestors. It’s one thing knowing roughly when your great-grandfather was born but staring at his birth and wedding certificates, even on film, is still a strange sensation. I discovered that my grandmother had a middle name she never used and found myself musing on the occupations of Victorian Ulstermen with names like Isaac and Jeremiah. My great-great-grandfather Isaac Callan had been a ‘water bottler’ in Belfast in the 1860s. The only interference – and you could scarcely call it that – was when Miranda asked politely if I planned any baptisms. I smiled and said ‘not just yet’. Mormons believe it’s best to know as much as possible about your ancestor before you take that step. I believe it’s best not to tamper with the religious beliefs of Ulster Presbyterians. Even dead ones.

By now, as you might be able to imagine after such a dose of religion and family history, I was ready for a drink. Or two. I had been warned this would be a problem. Mormon lawmakers had tightened up since Brigham Young’s day when, although he claimed not to drink, he distilled his own Valley Tan whisky which was sold to other settlers. In the late nineteenth century Salt Lake City was famous for its saloons. By the mid-twentieth, post-Prohibition, Utah was one of the most anti-alcohol states in America, even if the restrictions were
relatively
easy to get round, usually by bars requiring a ‘membership’ which could be bought at the door. When the city hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002, the laws were relaxed and today – unless you are a hardened spirit drinker – Utah is almost like anywhere else.

 Almost. Nearly all restaurants serve wine or beer, but only with food. But then, isn’t that why you’re in a restaurant? And if you want, you can get away with a bowl of chips (fries). Beer is easy to come by provided it is less than 3.2 per cent alcohol by weight, which is a funny way to measure alcohol as most of the rest of the world measures it by volume. In fact, 3.2 by weight works out at around four per cent by volume, which while weaker than premium German beers, is substantially stronger than most American lager, and perfectly on par with an average English ale. Or indeed, the product of most American
microbreweries
. Which may be why, paradoxically, ‘dry’ Utah has more
microbreweries
per capita than any other American state.

One of the best happens to be directly opposite my hotel. It’s called
Squatters
and just to prove that you can live in ‘SLC’, as I discover most locals call it, and have a light-hearted attitude to your Mormon neighbours, they offer up Polygamy Porter. It is, as you may imagine, a heady brew: delightfully dark, with a bittersweet aftertaste!

On the advice of the barman – motto: always listen to barmen; don’t always take their advice – I head down the road to another establishment which also has its tongue if not exactly poked out at the Mormon establishment at least firmly in its cheek: The Tavernacle. Yes, it’s a bad pun, and yes, they also do music. Their speciality is Duelling Pianos: two blokes sit at baby grands facing each other and each hypes the audience into paying him to play their song. Whenever someone bids the other guy more for a different song, he takes over. It’s fun – for a bit – and clever – it certainly pays the piano players’ wages – but primarily it’s ‘frat boy foul-mouthed’, an improbable reminder that this was indeed once not just a religious ‘capital’ but a yeehaw cowboy town.

I’m used to the version of ‘Living next door to Alice,’ that adds: ‘Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?’ But I start feeling old and prim when the piano player rattling out a version of ‘You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille’, adds: ‘You bitch, you slut, you whore, you suck, you swallow, you cunt.’ And this in what my rather overly proper friend Philip from north Oxfordshire would call ‘mixed company’. The girls don’t seem to mind, though, hollering right along with him.

As I wander out into a starry crystalline mountain-air night, I recall there are more than enough volunteers to save their souls out here. Even if it has to be posthumously.

‘
HEY, SUSAN
,’ the woman in the tight jeans and blue sweater calls, gazing out of the window as we head towards the highest railroad pass in America. ‘There are some bars.’

I shoot her a questioning glance and scan the vast panorama in front of us – it’s not as if we’re going to stop even if there is a bar – but all I can see across the great brown plateau to the distant snow-capped mountains is a couple of hundred contemplative-looking cows. Nothing that I would call a decent watering hole vaguely in sight. And then I turn to look at Susan, her teenage daughter, beaming away in delight, mobile phone clamped to her ear.

Bars. ‘Cellphone speak’. Reception. In fact the first trace of it for several hours, several hundred miles and several thousand feet difference in vertical altitude. ‘I’m on the train,’ mobile-phone syndrome is still a relatively new
phenomenon
for most Americans, if only because so few of them have ever used a train, and it is a small mercy that for most of the transcontinental routes
reception
is patchy at best. When it isn’t they have an overwhelming desire to phone their friends and tell them about it. And like everyone else in the world, they talk louder on mobile phones than they do at any other time. And in the case of some of them, that’s saying something.

But here we are at 6:30 on a Saturday night, in my case having been on the train since the extremely ungodly hour of 3:00 a.m. – and that only because the Zephyr’s arrival into Salt Lake City had once again been mysteriously ahead of time – at long last anticipating the run downhill to Denver.

‘Downhill to Denver’ is not a phrase people use a lot, not least because Colorado’s biggest urban agglomeration is famously known as the ‘mile-high city’, with a celebrated mean altitude of 5,280 feet, one of the few
measurements
on which Britons and Americans agree.

Unfortunately Amtrak’s timekeeping had lost its edge somewhat. There
were urgent works going on in the Moffat Tunnel and that meant we had to wait. The Moffat is not only one of Amtrak’s longer tunnels – at six miles – it is also the highest point the railroads reach in America, coming in at a quite remarkable 9,239 feet (2,820 metres). There are not many ski resorts in Austria that will take you up to that level even on their highest lifts.

But you can hardly tell how high you are, trundling across a high-altitude cattle-grazing plain through rocky crags and sparse scrubland. The Moffat was built in 1928 and was a hugely important development in cross-country rail transport. Cutting through the mountain saved 65 miles on the journey between Salt Lake City and Denver. Far more importantly, those miles were along twisting steep gradients around the continental divide, the 13,260 feet (4,040 metres) James Peak. That journey alone used to take five hours. Now, in theory at least, it takes 10 minutes. Not, however, when they’re working on it.

So here we are stopped outside Granby, a little town in the middle of a nowhere that just happens to be the Rocky Mountains’ – and the world’s – highest altitude road, the Middle Park Trail Ridge.

Disconcertingly, for someone fresh out of Salt Lake City and carrying more Mormon baggage than I’d anticipated, according to our train conductor, it is also near a site
1
where evidence has been found of habitation by people older than any of the known North American tribes. If the archaeologists ever dig up some inscribed gold plates there’s going to be an awful lot of smug ‘I told you so’ stuff coming out of Utah.

The result of the delay, however, is that by the time we are finally getting towards Denver we are more than three hours late and it’s pouring with
torrential
rain. The one bright side in all this is that for once, I don’t have to face tramping the streets. I’m being picked up in Denver by my cousin Barry. This, dear reader, is where, I have to admit, I’m going to cheat. Despite my best intentions to complete my entire US pilgrimage by train, there is simply no easy way to join the next leg on my itinerary southwest towards the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles without going all the way back to Chicago or making an overland connection. Amtrak recognise this by offering a bus connection south from Denver to Raton in New Mexico. I had been intending to take this when I realised that it in fact passed through Colorado Springs, which is where Barry lives and he has kindly insisted on making the connection for me and is right now waiting in Denver.

Thanks, however, to the very technology I’ve been moaning about – mobile telephones – he is not sitting staring at his watch in the train station, but ensconced across the road in the warm and welcoming surroundings of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, Denver’s oldest brewpub (est. 1988). He is my cousin, after all.

Dashing out of the dark damp into a steaming fug of beery conviviality it’s reassuring to hear a voice drawl, ‘Hey, cuz, how ya doin?’ and spot a familiar face at the bar, eyes twinkling behind glasses on the other side of a large steak sandwich. I should point out straight away that Barry is not one of those
Americans
with a weight problem. Given that he is of modest height (we are not a family of giants) and hardly a sportsman even in his less than athletic prime, he remains remarkably trim and active. He has also just passed the milestone age of 60 but you wouldn’t know it, primarily because he has the mischievous zest for life of a testosterone-fuelled 14-year-old, just occasionally tempered with a world-weary lassitude. We get on well together.

Not least because Barry is already ordering up for me a pint of Wynkoop’s highly recommended Railyard Ale, which he thinks I absolutely have to try. Never one to fight an argument like that, the long day’s train journey is soon soothed away in a tide of richly hopped, mildly fruity amber ale. Railyard – so named obviously because they are right across the road from it – is Wynkoop’s flagship beer, which they describe as a German Oktoberfest lager made from their house yeast and finished with Tettnang hops. All I can tell you is it went down full steam ahead. Barry watched just a little enviously; he was on Coke, having experienced difficulty with law enforcement driving home from a bar before.

And then it’s out into the cold rainy night – Colorado can get very hot but also very cold and when it rains, it rains – into Barry’s ‘bus’, a 20-year-old Ford Econoliner that has seen the 100,000 mile mark roll round more than twice, and head for the hills. Colorado Springs is another thousand feet higher than Denver on the eastern edge of the Rockies and at the base of one of America’s most famous mountains, Pikes Peak. It was also rated Best Big City in
Money
magazine’s 2006 list of Best Places to Live. Barry would agree, although
Money
magazine is definitely not on his regular reading list.

Barry was born, like myself, in Northern Ireland, just a decade earlier, shortly after his father had returned from serving in the British Army. He was four when his parents emigrated to America, and even though he has an American passport still considers himself an Irishman at heart, although as he actually is one, he doesn’t make much of it. What brought him to Colorado is a
complicated story: for much of his late teens and early twenties, he was
unenthusiastic
about being drafted into the army and getting sent to Vietnam. In the course of that he got a lot of education, including a year at Queen’s University in Belfast where he wore Aran sweaters, drank Guinness and sang Dylan songs in smoky bars to great effect with the local young ladies. A varied collection of careers, divorce and remarriage later, he did what he had least expected to: joined the army. As a drugs counsellor. ‘It was something I felt I knew about.’ Fort Carson in Colorado Springs was where they were posted to. He left after his wife died and devoted himself to bringing up a talented son who became a surfer, deep-sea diver and fighter pilot, joined the military and is now based in Hawaii, and serving in Iraq.

Barry, meanwhile, still enjoys female company, smokes his daily weed and soaks up conspiracy theories – including intergalactic ones – like the old hippy he is, while working on a semi-autobiographical novel that one of these days will win a Pulitzer. He is, however, clearly not yet fully attuned to North
American
ley lines because despite Denver being laid out on a grid pattern it takes us 45 minutes to find our way out of it, and then it’s only after asking a second set of strangers for directions. The first attempt had failed when Barry got out of the van next to a little bar lit by red neon to the side of the inevitable freeway overpass to ask if anyone knew where we might get on to it. He came back a few minutes later none the wiser: ‘I couldn’t even find out where we are never mind where to get on the freeway. Nobody in there speaks English.’ There are clearly parts of the state named for the reddish-brown coloured Rio Colorado that are going back to their roots.

Outside Barry’s house on the edge of Colorado Springs the next morning I realise just how close he is to Pikes Peak: the great conical mountain that is a focal point in the landscape for leagues around almost sits on his
doorstep
. Pikes Peak is named after the magnificently monikered Zebulon Pike, an explorer who was the first white American to see it, though because the US Board on Geographic Names back in 1891 ruled against the possessive
apostrophe
in place names it is officially called Pikes Peak.

Pike tried and failed to climb it, predicting it would never be possible, which was a bit out as the first man made it up there just 14 years later in 1820. By 1893 even a woman had made it. Katherine Lee Bates was the daughter of a congregational pastor from Massachusetts who came out here to teach a
summer school and was moved by both the journey and the view from the top of Pikes Peak to write what many Americans, on the left of the political
spectrum
at least, would prefer as their national anthem: ‘America the Beautiful’, with its references to ‘amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain’. An altogether less martial image than that conveyed by the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. But we shall get to that in just a minute. Today there’s a gift shop on top and you can get there by a partly paved road – the
mountain
is chiefly famed for the annual Pikes Peak race, and the annual marathon run to the top and back. There is also the Manitou and Pikes Peak cog railway which it had been my intention to take, but as we sat there trying to locate the timetables, thick fog rolled in and over the peak, and announced its intention to settle. A trip to the top in those conditions would be as scenic as a day out in an old-style London pea-souper.

Instead we take what Barry calls a ‘hike’ – a leisurely stroll – around the romantically named Garden of the Gods which is virtually Barry’s back garden; he chooses his property well. The ‘garden’ is actually a park created around some of the most spectacular sandstone formations on earth: great pinnacles, towers and strange eroded primeval animal shapes of pink and red rock shaped by millennia of Colorado’s occasionally awesome climate that varies from beautiful mild Mediterranean-style days to extremes of wind, snow, rain and searing sunshine. It’s a favourite spot for climbers and walkers and a cool spot to take a short after-dinner stroll round if you live next door.

It got its name back in 1859 when two of the surveyors laying out the
Colorado
Springs city plan came across it and one, being a practical man, suggested it would be a super spot for a beer garden. His chum, obviously of a much more prosaic and dull disposition, added: ‘Why, it is a fit place for the gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods.’ I think they should have gone ahead with the beer garden.

Barry, however, has that aspect of the day sorted out, having booked dinner for us, his long-term girlfriend and a couple of other pals at the Phantom Canyon Brewpub. In the meantime, it’s a chance for me to wind down into domesticity for 36 hours. I had half hoped we might take in a rodeo. Colorado, being classic cowboy country, is famous for them. Rodeos are an odd
obsession
. A neighbour of mine in England is a fervent fan, donning his Stetson and dragging his wife and daughter out to the Wild West every couple of years to watch him yippee and yeehaa his way around the rodeo circuit. Strictly from the stands, I stress. But then he is a Chelsea fan, so what do you expect?

Barry took us to my only rodeo the last time I visited him. It was an odd
affair. Out on the opposite edge of town. Pickups parked for miles in every direction. Concrete tiered seats around the stadium – for want of a better word: corral? – and every other man in a cowboy hat with a shoelace tie held together by some little Navajo jewellery woggle.

These, I suspect, are not people you’d want to discuss gun control with, or invite to a gay wedding, come to that. These are the sort of down-to-earth Americans who’d tell you their heart is in the right place. And put their hand on it just to check. And stand up and sing the national anthem at the same time. Which is, in fact, as I sat there cringing, exactly what they then did.