All Gone to Look for America (47 page)

IT WAS
2:20 in the morning when I woke to find a large Cuban prodding me gently in the backside and saying, ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’

I get this a lot. I think it’s to do with the hair, which was probably all he could see given that I was sprawled across two seats with my eye mask on and blanket pulled up over my face. He wanted to sit down. On top of me,
apparently
. Or at least in half the space I was occupying. The train had been full enough when we set off and I had a shrewd idea it was going to get worse, when I saw the conductor coming round and counting empty seats. But I knew there was one carriage at the rear of the train that was totally unused for no obvious reason and hoped that by feigning unconsciousness – or possibly death – I could persuade anyone from attempting to sit next to me, especially if they were large and female. I had by now developed a healthy paranoia – or you might just call it a survival instinct – about huge women with arses the size of Ecuador squeezing a small proportion of them into their allotted seat and the rest over me. It wasn’t the way I wanted to go. I didn’t want to be squashed by some outsize bloke either but on this train it was the ladies who were carrying all the weight.

The Cuban was actually quite petite as travellers on The Crescent go – he only needed a seat and a half – and he was clearly no more enamoured of having to sit next to me than I was to him. What had happened to the idea of underused American railways? By now I was coming round to seeing the advantages of flying. Getting from Memphis to Washington DC isn’t easy by train: it means either going back up to Chicago or back down to New Orleans. I had opted for the latter. Part of my original plan had been to continue all along the Gulf Coast and maybe even down into Florida, but since Katrina that has been impossible: even three years later the tracks along the coast have not been repaired.

So instead it was back on the City of New Orleans, which wasn’t such a chore – initially – as this was, after all, the train that inspired my whole odyssey, ever since my first hearing of Woody Guthrie’s son Arlo’s evocative rendering. The train itself was, regrettably, less romantic than I had envisioned, there only being two Amtrak models and I was more than used to both by now.

Arlo Guthrie of course didn’t write the song that became his greatest hit. The music business mythology, which Guthrie has propagated, says he was having a drink in the Quiet Knight bar in Chicago in 1971 when one of the regular
performers
, a singer-songwriter called Steve Goodman, came up and asked if he could play a song for him. Guthrie, who got pestered like this all the time, said Goodman could buy him a beer and he would listen to him sing for as long as it took him to drink it. It was the best beer of his life. Goodman’s nostalgia-tinged poignant elegy to the American railroad era moved Guthrie so much he asked to record it and the result was an instant hit that won him two Grammy awards, and secured his financial well-being for the rest of his short life. Goodman had been diagnosed with untreatable leukaemia in 1969 and died in 1984, aged just 36. In notes on a posthumous collection of his work his wife Nancy praised his ability to ‘extract meaning from the mundane,’ precisely the magic trick
performed
in ‘City of New Orleans’, with its references to freight yards and rusted automobiles. It has since become an anthem not just for the train but the city too, played by Guthrie among others at fund-raising events for the victims of Katrina, a piece of good magic Goodman could not have anticipated.

But it’s the second side of the triangle on this journey that is starting to get to me. The Crescent service up through the old south, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, is the most packed train I have been on outside the south London commuter network. And this trip is overnight and over a thousand miles long. And I’m stuck next to a large Cuban playing salsa music at 140
decibels
on his iPod.

By now I’m getting annoyed by this big empty carriage at the end of the train, and storm down to see if there is still space. There is. All of it. Still empty. With an eye to a showdown I find the conductor who must have seen me coming because he’s wearing protective glasses over his spectacles.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ I try, using my best newly learned American polite
warm-up
. ‘Could you tell me if there’s any reason why all these seats are still empty.’

He looks surprised. ‘Yessir. It’s because we’ve got about another 60 people getting on this train.’

‘Oh,’ I said, still wondering if he was trying a flanker, ‘and when’s that
supposed
to be.’

‘Starting at Lynchburg,’ he replied without a blink behind his doubly
protected
eyes. So that’s that.

I return to my seat and a new round of eardrum-threatening iPod wars: the shuffle god blesses me with Joni Mitchell singing ‘Woodstock’. I can only pray to God there won’t be half a million more boarding this train.

Just as I’m nodding off the conductor comes to check our tickets, and the Cuban tells him – for no other reason I can imagine than to evoke my
sympathy
– that he only has one lung. It works too, even if I can’t understand why the product of a lifetime puffing Partagas Coronas means I have to spend the night listening to a tinny second-hand rendition of ‘Guantanamera’. I get up and go to sulk myself to sleep on a bench in the brightly lit, noisy café car, thankful at last of my eye mask and the artificial fibre mock-Indian blanket I’d picked up on Albuquerque platform.

As a result by the time we crawl into Washington DC’s – yes, you guessed it – Union Station, I’m all but wrecked. More than 10,000 miles on trains around this vast inland empire is an experience both exhilarating and exhausting. By the time I’ve caught the metro to the university district south of Georgetown where I’ve booked a room, all I want to do is make immediate use of its bed.

But it’s incredible what 15 minutes’ catnap in a room that isn’t crammed with other people and shaking from side to side can do, and before I had dared hope I’m ready to take on the world, or at least the White House.

Not that you can. Not these days, at least. It used to be possible with little more effort than an hour or so of queuing and the self-control to stand behind the braid rope rather than run over and bare your buttocks on the big desk in the Oval Office. But the ‘war on terror’ has put a halt to all that – no
bare-cheeked
terrorists here – just as the IRA long ago put a halt to small boys being photographed on the doorstep of Number 10, Downing Street. Necessary security, you understand, nothing at all to do with the self-important hubris of one George W. Bush.

Instead, like the natives, I am reduced to staring through the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as are the hordes of visiting American school kids. This is a pity because I have done what they no longer can – when I was their age I was in there (though my parents wisely kept me in line and my trousers on) – and instead they are reduced to sitting on the steps of the monument
to General Sherman (the man the tanks are named after), while their earnest teacher gives them a lecture on the history of the White House, focusing – to my amusement very largely on ‘when the British burnt it down’. This was a long time ago – 1814, to be exact – in a war the Americans confusingly call the War of 1812, even though it lasted from 1809 to 1814; it is a big factor in their history, although British readers will almost certainly scarcely be aware of it, as it was little more than a few minor colonial skirmishes in the much greater conflict of the Napoleonic Wars.

One of the prime reasons for it was that the British attempt to enforce their continental blockade against Napoleon meant they declared American ships which violated it subject to attack. They started the war, with an attack on Canada, and insofar as there was a winner at all basically lost it, giving up the maritime issue, though with the defeat of Napoleon this was soon no longer an issue. And the US benefited indirectly from the British blockade which was an issue in persuading Napoleon to sell the loose package of land referred to as Louisiana, which, as we have seen, along with the railroad gave birth to the continental United States. It was also the war in which the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was penned, so in modern times those ‘bombs bursting in air’ would have to be labelled ‘friendly fire’. Nothing new there. But the remarkable thing about hearing this teacher tell his kids about it, is to what extent the British are still portrayed as the baddies.

We know Hollywood does this all the time – witness Mel Gibson films
passim
, and the absurd
U-571
which had the American, rather than British, navy capture the U-boat with the Enigma machine code book on board – but it is a funny old fact of life over here; villains have English accents. The Americans call them ‘British accents’ of course, even though they would never classify a Northern Irish, Scottish or Welsh accent as such, because ‘Britain’ deep down in the psyche still somehow represents the ‘evil empire’ they escaped from in 1776, even though – at least partly in gratitude for much-needed help in 1941 – we have been their obedient martial servants for the last half century. It seems a little unfair.

But then I can forgive quite a lot for a seat at the bar in Old Ebbitt’s Grill. This Washington institution just across the road from the White House comes highly recommended by a friend who used to be Washington correspondent for
The Sunday Times
. Although George W. wasn’t in the habit of popping over for lunch – and nor will his successor be, if the Secret Service have their way – I bet he often wished he could have done. Several of their nineteenth-century predecessors did, although the last sitting president known to have dropped by
was Theodore Roosevelt, and that was before the First World War. The place boasts the stuffed head of a walrus he’s supposed to have shot. But the lesser politicians still come to gossip over secluded tables in its clubby,
mock-Victorian
atmosphere.

If I really wanted a take on the election campaign this would have been the place to hang out in the hope of either running into or eavesdropping on a member of the Obama or McCain campaign team. But I’m not here to listen out for hot tips in politics; I’m here to eat crab cakes. Ebbitt’s is a hot
favourite
for Sunday brunch which means there’s a queue for tables. But there’s just one of me and there’s a space at the bar, where before long I’m tucking into the most mouth-wateringly melting Maryland crab cakes, one of America’s genuine culinary gifts to the world. You can almost forgive them McDo and KFC – just for the chance to taste one of these succulent little patties of white lumpmeat from crabs fished from Chesapeake Bay. Washed down with a spicy Bloody Mary and it’s a match for any cuisine the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ can throw at them.

I find myself seated next to an affable bloke in late middle age and a
striking
, athletic-looking young woman. She looks athletic for a reason: she is an athlete, here to participate in the annual Marine Corps Marathon tomorrow morning. Despite the name, which suggests it is run solely by crop-headed young men carrying backpacks and rifles, this is an amateur marathon run in their honour, which originally began and ended at the national Marine Corps Memorial, the famous bronze of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima island. Jena has high hopes of beating a personal record and her father wants to watch her do it. That’s why they’re in here: stocking up on the carbs first.

I have faster-moving objects on my mind for the minute. The Smithsonian Institution on the National Mall, that great green parkway that stretches from the odd obelisk that is Washington Monument to the great white dome of the Capitol, imitated by so many of those state ‘capitols’ across the continent, is one of the world’s trallegoricaluly great museums. But unlike most, what makes it
superlative
is not the collection of really old stuff but the really rather recent stuff. Of all the 19 museums which make up the Smithsonian in total, there is
absolutely
nothing quite like the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall: for a start there aren’t many other places on earth where you actually can touch the moon. Or at least a part of it.

I have a vivid memory of being allowed to stay up late – through the night – as a child to watch the ‘historic’ scenes of Neil Armstrong stepping out of Apollo 11’s lunar landing model, and curiously even more of television’s tame
Oxford historian, AJP Taylor, controversially dismissing it as ‘the non-event of my life’. All these years later, it’s hard to say Taylor was totally wrong, but I still feel a frisson at being able to go up to and almost touch (it is covered in a Perspex shell) the command module they came back to earth in, its exterior still bearing the char marks of re-entry. The iPod god can play REM’s ‘Do You Believe They Put a Man on the Moon’ if he wants, I’m not even giving him a chance. The only thing I still find astonishing is how small the craft were.