Coast to Coast (16 page)

The Indians are an odd, anachronistic part of the American body politic, in an uncomfortable state of half-integration. At Haskell Institute, their best-known institute of higher education (chiefly for vocational training) they gave me a copy of their magazine, including portraits of all the students. They are a fascinating study. Here is a girl from the Cherokee nation, with a Scottish name and with all the plush attributes of the modern American girl; her hair carefully waved, her make-up impeccable, her smile poised and conscious, her cardigan worn with a careful casualness, a single strand of artificial pearls at her neck, an elegant watch on her wrist. Here, on the other hand, is a young man so ferocious of appearance that the scalping-knife seems practically in his hand; his nose is hawked, according to tradition, his eyes flash, his eyebrows are heavy and threatening, his hair curls in a menacing quiff, his lips are thick but cruel, and his expression is one of unalloyed brutality. What a queer, mixed-up, mongrel, misused, ill-understood people these original Americans have become! They have their Football Queen at Haskell, their Pep Club, their Beau Brummel Society, their Katy Koeds and even their Indian Club (where they dress up in feathers). But they seem to resist the racial melting-pot more subtly and more resiliency than any of the enormous racial groups that have flooded into America during the last century; and there is about Haskell, despite the devotion of its skilled and kindly white staff, a feeling of melancholy and disenchantment.

For the Indian is still not as other Americans are. He is a man apart, a figure from the past, an old enemy, separate and different. Not long ago this induced, among white Americans, a blind passion for extermination; now the mood is rather one of repentant patronage, for the treatment of the Indians has long been on the sensitive national conscience. Time has mellowed the old enmities; even the cinema makes heroes of its Indians nowadays. On the banks of the Fox River, in Illinois, there is a monumental statue by Lorado Taft of the great Fox chieftain Black Hawk; he was a persistent and dangerous enemy of the white man, but today many hundreds of tourists visit his statue, to gaze with veneration, no less, at his stolid face as it stares out towards the West. There is even a statue of poor Sitting Bull, on the banks of the Missouri River in South Dakota, protected against vandals by a cage of wire netting. It is fashionable and interesting to claim Indian blood (among white people, that is; statisticians say that 25 per cent of the American negroes could make such a claim, if they had the mind). In the Indian country, of course, many white ranchers can truthfully declare, as did one cheerful dark-skinned loafer I met in Oregon: “I’m
no Indian, but I guess I’m kinda Indianified.” But among another class of person Indian connections carry a status of allure rather akin to the alleged gipsy origins of F. E. Smith. I remember a smart socialite in Chicago, living in a beautiful lake-shore house, substantiating her claims to kinship with Pocohontas by showing us an entire room devoted to Pocohontas relics; and indeed, she bore an extraordinary resemblance to that beautiful pagan.

Poor Indians! The hunters deprived of their limitless lands; the salmon-fishers working in canning factories; the Pueblos gaped at by tourists and patronized by gushing sociologists; the Navajo sitting at the wayside, like desert barrow-boys, hawking their blankets and their trinkets. It was more poignant than reassuring when, in 1961, Mr. Joe Thornton of the Cherokees won the world archery championship in Oslo.

I
t is science that has done all this to the Indians, taming their prairies and humbling their befeathered warriors; and science, in its most spectacular forms, is still a dominant social force in the West, harnessing rivers, reclaiming deserts, altering the face of the land and the lives of all its people.

Take a road north-west out of Kingman, Arizona, through the scrubby desert that surrounds the Colorado River, and before long you will see science applied to nature at its most magnificent. The road passes first through gold-mining country; little dusty tracks lead off into the blue Cerbat Mountains, and sometimes in their foothills you can see, imprecisely, the cluttered buildings of a mining camp, or read on a crooked notice beside the road the high-sounding name of some small hopeful enterprise. There are no towns for fifty miles or more, only an occasional cocky shambles of a shack and a gas station out in the wilderness; but a side-turning goes to a mining village hideously named Chloride. On either side the mountains rise, a desert plain intervening, sometimes red, sometimes a startling purple, and alone in this human landscape crouch a few shrivelled cactus trees. Presently the highway enters the hills, and winds over the dry dusty rises, doubling on its tracks, and twisting, and falling precipitously; and sometimes far below you can see a brown sluggish mess of slow water—the Colorado River, already 150 miles from its moment of glory, the Grand Canyon. Up and down the road goes, across interminable ridges, hot and dirty-looking,
the only sign of life an occasional little cheerful donkey trotting along a hill-side. The mountains are higher now, but the air is heavier, and you are beginning to wish you had driven straight through into the orange-groves of California; until suddenly, in the narrowest of canyons, squeezed in between glowering ridges, high above the river, like a towering white fortress, or the wall of the Potala without its prayer-banners, proud, gleaming and monumental, appears the Boulder Dam. I would fly to America again tomorrow, and make the long hard journey across the continent, and spend an uncomfortable night in a second-rate hotel, for five more minutes beside it.

The dam is necessarily very narrow, and immensely deep (still the deepest, I believe, that has ever been built); and the armies of pylons that march away from it, carrying power to California and its factories, are built willy-nilly up the side of the surrounding hills; they stand at grotesque angles from the ground, sometimes hanging horizontally over the gorge, sometimes so drunkenly leaning that they ought to sway, sometimes just a trifle out of true, so that you look at them twice and feel a little giddy. What with this queer crooked menagerie of steel objects, and the road running through the canyon, and the power-house in its depths, and the enormous face of the dam itself shining through it all, Boulder gives an extraordinary impression of jumbled brilliance; and to this effect an air of mystery is added by the constant unwavering hum of the turbines below, the only sound (with the dull thudding of the water) disturbing the silence of the hills.

From the top of the dam you can see through the canyon to the open desert beyond, and there stands a lake so blue as to be almost ridiculous. It was created by the building of the dam and is the largest man-made lake on earth. (We bathed in it and found its floor lined with thick and foul-smelling mud. One of the purposes of the lake was to absorb the millions of tons of silt carried downstream by the Colorado River, which cuts and swathes its way through the crumbly desert hills; much of this muck is trapped in the lake, and dictates the consistency of its floor, though a great deal escapes and is piling up rather ominously against the northern face of the dam.) All around is a great recreation area, for hikers and picnickers and yachtsmen and swimmers, all a by-product, as it were, of this marvellous structure.

Boulder, with its bold lines, its excitement, its size, and its ability to give pleasure as well as utility, is characteristic of those vast monuments of American engineering which set the national pace and best reflect the national predilection for power. I never drive along a great American highway without experiencing a sensual pleasure, as though
I am being carried away by the irresistible thrust and drive of the country. They are so wide and spacious, those great turnpikes and freeways, so sweeping and overbearing, so imperious in their stride. They are not all in the spacious West. The most famous of them, indeed, is the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which has been described by its controlling authorities, without false modesty, as The World’s Greatest Highway, The Highway of Tomorrow Serving You Today, a Gateway to Pennsylvania’s Travel Wonderlands, and The Highway That Restored Pleasure to Modern Driving. This splendid thoroughfare, financed entirely by its own toll charges, runs clean through the Allegheny mountains (one of the historic barriers to American expansion) by a system of seven tunnels; it crosses three big rivers, the Allegheny, the Beaver and the Susquehanna; 378 structures carry other roads over or under it, and there are 38 places of exit; nowhere on the entire highway, even among the hills, is there a single spot where a driver cannot see 1,000 feet in front of him. There are 26 restaurants and gas stations on the road; patrol cars are stationed every 25 miles; and so carefully is the whole system planned that the authorities have even dictated the correct length of the frankfurter sausages to be served at the wayside cafés. The turnpike has its own police force, equipped with wireless and radar, and a series of microwave relay stations ensures radio communications from one end to the other. The Pennsylvania Turnpike connects with the New Jersey Turnpike in the east, and the Ohio Turnpike in the west, so that you can already drive without a single traffic-light from New York to Chicago. Yet it is only one of a multitude of such great highways, generally reckoned to cost, in 1961, just about 1 m. dollars a mile. Soon they will span the entire continent, comprising a road system that dwarfs the vaunted
autobahns
‚
autostradas
and motorways of western Europe, and makes old Russia, in this respect at least, feel like a depository of the steam age.

Then there are the masterly bridges of America. Everyone knows the Golden Gate, which stands so slim and serene across the entrance to San Francisco Bay, but there are scores of others rivalling it in splendour. I remember with excitement my first experience of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which carries the New Jersey Turnpike across the Delaware River. The road is running smoothly across a flat, colourless landscape when it is overcome by a sudden and disconcerting spasm. It twists abruptly, shudders a little like a cat about to pounce, and then soars gloriously into the air on the thinnest of concrete supports. Almost before you know it you are high above the river, with the bridge white and shimmering all around you; and in a moment or two you are 
sweeping downwards in a graceful curve to be deposited gently on the Delaware shore. Such a bridge is one of the blessings of the automobile age, for a train could never surmount its gradients, and a horse would probably prefer to swim.

In Florida I once crossed the wide expanse of Tampa Bay in an elderly puffing car-ferry, which made the voyage hourly from Piney Point to St. Petersburg (a city of old ladies, sunning themselves on benches, and probably playing clock golf before lunch). It was a beautiful sunny day and we laboured gently across, vibrating heavily and wheezing; and as we moved there slowly came into view across the water the distant silhouette of an unfinished bridge. It spanned the whole bay, about fifteen miles wide. From each shore there jutted a low causeway, on stilts, and clustered here and there were little groups of cranes and derricks and hoists. In the middle of the bay—with the open Pacific beyond it—the structure rose abruptly, to allow the passage of big ships; and in the very centre there was a gap, where the two advancing structures had not yet met, as if two fingers, stretched out from the shore, were straining to touch each other, but could not, and had fallen back disheartened. A small coastal steamer, belching black smoke, passed beneath the distant struts as we watched, and presently the ferry jolted into its dock, there was a clanging of steel plates and a tooting of horns, and we drove ashore.

Strewn across America, too, blatant on the Florida shore or secretive in some arid waste, lies many a nuclear workshop, many a rocket range or space laboratory—some familiar to all the world, some muffled in security. There is an atomic reactor, for example, at a place called Arco, in Idaho; it stands in the middle of a volcanic desert, surrounded by distant dim hills, and littered with black crags and ridges of lava. Here they made the engine for the
Nautilus,
the first properly circumterrestrial vehicle, though it is 2,000 miles from the sea, in the centre of the continental mass, with endless deserts and plains and hills between it and the Atlantic, and the Rocky Mountains blocking the way to the Pacific. The reactor buildings are far from the highway and that part of the desert is closed to the public, but you can see, settled squatly on the plain, a square white building like a brick, which houses some of the more significant devices. Around it are a few straggled houses and structures, but it is the squareness and whiteness of it that stands out, and you can see it for many miles along the highway, and ponder for many minutes (if you are that way inclined) on the oddity of its presence there.

Los Alamos, where they first penetrated the ghastly secrets of the atomic explosion, is in another, brighter, gayer desert, in New Mexico,
within sight of those gracious mountains where the Penitentes indulge their mystic tastes. You can see the smoke of it above the ridges, but it is a secret city, and unless you have friends, or good reason, you are not allowed to pass the guarded gates that stand a couple of miles outside the laboratory area. Los Alamos has been a mystery for so long that it has become a tourist attraction, and many visitors drive down to peer through its iron portals. Two French visitors who went there a few years ago reported that the entrance was guarded by tanks and surrounded by anti-tank barriers. When I went, there were only a few languid, apologetic policemen, with revolvers at their hips, who said how very sorry they were that I could go no farther, and urged me to remember the names of any friends I had inside the barrier, who could give me authority to enter. The anti-tank obstacles, I am told by New Mexicans, are only gates to stop the cattle wandering. All the same, Los Alamos has its secrets still; the atom bomb was hatched there, and the hydrogen bomb, and who knows what is happening now in its desert hollow? During the first hushed activities of the Manhattan Project, when lorries drove through the night across the empty ridges to Los Alamos, and consignments of strange workers arrived to labour there, and when secretive scientists from several nations began to appear in Santa Fé, the local belief was that the new weapon being designed was something vast and round, that could be rolled across the countryside squashing everything within reach; now the wiseacres admit that anything being cooked at Los Alamos today is beyond the reach even of their fluid imaginations.

Oak Ridge is perhaps the most compelling and suggestive of these atomic spectacles. They built it in lonely country in Anderson County, Tennessee, and I saw it for the first time on a lowering drizzly day in early spring. If you are driving there from the north you see first the small and unpleasing township which was built during the war to house the Oak Ridge workers. Though it has some grandiose signs outside it, describing it as the cradle of the atomic era, it is a depressing place, a cross between an Army barracks and a lumber camp, with buildings of a dishearteningly temporary feeling, all peeling and cracking, as if they are not worth mending. There are a few shops and a hotel; and some long dormitory blocks that made me shudder slightly, so close were they in spirit if not in antiquity to the Cavalry Barracks at Aldershot; and an interesting museum where you may see a huge mechanical arm, used for handling radioactive materials, sweep out with the authority of a sledge-hammer and pick up from the ground, softly and sweetly, with infinite gentleness, a small but speckled egg.

Around the corner the blighted domesticity evaporates. The heath is bleaker and more desolate, and presently through a gap in the high ground beside the road you can see the atomic plant. For me, on that grey, wet morning, the impact of it was alarming. The sprawling plant lay in a gloomy hollow, all colourless, faceless and anonymous, surrounded by high fences of barbed-wire. Rank upon rank of low buildings stretched away out of sight, and smoke drifted and scattered from many tall chimneys. There it lay, silently; there was no sign of human life, but only this vast factory, like something dead, shut in and secretive, closed to the world, like a prison or an asylum. There was a hush about it, and a death-like blankness; and it was this supine feeling that made it eerie, for no doubt behind its characterless walls thousands of pleasant people were busy making bits of bombs, knocking off at the evening whistle, and driving down to their dull town for an evening’s bridge or a visit to the pictures.

The western States of America are littered with projects of such extravagant importance, and everywhere big new things are being done: wide roads are slapped across the countryside; graceful bridges soar across the rivers; there are new airports everywhere, new skyscrapers, new dams, whole new suburbs. Great river systems are being harnessed, as the Tennessee was harnessed years ago. In the Columbia Basin, for example (where the superb Grand Coulee Dam stands) there is rising a wide intricate network of dams, canals, reservoirs, pumping stations and power-houses, providing not only immense supplies of electricity, but also channelled water to irrigate large areas of sparse and wasted land. Often in the West you can see signs of the spreading fertility that follows such works; in a valley between dry brown hills, for instance, where a few first fields are tentatively sprouting and the road runs for a time between delicious green patches before plunging back into aridity. With an eye to that incalculable commercial advantage called “goodwill”, the Americans always make provision for the passer-by who likes to observe works of construction, even to cutting convenient eyeholes in the wooden walls that surround building lots. One warm summer’s day I stopped to observe the construction of a new dam. The river valley above it had already been stripped of life and it lay there shaved of trees and shrubs and farmhouses, with an even mark, like a contour line, marking the permissible limit of vegetation on its slopes. On the big pile of earth and stone that would one day be the dam, elaborate machines were busily moving, scrambling over the rubble, picking up soil and dumping it, pushing mounds out of the way, and suddenly scurrying off into the distance to perform some obscure operation out of
sight (for all the world, at that distance, like singularly well-behaved beetles, off to perform a natural function).