American Names
New York City: American Names
May 18th 2012
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.
I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.
I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
In the summer of 1965 my parents drove across America from San Francisco to New York, my dad having completed a year’s secondment from The University of Nottingham to The University of California, Berkeley.
This rather astonishing journey involved an uncooperative petrol pipe, a near miss with a tent flap, a bear, and a bar of chocolate. “Your mother sat up in her curlers and he ran away”. Not forgetting a picture of my sister, aged four, standing in a wheat field beaming. All undertaken in a black 1957 Austin Cambridge*, in August, with two very young children sitting on packing cases on the back seat.
I realise again, that all my life I have had a quiet love affair with the United States of America. The memory of that journey forms some part of our family psyche – even mine- despite it taking place eight years before I was born. Its physical legacy – the ‘University of California Berkeley’ sweatshirts, the photographs and the Cine film, the prints of Yosemite Valley and the “I’ll spell that for you” house name -‘ El Cerrito’ -borrowed from the small suburb of San Francisco which had been home for a year – was all still there as I was growing up. So too were the evocative names. Tuolumne Meadows, Lake Tahoe, Palo-Alto, Death Valley…
The memories from visits in my own childhood are as evocative. The buttered cornbread and the pancakes with maple syrup and bacon for breakfast. The log cabins and the smell of pine trees. Standing with my brother on the edge of a boiling, mud belching spring beneath the Lassen volcano. Pressing my nose to the window watching the rangers in Sequoia National Park shining their headlights into a bear’s eyes in the dead of night, trying to persuade it from the campsite. Giant redwoods you could drive a car through.
People we stayed with had things in their homes which were unheard of in Britain. Fridge freezers full of ice cream and beer, microwave ovens, swimming pools and enormous cars. The roads were wide and it felt as if there was a lot of space and a lot of sky. I remember liking my parent’s American friends, looking forward to their visits to us. They talked and listened. They were fun.
There is something too about the American use of language which is wonderfully dramatic. I have wondered why I haven’t minded the noise of the huge trucks which are constantly rumbling past on the road outside, delivering goods in and out of this remote community. I realised today that it’s because of the name. Road noise from lorrys. Well that’s just annoying. But how can you mind the noise of trucks on the highway.
The artist Edward Hopper painted the America he saw in the nineteen twenties and thirties, but somehow his paintings still evoke for me the America of my childhood imagination. The long roads, the gas stations, the freedom to look into the distance.
Most of all I notice what being here does to me. I hear my language changing. I think before I speak much less, assuming acceptance, or at least that I will be heard. I become more spontaneous in my responses to other people, a reaction to their openness. I stop bracing myself for the negative response which comes so easily if you are British. I even like the little phrases which some people find annoying..the “have a nice day” and the “you’re welcome”. I feel at home in myself.
I am, I am beginning to think, a closet American…
* all factual details, dates etc are subject to revision. I wasnt actually there!
