Road Trip - 2

There's a big one around the corner

Me, I see a city and I hear a million voices
Planning, drilling, welding, carrying their fingers to the nub
Reaching down into the ground, stretching up into the sky
Why? Because they can, they did and do so you and I could live together

Oh my God, New York can talk
Somewhere in all that talk is all the answers
Everybody owns the great ideas
And it feels like there's a big one round the corner

Elbow - New York Morning

What I had forgotten about the USA is just how massive everything is. People tell you, and you go: ‘Yeah, yeah,’ in that dismissive way. Then you arrive and you’re like, ‘Woah! Bloody hellfire. They weren’t wrong about that!’ Everything is huge. The cars, the roads, the trees, the houses. It is a land of giants and I found myself feeling rather like the much put upon pygmy shrew several times a day. Some days I ate sandwiches so big, when I held them up to my face, only my eyebrows were visible to others. That’s how big America is. It’s a place where you can hollow out a pastrami on rye and use it as a canoe.

At university, where I studied English Literature, we stuck to the time worn canon for the most part. It was however, the days where academics were beginning to accept the idea that it just might be possible to find great writing from nations other than our own. We studied Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, because although James was an American author, he did spend most of his time in Europe, which made him acceptable. In the first lecture on James, we were given a whistle stop tour of American literature and told that the theme that underpinned most great American writing was man’s battle against and conquering of the wilderness. It stressed the smallness of man against the vastness of the landscape and how brilliant the tiny man was for forging ahead, sticking a flag in everything that didn’t move and shooting everything that did. I thought about that a lot during this holiday as we drove through hundreds of miles of forests, up and down mountains and alongside endless ribbons of coastline.

To be fair to Americans, this also seems to be a running theme with Canadians. I once went to a dinner with my ex-husband at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall. As a child he had attended a very fancy boarding school in Canada that was like Hogwarts crossed with a lumberjack academy. We went to a fundraising dinner they hosted for alumni. I was seated next to an incredibly old woman who spent the evening getting smashed on small glasses of sherry and regaling me with tales of her school days. Apparently, when she started at the school the parents were told to drop the girls off in a woodland glade, where a teacher taught them to whittle their own canoes. Once they had finished, they were required to launch the canoe and paddle it to the school site to prove their worthiness to attend. She didn’t say what happened to the girls who failed. They were probably left to the bears.

No wonder she drank.

I realise that the fact that America is massive is hardly revelatory, and it’s not like I haven’t been before and it had just slipped my notice. It had diminished somewhat in my memory though and of course, the landscape of this trip was very different to the places I’ve been before. Oregon was new to me, and this time it was the sheer scale of the scenery that shooketh me. Once you’ve stood under the canopy of a forest of giant redwoods, you cannot fail to re-assess your relationship with pretty much everything. It’s a pointed reminder of what a little squib you really are.

Leaving Seattle, we drove through Mount Rainier National Park before heading to Portland. We couldn’t go to the top because we were stopped by a ranger with a fine hat and a pair of exceedingly wonderful moustaches who explained to us that even though we had driven through sunshine and rain and lush forests to that point, six miles up the road, everything was closed because of a blizzard. Even the weather is big.

Instead, we went to a place called Northwest Trek, which a lady we met in a coffee shop recommended. It’s a wildlife sanctuary and conservation project that aims to protect animals and birds native to the area. The park is in two halves, the prey animals roam about and the predators are behind bars. In the first half, you do a tour where all the cars follow a keeper in their car through miles of forest and glades and the keeper talks to you on a dedicated radio channel as you drive. It was an extremely surreal experience.

What was quite maddening, and which we also found frustrating on our trip to Alcatraz, which was the only other guided tour we did (because you don’t have much choice on Alcatraz), was the amount of time dedicated to a) health and safety and b) upselling. I’m not sure if we got so much health and safety because the animals are allowed to roam over several hundred acres, so there’s quite a bit of the hour long tour where you’re just driving through nice scenery and the promise of wildlife, or because it was standard, but by the time our guide had politely reminded us not to drive off into the uncharted depths of the forest four times, and that it was a bad idea to ride bison and/or feed them cake several times, it got a bit wearing. In the end, we were mildly hysterical and started riffing on our own advice: ‘Do not put an elk in the washing machine, it will not like it. Try not to entice a black tailed deer into your jeep, they are reckless drivers. Bison do not make good dinner party guests etc.’

We did get to see some animals after about twenty minutes, before which we had only seen one, furious swan, so that helped break things up a bit. After that we were able to leave the car and go to see the animals behind bars, which was the bit we were most excited about. I wanted to see wolverines, Tallulah wanted to see bears, Oscar wanted to see lynx and we all wanted to see raccoons.

We spent over an hour in the park, during which time we saw one baby skunk sleeping in a nest, which never moved and looked like the bobble on a hat, and which could well have been. We saw two, river otters, which were extremely cool and one bald eagle with one wing, which looked remarkably like my granny. Oh, and we saw the backside of a retreating wolf. Every other enclosure seemed to be empty of life. It pissed it down the entire time and apart from the cries of despairing children whose parents had brought them to see the animals, and our increasingly hysterical laughter, it was a bust.

I am all for animal conservation and the idea that sanctuaries and zoos are not primarily for human entertainment. It is important that the animals have habitats in which they feel comfortable and safe, and where they can shelter from the prying eyes of humans. I get all that and yet I think I am still allowed to be disappointed at the lack of tangible wolverine action in my life.

It was our theory that Northwest trek had not actually got any of the animals they claim to possess and that they were using the whole animal privacy thing as a con to make money that they say they are spending on conservation but they’re actually spending on sweets they can eat while they sit and laugh at gullible tourists roaming the empty pens.

We did enjoy Northwest Trek, but probably not for the reasons they want you to. I’d say that the animals were sheltering because it was raining, but having spent some time in Washington state prior to this and the Pacific North West in general, rain is fairly standard, so that probably wasn’t responsible for their absence. I reckon they were as bored of humans as we are and were on strike. Either that or they were all living it large in Seattle on a day trip to see the humans.

It was fascinating to journey from the wet, cedar smelling forests of Washington and Oregon into the giant redwood forests of California. I love them both for different reasons. The forests of Washington and Oregon seem more secretive and private. There is a feeling of muffled anticipation and potential in them that changes when the redwoods appear. For me, the cedar and pine trees are all about the smell. It’s like being high on the best sort of incense you can imagine. I can’t describe it properly but it’s the aroma of snow melt and clean things, of sharp, piney needles and an elusive, spicy back note that makes you want to follow it wherever it goes.

Being in a redwood forest is like going to mass. It’s a genuinely awe inspiring experience that makes so much room in your brain you can’t really contain it all. They’re spaces full of fractured light and dappled spaces, that make you think God might be real after all. There is a strong sense of time out of time. Things are slower in these forests and human time is meaningless. Humans are meaningless. Everything shrinks next to the trees.

The best animal I saw on the whole trip was in the redwood forests. A tiny bird, maybe smaller than a wren was flitting about in the undergrowth, shouting at us. He seemed utterly unafraid of us and anything else. At one point, he flew in front of us, landing on a broken tree trunk, where he disappeared into a hole in the trunk. About ten seconds after he vanished, he popped his head back out and started rearranging his nest in front of us, kicking out old bits of grass and straw and tidying up. Then he jumped out the hole and hopped sideways up the trunk to another hole where he disappeared, only to emerge with some more tidying. I’ve never seen a bird with a two storey nest before, which only goes to prove how big America really is. Even the birds have bigger houses.