This is a dream I could live in.
But the dream has changed. In What Is America? Canadian writer Ronald Wright charts how far the American Dream has sunk: “Here are the ingredients of the American Dream: love of the new and dismissal of the old; invaders presented as ‘pilgrims’; hard work both rewarded and required; and selfishness as natural law.”
There is an appalling arrogance and a pitiable naïveté in America, which assumes that the winner of four out of seven baseball games between teams from, let us say, St. Louis and Detroit is by definition the best team in the world. The same attitude caused Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in 1860, to declare Boston “the thinking center of the continent, and therefore of the planet,” and causes a place like Utah to advertise itself as having “the best snow in the world.”
“America shapes the way non-Americans live and think,” wrote Ian Jack, then editor of Granta, in his introduction to a 2002 issue entitled “What We Think of America.” “What do we think of when we think of America?” Jack asked. “Fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope?”
All of those things, I would say, and almost in that order. I am in the “fear” stage at the moment, moving into “resentment.” The very thought of Homeland Security rattles me: it’s as if the whole country were a border. It makes the United States a nation of 300 million border guards.
These thoughts are not unique to me: according to recent polls, 37 per cent of Canadians dislike the United States. In fact, it is almost a national pastime, identifying ourselves by what we are not: that is, American.
Nor are the sentiments new. The word “anti-American” appeared in Noah Webster’s first dictionary in 1828 and was defined pretty much as it is today: “Opposed to America, or to the true interests or government of the United States.” It’s hard to imagine being opposed to an entire nation, but consider the remark of an earlier prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in the House of Commons in 1903: “We are living beside a great neighbour who . . . are very grasping in their national acts, and who are determined upon every occasion to get the best in any agreement which they make.” Pierre Trudeau said something similar when addressing the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in 1969: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even-tempered the beast . . . one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” People are always saying things like that about Americans, which may be why only 26 per cent of them think they are liked by other countries, and much fewer than that give a damn. But most Canadians agreed with Trudeau when he said, “We are a different people from you and a different people partly because of you.”
When asked to think about America, some Granta contributors thought of things that had arrived in their countries from the United States. The Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh, for example, remembered a gift sent by a cousin who had immigrated to the United States to study aeronautical engineering—a red satin pillow with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, “a good-hearted woman wearing a crown on her head and holding a lamp, a torch.” It is a torch, but I like Franz Kafka’s version better. In his novel Amerika, published in 1927, his hero, Karl Rossmann, looks at the Statue of Liberty as his ship edges into the New York harbour: as Kafka describes it, the woman is “holding aloft a sword,” one of those Freudian slips that no one seems to have caught. But of course it’s a sword—how appropriate! With what else would the United States bring democracy and freedom to, for example, the Middle East? A lamp?
Having grown up sharing a river with America, it is difficult for me to pinpoint any one thing that came to me from across the border. Everything did. In few other places on the continent do Canadian cheeks live in such close proximity to American jowls. Almost everything in the room, including the air, would have been from the States. The dance music my father played, the books my mother read voraciously, all American. The Pablum I ate, although invented in Canada, was produced and marketed in Chicago. During the day, my father worked at Chrysler’s and my mother shopped at Woolworth’s. At school, we played baseball—hardball, not softball, and not hockey. When we got our first television set, I watched Soupy Sales and Bugs Bunny and Popeye, all of whom I thought lived in Detroit. It never occurred to us to be anti-American; it would have been like being against life itself, and not even the good life, just life. Canada was a long way from Windsor; America was just down the street.
That was in the mid-1950s, when the American Dream was already beginning to morph into the American Disturbed Sleep Pattern. I was too young to know about McCarthyism and was blind to racism, but they were as present in our home as Frank Sinatra and Roy Rogers. They “came with,” as the waitresses in Woolworth’s would say to my mother about the Jell-O. My father joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1957, and we left Windsor to live on remote radar bases in the north, DEW Line stations (for Distant Early Warning—distant from whom?) that were built in Canada by Americans during the Cold War so that
Canadians could stand on guard for missiles coming across the Arctic Ocean aimed at Washington, D.C. We imbibed the fear of creeping Communism with our Sergeant Rock comic books, soaked in racism with every episode of Amos ’n’ Andy, and loved every minute of it.
Only later did I resent living the American Dream in Canada. I wonder how I’ll feel about travelling through it in the United States.
“The Cannery Pier Hotel,” Merilyn reads from the brochure, placing special emphasis on its strangely Germanic sprinkling of capital letters, “is a luxury boutique hotel built on the former site of a historic cannery six hundred feet out into the Mighty Columbia River in Astoria, Oregon. The Hotel offers . . .”
“How do we get to it?” I ask. “By boat?”
“ . . . the Hotel offers guests an unparalleled experience in a real working river. Private river-view balconies in all rooms. Fireplace. High-Speed Internet in room. Clawfoot tubs with views. Terry robes.”
I am still feeling anxious.
“Who,” I ask, “is Terry Robes?”
MY estimates are wildly out of whack. Clearly, I have forgotten how long a mile can be. It is late in the afternoon by the time we turn west off the I-5, toward the Pacific. The direction seems all wrong. Aren’t we supposed to be heading home?
US Route 30, the highway we’re on, ends just a few miles down the road, in Astoria. If we turned the other way, we’d be in Atlantic City in just over forty-eight hours. We’d head east through Bliss (Bliss!) and Twin Falls, Idaho, across the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers, skim the southern edge of Chicago, then cut straight through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, until we hit Virginia Avenue, a few blocks up from the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
Route 30 is the main east-west highway in the United States. It’s not an interstate; it’s a highway. A main cross-country road, like Route 66, except that long stretches of that iconic cross-country road have been replaced by multi-lane throughways that stop for nothing, not a crossroad, not a town, not a megacity. “Life doesn’t happen along the interstates,” William Least Heat-Moon notes laconically in Blue Highways. “It’s against the law.”
This narrow road taking us west to the sea is the only red highway that still runs uninterrupted across the continental United States. Even Route 66 went only to Chicago. Not only is Route 30 the last of its kind, it was the first of its kind in North America. In 1912, Carl Fisher, the man who built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and turned a Florida swamp into Miami Beach, proposed what he called the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. There were already some 2.5 million miles of roads in the United States, but they weren’t connected. Dirt tracks radiated from settlements to farms, logging
