The longest flight I've ever been on - 13 hours, via the north pole. We landed at JFK in the late morning. Well, we nearly landed. The 747 was just about to touch down - must have been no more than 20 feet from the tarmac, as far as I could tell - when the pilot decided to pull out and abort the landing, and we lurched back into the air again. This was well and truly the strangest thing that had ever happened to me in a plane, and I wondered whether this sort of thing happened all the time in the USA (from the 20 or so flights I've taken there since, I'd say no.) I guess there was something else on the runway, or maybe the tower just noticed he hadn't lowered his landing gear or something :/
One of the sad things about flying, I think (apart from the fact that I constantly wish I was down there on the ground whenever we're flying over something interesting) is that your first taste of another country is basically not very different from any other country. International airport terminals don't seem to be very diverse. Still, this was definitely the USA. The accents were right. This finally resolved a long-standing, nagging suspicion I've had - that Americans don't actually have American accents, but only put them on for television and movies. Americans travelling abroad, I surmised, might be obliged to copy these accents to keep up the illusion. In fact, everyone sounded just like they did in the films, more or less. The customs official, who was the first person I spoke to, was also much friendlier than the Japanese customs people, and made some gag about Tasmania, which I can�t remember, but which was definitely much more pleasant than the ones mainland Australians generally make.
So now I just had to hope that my host was there to meet me. As I came out into the terminal I saw a crowd of people standing behind a rope on the other side. One of them was clutching a large Meeko plushie. This was Alex Rakune, who'd driven up from Boston to collect me, and this was my first RL meeting with another furry. I hadn't really realised till then how alone I really was, on the other side of the world, and it was reassuring to see a familiar face. Meeko's was the familiar face. Alex I only knew from a blurry snapshot, but the fact that he was holding a Meeko sort of fused them into one familiar entity.
So this was America. Again, because of international airport syndrome, it wasn�t immediately obvious to me that I was somewhere different - that didn�t become clear till we got to the carpark (one of many instances of getting lost at airports) and I tried to get in on the driver's side of Alex's car. That wasn't the last time I was to make that instinctive error. Alex's car itself was something of a revelation: a 2-door Ford somethingorother. bright purple and shiny like a boiled lolly. The seat-belts were motorised, and would leap into action at unexpected moments, entangling my arms in awkward positions. The car had a pleasant smell, like crushed vanilla beans.
As we drove down the freeway with New York City distantly on the skyline, I was trying, of course, to 'get the hang' of America. There was a subtly different vibe to it, but in what _way_ was it different? This is still something I spend a lot of time pondering. I think there's a book in it.
We stopped for what was to be my first meal in the USA. Perhaps inevitably, and perhaps rightly, it was at a McDonalds in Connecticut. Here I discovered something odd: that ordering fast food - which would seem to be an uncomplicated, universally translatable activity, is encoded with all sorts of idiosyncratic local jargon and procedures which are liable to render it impenetrable to an alien. I don�t remember specifically what I did wrong during this, my first retail transaction in America; just that I was embarrassed I wasn�t able to get through this everyday activity without making an idiot of myself (so it seemed to me.)( I gradually did get the hang of buying fast food in America, but I still can't tell you what it is that makes it different. It has more to do with _attitude_ than anything else.) I discovered one other thing: that McDonalds food is uniformly awful all over the world. McDonalds maintains its title of worst franchise food on the market, by a considerable margin AFAIC :)
We got off the freeway somewhere near Boston, and headed towards Alex's parents' place, through the summer, New England countryside. Straight away I was seduced by the rich, pastoral scenery. Just about every bend in the road revealed some perfect new scene which looked as if it had been set up for a postcard. I don�t know whether it's just that first impressions retain a special importance, but I still feel that rural Massachusetts is perhaps the most splendid countryside I saw in America. At least it appealed to me in a particular way which I found very pleasing.
Alex's place is in a small country town which I'm assured is a satellite suburb of Boston, though it was hard to imagine it being anywhere near a big city (an expectation I'd had of America, which proved to be incorrect, was that the whole country would be overpopulated and choked with people.)
It was here in Framingham that I noticed the first sign of a particular difference between American and Australian culture. People in Australia just don't fly flags outside their houses. In New England, by my count, every seventh or eighth house had a US flag on display. This phenomenon was more or less consistent on the eastern seaboard, gradually declining the further west one goes, until in California it is a relative rarity. Of course I hit New England a week before the fourth of July long weekend, so I probably caught Americans at their most patriotic - for which I'm glad, because it's almost certainly one of the most important and (to an Australian) mysterious aspects of American culture; far from simple for an outsider to digest or apprehend. I think it's probably the case that Americans are more patriotic than most people, and that Australians are one of the least nationalistic races on earth, so such visible patriotism was very arresting. I'd go so far as to say that it was the one and only example of culture shock I experienced in the USA. For reasons I don�t think I can really understand or articulate, this very visible patriotism was quite intimidating. I came to feel, after a while, that the patriotism which seems instilled in the average American is probably a good thing. It just took me a while to get over the idea that such fervent patriotism didn�t necessarily contain a dark undercurrent of violence. As someone pointed out on the radio recently, America is unusual in that Americans are often possessed of this deep nationalism, without the coiled violence which accompanies that sentiment in other parts of the world. This seems to me to be quite an accomplishment.
After picking up some victuals at the (first) supermarket (I'd ever visited in the US) we headed out to Alex's parents' (trailer? Caravan? What is the right word for those things?), by the lake, in the forest, somewhere in the vague vicinity of Worcester, (where Freud gave his famous lectures on psychoanalysis, I later discovered.) When I think about America it is often this image which comes back to me first: the warm, sunny days by the lake, lozenges of golden sunlight falling into the leafy spaces between the slender, silver-grey boles of the trees; the music playing late in the day from the nearby cabins.
We'd bought some hamburgers (I was still an omnivore at this stage), and Alex had confessed to me that he had only the slenderest grasp of the mysteries of food preparation. This proved to be no idle claim, though I confess I acquitted myself just as poorly with these hamburgers. Just how one renders a frozen hamburger almost inedible by virtue of putting it on a bbq grill is a bit of an enigma. In fact I now suspect that these were examples of an infamous brand of near-inedible hamburger which I was told about at CF9 - in which case we can both be excused.)
The subject of cooking bears a little further discussion. Thought it's a generalisation, it seems to me that, by and large, furries can't cook. I haven�t worked out whether this is particularly a furry thing, or more an American thing, but I suspect the former. Supermarkets in the US are filled with fresh fruit and vegetables, and it stands to reason that _someone_ must be buying the stuff (or are they only there for appearances?) I can think of about four furries who I've seen cook food. At least one of these (Robin, FYI) is probably talented enough at it to make up for all the furries who experience insurmountable difficulties with frozen hamburgers, or who use their ovens as cupboards.
And so finally the long summer day died (coming from winter to summer solstice is a rather lovely experience it itself, which I highly recommend. Having done the reverse, I highly dis-recommend that), and gave way to a warm night. I sat on the porch of Alex's cabin-thingie, enclosed by fly-screen (a squirrel was later to penetrate this and cause havoc, while we were up in New Hampshire buying plush). I listened to the sounds of Americans enjoying their summer holidays. It was a sound which was both familiar and alien; comforting and remarkable. I was allowed to raid the eski (or whatever you call it over there) for one of Alex's dad's lite beers, and sitting there, with the big travelling over, and myself finally arrived; 36 hours awake and completely un-jet-lagged, I had my first and only bout of 'what the hell am I doing here?'
Alex, with a style typical of his unwavering hospitality offered to sleep in the top bunk, which was positioned in claustrophobic proximity to the roof the trailer. I am almost certain that I couldn�t have endured such a confined space, so I was very grateful for this gesture. I gradually fell asleep with my plush in the lower bunk. Sometime during the night, Alex bashed his head on the ceiling.
Here's that picture again. I cropped it out of a wholly unremarkable photo of me, for one reason only. See how Sarsha Always looks at the camera?