Things I hadn’t thought of

(And yes, that title does end in a preposition—apologies to all English fanatics like myself.)

I am currently reading a book left to me by my aunt, who stayed in my room while attending my sister’s high school graduation. It’s called I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away, by Bill Bryson. Bryson is an American who lived in Britain for twenty years, got married to an English woman, and then returned to America to settle in New Hampshire. This book is a collection of columns he wrote for a British newspaper after returning to America, on the topic of America.

Having recently returned to America—after a comparatively puny six months in Britain—I’ve made some observations of my own about America, particularly American suburbia (since this is where I live). For one thing, everything here is spread out. And by spread out, I mean that every place I need to be is inconveniently far away from the next one I need to visit. Having lived here virtually all my life, I never considered the vast place America is. However, after living in the little self-sufficient community of Brighton for the last six months—in which everything, including uni (assuming one is willing and has the time to walk six miles), is within walking distance—I have realized that because we are such a large country, we have taken advantage of our land space and, as a result, let everything sprawl to disproportionate degrees.

In England, for instance, I never considered where people park their cars. There are no parking lots or parking garages, and the streets were almost always lined with parked cars, sans meters. The fact is, though, that few enough people even drive cars, because everyone walks or takes public transit. Here, everything is so far away from everything else that one has to drive between locations, if he/she wants to visit more than one store/job/building in one day. For instance, it takes me a minimum of fifteen minutes to drive to the pool where I practice, in a neighboring community. In Hove, it took me fifteen minutes to walk to the pool, twenty-five minutes if I went to the one farther away. On a regular day, I then drive fifteen minutes back to my house, shower, and then drive twenty minutes to Oakland to my lab job at Pitt. However, I first have to pick up my mother at her job so that she can drop me off at the lab building and then go park the car using her University of Pittsburgh parking permit, since there is nowhere in Oakland I can park for less than $30. Then, when both of us are done working, she picks me up at work, and we drive twenty minutes back home. (If I want to see any of my friends in the evening, even more driving is involved.) And this is only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Talk about a lot of driving.

I used to think I liked driving. I was proud of being able to drive a manual transmission, particularly because I am a girl, and because (not to boast) I am so skilled at it. However, after spending six months utilizing an extremely efficient, clean, and available bus system, I have discovered that I don’t actually like having to drive at all. It takes too much time, I can’t do other work while I am doing it, and it makes me feel guilty not only for injuring the environment, but also for spending so much money (otherwise known as gasoline).

What’s more, I have discovered that driving makes otherwise-even-tempered people impatient. I consider myself a patient person. Never once while riding on a bus that was stopped at a traffic light did I ever think, Come on, come on, let’s go! Turn green! Sitting at a red light in a car, however, is an entirely different story. Driving gives you a sense of control over how fast you get from one place to another, even though this sense of control is entirely inaccurate. You become convinced that if you can just make that green light, just go a little faster over the speed limit, just pass that one pokey car, then you will arrive at your destination sooner. Yet, the time it takes to get from one place to another will always depend upon traffic patterns, speed limits, and (most obviously) distance between locations. This is true no matter how much effort you do or do not put into “getting there faster.” On a bus, you are a passive passenger. In a car, you are literally in the driver’s seat.

I am immensely appreciating Bryson’s book because he makes so many observations that I have not consciously considered. These observations are absolutely spot-on in their unique American-ness. Following are some of my favorite:

“I was as dazzled as any newcomer by the famous ease and convenience of daily life, the giddying abundance of absolutely everything, the boundless friendliness of strangers, the wondrous unfillable vastness of an American basement, the delight of encountering waitresses and other service providers who actually seemed to enjoy their work, the curiously giddying notion that ice is n ot a luxury item and that rooms can have more than one electrical socket.” (3)

“My wife thinks nearly everything about American life is wonderful. She loves having her groceries bagged for her. She adores free iced water and book matches. She thinks home-delivered pizza is a central hallmark of civilization. I haven’t the heart to tell her that waiters and waitresses in the United States urge everyone to have a nice day.” (59)

“Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of a family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of Milk of Magnesia for dealing with the aftereffects, that would still leave three cupholders spare.” (71)

“An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn’t walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill. She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, ‘But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie-burn rate, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.” (103)

“People don’t even have gardens in America. They have yards. And they don’t garden in those yards. They do ‘yardwork.’ Takes all the fun out of it somehow. In Britain, nature is fecund and kindly. The whole country is a kind of garden, really. In America, the instinct of nature is to be a wilderness—glorious in its way, of course, but much harder to subdue. What you get here are triffid-like weeds that come creeping in from every margin and must be continually hacked back with sabers and machetes. I am quite sure that if we left the property for a month we would come back to find that the weeds had captured the house and dragged it off to the woods to be slowly devoured.” (119)