Adventures in… Kansas
It’s been a while since I last blogged, but I’ve had good reason, honest! To be exact: I’ve been in America! Whoopee adventure!
So yes. The University of Kansas – specifically the Gunn Centre for SF – very kindly invited me to come and attend the Campbell Conference, and even more kindly gave me a prize for Harry August. It’s a wonderful thing to receive, not least as the trophy is covered in the names of so many greats that to be included is both a massive honour and hugely geek-joy-tastic. It was also a wonderful shortlist to be part of, and a real pleasure to see how many awesome books are being published at the moment. So the Gunn Centre, particularly Chris, Kij and Ruth – thank you!
Now. Enough of books. Let’s talk America.
First thing first: is anyone else really frightened of going through US border control? I mean, honest, I’ve got nothing to hide, despite being asked on the form if I’ve committed genocide or espionage or sabotage or anything of that ilk. I think it’s possibly a combination of the paperwork, the hassle and then the massive machines of scanny death that you have to stand in, arms raised, feet bare, while technology looks for your android heart. As one security official said to every single person who left it in one piece at Chicago: ‘see, you survived!’
Haha, quoth the travellers’ silent, reproachful eyes. Very funny.
Second thing: isn’t the world big? The journey took approximately 23 hours door-to-door, of which fifty minutes were spent sat on the runway at Chicago while air traffic control opened and closed, opened and closed the relevant patch of airspace owing to massive storms to the south.
And here’s the first thing that I’m gonna cherish from America – the huge sod-off massive storms that we flew parallel to all the way from Chicago to Kansas City. True, there were times when we flew close enough that they lost some of their appeal, but most of the time, we were far enough away to enjoy without being petrified. Out of the east side of the plane, all I could see from the earth to the heavens was thundercloud. The lightning wasn’t the white of an arc-lamp, but a sort of tungsten-yellow, and to say it struck once a second isn’t right either – it was a constant wall of moving light in the dark. Sometimes you could see forks of lightning, but mostly it was just bursts of fire moving in the sky, sometimes bright enough to illuminate gridded fields below, sometimes striking behind another pillar of cloud so that you could see that shape as darkness against the light. Even after 20 hours of flying, it was absolutely stunning, and a reminder (one of many) that big continents have more excitable weather systems than island nations.
Other reminders of this fact: the tornado warning in Chicago. So the University of Kansas is in a small town called Lawrence (more on that anon), and as getting there involves changing planes in pretty much every major airport in the US, and as one of those airports was Chicago, it seemed a worthwhile (and oddly enough, cheaper) thing to add a couple of days onto my trip to see the windy city. Or, as my local Chicago-friends suggested it could be called, ‘the city that never drains’.
The day I arrived, the water of Lake Michigan was still as a zen monk’s tomb, but hot enough that it seemed to be steaming, white mist rising up to obscure the towers of the Loop. By midday it had rained enough that the ground outside Lincoln Park Zoo was starting to spontaneously rupture with damp. Through the Art Institute, as I wandered through modern and impressionist art with a London friend (we had an unexpected encounter, for which there was much squeaking), taking in more Monet and Van Gogh than I had ever imagined to see in a place, phones were beeping all around with approaching flood warnings. And as I caught the El back towards my flat, rivers of water obscured the opening doors of the (awesome but stunningly slow) trains, and eerie sirens sounded in the distance. ‘How interesting,’ I thought. ‘Eerie sirens.’ And I thought nothing more.
“Yeah,” said one of my Chicago friends. “That’d be a tornado warning.”
I had bought my Chicago mates some English tea (apparently the stuff you can get in Chicago tastes wrong – AS DOES THE CHOCOLATE just saying) and industrial quantities of wine gums. (Again, they just don’t taste right.) We ate pizza – but not Chicago style. “Yeah,” they explained. “Chicago style pizza is basically all the cheese and then some more cheese and then more cheese kinda baked in cheese. It’s good! But not more than once a month, I think.”
They were busy moving house, from a small apartment in Roscoe. Roscoe is north of the Loop, and felt, to a wandering Brit, practically almost sorta European. Little shops and fewer big brands – although the big brands were everywhere in the centre of town – leafy streets and minimal traffic, it’s a middle class haven of a sort.
“A middle class white haven,” sighed a friend. “We don’t like to talk about it in Chicago, but there’s huge racial divisions.”
And here was the beginning of a few things about America that makes me uneasy. In Blighty, let’s not kid ourselves, we have massive racial/cultural/ethnic divisions, with whole segments of our society that have been disadvantaged by generations of discrimination and stupid bloody prejudice. But in America, everything seems just that little bit bigger. For example, the friendliness I received from people I met was huge and stunning and left me genuinely grateful and honoured – but when I asked ‘how is it that everyone is just so nice?’ one of my companions simply replied, ‘yeah, everyone here is really nice but very few people are sincere.’ Emotions were expressed bigger, words were louder – voices were definitely louder – but truth, for a stranger in a strange land, was sometimes hard to perceive.
Obviously I was not thrilled, as a wandering Brit, to see ‘no guns beyond this point’ signs all over the place, in both Chicago and Kansas. The uneasy implication was that, up to the point where you entered the library or the hall of residence, there were guns around you, and the arguments for carrying a firearm seem so absurd to a foreigner that you can’t help but feel unease.
Another burst of serious culture shock came while walking through the Loop in Chicago. The Loop is a giant skyscraper explosion in the heart of the city, hemmed in by the river, the lake and the El. It’s architecturally fascinating, loud, rich, and full of international brands and boutiques. (Fact of the day: TK Maxx in the UK is TJ Maxx in the US, raising the question of just how much thought went into that bit of branding logic?) It’s also got its fair share of homeless people, like most major cities at the moment, including London. But there was one man, perhaps in his mid-forties, sat with a cardboard sign on his lap asking for money, and one trouser leg rolled up. Here, huge swathes of flesh had just been gouged away, as if consumed by some necrotic bug or massive, explosive ulcer. Signs of infection had passed, but raw, gouged flesh was still exposed to the air. I have seen plenty of injury and poverty in London, that’s nothing new – but something like that I have never ever seen in the UK in all my days, yet people passed it by like nothing. It was another reminder, as if I needed one, that for all the British medical system has its flaws, it’s infinitely, infinitely better than the alternatives. Privatized medicine, guys: just say no.
I’m aware that I’ve written here about things that shocked or surprised me, so let’s take this moment to focus on some of the things that blew my tiny mind.
Firstly, the Gunn Centre in Lawrence has both actively visiting, and a history of hosting, some of the most awesome SF writers I have ever met or heard of. I have rarely been so well looked after or felt so welcomed as I was in Kansas.
I also had the best burger of my life thus far in Lawrence, complete with duck-fat fries. Oh my word it was so bad for me and oh my word it tasted so good. Other culinary adventures included the hot cookie shop in the same town. Its business hours were 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Monday-Friday, and 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. on Saturday. I waited for my moment to strike, then went in and bought a cookie, because I had to, just had to know how any business could survive on an economic model of being open only 14 hours a week. The cookie was a dollar (then add taxes) and tasted quite nice. The mystery remains.
Lawrence is both a hugely civilized town (it even has a zen garden next to the historical society) but also felt to me like a little piece of the wild west. There was something about its downtown – all straight, stiff buildings of a certain size and solidity, that made me feel that any second now the Sheriff was gonna face off against the bandit down the middle of the street. From its knitting shops to its tiny blue buses – basically ice cream vans with passengers – it felt like a place unique unto itself, with a strangely liberal and welcoming character that the ‘no guns beyond this point’ signs belied.
It also had all the wildlife. Tree frogs chirruped from the overhanging, damp branches. Rabbits chewed on the lawn around the university campus. Cicadas were just getting chittering, and the fireflies were beginning to appear at night. I’d never seen so many fireflies, though I was told this was just the start of their season – they popped in and out of existence in greeny-yellow bursts, hundreds floating two foot or so above the ground, and then vanishing as more snapped and faded in and out of existence. It was one of the most stunning sights I’ve seen for a long while, and was happening all through the quiet gridded streets of the city.
That said, against the backdrop of nature was the constant sound of air conditioning. I got so pissed off at mine (it was a little bit like trying to sleep on a train, the building was so loud and shook so hard with the massed force of air conditioning units) that I ended up using my expert technical skills to introduce a resistance issue every night, since the damn fan seemed unwilling to turn off. I mean, sure, it was hot – but not that hot.
Giant cars grumbled down straight roads, and in the distance you could sometimes hear the blare of huge lorries hauling goods down vast highways. In Chicago I saw my first highway-within-a-highway, expressways built for paying customers to avoid the clogged up, eight-lane traffic. I also discovered that it’s very hard to just ‘grab a bite to eat’ unless you want to buy it from a diner, as the culture of corner shops that we have in the UK doesn’t seem to be a thing in the US. Navigating by basically going south, I stumbled on Lincoln Zoo kinda by accident, since zoos aren’t my thing, and was surprised to discover it was just a thing you could wander into. Ah flamingos – who doesn’t love a flamingo? Ah, also, actually, seals. Because there’s something delightful about watching seal having its nails trimmed.
In the end, though, I think the best thing about the trip kinda has to be the people. Old friends and new, welcoming strangers and unexpected encounters in Millennium Park – however weird those vacuum-suck toilets that you guys have over there are, and however stupid the no-change thing on the El ticket machines might be, people are people wherever you go, and in America, I met a very high number of awesome people at that.
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