Who's for Aroostook ?

By JOHN

ROSSELLI

NEW JERSEY

Here we are, visiting a family of good pleasant People whose names will never get into the news- papers. The F.s live in a hundred-year-old wooden house on the low-lying bank of the Delaware; everything about it is large but run- down. The rooms are big, the ceilings high, the Porches wide; but everything wants a coat of Paint, weeds swarm up tM back steps, an extra- ordinary variety of junk fills the cellars and attics, and the children keep frogs, mice, and skunks indoors-(as a concession the skunks have had their stink glands removed). Across the tidal river, which carries big iron-ore ships from the Great I akes, North Philadelphia peters out amid factory chimneys. It is a bit like living on the Manchester Ship Canal; yet you cannot spot the boundary between the F.s' property and the neighbouring large farm (where the F.s' seven- teen-year-old son is paid for milking the cows at 4:30 a.m.); the family, though neither farmers nor rich, keep a pony as well as a goat and chickens; the Delaware is clean enough to swim and canoe Jo; and the mother manages to keep up her ceramics work in a corner of the cellar.

What have we got that they have not got? Main drainage (the cesspool backs up with every high tide) and elite education (which is available; but the F.s would probably not want it even if they could afford it). What have they got? Some sense of possibilities.

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WASHINGTON

Another suburban house, this time brand-new in a brand-new estate some fifteen miles down the Potomac-all split-leyel, open-plan, ranch- type and otherwise enlightened houses concealed among the tall trees. The chief reason why so many American suburbs look better than ours is that trees crowd in about and above the houses; and the reason Why this is possible is that the light (we are on the latitude of Granada) is too strong for the trees to cut it off. So lush, even then, is the vegetation of tide- water Virginia that a few trees have to be cut down. My hosts the M.s paid $300 two years ago to be rid of an old oak that was hemming them in; but, like several other householders in this road, they are still having to cope with the stump. Poison, hacking, sawing, burning- nothing quite does it. Mrs. M tries each fine day to burn off a bit more. 'I tried again today but it didn't catch properly,' she reports. The charred stump looks good for some years yet.

Politics, politics, politics-no doubt a journal- ist is bound to run into it everywhere but Washington lives up to its reputation as a one- industry town. Impossible to get off the subject. Are President and Mrs. Kennedy really interested in meeting artists and Nobel Prize winners or do they think it is good public relations? (The answer seems to be a bit of both.) Is Secretary McNamara's success in getting a grip on the Defence Department to be put down to his intro- duction of computers as instruments of personnel management? (The answer is that the good old human power of decision has more to do with it.) Even harmless gossips at parties give out tips about the best way to promote economic growth as, elsewhere, they would push the latest dirt about Elizabeth Taylor.

Much of the discussion is at once highly serious and highly sophisticated; some of the people that carry it on are fine-drawn enough to have conic out of a late Henry Jamei novel. But, impressive as it is to come upon a whole city seemingly given over to discussing the political issues of our time from the Common Market negotiations to the talents of Bobby Kennedy, it would be nice now and again to talk about something else. Also one would like to see someone who was neither a civil servant nor a lawyer nor a Negro -someone with a red face and a fat belly who was roaring for a beer.

*

Why do some public transport undertakings here make such a mystery of where their buses are going? In Washington as in New York the buses carry no more than the name of a faraway terminus; and the bus stops carry no indications at all. Many passengers, some of whom must be local residents, have to ask an already over- worked driver where he is going and often get a garbled reply.

Somebody suggests an economic explanation: Americans who depend on public transport are by now the poor, who are bad at agitating for better service. True, in Washington the bus-users —like the population of the inner city-are heavily Negro. In New York, though, nearly everybody :nes public transport: yet the system keeps just as mum about where its component parts are headed for. My own explanation is simply that this is one of the curious backward patches in the American economy. When we lived in th, United States twenty years ago my grandmother used to say that the national American gesture was to go into a dark room and grope for the cord that lit the overhead light. Now that most rooms have switches by the door the phantom bus and the blank stop sign do duty for the unfindable overhead cord.

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PENNSYLVANIA

The girl in the train to Philadelphia went to sleep almost before it pulled out of Washington. She looked enchantingly pretty while she slept; less so when she woke up (bad teeth, and black- heads in her nose). Between yawns and apologies for them she explained within a matter of minutes that she was a student at one of the Philadelphia universities, that she had been visiting her boy friend in Washington ('he never got up this morning, so I missed my train'), that although they were going to get married they would make sure they did not have children until he was earning a good salary, that he was hesitating between the law (money) and teaching (prestige), and so on. Yet her manner, though affable, was not specially confidential; and she seemed not at all inclined to find out about my own private life.

What was it? Awe at the terrible gap of some thirteen years between us? I think not. Somebody says, 'Americans can be surprisingly incurious.' Certainly I have found among casual acquaint- ances (not among old friends) that while they are most courteously ready to tell me at length what is on their minds they often do not stop to inquire what is on mine. The other place where this seems to happen to me is Scotland. Maybe the root of it all is the common Calvinist background. When the sermon has for centuries been the highest form of self-expression it must have some influence on conversational habits.

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The romance of America the giant continent: how it persists even now that hardly anybody walks, the railroads are dwindling away, and maps showing more than roads and towns are almost impossible to come by. (A man I know has pieced together a complete map of New Jersey, relief and all, from sheets put out by the National Geodetic Survey; but he is exceptional.) The most potent carriers of romance are the names on the goods trucks you can see on the main line between Washington and New York : Wabash, Grand Trunk Western, Southern Pacific. Some of the lines have vanished.; the names remain. My favourite is the Bangor and Aroostook: Bangor is in Maine and Aroostook County is Maine's northernmost tip, much of it roadless wild country reaching out into Canada. What are we waiting for? Who's for Aroostook?

But the best sequence of place names I know is here in Pennsylvania. It conies from a quartet of ■ •■••■■••• 44 small towns close to one another in the Pennsyl-