TABLE TALK

Gazing on the Pacific

DENIS BROGAN

Belvedere, San Franciso Bay—I must have flown several hundred thousand miles in the

United States and yet I never get used to the size of the country or what seem to me the eccentricities of air travel. I know, in an abstract sort of way, how big the United

States is and when I travelled by rail or road, I wasn't surprised at the distances. I felt as well as knew, that I would take five days or more to get from coast to coast. I knew how long (and tedious) it was to cross Texas. knew about the different time zones and he political fights over what time zones ould be observed and what various states, r even smaller units, did about summer me. But air travel always catches me un- wares.

I either underestimate or overestimate the me or the distance involved and believe, aively that air lines run straight from here I am to where I want to go to. It a matter of the curvature of the earth. Is said in Washington that the very de- At mosque that the Islamic embassies -ected, is badly orientated towards Mecca, 1.:e the religious authorities refused to Now for the roundness of the world and strutted the architect to follow a straight ne south-east from Washington. My trouble different. I forget that, unless I manage ne of the few non-stop flights, the air lines re interested in more than taking up and fling down passengers from Washington San Francisco.

As, in any case, I wanted to stop over in ouston (Texas) and Birmingham (Ala: ma), I ought not to have been surprised at I was. forced to change planes at Nash- Ile. Tennessee, New Orleans, Dallas, rmingham and at Los Angeles. So I found yself at airports I had not planned to sit. O'Hare, the main Chicago Airport, is busiest in the world. It is admirably armed, but it sprawls; and as I am, at the ent, very lame, trudging along the end- s corridors is enough to make me sigh for e days of the iron horse. Of course, I uld get a kind of bath chair, but I still nt this intimation of mortality, so I wl on to the plane 'pooped', especially if am carrying a heavy typewriter, face: uslY called 'portable'. But there is some'- rig in a name, for at the Los Angeles air- (which I know well) the representative the airline that was transporting me was amesake who asked if I came from Bel-

although I didn't, he offered me one of bathchairs and, more important, illegally me on the plane before anybody else was allowed on board.

But even an unexpected deplaning in an airport which I had not foreseen would be a stopover has its points. Thus, in Nashville, Tennessee, a city I know well and like a lot, I was able to see an interesting piece of insti- tutional advertising. On the wall was a large plastic map of the river system of Tennessee, exalting the hydographical services of the most adroit of American lobbies. Needless to say, it was the work of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is to our modest Royal Engineers plus REME what our Royal Marines are to the American Marines. The American engineers have their headquarters in a bogus Schloss in the manner of Ludwig It of Bavaria above the Washington Reser- voir, and installed there is a motivated body of men even more skilled in nobbling Congress than in building magnificent dams and sometimes superfluous lakes. But I noticed that there was not a word about the Tennessee Valley Authority, which most people in Tennessee (the common people anyway) think has done more for the state than all the military. As the late Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee once told me, it is safer to damn motherhood or the flag than the TVA, a view not accepted in the best clubs of Nashville or, I presume, in the Army Engineers GHQ in Washington.

I also saw on this trip a sad ceremonial. While I was in Birmingham (Alabama) the magnificent railroad station was finally closed. It was magnificent when built, just before the 1914-18 war, but it was already old. The Pennsylvania Station in New York was like the Baths of Caracalla in Rome but the depot in Birmingham was like a German romanesque cathedral as, indeed, some of the Rhineland stations are. But none was so 'Domlike' as the station in Birmingham and I could only say, as was said in similar cir- cumstances on the closing of a Dublin station: 'Fare! farewell, a long farewell to all thy greatness'. To think that I once was able to go to Santa Fe by train, at a time when Albuquerque was boasting it would have a population of 30,000 by 1930! The most enthusiastic boaster could not have foreseen the double effect of the impact of the atomic explosion at Los Alamos or of the D. H. Lawrence industry.

We flew too high to see much of what lay below us. True I saw the Mississippi at New Orleans but that was because I was grounded there. And the Mississippi at New Orleans is quite unworthy of the name of 'the Father of Waters'. It is much further north, above all on the Iowa-Illinois border, where Joseph Cirt built his Mormon capital of Nauvo, that the Mississippi is most impressive. Any- way. I am not a great admirer of New Orleans, whose French charm is very bogus.

The last time I was there I noticed that the main street in 'le vieux Carre' was called the 'Rue Royal' and most of the municipal French is of that order. I have never, in recent years. heard a word of French spoken

in New Orleans, even by elderly Blacks; the most lively memory of its cultural attractions that remains with me is the perform- ance of that eminent strippeuse, Miss Candy Barr.

But even at the height of 30,000 feet it was, from time to time, possible to see through the clouds. And for a moment, I thought that I would have to abandon one of my favourite generalisations. I have (I think) once before in this journal, described flying north from the edge of the Caspian to Moscow on Christmas Eve and seeing below, in the vast snowy landscape, hardly a sign

of life: there were next to no lights and not even children being thrown from sleighs

to pursuing wolves in the old Tsarist tradi- tion. Not long after that, 1 flew east from the Rockies and the vast snowy landscape was pinpointed everywhere by the tiny lights of cars. But looking down on the lunar land- scape of Arizona, I, for a moment, thought the magnificent ribbons of roads were empty.

But no. It was still light and the lights were not on, but even desert roads had a steady stream of tiny cars (mostly driving west).

Then came the great smog field, below which lay the city of Our Lady. Queen of the Angels. We had crossed the High Sierra and the most—or least—American city lay be- low us.

We took off again for the remote and hostile north (I am speaking of spiritual, not geographical, distance). The chill Pacific rolled its great waves over the barren shores. There were cars aplenty, mostly, rightly, go- ing north. Then below us was the Bay of St Francis and his city, which is not like Assissi but has more spiritual kinship with Tuscany and Umbria than has what the San Fran- ciscans ironically call 'our sunny southland'. It was only a little over a year since I had last been in San Francisco. In that time, a new and very modern Catholic Cathedral had been built, and also the vast new offices of that tribute to the banking genius of the countrymen of the Medici, the Bank of America. Over the Golden Gate Bridge, past the narrow cleft that John Charles Fremont (with memories of Gibb and the Golden Horn) had called the Golden Gate, just before the gold rush began to Belvedere Island—and I reflected that to the south and west was a city that had returned $50,000 to the state of California on the grounds that it didn't need or want any more freeways. Enough cars came into the sacred peninsula as it was.

I know it is fashionable to sneer at the 'charm' of San Francisco. But I looked out of the glass-walled rooms of the astonishing house of my friends. On one side was a land- scape that could have really startled Stout Cortes and behind me were the inner walls all lined with the best furniture and books. So I quoted to myself, the verse that Macready engraved on a window of his cottage looking out on Loch Fad, and be- yond it, to Arran: ' Tis pleasant through the

loopholes of retreat To peep at such a world!'