Travelling by motorcycle through the US this week, I’m struck by the tension between my sense of both its familiarity and difference, Unlike the twenty or so miles separating Dover from Calais there’s no language barrier here, the roads and infrastructure are not dissimilar to our own, and the food, for all its occasional oversize portions, would find a welcome home in most British pubs. I guess the climate is more extreme, but that’s increasingly so in the UK too - frankly, even Vegas felt like Blackpool on acid.
Indeed, so much of our culture is now shared, that the differences between them are smaller and subtler than we perhaps like to admit. There’s a tangible lack of self consciousness in America (even more so of deprecation or irony) that to us Brits can feel brash to the point of cringeworthy. So too with the overt displays of patriotism and religion; yesterday, on the road to Cortez, I counted over fifty US flags, several of them flying from Baptist chapels.
While that’s not something you’d see in the Cotswolds, a moments reflection brings to mind the Union Jacks we dig out for the World Cup or Royal Weddings. And as for Americans being arrogant, consider the plummy accents of our upper classes and elitism engendered by public schools. Ultimately, for all our superficial contrasts I can’t help but feel that deep down we’re more together than apart - not least in a common if incompatible faith that our respective homelands, and their associated values, music, sports… you name it… are a model for the rest of the world to follow.
But riding through - and ‘in’ - the landscape here, I’m stuck by one overwhelming difference, encapsulated in an adjective that repeats with every turn of the road. This place is vast! And as I said today, tongue in cheek, to a delightfully welcoming gallery host I met in Durango - size matters!
We were viewing some over-scaled photo prints by David Yarrow and thankfully she laughed, confirming that we can share a sense of humour after all. It turned out that we also shared an interest in nature and art and the capacity of both to inspire and connect us to something bigger than ourselves.
Of course, all this is possible in a more intimate setting. My point is not that bigger is better. Rather, that it’s different, and at the risk of using an intentional pun, massively so!
Scale is important - and especially in landscape and art - because more than other visual or spatial factor, it impacts directly on our intuitive responses. By this I mean those visceral feelings that come in the nano- seconds before thinking and categorising and verbal proxies such as beautiful, or awe inspiring, or for that matter vast! Taking a painterly example, it’s precisely why the abstracts of Rothko or the water lilies of Monet were rendered so large.
And following that vein, I wonder how riding here - and the physicality that involves - has shaped my first impressions after an absence of twenty years, So much of America is bigger, and yes, brasher and less apologetic, than the distances and polite understatement that sit more comfortably with our British reserve. But it’s also wonderful and immersive and - that word again - vast.
On Tuesday this week I rode across the Navajo first nation territory, uninterrupted and almost entirely alone. ‘Follow the road for seventy two miles,’ my sat-nav said, the arrow straight tarmac melting into the heat of a pale desert sunrise. As the miles clicked by I kept thinking of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the violent if ultimately redemptive novels of Cormac McCarthy.
That probably says more about me than it does about modern day America. But then this is a landscape that it’s easy to get metaphorically lost in, and yet also, I sense, a good place to find yourself. In both regards, there’s, thankfully, still much to discover.
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