Letters from America, 1946–1951 by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497697683
Publisher: Open Road Media

* i.e. impassive

AMERICAN SUMMER

Of the four American seasons none is more dramatic or more humbling than the summer. It is a time when heat-waves roam around the continent moody as bandits, and close in on unsuspecting places, on southern swamps and midland prairies and northern valleys, with thunder out of the Apocalypse and a one-night respite of cool after rain. Then they gather their forces and are off again after another victim.

Only in Maine and down most of the Pacific Coast can you be sure of cool grey days. Only in western Oregon is the grass green and knee-high all the time. And the price they pay is the English price: cloudy skies, gentle showers spoiling tennis games and picnics, and a breed of sober people who expect the worst and live in raincoats. But everywhere else the summer is a blinding ordeal that drains off the fierce American energy; it takes a lot of the brashness out of them, leaving them a little more limp and a little more lovable. In the South it is so surely the fate of every man, every year, that they pretend to make a virtue of it. There is hardly one of the state guide-books that does not discover, with a little cheer of surprise, a compensation in the climate the stranger would never suspect. Thus, although ‘Louisiana has a semi-tropical climate …[it] is remarkably equable over large areas.’ Texas starts in with the brazen sentence: ‘Texas climate is remarkable for its salubrity,’ and adds the insult, ‘the summer heat is surprisingly bearable’. And Mississippi turns a barefaced lie into a boast with the final sentence: ‘This almost sub-tropical climate not only makes for pleasant living, but assures approximately a nine-month growing season.’

Several times I have had the misfortune to be in the Southwest in midsummer, and once I was going through the Great American desert. A small town that lies there, in the Imperial Valley, is a marketing centre called El Centre It is below sea-level. Its gardens are always in flower, but only because they are irrigated, for they have there about three inches of rain a year. Most of the year you would have trouble snapping pictures of the inhabitants, and in summer it would be next to impossible. For they cling like lizards to the deep shade of the hangovers, or arcades, that are built over the store-fronts and run from the top of the first storey high across the sidewalk. El Centro is on that highway which, when it was only a path, was well christened by the early Spanish priests the Journey of Death, or the Devil’s Highway. Only a few miles to the south are beds of fossilized oystershells, and petrified fish left there when this bone-dry region was an ocean bed. El Centro, you will gather, is out of this world and ought to stay there. At three in the afternoon the houses and stores glowed pink with heat and the desert beyond was a white glare to bruise the eyes.

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