Notes on Them and Us by Justin Webb

Author:Justin Webb [Justin Webb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780720128
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

AUTUMN HAS PROVED the strangest, most discombobulating time of year for a family settling back into English life. By the time our second autumn came along, we were beginning to feel confident once again with the hallmarks of Englishness: the price of petrol, the sense of irony, the mists and mellow fruitfulness. All was going swimmingly. Until we were knocked off balance by the trees.

Fall colours – colors to be accurate – are one of the great joys of American life. You do not get them anywhere else. This is the American conceit and we believed it with the passion of all immigrants to the New World. As the United States National Arboretum website has it: “In areas that are often cloudy for much of the autumn, with rather warm temperatures, fall colors are dull at best. This is often the case in much of Europe.”

Ouch. That puts us in our place. The ideal conditions for brilliant autumn colours are a warm, wet spring combined with a sunny, cool autumn. We often have the former on our side of the pond but the Americans are right: we rarely enjoy the latter. Americans have these conditions – especially in New England but also extending down south into Virginia – almost every year. The result is breathtaking; in particular, I always felt, when savoured alongside that other great American vista: the sleazy glamour of the road I mentioned in the introduction, the glamour that both repels and appeals to visitors – and indeed Americans themselves – in roughly equal measure.

America, as you know, can be pretty ugly. The tat! And then turn a corner and your jaw will drop. A panorama of the mundane gives way to America’s greatest asset: its space and its natural beauty.

The colours of the American autumn, the coppers, the yellows, the deep reds and purples, stretch in some states for as far as the eye can see. America has always, right from the beginning, been a land of trees. The American historian James Harmon McElroy suggested that the taming of the forest and the wilderness has been the principal event in the history of the American people; everything else has flowed from this struggle to preserve nature but to conquer it as well.

Now this is where our autumn colours come in. In 2010, without doubt, we challenged the good folk of the United States to rethink their view of the dank European fall. Walking on the hills outside Bath, we were shocked as a family to see sights that we thought we had left behind for ever. A genuine New England vista in old England. The whole marvellous copper-tinged, yellow-flecked gorgeousness laid out before us, with the city of Bath thrown in for good measure.

It was a surprise, this view, and that, it occurred to us later, was itself an added bonus. Because one of the great ironies of American life is that along with the space and the freedom and the sense of rugged adventure

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