Another Fine Mess Read online

  Henry was the farmer’s friend and the small-town sweetheart. When the American Magazine ran the soar-away cover line ‘Henry Ford Talks About His Mother’, they shifted 1.9 million copies. (‘Pray God may prosper you for what you said about your mother,’ wrote a female admirer. ‘When I read about the old-fashioned embroidered slippers, I could not keep back the tears.’) For fifteen years, he received more than a thousand letters every single day. ‘Until you gave us low-cost transportation,’ wrote a farmer from Berea, Ohio, ‘nobody I know had been 5 miles from home. God bless you, Henry Ford.’ People told him they’d squeezed a pony in their T and driven it to the vet. They wrote of Model Ts that mowed lawns, sheared sheep and even cracked nuts. ‘My T does everything but rock the baby to sleep and make love to the hired girl,’ boasted one rural correspondent. But plenty of people just posted him reams of idle chatter, as if writing to a close friend or relative. ‘We planted our potatoes today, but the rest of the garden isn’t up yet.’ ‘We have eighty-five chicks three weeks old.’ ‘Could you stop in and help us churn butter?’ An Oregon family wrote inviting Henry and his wife to dinner, and asking if they preferred their chicken fried or boiled. ‘It seems we have known you all our lives.’

  A hundred years on, this was still how my old car guys felt about Henry. Though few of them shared his rather spartan sense of moderation – Henry didn’t drink, and despised all forms of indulgence – they revered the culture in which it was rooted. Because, in almost every case, it was their culture too. Like him, they were down-to-earth Middle Americans of humble origins, who had prospered through determined hard work and the application of bold ideas.

  These days in Granville were my introduction to the orderly realm of traditional, capable masculinity that was every Model T owner’s garage, or ‘shop’ as I would learn to call it. Neat banks of tool chests and parts cabinets, shelves of sealing unguents and lubricants, labels facing out, and a T or two with a drip tray under its incontinent business end. There’d generally be a pet, in this instance a rotund tabby cat with his head in a plastic trough full of dry food, and evidence of light-hearted conservatism: Paul had a sticker on a tool chest that read, ‘I support PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals’. And within this realm, I assumed what would become my typical station of hovering uncertainty, offering to point a flashlight or unscrew something large and obvious. At least on a Model T there were plenty of such things: however reliable by the standards of its age, a T was still expected to break down a lot, and to be fixed by farmers when it did. My reprint of the original workshop manual began thus: ‘1. Disassembling Your Vehicle.’ Undo six bolts and you could remove the whole body. It tickled me that almost every repair on my car would begin with the same two orders: ‘OK, Teeum, take the hood off and pull up the floorboards.’

  For three hot afternoons, Paul and I took turns filthying our fingers under the T. As we worked I heard his story. His father was one of nine Nebraskan brothers who’d all became Lutheran pastors – a family fate Paul was so keen to avoid that at nineteen he bought a $100 air ticket to Hawaii. Six years later, he flew back to the mainland with a wife, three kids and his first million. It’s fair to say I left Granville knowing more about the manufacture of industrial dehumidifiers than I ever expected to. Paul moved to Ohio, expanded his firm into a global concern – India proved an especially lucrative market – and got into old cars. It was the definitive American lifestyle of yore: working hard and playing hard. ‘I worked nine hours in the office, came home, put on my overalls, and worked four or five hours on the cars.’ Even in retirement and plagued with a dicky hip, Paul remained a man of practical action. When I spotted a hornets’ nest above the shop’s door, he went straight outside and smote it clean from the eaves with a big stick.

  In the evenings, after a stiff drink on the terrace of Paul’s poolhouse, we’d head into central Granville for dinner. It was a most becoming little town, built around a venerable, picture-perfect college campus and a tastefully gentrified old main street, its broad sidewalks full of smart people dining under stripy awnings. The balmy air and Paul’s easy hand on the bourbon compounded the favourable impression. There was a general mood of relaxed prosperity that seemed at odds with my experience to date, and presently I found out why. I had strayed off-piste: Granville was a dot of Democrat blue in Ohio’s red sea, home to college academics and wealthy young professionals who commuted into nearby Columbus, the state capital. Urban America overwhelmingly voted Democrat – the most populous city to plump for Trump was Mesa, Arizona, a place whose existence had previously evaded me, and which ranks as the thirty-seventh largest settlement in the US. Yet Paul was a card-carrying Republican: at the back of an outbuilding I’d spotted a parade-ready plywood pachyderm, the party’s symbol, looming behind a shiny red 1950s Ford convertible. There was an elephant in the garage, and Paul let it out as we strolled through Granville, licking after-dinner ice creams bought from a parlour on the corner of East Broadway, and taking the odd hip-soothing rest on a sidewalk bench.

  ‘Obviously Trump is a jackass, but, you know – we’re Republicans.’ Paul shrugged helplessly: his preference, one he had bolstered with campaign donations, had been the inestimably less appalling Ohio governor, John Kasich. I could only sympathise. This must be how it feels when the football club you’ve supported all your life appoints a manager you find it very difficult to warm to, on the grounds that he’s an absolutely colossal anus. And who then wins the league, but does it by playing with seventeen Russians up front.

  ‘So, Tim, you think we’ve had our day as number one?’

  The question seemed an obvious follow-on, and the catch in Paul’s voice suggested he already knew my answer. Putting Donald Trump in the White House was hardly the act of a confident, optimistic nation, comfortable in its own skin. I hadn’t been alone in seeing his election as an end-of-era event, a superpower on the wane raging against the dying of its light. When had that light shone brightest? Since setting off I’d been routinely struck by the anachronistic trappings of daily life, the fixtures and fittings that dated America’s high-water mark to somewhere around 1962. The weedy 110-volt power supply that struggled to boil my bedroom kettles. The crappy, wobbly two-pin plugs. The cumbersome top-load washers in the motel laundry, like props from a monochrome sitcom. The speed-stick deodorant that I’d bought by default in a West Virginian pharmacy, a real blast from the personal-care past which harvested short and curlies while pasting my pits in mentholated lard.

  However poorly all these accoutrements had aged, half a century back they were the trailblazing future. Domestic appliances and hot showers for all! America was a proving ground for the modern way of first-world living. It proudly invented all these home comforts, then popularised and standardised them, while the rest of the benighted, unwashed, steam-powered world looked on in awe. For more than half a century, they led and we followed. They were number one by a million miles. I remember when my American cousin Patricia, Miles’s partner, first visited us in London in 1976, and left her toiletries laid out in the family bathroom. I was agog. A bottle of strawberry hair conditioner held particular fascination. I’d never even heard of hair conditioner – I’m pretty sure it didn’t exist in Britain back then, except perhaps as some harshly medicated slurry that stank like Vicks VapoRub and made your scalp shriek. This stuff was a creamy pale rose and (sorry, Patricia) smelled good enough to drink. It was also graced with a runic robot tattoo – the first barcode I had ever seen. Patricia had bottled the future and brought it over.

  But that was about as far as they got. Europe and the Far East stealthily reeled them in, and because Americans never leave their country – Patricia was the exception that proved this rule – they didn’t notice. When my wife and I first watched Friends back in the mid-1990s, we were amazed to see Chandler dispense high-end Manhattanite sarcasm into a house-phone the size of a wine box, the sort of hulking embarrassment even my parents had long since chucked out. And because Americans are so cocksure and head
strong, even when they belatedly did notice, they took forever to react. The fossil-fuelled, eight-track American Way was the original and best.

  I thought about all this, and felt chocolate ice cream dribble down my hand as I did so. Then I licked my sticky wrist and said: ‘If you want my opinion, Paul, I’m afraid I do.’

  ‘Well, I sure hope you’re wrong.’

  It was difficult to hear such an upbeat, irrepressible character sound so crestfallen. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to explain that my country had been there and done that, had made its own sombre journey from globe-bestriding superpower to outmoded also-ran. That morning I’d enjoyed a diner breakfast with Paul and half a dozen of his oldest friends – doctors, lawyers, apple farmers, all fellow pillars of the community, and most of them car guys. On learning my nationality, a chap who owned a vintage Triumph rattled off a series of one-liners poking fun at Lucas Industries, the now defunct manufacturer of British automotive electrical components. ‘Know what we call Lucas? The Prince of Darkness! Ever wondered why you guys drink warm beer? Because Lucas makes your refrigerators! I had a Lucas pacemaker fitted last week, and it hasn’t given me any tr-tr-tr-aaaagh!’

  I chortled politely. Yes, Britain had once been great and ruled the waves and all that, then we rested on our laurels, let everything decline and wound up as a laughing stock. But afterwards, though it took a while, we learned our lesson. We accepted our limitations and a lowlier place on the world stage. We conceded that designing and building stuff like cars and car parts on the cheap was daft, and that it was therefore prudent to stop bothering until we bagged some proper – which is to say foreign – investment. We swallowed our pride and admitted that imperial measurements, as per the absurd compound fractions stamped into every wrench in my Model T’s toolbox (‘Teeum, you done give me a 5/8 but I need a 9/16’) could not compete with the cogent simplicity of metrics. Most of all, we learned to laugh at ourselves. I’d heard most of those Lucas jokes before, because we cracked them first.

  Scooping out silver to supplement the breakfast waitress’s tip, I’d been struck by another pig-headed native anachronism. The highest denomination coin in mass circulation was still the quarter, with a face value of less than 20p. My pockets always jangled heavily: I had to harvest quarters, ready to stuff them by the fistful into a forecourt air compressor, or a motel washer or tumble dryer. Every few years the US Treasury attempts to relaunch the dollar coin, reminding Americans of the vast savings the nation could make with a switch from dollar bills (the current estimate is $4.4 billion over thirty years, the typical life of a coin). And every time it fails. Of the 1.4 billion dollar coins ever minted, over half have been returned, unloved and unwanted, to federal reserve banks. I didn’t encounter a single one of the circulating remainders. Consumers just can’t be doing with them. They want a great sweaty wodge of good old American greenbacks.

  The federal authorities could of course force the issue by removing dollar bills from circulation, as the Canadian authorities did all the way back in 1989 (a year after the Bank of England killed off the pound note). But they won’t, because they’re too scared of the backlash. As I would discover, the most reviled adjective in Middle America is that other F-word: federal. The American small-town public is so conservative, so obstinately proud of its parochial old ways, so deeply hostile to federal meddling, that the authorities haven’t even dared to change the size of its coins in over a hundred years. As a result, pennies, nickels and dimes all now cost more to produce than their face value. Minting a one-cent coin sets the Treasury back 1.7 cents. What a remarkable state of affairs. The Bank of England introduced plastic banknotes while I was away. If the US Treasury tried to pull that, Donald Trump could probably declare himself emperor and be done with it.

  I took a lot more than a fixed Ford away from Granville. I finally learned how to reverse (as Paul patiently demonstrated, a simple matter of heaving that big lever into the halfway position before stomping the requisite pedal). I finessed my theory that America’s increasingly tempestuous socio-politics might somehow be a reflection of their increasingly tempestuous weather: on the way to pick up my replacement starter, a pocket apocalypse bent trees in half and took the power out in a gas station we pulled into to take cover, and a couple of days later, taking the T for a test drive around Paul’s yawning grounds, we found our path blocked by storm-felled boughs. And I added a bitter-sweet stanza to my inner elegy to the American Dream. Paul was one of the last off Henry Ford’s other production line, the one that churned out hard-grafting, ballsy manufacturing entrepreneurs. A lost age when Americans still made money on Main Street, not just on Wall Street. Proper businessmen who employed lots of people and produced actual stuff. Still proud, still practical and prosperous, but now gently on the wane, with dicky hips and hearing aids. As I swung the T round the drive and waved Paul and Linda a heartfelt farewell, the brand-new range-topping SUV behind them stood in eloquent testimony to the end of an era. After Ford after Ford after Ford, an uninterrupted lifetime of loyalty, Paul’s daily driver was now a Honda.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘FARMING – OHIO’S LARGEST INDUSTRY!’

  It’s easy to forget how very agricultural America still is, which is perhaps why they put up huge roadside billboards to remind you. I’d never really thought of Ohio as farming country – this was the state that all those Kentuckians in Hillbilly Elegy headed north to in search of a prosperous factory-based future. But in fact almost every state in the US is farming country. There are still 2.2 million farms in America, covering an area a lot larger than India. Compare that with the UK, where more people now make and sell sandwiches than work in agriculture.

  On a hot and humid morning, rural Ohio obediently exuded its fertility. It was like rattling through an open-air greenhouse: the storm-watered cornfields shone luminously and the sun blazed down from on high, slowly grilling my left forearm alive. It struck me that the only way I’d ever develop an even tan would be to turn around and drive back after hitting the west coast. These were some of the loneliest roads I’d been down. A buzzard pecked at a crimson smear on the asphalt. I passed a couple of rickety wooden outbuildings with ‘CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO’ painted elegiacally across them in huge, fading letters, shabby-chic survivors of a promotional drive that once embellished 20,000 barns across twenty-two states. And for once I wasn’t the most lethargic road-user, nor the messiest. This was Amish country, and for pleasing swathes of the day the predominant vehicle was a shiny black horse-drawn buggy, with a bench seat full of beards and bonnets, leaving a trail of steamy nuggets in its wake.

  There are 320,000 Amish in the US, and though these wood-fired comfort-shunners are most famously associated with Pennsylvania, Ohio is home to just as many. A third live exclusively in the distant arable past, the ones I saw ambling out of hip-roofed white barns with scythes over their shoulders, or hanging out Little Women dresses on a veranda laundry line. But there was plenty of evidence of a rather more nuanced integration with the present: a roadside advert for fibreglass buggy wheels, and countdown billboards to Amish-run commercial concerns (‘GRANDPA’S CHEESEBARN, 11 MILES AHEAD’; ‘NURSERY FURNITURE – TURN LEFT, TWO MILES’). ‘They’re Americans too, so of course they like making money,’ Paul had said when we chanced upon an Amish family selling ambitiously priced zucchini at Granville’s upscale farmers’ market.

  He’d filled me in on some of the anomalies and grey areas of Amish life, generally dictated by the whims of their local bishop. One community had been split in two by a dispute over the number of permissible pleats in a woman’s bonnet. Another was allowed to own cars, as long as they were black. I saw a horse pulling a diesel-powered baler across a field, and a lot of solar panels. As a rule, it’s apparently OK to go down a lot of banned technological avenues as long as you go down them off-grid, or using borrowed equipment. Stopping for gas, I saw men in straw hats and face-girdling moustache-less beards queuing up by the forecourt’s payphone. The Amish are past masters
at zoning out the twenty-first century, but I’d already noticed a couple of buggy drivers eyeing Mike with keen curiosity, and now the last beard in the line – a middle-aged chap with pebble specs and a plastic gallon of milk in each hand – came over and engaged me in conversation.

  ‘So you must get a little wet in there, I suppose.’

  The Amish speak a dialect known as Pennsylvanian German at home, and though this fellow’s manner was shy, his words were delivered in a toneless Schwarzenegger blare.

  ‘No seat belts, no radio, nothing like that?’

  He appraised Mike’s cabin over the top of his glasses and I suddenly understood: my shiny black T was the missing link between his shiny black buggy and the modern world. You know what, he seemed to be thinking, I reckon the bishop could get on board with this. As he furrowed his brow and nodded, curious and approving, I glanced over at the buggy-hitched horses tied up to a railing by the car wash, and began to feel like some early-adopting farmer at the wheel of the first motor car in the county. This was a scene from Henry Ford’s earliest promotional campaign: say goodbye to hopeless old Dobbin. On cue, a bushy tail was raised and a harvest of road apples slapped on to the concrete. Alongside its superior efficiency and cheaper running costs, the T was also sold as a greener alternative to the animals that hosed and splattered the streets of New York alone with 60,000 gallons of urine and a thousand tons of manure every single day, and whose dead bodies were generally left to putrefy in the gutter to facilitate dismemberment and removal. For a heady moment, Mike was the bright, new future, not the clunking, filthy past. Though for a symbolic insight into America’s backward-looking present, its retrogressive fondness for the old ways, consider this: in the last fifteen years, the Amish population has doubled.

  And then, quite suddenly, I was into the Rust Belt, bumping over weed-pierced train crossings, creaking down streets lined with boarded-up small businesses and shuffling drunks, readjusting to a world with Democrats, black people and tall buildings that weren’t churches or grain elevators. Squadrons of Great Lake seagulls squawked about in the blue sky. An old man at a gas station offered me $20,000 for my car, wheeling away with a strained laugh when I held out my hand to shake on it. (No offence, Mike – making a quick buck is just the American way.) Toledo was a run-down mess when Dib Fewer and Tod Snedeker drove Mike Mark 1 through the city in 1931, shocked to find its riverbanks and parks thick with unemployed shamblers. To judge from the roofless, burned-out, full-fat dereliction I drove through, the place had clearly never recovered. I was taking a wayward swerve from Trumpland, on a pilgrimage to the Rust Belt’s scabbiest buckle. After ninety-three years, my T was coming home.