Bill Bryson - Im a Stranger Here Myself : Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

Broadway Books
New York

Contents

To
Cynthia,
David,
Felicity,
Catherine,
and Sam

In the late summer of 1996, an old journalist friend from London named Simon Kelner called me in New Hampshire, to where I had lately moved after living for twenty-some years in Britain. Simon had recently been made editor of Night & Day magazine, a supplement of the Mail on Sunday newspaper, and it was his idea that I should write a weekly column for him on America.

At various times over the years Simon had persuaded me to do all kinds of work that I didnt have time to do, but this was way out of the question.

No, I said. I cant. Im sorry. Its just not possible. Ive got too much on.

So can you start next week?

Simon, you dont seem to understand. I cant do it.

We thought wed call it Notes from a Big Country.

Simon, youll have to call it Big Blank Space in the Magazine because I cannot do it.

Splendid, splendid, he said, but a trifle absently. I had the impression that he was doing something else at the same timereviewing models for a swimsuit issue would be my guess. In any case, he kept covering up the phone and issuing important editor-type instructions to other people in the vicinity.

So well send you a contract, he went on when he came back to me.

No, Simon, dont do that. I cant write a weekly column for you. Its as simple as that. Are you taking this in? Tell me you are taking this in.

Excellent. Im absolutely delighted. Were all delighted. Well, must run.

Simon, please listen to me. I cant take on a weekly column. Just not possible. Simon, are you hearing this? Simon? Hello? Simon, are you there? Hello? Bugger.

And that is how I became a newspaper columnist, a pursuit I followed for the next two years, from September 1996 to September 1998. The thing about a weekly column, I discovered, is that it comes up weekly. Now this may seem a selfevident fact, but in two years there never came a week when it did not strike me as both profound and startling. Another column? Already? But I just did one.

I mention this to make the point that what follows was not intended to becould not bea systematic portrait of America. Mostly I wrote about whatever little things had lately filled my daysa trip to the post office, the joy of having a garbage disposal for the first time, the glories of the American motel. Even so, I would like to think that they chart a sort of progress, from being bewildered and often actively appalled in the early days of my return to being bewildered and generally charmed, impressed, and gratified now. (Bewilderment, youll note, is something of a constant in my life, wherever I live.) The upshot is that I am very glad to be here. I hope that what follows makes that abundantly clear.

These pieces were written in the first instance for a British readership and of necessity included chunks of explication that an American would find unnecessarywhat a drive-through window is exactly, how the postseason playoffs work in baseball, who Herbert Hoover was, that sort of thing. I have endeavored to excise these intrusions discreetly throughout, though just occasionally the drift of the text made such adjustments impossible. I apologize for that, and for any other oversights that may have slipped through.

In addition to Simon Kelner, I wish to express my sincere and lasting thanks to Bill Shinker, Patrick Janson-Smith, John Sterling, Luke Dempsey, and Jed Mattes, to each of whom I am variously and deeply indebted, and, above allway above allto my dear, long-suffering wife and children for so graciously and sportingly letting me drag them into all this.

And a special thanks to little Jimmy, whoever he may be.

I once joked in a book that there are three things you cant do in life. You cant beat the phone company, you cant make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you cant go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.

In May of that year, after nearly two decades in England, I moved back to the United States with my English wife and four children. We settled in Hanover, New Hampshire, for no other reason than that it seemed an awfully nice place. Founded in 1761, it is a friendly, well-ordered, prettily steepled community with a big central green, an old-fashioned Main Street, and a rich and prestigious university, Dartmouth College, whose benignly dominant presence gives the town a backdrop of graceful buildings, an air of privileged endeavor, and the presence of five thousand students, not one of whom can be trusted to cross a road in safety. With this came other attractionsgood schools, an excellent bookstore and library, a venerable movie theater (The Nugget, founded in 1916), a good choice of restaurants, and a convivial bar called Murphys. Helplessly beguiled, we bought a house near the center of town and moved in.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch. You proffer hopelessly inadequate sums when making small purchases. You puzzle over ATM machines and automated gas pumps and pay phones, and are astounded to discover, by means of a stern grip on your elbow, that gas station road maps are no longer free.

In my case, the problem was intensified by the fact that I had left as a youth and was returning in middle age. All those things that you do as an adulttake out mortgages, have children, accumulate pension plans, take an interest in the state of your gutteringI had only ever done in England. Things like furnaces and storm windows were, in an American context, the preserve of my father. So finding myself suddenly in charge of an old New England house, with its mysterious pipes and thermostats, its temperamental garbage disposal and life-threatening automatic garage door, was both unnerving and rather exhilarating.

It is disconcerting to find yourself so simultaneously in your element and out of it. I can enumerate all manner of minutiae that mark me out as an Americanwhich of the fifty states has a unicameral legislature, what a squeeze play is in baseball, who played Captain Kangaroo on TV. I even know about two-thirds of the words to The Star-Spangled Banner, which is more than some people know who have sung it publicly.

But send me to the hardware store and even now I am totally lost. For months I had conversations with the clerk at our local True-Value that went something like this:

Hi. I need some of that goopy stuff you fill nail holes in walls with. My wifes people call it Pollyfilla.

Ah, you mean spackle.

Very possibly. And I need some of those little plastic things that you use to hold screws in the wall when you put shelves up. I know them as rawl plugs.

We call them anchors.

I shall make a mental note of it.

Really, I could hardly have felt more foreign if I had stood there dressed in lederhosen. All this was a shock to me. Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.