Driving Home, page 55
Too much irrigation brought bigger crops, fatter grapes, more juice, less skin. “It’s what a lot of people like, but not me. The wine has flavor, but no concentration. My ideal is small berries with a big ratio of skin to juice. My best Cabernet vines are fifteen years old—just half a ton of grapes to the acre in a good year, which is way low by industry standards, but it’s what I like to see.”
Despite his high scores from Parker, he deprecated the trend toward Parker-style “New World” wines—big and bold, all fruit and power. He wanted his own wines to have restraint, subtlety and—a word he repeated several times—“concentration.”
“How local is terroir here?” I said, swimming somewhat out of my depth. “In a blind tasting, could you recognize the grapes from this vineyard from everyone else’s?”
“I might have difficulty with Walla Walla Valley, but I could easily tell them from Yakima Valley, Columbia Gorge, or Horse Heaven Hills.” Each was a separate Columbia Valley appellation, or AVA, a federally licensed American Viticultural Area.
“And can you describe the taste?”
“Herb, with nuances of tobacco, berry, and cassis.”
I wasn’t sure if this was a straight answer or if he was ribbing me about saying “terroir.” What I did cherish was his “flavor without concentration”—a crisp, non-pseud description of a lot of wines I’d glugged down without much caring for.
No pesticides or herbicides touched his precious loess. Every terrace was hoed and weeded by hand. “It’s all about sustainability.” He was proud of the fact that he was now employing the sons of the Hispanic men who’d worked for him when he first started the vineyard. “Sustainability again.”
I was admiring his plantings of native shrubs, like juniper, on the land around the terraces. Everything fitted—this was landscape farming that molded itself closely to the shape of its original nature.
“It’s perfect here,” I said, looking down over the valley to the forested Blue Mountains in the distance.
“I love this place’s violent history,” Small said, meaning the lava surges and the catastrophic, Noachian flood that had swept through the Columbia Basin in the last ice age, some thirteen thousand years ago. The flood had been caused when a huge glacial lake in what is now Idaho and Montana had broken through the ice plug at its western end and poured into the basin as a racing wall of water nearly a thousand feet high, scouring the valley to bare rock. It had left behind low hills in the shape of giant ripple marks, dry coulees, cataract cliffs, and plunge basins, the Martian “Channeled Scablands” that had drawn NASA scientists here to investigate the terrain that the Viking and Phoenix landers would meet when they touched down. It had also left behind Rick Small’s favorite found object on his property, a lump of granite the size of a small chest of drawers. “My erratic.”
The boulder had once been trapped inside a floating berg. When the flood receded and the ice melted, the alien granite found a home on Small’s vineyard. One side was a sheer plane, the rock sliced through as cleanly as if it were cheese. “See those scratches there, how straight they are? The ice did that. I had a geologist from the university come out here to look at it. He told me exactly where in Canada it came from. It’s kind of inconvenient where it is, but I’d never move it. It’s part of the history of the land.”
At the north end of the vineyard, the rising, rollercoasting hills of sagebrush steppe went on for as far as one could see.
“So this was the last farm.”
“Oh, no, all this was wheat. Dry-farmed, no irrigation. It paid some years, but just about everybody went bust.” Pointing to the hills, he named the farmers.
I looked more closely, but couldn’t see a single fencepost trailing strands of rusting barbed wire. There were no collapsed barns or abandoned plows, nothing to suggest that here had once been homesteads, farm tracks, fields. No doubt a botanist would have corrected me, but all I saw was pure natural habitat, sage-grouse country, as it must have looked when the first white settlers showed up in the Walla Walla Valley.
If the market for perfectionist, expensively produced wines were to collapse, Rick Small’s vineyard would fade back into the wild in the course of one generation, perhaps two. Hanford’s plutonium factory will take a little longer only because of the toxic horrors buried in its grounds. From there, it needs no great exercise of the imagination to see the canals of the Columbia Plateau run dry and its mega-farms revert to sage.
Here’s the big difference between British and western American ways of seeing nature. Each time I drive through England on a visit, fresh blots on the landscape present themselves to my conventional eye: business parks, new subdivisions, a motorway under construction, an expanded airport. But, as one does, I have a definite yet arbitrary line drawn in my mind between the undesirably modern and the immemorial. That line is recent—not much earlier than about 1900, or about the time the car arrived on the scene. A reflexive nostalgia for the antique is hardwired into my brain. Old stuff, however junky or ugly when it was first made, takes on value because of its age alone: the small thatched cottage with crooked windows, which began life as a miserable human sty, is a Grade II–listed building now.
So I take indiscriminate pleasure in the packhorse bridge over the canal, the drystone wall, the field still marked by the medieval ridge-and-furrow system, the blackthorn hedge, the wooden stile, the now-dry communal village pump, the straight-line Roman road, the Neolithic tumulus, the one-track lane overarched by trees, the distant Victorian (or any other period’s) spire—all equally immemorial and to be cherished because they represent ways of living on and changing the land that are all either long gone or as good as gone.
But here, where the lust for the antique is no less keen than in Britain, the true antiquity is wilderness. Old mining towns, chasing tourist dollars, deck themselves out with false storefronts, wooden boardwalks, and faux shoot-’em-up saloons, but nobody’s fooled. The real thing—the pricelessly antique antique—is deep forest, the river running wild, the open prairie. There is no second nature here to fall back on, only an either/or choice between nature as it was before we came and the dreck we’ve piled on it in the recent past.
In the dry and lightly populated West, for all the ranching, farming, logging, mining, damming, and city building that have gone on for the last century and a bit, for all the immense expenditure of public and private money lavished on its development, Americans have altered the land less immutably than the Romans, Saxons, and Normans altered the face of England. Most of what has been done here still looks like a recent project, a work in early progress, that could yet be stopped.
In 1987, Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University made a shocking proposal in a short article for Planning magazine, in which they suggested that the Great Plains, lying west of the ninety-eighth meridian and stretching from the Canadian border down to Texas and Colorado, should be returned to the buffalo. “The small cities of the Plains will amount to urban islands in a shortgrass sea,” they wrote, calling their scheme “Buffalo Commons.” The article was greeted with outrage by the implicated farmers. The Poppers were threatened with assassination (it didn’t help that they came from, of all places, urban New Jersey). The idea was so extreme and sweeping that many people took it as a joke in bad taste. Yet twenty years later the article is still discussed, and the Poppers remain unrepentant.
As rural depopulation continues on the Plains, especially in northern states such as the Dakotas and eastern Montana, they see their idea as being vindicated by history. In 2004, Frank Popper said that the article was originally meant as “a metaphor for the environmental and ecological restoration of a lot of the Great Plains,” and that he and his wife had been astonished by the enormous audience it had attracted. “There is no question that some form of the Buffalo Commons will happen. We believe it is a done deal.”
That such a proposal could be entertained at all is a measure of how lightly white civilization still sits on nature in the interior West, how precarious is its tenure here. It’s as if the land itself whispers that everything could be otherwise, that it’s not too late to change. And this is the vision that haunts the radical environmental movements.
Only in the West could one look at the Columbia Basin and so easily reshape it in one’s mind’s eye. Why not dynamite every dam on the Columbia and the Snake? Take down the power lines? Resettle the cities? Free the sturgeon and the salmon? Reopen the plateau to the elks and wolves? Farming would go on along the banks of the rivers, as it did before the federal government began dreaming its grandiose dreams, but for the most part this land would soon go back to its immemorial state as sagebrush steppe, a tract of near wilderness larger than any country in Western Europe.
Of course it would wreck the U.S. economy. It would send electricity prices rocketing, drive the local inhabitants to (probably armed) revolt, and mobilize the multinational agricultural and mining corporations to jam the courts with litigation for decades. The point is not that any of this is likely to happen, but that it’s conceivable that it could. And people do conceive it, just as the Poppers did the Buffalo Commons.
The idea of home as a temporary habitation is built into the folk psyche of the West. Most of the farmers who settled in eastern Montana and the western Dakotas in the teens of the twentieth century eventually starved out and moved on. Loggers and miners were itinerants, accustomed to striking camp every few months or years. Driving through the West, it’s common to see houses mounted on the flatbeds of beflagged tractor-trailers, each off on a journey to a new site in another state.
In 1981, Norman Tebbit, then Mrs. Thatcher’s secretary of state for employment, caused an outcry when he told the jobless in the north of England to “get on your bike” and look for work elsewhere. The remark deeply offended the instinctive English sense that attachment to one’s place of birth and its known landscape and society is a moral right. People may move away of their own volition, but they cannot be cruelly ordered to get on their bikes.
It’s different here, where people are in the habit of getting on their bikes many times in the course of their lives. One’s local patch of soil is rarely an ancestral tenancy, going back through the generations, but rather a perch from which one may at almost any moment flit. That the demolition of the four dams on the lower Snake—an issue that’s now being fought through the courts—would drive many farmers from their land is of no great concern to the conservation groups that have brought suit, because upping sticks and moving on has always been the way of the West. Let them be compensated and go farm—if they must—somewhere else. Get over it.
So the hankering to wild the West persists, and I suppose that the project of restoring the Columbia Basin to nature would be hardly more gigantesque and unrealistic than the federal project of filling it with human population. For a start, one might post billboards around the perimeter of the Tri-Cities (population 168,000) to remind everyone living there that, in the fine words of the Wilderness Act, man is a visitor who does not remain—the unsettling truth that westerners know already in their bones.
Granta, Summer 2008
Cyber City
IT’S CHASTENING to realize that since Soft City’s first publication in 1974, the book’s citizens, nearly all in their go-getting twenties and thirties, have moved on to the world of bus passes, if not the Great Beyond. It’s sic transit gloria mundi time for the pioneer knockers-through who gentrified Islington, the vegan squatters of Notting Hill with their I-Chings and Ouija boards, the band of young writers in the Pillars of Hercules pub on Greek Street, the rival salons of Holland Park. The girls who affected granny glasses are grannies themselves now. I moved to Seattle nearly twenty years ago, and so my increasingly imaginary London still has Muriel Belcher presiding over the Colony Room, otherwise plain “Muriel’s,” and Gaston over the French Pub; you can lunch at Mario and Franco’s Trattoria Terrazza (“The Trat”); two can dine at L’Escargot, with a carafe of house red, for around £7 (or five review copies sold to the literary knackers’ yard, owned by another Gaston, off Chancery Lane); and you can still smoke on the tube.
Thirty-plus years ago I tried to write about metropolitan life as it had existed since the eighteenth century—as a theatre in which the newly arrived could try on masks and identities more daring and extravagant than any they had been allowed in their villages or small towns, as a place that guaranteed a blessed privacy, anonymity, and freedom to its inhabitants, and, most of all, as somewhere where every citizen created a route of his or her own through its potentially infinite labyrinth of streets, arranging the city around them to their own unique pattern. That was why it was soft, amenable to the play of each of its residents’ imagination and personal usage. A town, even a large one, imposes on its people certain fixed patterns of movement and, with them, a set of rather narrow expectations of what kind of character you’re permitted there. If I live in Worksop, Worksop largely defines me; if I live in a great city like London or New York, I can make the city up as I go along, shaping it to my own habits and fancies.
Cities have become harder, less humanly plastic in the past thirty years. My London was far seedier than it is now—an immense honeycomb of relatively inexpensive flats and bedsits, mostly contained by the perimeter of the Circle Line. It was a place where immigrants and the impecunious young could still afford to live within walking distance of Hyde Park Corner, quarrying out nooks and crannies for themselves in Victorian houses originally designed for large families and their servants. The Earls Court square on which I lived when I was writing the book was as diverse and cosmopolitan as any place I’ve known: it was home to Arabs in dishdashas; gays in leather gear, waiting for the Coleherne pub to open; out-of-work actors; titled diplomats; jobbing plumbers; microskirted prostitutes in fishnet stockings; Australian students; Italian waiters; and the most famous American poet of his age. I see that a rather poky-looking one-bedroom flat on Redcliffe Square is now on the market for a cool half-million pounds, which would put it impossibly beyond the reach of nearly all the characters I knew when I was there. The £10-a-week rents in districts like North Kensington and Ladbroke Grove have mushroomed to around £400 (had rents followed the declining value of the pound, £10 then would be a fraction less than £50 now).
The inevitable consequence is that diversity is being driven from the central city to its remote peripheries—a trend that is reflected in metropolitan areas around the world. Here in Seattle, for instance, to find good Indian, Chinese, or Korean restaurants one now has to make a twenty-mile drive into the suburbs, which is where immigrants, along with artists, students, freelance writers, and other natural denizens of the soft city are increasingly moving because they can’t afford the alpine rents of downtown. The densely populated inner-urban honeycomb—what Henry James, writing of London, once called “the most complete compendium in the world”—has become so expensively reconstructed, so tarted-up, that only people with a merchant banker’s income will soon be able to live there, outside of the steadily diminishing supply of low-rent public housing.
In the soft city—whether it was Dr. Johnson’s, Dickens’s, or my London—the rich lived cheek-by-jowl with the poor, a source of daily interest and entertainment to both parties. In Victorian times, even posh new areas like Belgravia had mewses tucked behind their grandiose stucco mansions, where stable boys, with lurchers at their heels, and coach repairers hung out amid the washing strung on lines and the ever-present stink of horse manure. Even in my time, there were still a few defiant survivors from that working-class world, as in the South Kensington mews to which I used to take my car for repair by an elderly mechanic who had his rented cottage-workshop there, as if he’d weathered the transition from coaches to horseless carriages. My bet is that his modest digs are now priced at £1.2 million plus, to go by current offerings in the vicinity.
One essential element of soft-citydom remains unchanged: just as you’re free to create your own unique paths through the honeycomb, so you can create your own community. In suburbia, you’re stuck with your neighbors, and with the same bores you ran into over dinner last month and the month before. In a metropolitan city, you may well not know the names of the people living next door, or on the floor above; your true neighbors are scattered through the inner postal districts, connected by a spiderweb of phone lines (and now by texting and e-mail). I used to see “my” London as a circuit board whose electronic layout was my secret.
Friends X, Y, and Z were unknown to one another and unlikely ever to meet, but each was a close neighbor in my personal, improvised London community. We’d connect at different pubs and restaurants, widely spaced across the physical fabric of the city, each one a “local” for a particular friendship.
As someone who grew up in a succession of small towns and cathedral cities, subject to the confining social constraints of such places, living in London was an exhilarating liberation for me. In a thirdhand green MG Midget, I learned its back streets as assiduously as any cab-driver preparing for the licensing exam, and found poetry in its place names, from the Angel to Pimlico and Parsons Green, from Shepherd’s Bush to Limehouse. In Iris Murdoch’s 1954 novel Under the Net, there’s a running philosophical joke in which north London is “necessary” and south London is “contingent,” which is exactly how it felt to me. South of the river, I was lost, navigating by the London A–Z on cautious excursions to Clapham, Catford, Brixton, and Battersea, each place intimately associated with a friend who, so far as I was concerned, might as well have chosen to live in Sevenoaks or Guildford. But all of London north of the Thames felt like home to me. I joined the London Library and mugged up on the city’s fantastically complicated social history, and could once name every major speculative builder and architect in the nineteenth century and explain precisely how and when London’s high life moved westward from Grosvenor Square to Belgrave Square and Bayswater (the “wrong” side of the park). Living rather well on a spotty but sufficient income made mostly by writing book reviews and plays for radio and television, I gypsied from quarter to quarter, picking up acquaintances, trying to absorb the peculiar atmosphere of each district, filling notebooks with scenes encountered on my inner-city travels.
