← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC World Service FOOC
00:08:43
An American Dream: New Hampshire, 1996 Owen Bennett Jones introduces an archive by...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition of the program for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service. It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.
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This week we've been trawling through our records, rediscovering dispatches from years gone by. And today we go back 15 years when the United States, as it is today, was thinking about the next presidential election. And what do the two periods have in common? Well, perhaps this distrust of central government, disdain for Washington insiders, the hope for simple solutions to complex problems. Gavin Esler packed his winter coat and left the capital, Washington, to take the nation's temperature with a couple who were living a classic American life. Self reliant in a log built cabin deep in the forest.
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The man walking across the frozen lake is carrying something in his hand. A stick probably. Even at this distance you can see his boots kick up a light dusting of snow on the ice as his dog, a tan coloured Labrador, runs around. It is bitterly cold, at least 10 below freezing, with an ice wind from the north like a knife in the ribs. He's bundled up in a goose down parka, so fat he looks like the Michelin Man. Everything is white and frozen. Then the man bends down and puts a golf ball on the ice. The stick turns out to be a seven iron and he pitches the ball 100 yards as the dog runs after it across the ice. This is New Hampshire, where once every leap year, the fate of American democracy is by an accident of history in the hands of the eccentric ice golfer and 800,000 other voters in the first in the nation primary election. And I'm driving Interstate 93 north to meet a family who say they were once living that cliche, the elusive American dream. But now the dream is frozen and possibly lost for them and their generation. The road cuts through the old mill town of Manchester, where mill jobs have mostly gone, along the Merrimack river, past the ice golfer on his frozen lake to the White Mountains. The scenery is spectacular. Mixed forests, frozen waterfalls and alpine meadows in valleys they call notches. Locals joke that there are only two seasons, winter and July. Snow is forecast and a few flurries begin as heavy trucks carrying huge logs roll past, each with number plates which read New Hampshire Live free or die. Only in America would these be the available choices. Road signs instruct you to break for moose. Hundreds of accidents, they warn, which sounds funny until half a ton of moose emerges from the forest to trot along the road, I realized that hitting it would be like driving into a brick wall. By the time the Androscoggin river snakes into view, I've reached Berlin, a small town of 11,000 people. Bleach smoke from the chimneys of colossal paper mills pumps into the sky. Then a few houses appear, clustered like toys around the mill's feet. Crown Vantage Mill is so big that the people walking below are matchstick figures from a Lowry painting. Berlin's main street is one way, and the cars are of an older patriotic gas guzzlers. Oldsmobiles and Chevys pick up trucks with dogs inside and gun racks for hunting rifles. Two restaurants face each other a country kitchen, which proudly boasts its speciality fried food. The alternative is Choo Choos, which boasts meatloaf, mashed potatoes, a vegetable, a small salad and coffee for $5. Up here, meatloaf is as close to health food as it gets. The owner, a portly 66 year old with a bald head and a long white chef's apron, is Lionel Caron. Everyone calls him Choo Choo, and he's frying eggs and bacon while at the counter a handful of locals are discussing politics. Betty Jo and James Laroque are in their late 50s. He is unshaven, with a couple of teeth missing. She has dyed brown hair and a wan smile, works in a bank. She admits she is not well informed, perhaps because politicians disgust her. If you want my honest opinion, she says softly, I don't really believe in any of them. I think they're in it for their own benefit. I think I may vote for the one who sounds good. Her voice trails away and be disappointed later. The American dream is five miles out of town. First I smelled it. Wood smoke rising above the snowy fields. The Marin family built their own log cabin in two acres surrounded by forests of white birch, oak and pine. Claude Marin is a thick set man of 32, with a walrus moustache and wiry hair like a pot scourer. When he shakes your hand, it stays shook. Your body bounces. His wife, Anne Marie, is an articulate physiotherapist who works in a small local hospital. They have one daughter, Mary, aged three, who peeps out shyly from behind her mother's legs, and a spaniel, Bailey, who's just given birth to nine mongrel pups. Claude was laid off by the paper mill last October and tries unsuccessfully to hide his anger. Three months as a house husband looking after his daughter while his wife is the sole breadwinner, and he knows he's running out of options. He admits with restrained panic that yet another employer told him today that he'd not been hired as a machine operator at the paper mill. He used to work 12 hour shifts at $13 an hour. Hard work, good money. Now all the jobs are around $7 an hour. Even if he could get one, he might lose the log cabin. And the big man is almost in tears because this really is is his American dream, the home they built themselves in the forest. We were always raised with the ideals that if we wanted something we had to work for it, anne Marie says. That was not a problem for us. We want to work. We have lived the American dream. We'd like to have another child. Then Claude breaks in, but not right now. We talk about the economics of the north country, the dead 600 pound moose Claude found last autumn, hit by a truck and from which he recovered 190 pounds of meat, including sausages and hamburgers. He hunts white tailed deer and pheasant. He managed to collect free waste wood, three cords or a small truckload from local woodyards, enough to heat the house all winter. And he proudly offers me water from the tap, cold and fresh from their own artesian well. But he turns bitter when he talks of his layoff and the corporate killers who, like Washington politicians, appear as alien beings from an another planet. We walk outside with the spaniel Bailey, barking and running crazily in the snow. With the enthusiasm of a pioneer, Claude explains how he chose the land, cleared the trees, then sank the foundations. They bought logs in a kit, but cut every joist and joint themselves, varnished the wood with the help of brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and cousins. Family values. I reached my hotel optimistic about their spirit until I switched on the television. One presidential election candidate, reporters said, was out of touch because he did not know the price of a dozen eggs. Another was asked by a reporter, undoubtedly an investigative reporter, what kind of underwear he favoured. A third was giving out a recipe for apple pie. A fourth, Senator Bob Dole, passed around photographs of his wife and his dog called you could not make this up, leader. I tried to imagine which one of these political jesters in America's theatre of the absurd was most likely to get Claude Morin a good job. I didn't realize, Senator Dole complained, that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue in the last few days of this campaign. The TV weatherman said heavy snow was general and I looked out of the window, wondering whether the tough ice golfer was still at his game on the darkened, frozen lake and whether the Marins were watching the politicians on tv. I guess they were too busy figuring out how to survive in the real world.