Coach Class to the Americas

By Jay Maclean

Spanning the late 1980s to 2000, Coach Class to the Americas reveals aspects of life and times in the Americas that will probably not appear in history books—in short stories that take the reader from the lighter side of elections in Washington DC to fashions in Waikiki, from the guilt of sun seekers in Canada to the violence of fishers in the Galapagos Islands, from the grilles of US automobiles to the restrooms of Detroit airport, from altitude sickness in Quito to shrimp trapping in the Georgia Strait, to the big San Francisco quake of ’89, to poverty and homelessness both east and west, and the strange peril of Nanaimo.

Coach Class to the Americas follows the vapor trails of Sometimes in Business Class, which tickles the underbelly of Europe, and Mostly in Economy Class, which runs riot across Asia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018

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COACH CLASS TO THE AMERICAS

Jay Maclean

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Copyright © 2017 by Jay Maclean

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

California: Still Dreaming ‘88

The bounty of supermarkets and mail

Distilling essential Americanisms

Information overload

A Smell of Gas and Money

San Francisco, the quake of ’89

The smell of money

A Novice in Newark and Everywhere Else

Washington DC

Maine

New York

Back in the USSA ‘91

October malling

Hawaii detour

Old Ways, New Age ‘92

New names, old hat

Elections ’92: drama and nonsense

A walk across San Francisco

Canada: A Lot of Tax for a Little Sun

Ottawa ‘93

Torrid Toronto

Vaporous Vancouver

Nanaimo mornings

Don’t send flowers

A week in the straits

In Darwin’s Slipstream

Outward bound

The Galapagos Islands

On flights less traveled

Detroit’s dragons

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

SPANNING THE LATE 1980S TO 2000, Coach Class to the Americas reveals aspects of life and times in the Americas that will probably not appear in history books—in short stories that take the reader from the lighter side of elections in Washington DC to fashions in Waikiki, from sun seekers in Canada to violent fishers in the Galapagos Islands, from the grilles of US automobiles to the restrooms of Detroit airport, from altitude sickness in Quito to shrimp trapping in the Georgia Strait, to the big San Francisco quake of ’89, to poverty and homelessness both east and west, and to the perils of Nanaimo.

Coach Class to the Americas follows the vapor trails of Sometimes in Business Class, which tickles the underbelly of Europe, and Mostly in Economy Class, which runs riot across Asia.

CALIFORNIA: STILL DREAMING ‘88

IN 1988, AMERICA WAS WHERE the rest of the world was heading, wanted to head. The American dream was on everyone’s TV, newspaper, comic book, and stereo set. The best or at least the biggest automobiles and the home of Coca Cola. Everybody was watching their own street in their own town in their own country for nuances that would mean they were coming closer to being just like America, the US, everybody meant. In its 1988 form, it had mushroomed out of World War II and survived Korea and Vietnam.

I left Australia (better known as Oz) eight years before and was living in the Philippines, which, despite being a colony of the US for more than 40 years until World War II precipitated independence, was a million miles further from the American dream than was Oz.

My wife Margie and I were in the US in October that year for the first of several Halloween visits. For me, it was a week of work in Miami and then, for Margie, a long awaited reunion with her family in Sacramento.

It was hardly good conditions for writing—a week in a hotel room followed by a family get together. But images came and went and when I noticed a cheap dictaphone in a sale I bought it and recorded a few pneumonic sentences, mostly as we bounced around California in a small utility truck.

The first thing I noticed after pushing the red button was a small sign about football, not the celebrated gridiron of the US but the celebrated British (and therefore Oz) game of rugby. Nice to see rugby is alive and well under the gridiron onslaught, I began to think happily, until I read the whole sign. Rugby players eat their dead.

It was a bumper sticker on the back of a small sedan in Santa Rosa that overtook us so the occupants, craning their necks upward, could get a closer look at Margie, who was driving at the time. But they sped away as I came into their line of sight. Pity, I wanted to ask them how they knew about rugby; rugby is a British Commonwealth football passion, almost unheard of in the sports pages of American magazines—possibly because the players eat their dead. And in the Philippines, rugby does kill. It is the common name of a favorite drug sniffed widely among the poor, actually a cheap contact adhesive. It sticks wood but dissolves lungs.

Raunchy bumper stickers had just been banned in California, I read somewhere; smoking in some government posts has also been banned. So? Well, the ban applies both on and off duty. Nice, but I felt it could make one uneasy about one’s right to privacy…Will there be inspectors checking their houses, smoke sensors or dogs at the ready? A SWAT team lurking in a laundry van nearby? Yet, there was no outcry, no follow up news of strikes or mayhem. Imagine what halcyon days it must have been for government, unfettered by the scrutiny of social cyber media.

Margie is pointing to a large vineyard on our left. We visited a few wineries yesterday and tasted some of their best fermentations. Much on a par with Australian wines I concluded, which separates them from the light, the dry, and the cloying European wines. And beyond the vineyards, the landscape could have been rural Oz, dry grassy plains with scattered trees (mainly sheep country in Australia). And when we arrived at the house of long-time friends Tom and Jeannie, I discovered their backyard was identical to that of a house in any Australian city or town—an expanse of grass, a little too big to keep green in summer, with a few fruit trees and shrubs around the edges, a small veg garden, and a greying paling fence; identical but, of course, bigger and thus better.

We are heading south after stopping for lunch in one of the wineries. For some reason bakeries and wineries are often under the same roof. No doubt there are biblical connotations, a hint of the sacred nature of wine or misinterpretation of loaves and fishes perhaps. The sanctity of wine was very true in Manila where it was very rare to find any worth drinking or being drunk, except, what the priests were quaffing as part of the mass ceremony. In Manila, you could have beer or you could have alak, which covered everything else alcoholic, and that meant gin or whisky, much of it produced locally, and wine. Only one brand of cheap imported wine was available in Manila’s two supermarkets and I felt sorry for the priests, for whom drinking the stuff must have been a form of penance.

Margie commented on how friendly the service was, particularly in contrast to the developing world at the time. Of course, you are expected to pay for it too. In my Miami hotel, the service charge was 15%, from which one could subtract or add, said the bill. Bit cheeky, I thought, to expect one to negotiate the relative value of a smile. They need exposure to Manila, where one can hardly begrudge tipping the waiters, knowing their probable salary range. Transplanted Californian waiters would be the godammest friendliest waiters that Manila had ever seen, hoping to get at least a 350% tip so they could afford to catch a bus home. They would have to be Chip ‘n Dale waiters to get it though.

THE BOUNTY OF SUPERMARKETS AND MAIL

I had a love affair with American supermarkets on this trip. Bread. In Manila in 1988, bread was a white, powdery, sugary substance that stuck to the roof of your mouth and never hardened with age. Here there were wonderful aromatic breads of all sizes and shapes, countless choices. You could even eat biblical bread a la Ezekiel, which, says the label, is to take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make the bread. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. Sounded like Ezekiel was in for a long bout of flatulence.

Cheese. Whole tables and long shelves of them. I drooled at huge loaves and wheels, vacuum packed chunks and freshly sliced wafers. Fruit. I loaded trolleys with apples, plums, pears, peaches, enthralled with the abundance of everything. I floated around the stores under the suspicious gaze of sales attendants, touching and stroking goods for sale. This cornucopia far surpassed my memories of Oz as well.

Even lawn mowers. Beside our rented house in Manila is a rusting hand mower; it would be next to impossible to have it repaired and I hadn’t found one in the stores; the gardener uses hand shears but looks wistfully at the mower. In a small Sacramento department store I saw not one but several brands of driver-type mowers. I wanted to drive one onto the plane home.

The bounty of America. When Tom and Jeannie returned from five years in Manila, they immediately turned into rabid consumers, soaking up the junk mail advertisements, filling the house with appliances and everything else they were unable to find in Manila, which was just about everything.

Looking at the huge pile of advertising mail holding up a wall in their home, one has to be impressed by the sheer persistence of the retailers and the outstanding achievements on the part of the paper mills, printeries, and delivery companies in ensuring that every home in America gets its 10 kilos of adverts on its doorstep each day. And apart from these daily outpourings are the colored booklets and pamphlets that come in the daily newspaper. Often these supplements contain coupons for store discounts on selected items. I was surprised to see what a big business it is here, a sales gimmick long forgotten in Australia, while in the Philippines, discounts are measured in tiny fractions of a peso, not worth the paper needed to print coupons.

US newspapers themselves have grown to prodigious proportions over the years. People have probably forgotten that they could once hold them in one hand. The weekend New York Times now weighs over a ton and is usually manipulated from news agency to car trunk with a small crane; and the San Francisco Chronicle isn’t far behind in the weight race. These tomes take a full 24 hours to digest, by which time, of course, the next issue is on the doorstep, rolled in its plastic wrapper. Even if one confines one’s reading to the comic section and the colorful advertising pamphlets and uses, as one normally does, the rest for kindling for the barbeque, there is not enough time to both read about and shop for all the bargains. Hence, the system can continue without fear that consumers will fully exploit the bargains and bankrupt the stores that offer them.

In yesterday’s junk mail—I am already falling behind after only a few days here—was an 8-page glossy advert from a local private health clinic. Short articles explained the clinic’s views on the latest health fads, laced with hypochondriac-friendly buzz words like retin-A, etc. The legal profession also indulges in a kind of subtle bragging through advertising. Very persuasive writing. Who among us can dismiss a self-professed cancer expert or divorce lawyer as we might an assertion that brand X washing powder cleans better than does brand Y?

American householders are bombarded with this stuff every day. How they weather the storm of such unashamed self-aggrandizement is beyond me. I guess they don’t and fall prey to all sorts of spurious health and legal activities. In Australia, advertising by the medical and legal professions is not only unethical but is (or was) punishable by law. Television is another medium through which to exploit the susceptible. For instance, if there is a drug recalled because of new side effects, lawyers are on your screen the very next day advertising how they can sue the pants off the government or manufacturer if you think you were injured in some way by the drug.

Talking about this phenomenon later, someone said that Americans are so empowered by all the medical information they get through television advertisements, and advice on legal matters. I felt it was more a case of misinformation or disinformation. One health advert informs us seriously that 5 out of 7 doctors marooned on a desert island would take some new drug rather than Tylenol. The 7 castaway doctors also appeared in another drug advertisement, so they must have survived the ordeal. What nonsense. Can you see them trapped on one-coconut tree islands with their surgical bags full of drugs to see them through each day while waiting for Robinson Crusoe to turn up with a headache?

Hullo Robbie. Now look my son, I’m taking you off the Tylenols. You see, there is this new…..

TV advertisements during kiddies’ primetime exhort them not to watch TV all the time and to experience the joy of reading. I think they are pitching that advert to the wrong audience. Similar ads pitched to adults give the impression that books are a new invention (perhaps hinting they are not to be trusted?).

To think how all that has been washed aside in 2017 by the post-truth era, the present (21st century) era of trust in social media. How often do we hear It’s true; I saw it in the social media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, etc.)?

DISTILLING ESSENTIAL AMERICANISMS

Heading toward Napa, past Mont St. John’s winery, I notice a big American flag atop a building. Apart from the size, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Most Americans would not have noticed it because so many private homes display the flag. A strong nationalism is evident. Certainly the Australians don’t do it and when I broached the idea of flying a Philippine flag at home, Margie pounced on me, saying people would think we worked for the government and would try to rob us or even vandalize the house. Flags are definitely out in the Philippines.

Tom came with us as we moved west past the vineyards into redwood forest country; there were beautiful tall trees—the likes of which would last 5 minutes in the logging-happy Philippines—crystal streams and, as we cleared the trees a few hundred meters from the coast, we could see whales spouting in the distance.

Tom and I were trying to distill the essential American. There may not be such a person but there are essential Americanisms. Flying the flag is one; insularity is another. I see it in the walk-tall, somewhat patronizing attitude of many Americans overseas. They speak easily, from a position of perceived strength (knowing the overseas ratings of US TV soaps portraying the American dream) and when you see them at home in their own habitat—right now a vast agricultural parkland that stretches from horizon to horizon in this part of California—and compare it to what you have, you can actually understand their attitude. Not necessarily approve of it, mind you.

We took Highway 12 south into San Francisco where we visited a friend in the California Academy of Sciences. He invited us to stay the night in the bowels of the ichthyology department on fold-up beds among the countless bottles of pickled fish. I was disappointed when Margie declined this wonderful and unique offer; I mean have you ever…?

Unabashedly American, a pair of girls kissing each other in a car in front of us at traffic lights in San Francisco reminded us of the large culture gap between America and much of the rest of the world. It was to be yet another social media storm in the next century, when same-sex partners want and are literally fighting for equal marriage rights.

Mobile homes are another sign of living in a vast parkland. America 1988 was on the move. In Oz, caravans usually 3 or 4 meters long were the norm and to see a huge 6 meter beast was like seeing a large fish during a dive in the Philippines, that is, very rare. The trend down under has been to smaller campervans. In America, the trend in this, as in everything else come to think of it, is to get bigger. These mobile homes are 10 and more meters long, like grotesquely overgrown campervans, more like mansionvans, with motor bikes strapped on the back or—in a reversal of roles—towing cars behind. And they’re not rare; they are a part of the American way.

We laughed about the idea of trying to cross Manila in