All Gone to Look for America (23 page)

It’s not that we Europeans are immune. Far from it. Anyone who has been to the Munich beer festival will have seen some stupendous lederhosen rumps, while the amply endowed Italian ‘pasta mama’ is no more a spurious national stereotype than an archetypal English ‘lardy-arse’ overfed on fish’n’chips. Britain in particular these days is dangerously hooked on a love-hate affair with obesity. How else do you account for the fact that one of our most slender and internationally celebrated beauties, Princess Diana, and one of our most
grotesque
, fat-bottomed politicians, former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, were both confessed bulimics. If we’re not chugging it down, we’re choking it up. But the growing trend towards fatter kids in particular has undeniably gone hand in pudgy hand with our growing enthusiasm for the cheap,
cheerful
, instant gratification of mass-produced fast food. Where America leads, we blindly follow. I’m just amazed you guys are so far in front, given the weight you’re carrying.

But – and it is a big but – there are places in America, and more than the casual tourist might think, where you can also eat astonishingly well for
relatively
little. Unsurprisingly they tend to be the places where you can drink
reasonably
well too. Like Pike’s Brewery. So spare me for a minute, if I offer up a sample. As a starter for $3.75 (under £2 at October 2008 exchange rates) Nancy
has brought me a little bowl of chopped radishes with a Seattle speciality: a little dipping saucer of salt liberally flavoured with specks of black truffle. Now I am familiar with radishes as an accompaniment to beer – it is an old Bavarian speciality, the sharp tang of the radish piquing the thirst and contrasting with the sweetness of the beer – but add the salt and the hint of truffle! Inspired. Nothing less.

For my main course I’ve ordered a starter-sized portion – always a safe option at lunch, American main course dishes can be humongous –
Dungeness
crab with Chilean bay shrimp, globe peppers and Japanese ‘puko-style’ breadcrumbs with a Thai sweet chilli sauce. I don’t often let the menu speak for itself but this is every bit as good as that sounds, even if I still haven’t a clue what ‘puko-style’ means. Pure heaven. As I bite into it, my faith in the small god of incidental music, breaking free from the confines of my iPod now to the restaurant’s sound system, contributes an old song by Bryan Ferry: ‘More than this, there is nothing!’ A bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but right now it would seem churlish to disagree.

Odd circumstances, then, in which to think of the challenge of industrial espionage. That, however, is the thought that automatically comes into my mind as I involuntarily catch snatches of conversation wafting over me from the two other men eating at the bar. It’s easy enough to ignore the bit about property prices, a global staple though high-employment Seattle has remained relatively sheltered from the sub-prime collapse. But after a few minutes I can’t help hitting on a whole series of archetypal Seattle buzzwords: ‘system backup’, ‘soft viruses’, ‘overly proprietorial hookups’ and similar. Computer geek-speak obviously, but then Seattle is home to Microsoft, the world’s biggest
corporation
. This is the city that prides itself on having made ‘geeks’ chic.

Such is the pulling power of the United States most northerly and most westerly metropolis – despite its famously dreary weather – that a recent issue of
Seattle Metropolitan
magazine boasted of ‘50 ways in which Seattle will change the world’. And what makes otherwise dodgy bar-room eavesdropping so tempting is that they just might be right. Amid such questionable boons to humanity as the enhancement of the world bestselling Halo 3 ‘shoot me up’ computer game, the magazine’s list included dozens of serious scientific projects under development in the greater Seattle area from a potential cure for cot death, to a handheld machine for diagnosing tropical diseases to a
hyper-effective
wave energy generator (Washington State gets the biggest waves of any stretch of US coastline outside Alaska). In other words if you’re worried about child health care, Third World development or alternative energy, Seattle
is a good place to start looking for answers. Greater Seattle is taking over from California as the place where America designs tomorrow for the rest of us.

That doesn’t mean we have to like it. Amongst the other plans being drawn up locally are a few that sound like escapees from science-fiction plots:
spaceships
that can take off from airport runways (including an intercontinental bomber capable of 10 times the speed of sound, ref: Dr Strangelove,
Starship Troopers
), a Pentagon-commissioned ultrasound instant blood coagulator that could stop bleeding straight away (ref:
Star Trek
’s Dr McCoy), micro-implants in the human body to grant keyless access to your home, office or car (
I, Robot, The Fifth Element
), ‘brain-fingerprinting’ that could prove innocence or guilt by automatically detecting reactions to a crime scene (
Minority Report
). Just to prove this last one isn’t necessarily negative, the magazine cites an early version used in Iowa in 2003 to help clear a man who had served 25 years for a murder he didn’t commit.

Then there’s the sky elevator made of nano-strips of super-tough carbon that will extend 62,000 miles to a geo-stationary satellite, be held taut by the earth’s rotation and be ascended with minimal energy by a robot the size of a Boeing 747 to transfer cargo to spacecraft (Arthur C. Clarke
passim
) That one might sound the most fantastic, but they actually have a delivery date, albeit not exactly imminent: October 2031.

Time therefore to get a satellite’s eye view of the man who not so much inspired the white heat of the technological revolution as the white rage of fury most of his customers feel when faced with the blue screen of death on a computer running Microsoft Windows: Bill Gates himself. Actually, it’s easy enough to get a satellite view of the Gates’ estate – just go to Google Earth – but it’s a good excuse for trying what I had been tipped was the best way to fully appreciate Seattle’s extraordinary geographical location: from above.

As it happens in Seattle, nothing could be easier. What is still called Lake Union is actually now a bay on the Lake Washington Ship Canal that cuts across the north of the peninsula on which Seattle sits, separating the
commercial
heart of the city from the student-dominated university district. It not only hosts a marina of pleasure craft – Seattle has enough berths to provide two spaces for every three citizens – and some expensive little waterfront homes, virtually built out onto the lake, but also a couple of small seaplane companies.

An aerial sightseeing tour might seem an extravagant indulgence but here it is nothing of the sort and rates as one of the best value, most exhilarating treats you can give yourself. There is a seaplane taxi service out to the islands, and that probably is an indulgence, but at the time of writing the 20-minute air tour
of Seattle cost an affordable and highly worthwhile $67.50 a head (£35). And believe me, the ride is worth it. I mean, how many times do most of us actually get to take off from and land on water?

To book my ride I had called in advance the nice young woman who runs the front desk for Seattle Seaplanes. The aerial side of operations is actually a one-man show run by a genial white-haired pilot in his fifties called Jim
Chrysler
. He used to call it Chrysler Air, but motor manufacturers can be a bit touchy about their trademarks. It could have led to problems if anyone had assumed Jim’s little business was Mercedes-Benz’s attempt to emulate Rolls-Royce with a leap into the aerospace sector.

In fact, Seattle Seaplanes has just one seaplane, a little, single-engined Cessna that sits at the end of a wooden jetty, along from the neat little shack that serves as an office. It looks more like it should be selling bait and fishing tackle than serving as a check-in for an airline.

I stumble in through the door, somewhat out of breath from the
longer-than-expected
yomp up from the city – taxis as ever in America proving remarkably thin on the ground – to find Jim talking to three other
customers
, guys from Chicago in their mid-twenties who’re holidaying in Seattle and taking the flight as a birthday treat for one of them. Jim is a genial but gruff bloke with a big droopy white moustache that just vaguely suggests a minor character in a
Bugs Bunny
cartoon. He also has a very droll sense of humour.

‘Have you been doing this long, sir?’ asks one of my three slightly nervous about-to-be fellow travellers in the six-seater seaplane. Jim turned, eyed the young man up and down and said coolly:

‘What’s today’s date?’

‘Uh? The sixth, sir.’

‘Hmmm, not that long then,’ comes the deadpan reply, neatly rounded off with: ‘The regular guy’s not on today.’

I watch the nervous doubt on my fellow passenger’s face turn to scepticism and finally, as Jim grins broadly, the suspicion he’s being teased. Nonetheless, they’re more than happy to let me sit up front, alongside the pilot, with the propeller just inches in front of my nose and a parallel set of controls in front of me. Jim gives flying lessons as well. Then he turns the key in the ignition, with a sound disconcertingly reminiscent of cranking up a Morris Minor and starts the little seaplane taxiing out at the legal limit of seven knots an hour across Lake Union.

Then there’s a shuddering under the floats as we accelerate to what seems breathtaking speed but is, Jim shouts over the roar of the engines, just over
45 mph. And we lift off smoothly from the wake of white waves left on the lake surface and see the city falling away beneath us. There’s a giddy feeling of euphoric freedom in a small plane flying above a big city, exaggerated by the surreal sight of the controls in front of me moving to and fro, echoing Jim’s.

Up and away we soar on a par with, then above the skyscrapers of the
downtown
area, out over the sound and the lakes, and immediately it is apparent what a blessed situation Seattle has, straddling the peninsula at the heart of a vast oceanic lakeland. How fragile and improbable the two floating bridges look, the longest in the world, a silver-grey filament a mile and a half long strung across the northern half of Lake Washington, and the world’s second longest linking the city to Mercer Island further south. Then we turn, banking steeply enough to draw sharp intakes of breath from all of us but smiling Jim, out over rugged Bellevue peninsula.

‘That’s the Gates’ place, down there,’ says Jim, nodding with his head to indicate a line of waterfront mansions far below. ‘His is the one with the silver roof.’

Gates is America’s richest man and the story of his rise to head of a
globe-spanning
software empire from origins as a lad tinkering with electronics in his dad’s garage is legendary. What is less known is that although far from a
multi-millionaire
he wasn’t exactly a poor boy either. The rags to riches story actually belongs to another of Seattle’s most famous sons – Jimi Hendrix (whose body was brought back here to be buried). The Gateses are an old Seattle family and amongst those who always preferred to live out on the islands rather than in the city. So by building his mansion out here he was not so much opting into an exclusive community as continuing a family tradition. In fact, the most
striking
thing is how densely packed they are, these billionaire’s mansions along the shoreline, each with their private jetty. I suppose I had imagined Bill’s
billions
would have bought him not just luxury but seclusion. But then the mega-rich are not exactly exceptions to the rule out here. And maybe he just likes to be sociable with the neighbours: for the first (and last) time in my American odyssey the music that springs to mind unbidden hails not from these shores but from Lancashire, an ancient George Formby song: ‘If you could see, what I can see, when I’m cleaning Windows!’

For the next 20 minutes or so, we bank and climb and all but hover just beneath the blanket of cloud that even Seattle’s greatest admirers admit is their city’s habitual cover. Then we wheel down audaciously to loop round the ‘Space Needle’, concrete proof that even in the city where they invent
tomorrow
today, they still had a pretty daft idea of it yesterday: yet another silly
sixties ‘observation tower’. The city fathers who authorised its building for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition no doubt imagined that towards the end of the first decade of that century the Jetsons would be flying round it in their cartoon space bubble cars. Instead it’s still being buzzed by vintage seaplanes.

Then we are coasting down once again onto the surface of the lake,
skimming
the waves to come to a halt smoother than on many wheeled aircraft I’ve flown on. It occurs to me that maybe ‘landing’ isn’t the right word on a seaplane. The French use ‘
amerissage
’ for landing on
la mer
as opposed to ‘
aterrissage
’ for coming back to
terra firma
but they also used ‘
alunissage
’ for the lunar landing, which is either very clever or just plain silly.

Back to earth, as it were, I decide I really must go and take a close-up look at the ‘big spike’ we just flew around. Not because I found it particularly
impressive
– even though it is Seattle’s most famous landmark – but because I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be as tacky a remnant of the World Fair craze as the crumbling concrete in Spokane. The recommended way to get there, according to Big Jim’s assistant, is by monorail. Involuntarily I cringe: ‘
monorail
’, like the Jetsons’ bubble hovercars, was one of those concepts of the future that figured heavily back in the sixties. I had an
Understanding Science
book for boys that depicted twenty-first century people queuing up at platforms in the sky to board monorails. But then they were all wearing what appeared to be Superman suits, something that seemed not just improbable but impossible until the advent of Lycra, and given the evolution of the human shape it will hopefully still be some time before we are all wearing it.