Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (31 page)

The big cities like Colorado Springs are gobbling up the farmers' water in this area, and once a desperate farmer sells his water rights to pay his debts, he can forget farming.

If Norman Rockwell had been looking for a model American farmer for the cover of the old
Saturday Evening Post
, he could have used Albert Siegfried of Sugar City. Albert and Hilda Siegfried are in good shape compared to most. He's a good and careful farmer, and Hilda brings in money working as an accountant while he's in the field.

Albert works his 180 acres alone because he can't get anyone to help him, so he worries a lot about getting old. He still can do the work because he has a lot of heavy farm equipment but he's given up growing anything that has to be picked by hand. He has gone into the cattle business, and what he grows most of now is corn and alfalfa for the animals.

Albert buys four hundred head of young cattle at an auction every spring. Each steer or heifer weighs about four hundred pounds when he gets it, and he pays perhaps 72 cents a pound, or $115,000 for all 400. He takes care of the cattle and feeds them for six months until they weigh six hundred or seven hundred pounds. Then he sells them to a feed lot. The heavier an animal is, the less it brings per pound, so he only gets 62 cents, but they each weigh two hundred or three hundred pounds more, so Albert might collect $174,000 when he sells & if all goes right. That's the catch. In 1976 all went wrong with the price of beef and he lost $28,000 in cold cash. He still hasn't recovered.

Even if all goes right and he collects $60,000 more than he pays for the cattle, he has to run his farm before he has anything for himself. A growing steer eats thirty pounds of food a day. Fields need fertilizer, tractors take fuel and maintenance. Everything costs money. I didn't ask but I'll bet it's a satisfactory year when Albert has $10,000 left after expenses. I would hate to think what his hourly wages are with the hours he puts in.

“We go to bed at night pretty depressed sometimes,” he says. “You wonder why you're doing all this work for nothing but then you get up in the morning and go right back at it because that's what you've always done.”

The Siegfrieds were able to put their two boys through college, and
their sons come home to help some on the farm but they're both teaching now.

“Imagine me having two sons teaching,” Albert says, laughing.

The farmers like Albert Siegfried, who have sons who leave the farm, are sad to see them go but they understand.

Sugar City is a microcosm. It's difficult to believe our civilization can't organize its way out of this mess and save two cultures in the process. In one corner of the earth people are starving to death for lack of food. In this corner, death comes to the farm from too much.

If you'd like to hear some terrible ideas for promoting travel in the United States, the Travel Industry Association of America has some.

It's starting a program to promote travel that will include, its members say, a sweepstakes, a photo contest, an essay contest, discounts and a Stay-Another-Day promotion.

Is there anything in all of that that would induce you to travel more? It sounds like the worst promotion campaign I ever heard of. It's all fake stuff.

Everyone, it seems, is trying to con us into buying something or doing something with a sales pitch or promotion scheme. The last way anyone thinks of trying to attract more customers is by improving the product. If this travel organization wants people to do more traveling, it ought to try to make some improvements in the things that would make travel easier and more enjoyable. I have some suggestions:

—Build more hotels and motels with rooms that are half the size and also half the price of current hotel rooms. Save money by eliminating the swimming pools. No one ever seems to swim in them anyway. There isn't going to be a big travel boom in the United States while a good hotel room costs from $50 to $150 a night.

—Make good road maps available for free again.

—Build thousands of rest stops along major highways and keep them clean. It shouldn't be necessary for a traveling family to buy gas to go to the bathroom.

—Discourage fly-by-night gift shops. Find a way for good local artists and craftsmen to sell their things to people passing through. Many
travelers like a little memento of their visit to an area but too many of the items in tourist-trap gift shops were made in Taiwan.

—Upgrade postcards and sell them with stamps affixed.

—For air travelers, get the airlines to draw up an unambiguous schedule of air fares that anyone can understand and that don't change with the wind.

—Encourage tourists to go to places that are not tourist attractions. “Tourist attractions” are the worst places for tourists to go. For one thing, they're always crowded with tourists. A husband and wife with two children could have a more interesting and educational time if they spent a week in Chicago than they would at Disneyland. Everyone ought to see Disneyland, or Disney World, once but not twice … and not for long then, either.

—Encourage hotels and motels to have breakfast available at 6
A.M.
instead of 7
A.M.

—Bring back long-distance rail travel with Pullman and dining cars. Most Americans never have traveled on a train. Steel wheels rolling on steel rails is the most pleasant, most efficient and cheapest way to get long distances. Anyone who never has been carried from New York to Chicago while sleeping in an upper berth of the
20th Century Limited
or ridden on
The Super Chief
has missed one of the great travel experiences. In Europe they still have real trains. Why can't they have them here?

—Teach people how to be in the big cities. People are afraid to come to New York, for example, because they don't know how to use the city. It uses them. Help them.

—Stop encouraging everyone to go to the beaches, the lakes or the mountains. When too many people go to the beaches, the lakes or the mountains, it ruins them for everyone. In a city, the more the merrier.

—Make it acceptable for people to travel alone. The world is filled with people who'd like to go someplace but feel ill at ease doing it by themselves. Hotels and restaurants often make single guests seem less than welcome. Educate the members of the travel association.

These are just a few suggestions I have for encouraging travel.

Road signs and direction markers in America are largely designed for the people who already know how to get there. Signs are seldom helpful to the stranger who is lost. We desperately need a set of rules for direction signs. Often you can't ever be sure which way an arrow is pointing.

Last week I drove from New York to Philadelphia, a distance of about one hundred miles, and almost all of it dull, sleep-inducing turnpike miles. I was due at the Warwick Hotel in downtown Philadelphia at six
P.M.
At about quarter to five I knew I was getting close to downtown. Ahead of me and over to the right I could see the clump of high-rise buildings that marks every city's business district.

PHILA CENTER CITY
1½
MILES
, the big, official green highway sign with white lettering said.

I wasn't watching my odometer and it's hard to guess how far one and a half miles is. The next exit sign read something like
HISTORIC BUILDINGS
. I had two seconds to decide whether to take the exit ramp or continue on the highway. “Historic buildings” didn't interest me at the moment and I decided “Phila Center City” must be a few hundred yards along.

That decision cost me forty-five minutes. The next exit was in a dock area six miles from nowhere.

That incident is typical of how a lot of Americans will spend much of their summer vacations—looking for someplace. Direction signs are infuriatingly bad or nonexistent in many places. A large, well-placed sign will send you along a street toward something you're trying to find. Five blocks along there will be a major fork in the road with no indication whatsoever about which road you should take.

The world is divided between people who ask directions and people who push on whether they're going in the right direction or not. I tend to push on because experience has taught me that the average man-on-the-sidewalk either doesn't know where anyplace is or doesn't know how to get to it if he does.

“Three—wait a minute—four traffic lights and take a left,” they'll say. Forget it. The turn you want is always at least six traffic lights away and half the time the turn you need is a right, not a left. I don't ask directions unless I'm desperate.

By 5:45 the other night, driving along Market Street in Philadelphia, I was desperate. I stopped for a light and asked an intelligent-looking businessman who came within a few feet of my open car window, “Do you know the Warwick Hotel?”

“Sure,” he said. “Just stay on Market Street to Seventeenth. You'll have to go around City Hall and pick it up on the other side.”

That seemed easy but when I looped around City Hall, it was not clear to me which of the streets feeding into the circle was the continuation of Market. When I found it, I saw that Market was one-way coming toward me at that point. So much for intelligent-looking businessmen. He must have thought I was walking.

Within what turned out to be four blocks from the Warwick, I asked a cop where the hotel was. “Take a right there on Sixteenth,” he said. “It's way out on the parkway.”

Finding any address is hard work in a strange city. You may have the street number carefully written down but it doesn't help. Only about one of every ten buildings in this country has a street address on it and half the time when they do, the numbers are placed where you can't see them from the street.

Road signs always are getting you started toward your destination and then leaving you for dead. If you see a sign that indicates you're headed in the right direction, you assume there will be another sign when you should make a left or a right to get there. Not necessarily.

My advice to Americans who are driving somewhere on vacation this summer is this: Try to enjoy where you are because you probably won't be able to find where you're going until after it's closed.

Everyone who lives in Florida wants you to like it and you can't hate them for that. They want to convince you that Florida is the place to live.

I suppose it might be a good idea if everyone went to both Florida and California once every few years to see how they compare with where they live, because the question of moving to one of the two comes up in almost every American's life at one time or another.

I spent four days in Florida in February and talked to a lot of people. “This is the place to be, this time of year,” the young woman serving
me a hamburger in Fort Lauderdale said. She paused a minute, looking at me quizzically after I failed to agree with her. “Isn't it?” she insisted. “Don't you think so?”

“Were you born here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but I've been to Pennsylvania. It was snowing.”

I had been in Florida for two days when the young lady asked me the question and I wasn't prepared to answer because in forty-eight hours I'd only been outside for about half an hour getting from the airport to the hotel and even that trip was in an air-conditioned bus. Floridians spend a great deal of time inside, considering they talk about the weather outside so much.

I knew, though, that at the moment she asked me, it was cloudy, windy, about 68 degrees and very, very humid. It did not strike me as a beautiful day and Florida didn't seem nearly as good to me as the brisk, cold morning I'd faced in Connecticut the day I left home.

The difference between the people in Florida and the people in Iowa who boost their state by asking how you like it is that, unlike the girl who asks you how you like her state, most of the people in Florida are not natives. They've moved to Florida after having lived somewhere else and the question often is motivated by the desire to be reassured that they did the right thing.

A great many things annoy me about Florida but most of them are petty complaints. It always has annoyed me that it's almost impossible to get fresh orange juice or any other kind of fresh food in a state that grows some of the best—but this is quibbling.

If the young woman wanted a real answer to her question, I could have given her one. If you're talking about weather, “no,” I do not think Florida is the place to be at this or any other time of year. I do not like Florida's weather. It is almost always a disappointment, not because it isn't often good but because we've all been propagandized to expect more from it than it consistently provides.

If, on the other hand, you're talking about the people of Florida, I'd say “yes,” it's a great place to be. Florida, at this point in history, may be the most interesting of all our fifty states. No other has such a growing and diverse population. If the United States is both great and interesting because of the ethnic mix of its population, as we are always saying it is, then the same thing can be said about Florida. There are more secondhand Rolls-Royces for sale in Florida than anywhere else, which isn't much to recommend it, but there are also more good large and small newspapers than in most states.

The ethnic indigestion that paralyzed Miami for so long is going
away. The process of assimilation that distinguishes New York City as the major melting pot in the nation is now at work in Florida.

It's easy to start thinking of Florida as a dumping ground for the elderly, and there are depressing areas where everyone in them seems to be the same age, but the biggest influx of newcomers to the state this year will be young people.

Florida, as much as any state in the union and more than most, has an incredible variety in both its population and its geography. If I could only get a glass of orange juice that was still in the orange when I asked for it.