Local issues

An old television director of mine who has filmed stuff as far apart as the Hebrides and Peking, he's gone from Shanghai to Shepherd's Bush, he's not at all a cynical man but he says that you can take it as a working principle whenever you go anywhere to shoot film that the natives will first write you congratulations on having chosen their spot for its golden days or its balmy nights, its absolutely dependable brilliant weather and then, when you get there, you can depend on their telling you in alarm that they have never seen such extraordinary, such devastating and unusual weather. And this is more often true than not.

Anyway, this man told me last summer that he'd been offered a research project in New York for the two months of September and October. I said what a lucky man he was picking the perfect time, the only time of the year, I told him, when I would not want to be anywhere on earth but New York – or rather New York as a springboard into the splendid fall of New England, about which the older members of the class will tell you I have gone on and on for years. 

Well, you already guessed what happened. He got here in time for one brilliant weekend in early September and then the low pressure moved in, like the sliding roof of a convertible car, and stayed there drenching and dowsing us – no games, no outdoors for eight weekends in a row. Something like 20 inches of rain over a period which usually gets about three-quarters of an inch. The wettest fall, the weather boys say, since 1801. 'Of course,' said my friend, grey by now with disillusion. 

In fact we had no fall but two weeks ago, suddenly, a beautiful Indian summer. And now this past week, the skies raging, floods everywhere and the streets and avenues of New York which in the parlous state of New York's finances have not been repaired for two or three years, the streets looking like scratchy newsreels of the Western Front in the First World War. I shall say no more about the fall – ever! 

Last year a closer friend asked me, in touching humility, what was the best time to motor around New England and I told him the last week in September, first and second in October was the safe time when, as even the sourpuss Mrs Trollope wrote, 'The whole countryside goes to glory'. Well, he came and he motored and the light was there and the blazing colour but that was the coldest fall in 75 years. From now on, I shall recommend that anybody with a couple of weeks to spare plays safe and take a holiday in Manchester. 

And here am I, just come back from a part of the country where the people, even the most heathenish, would fall on their knees and bathe in the beautiful rain if it ever again came down. I was, as I mentioned a week or two ago before that, in Texas which was complaining about a fairly normal drought, but California is getting to a critical stage. This huge state, 900 miles long, Edinburgh to Naples, and 200 some miles wide is now well along in its third year of almost total drought. Now allowing for the fact that Californians cannot tell you anything about their state in language that's less than superlative, you have to believe the bare, grave language of the ranchers and the farmers and the public utilities people that this is the worst natural disaster in the state's history. The cost in dead cattle and interminable ruined crops alone is not to be calculated. 

As a visitor, I'm sorry to say you have to learn this from reading because San Francisco, for instance, where I've just been, blinding, flawless days and nights but the mountains brown and bare down to the rock. When you get into your hotel you see a printed sign, 'Don't leave the water running when you shave. Take a very shallow bath. Showers take so many gallons. Turn the lights off. Do without air-conditioning. Put a glass of water aside if you didn't drink all of it', and so on. In northern California, which takes in the big region in and around San Francisco, the authorities put it up to the people, 'Shall we shut off the water for so many hours a day or will you try and save it voluntarily?' And surprisingly – it's surprising in a comfortable country not renowned for its rigid self-discipline – the referendum, or whatever, chose the voluntary method and saved more than 40 per cent of normal water use. 

I ought to say that California has a device which we, for example, in New York, do not. They have along with your gas and electric meters, they have in every house and apartment building a water meter. So they come around and check and, once the emergency was declared, there went out with it the warning that if your water meter exceeded a calculated average, you would pay for the excess at a very stiff rate. So it's a... it's a voluntary system with involuntary fines. Not a bad trick to impose on a people who tend to scream blue murder if any authority appears to be, or can be said to be, violating your democratic freedom of choice. 

Well, I began with these things instinctively because they are what everybody, highbrows as well as lowbrows, double-dome literary critics as well as double-decker bus drivers, live by and talk about first. We... we – we being what are called well-informed journalists – we tend to forget this because the bus driver doesn't have to write a column, whereas the literary critic, having beefed to his wife about the miserable dribble of water coming from a bathroom tap and cursed his dirty car, goes to the office, pulls himself together and settles to the serious business of life which is whether Lawrence of Arabia was a man or a myth and whether the symbolism of Kafka was deliberately plotted or just came to him in the night. 

Well, I'm now, spiritually speaking, back at the office ready for the real business of life. I find it hard to do this because two nights ago I circled over Kennedy Airport for a couple of hours, the plane turning over from time to time to rinse the rain from its wings and came down with a bump into what for the moment I thought was the Atlantic Ocean, just off the edge of Kennedy Airport, but it was the tarmac all right, simply under two or three feet of water. And for a minute or two, we had the nostalgic experience of scudding through a lake with the white waves breaking and the foam spurting up in arcs from the landing wheels. And I thought we were back again with those first, dashing transoceanic planes – seaplanes, the 'clippers' as we called them, with two decks where you came downstairs to eat and drink and went upstairs to bed. 

The morning after I arrived was election day and surely nothing could deal more decisively than that with the serious business of life. Of course, in this huge country, every state, every city, every hamlet, has a very decided and different notion of what is most serious in public affairs. The president may have decided – did decide – that the nation's comparative indifference to the energy crisis was alarming enough to cause him to call off his tour of nine nations and to go to the people with his John the Baptist warning for the third time. But I question whether he picked the right time for this. He did it on election night. It was not a national election in any sense, no elections to Congress, it was what most of you, in your own countries, would call a year of municipal and county elections. 

Now it sounds responsible to sum them all up by saying, as the serious papers do, that last Tuesday 35 cities each with populations of over a hundred thousand voted for a mayor and the main issues were jobs, housing, crime. At any time, when there's no election, jobs, housing, crime are the main issues everywhere and not only in the United States. But the moment you zero in on one state, one city, you find that one city's issue is another city's tired topic. To span the wild variety, let's just look at, say, three cities: Houston, Texas, Columbus, the capital of Ohio, and Pioche, Nevada. 

In New York, I ought to throw in, the issues are anything you care to mention that affect or reflect urban decay – jobs, housing, crime, streets with potholes, tube trains defiled with graffiti, should the city income tax go up or down, same with the tolls on bridges, how to turn the schools from beleaguered barracks into places of education, a new deal for blacks, Puerto Ricans, can we ever have bearable prisons, etc. But, in the main, for there is a main issue in New York – can the new mayor, can anybody, stop the rot of the city and the slide into bankruptcy? 

To a greater, or a lesser extent, every big city in America has most of these problems but in Houston, the race was between four men, all of whom outbade each other in promising a better fire department and an untangling of the choking traffic problem. And all of them said they could do it without raising taxes. 

In Columbus, Ohio – in fact throughout that big state – there was one burning issue. Shall the leg-hold trap be banned? This is a trap with steel jaws which snaps on any animal which treads on it. The drive to have it banned is led by humane societies and the people who wanted to keep it – the farmers, sportsmen, people on the fringe of the city who know, at first hand, the depredations of foxes, field rats and other vermin. One powerful television plug for keeping the leg trap recited to vivid pictures, this is the fox that bit the dog that bit the child who's getting the shots for rabies. This issue has drowned out, or burned out, most other burning issues in Ohio. 

And lastly, in a lonely stretch of the Nevada desert is the town of Pioche. Last year the county voted to legalise prostitution. Now the district attorney and the Mormons thereabouts are trying to reverse the vote. Some residents say vice is better kept in a confine where you can keep your eye on it. Others say it brings in drug runners. Two bodies have been found recently in the desert. The owner of the big ranch, so-called, was interviewed last year and said, 'Every man should do the work God called him to.' In the process, however, he forgot to render under Caesar. He was convicted for tax evasion and is now serving 20 years. It looks as if Pioche, when all the returns are in, will ban the girls or rather banish them to Las Vegas and Reno where they'll have, so to speak, more leg room where the old trade is strictly forbidden – and completely tolerated.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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