Letter from America
Snowstorms, floods, wildfires, heatwaves… we’re blighted by them all
It had been snowing for two days – so we decided to have a party. We invited everyone we knew, and promised chilli and cocktails. Everyone else must have been suffering from cabin fever, too, because they made the effort to get into their outdoor clothing, out of their houses, and into their cars, which the storm had laminated with ice, like giant Dinky Toys.
The party was going so well that only one person noticed that the heating had failed. She was the aunt of our Bulgarian neighbour and spoke no English. As she had spent the afternoon sitting on a radiator in the kitchen, I assumed she was miming something about a sore bottom.
As darkness fell, so did the temperature indoors. Departing guests warned about frozen pipes. A Russian friend loaned us some space heaters. Feeling lonely as only immigrants can, we dragged the children’s mattresses into our room for a cold night of ensemble snoring. At lunchtime the next day, an engineer fixed the boiler, leaving us much warmer and me $400 lighter.
America is excessive in weather, as in everything else. The choice is wide, but most of the options are awful. You can freeze wherever you like, from Alaska to the Lakes to Maine. You can be griddled in Arizona, roasted in Texas, steamed in Mississippi or poached in your own sweat in Florida. The major cities are located in order to catch the worst of the weather. Chicago, Boston and New York are murderously sticky in the summer, but the winters are cold enough to freeze your finger to the trigger.
Florida and California are particularly hostile to human habitation. Miami is at sea level, and in the path of the Caribbean hurricanes. When it rains, floods force alligators up from the sewers. And it is only a matter of time before San Francisco has a Big One. Look what happened to Minoan civilisation after the eruption at Santorini. Who will fix our phones when all those clever tech people have fallen into the bowels of southern California?
Last winter alone, Californians contended with wildfires, biblical inundations, and fatal mudslides – enough to take their minds off their recordbreaking drought. Puerto Rico, which is an ‘unincorporated American territory’ and thus entitled to the same terrible weather as the mainland, was smashed by Hurricane Maria. Record cold temperatures were set across the country. Parts of Florida received six inches of snow. The north-east spent two weeks in the deep freeze after a bombogenesis, a ‘bomb cyclone’. The pressure fell 50 millibars in 24 hours, followed by up to two feet of snow. Coastal towns were flooded, airports were closed and my boiler broke down.
I should have known. In a way, I did. This is America; so there are films about weather. The Coen brothers’ Fargo is set in the dead of Minnesota winter, not to attract group bookings from meteorologists, but to complicate the otherwise straightforward business of murdering people in the middle of nowhere. In Key Largo, John Huston uses a hurricane to force Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G Robinson and several canoe-loads of Seminole Indians into the same hotel. The premise of The Seven Year Itch is that nobody wants to be in New York City in the summer. Lawrence Kasdan’s Body
Heat confirms that hot weather leads to adultery and murder.
But the movies only give you part of the picture. If the weather doesn’t carry the plot, it’s invisible. So detectives run around New York City in August without breaking a sweat. Planes are never grounded in DC by blizzards. It’s always autumn in Boston, but no one ever slips on wet leaves.
The characters in Oliver Stone’s delicate remake of Scarface powder only their noses in the bathroom. We never see Tony Montana applying talc where he really needs it – if, that is, he wants to go dancing in Miami without chafing his undercarriage.
Nor do we see Montana saying hello to his little friend: his tube of Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. There is no dignity in the Land of the Fanny Pack, and America’s pharmacies carry a rich array of medicaments for chubby chafers. Nothing works like Boudreaux’s.
In the Seventies, George Boudreaux, a pharmacist at Covington, Louisiana, developed a secret recipe for a nappy rash cream – a kind of moonshine for the buttocks. His bootleg cream spread by word of butt, and Dr Boudreaux became a full-time paste-maker, with a factory at Covington. When the factory went underwater during Hurricane Katrina, the sore cheeks of America were calmed by emergency production in Indiana.
Butt Paste is wasted on children. It looks like cement, but it goes on like ambrosia. A decent larding of the tender parts, and you’re all set for summer. Oprah recommends it. She probably keeps some in her arsenal, too.
And so, as we put away our skis and skates and stock up on Butt Paste, we prepare for the meteorological apocalypse of summer. First, though, we must get through spring, a time of verdant promise and quickening hopes. Or, as we call it in Massachusetts, Mud Season.
‘It is only a matter of time before San Francisco has a Big One’