Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake
Fiona Stafford
Slow Road to San Francisco: Across the USA from Ocean to Ocean By David Reynolds Muswell Press £14.99
What a book! What a joy of a book, plunging you straight away into the very body, bosom and blood of America. And, with its regular sprinkling of poison generated by the odious Trump, you are up to the last exhilarating minute.
Where shall I start? David Reynolds takes us on the terrific journey of driving from the Atlantic to the Pacific – from sea to shining sea – with triumphs of wildly diverse observations, both verbal and visual, great and small.
How delightful to read the evocative description of ‘the din of
grasshoppers scraping their legs … the grass is alive with their constant hopping.’ I was also entranced by the architectural description of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington: ‘A delightful building … a place of high curving walls, long curving staircases, circles, semicircles, ovals and ellipses.’ I was so grateful to have the 2004 museum brought to my attention.
What, too, about the beautiful Maryland State House of 1772 in Annapolis? It is the oldest state capitol in the country in continuous legislative use. It has the largest dome in all America, built of cypress wood without a single nail. Topped by a balustraded balcony, on an octagonal drum, it has a lantern capped by a lightning rod constructed and grounded to Benjamin Franklin’s precise specifications.
The Continental Congress met here, in its beautiful, recently restored, Senate Chamber, where George Washington resigned his commission as Commanderin-chief, marking the end of the Revolutionary War and signalling the beginning of American democracy.
Let us now veer off to pastures new, to enjoy Reynolds’s detailed description of Patsy Cline, one of America’s greatest country singers, who, we read, initially worked in a meat-processing plant before becoming a waitress in a diner and then a ‘soda jerk’ in a drug store, while building her reputation by singing locally.
Going to her house in Winchester, Virginia, Reynolds sees the piano she played with Joltin’ Jim Mccoy and the Melody Playboys. He hears of her breakthrough on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, watched on television throughout America, when three performers competed each week, with the winner being chosen by a clapometer. Thereafter her fame reverberated worldwide.
Reynolds relishes a tour of the white clapboard house where she lived as a child, with the furnished bedroom in which Patsy, her brother, sister and mother all slept. As her fame flourished, all Patsy’s clothes were still made by her mother, including a dress sewn with 3,000 sequins, made for a Carnegie Hall show.
On we drive, ‘meeting’ such luminaries as Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the first white men to cross the continent in 1805. Clark was accompanied by a slave called York and a young Indian woman called Sacagawea. She was the only woman, the only Indian and the only teenager to give birth during that great pioneering expedition. And she was a brilliant guide who, at one point, after their boat was upturned in a river, saved both Lewis and Clark’s diaries. Reynolds argues that without her the defining expedition would never have succeeded.
Obscure figures suddenly appear, such as Elijah Lovejoy, who Reynolds reads of beneath the great, stainless-steel-clad arch of St Louis. He was the printer and editor of the anti-slavery newspaper the St Louis Observer, killed for writing a fierce attack on a mob who had carried out a lynching. When the doomed abolitionist John Brown heard of his martyrdom, he said, ‘Here, in the presence before God … from this time, I consecrate my life to the abolition of slavery.’
There is more to be found in this book that makes me cry with pleasure, enfolding me, as it does, with the sheer magic of being able to be back on the road in America, where I have spent so many happy days.