Stephen Fry in America

The doyen of news anchors, Walter ‘and that’s the way it is’ Cronkite liked apparently to sail in the waters around Eastport and was disturbed one day to see a film of oil all over the water, staining the trim paintwork of his yacht. He made complaints. A government agency looked at the fish oil coming from the cannery and imposed regulations so strict that the economic viability of the business was compromised and the industry left Eastport for good. That at least is the story I was told as gospel by many Eastporters. Certainly the deserted shells of the old canneries still brood over the harbour awaiting their full regeneration. The body of water that dominates the harbour is Passamaquoddy Bay and the land on the other side is, confusingly, Canada. A line straight down the middle of the bay forms the border between the two countries.

Before the British, before the French, before any Europeans came to Maine there were the tribesmen, the ‘First Nations’ or Native Americans, as I expected I should have to be very careful to call them. Actually the word ‘Indian’ seems inoffensive to the tribespeople I speak to around town. The federal agency is still called The Bureau of Indian Affairs and there are Indian Creeks and Indian Roads and Indian Rivers everywhere. It is true that the word was wrongly applied to the native tribes by Columbus and his settlers who thought they had landed in India. But the word stuck, misnomer or not. Sometimes political correctness exists more in the furious minds of its enemies than in reality, which gets on with compromise and common sense without too much hysteria.

Anyway, the indigenous peoples of the Maine/New Brunswick area are the Passamaquoddy, a European mangling of their original name which meant something like ‘the people who live quite close to pollock and spear them a lot from small boats’, which may not be a snappy title for a tribe but can hardly be faulted as a piece of self-description.

My first full day in Eastport will see me on Passamaquoddy Bay, not spearing pollock, but hunting a local delicacy prized around the world.

Lobstering

The word Maine goes before the word lobster much as Florida goes before orange juice, Idaho before potato and Tennessee before Williams. Three out of four lobsters eaten in America, so I am told, are caught in Maine waters. There are crab, and scallop and innumerable other molluscs and crustaceans making a living in the cold Atlantic waters, but the real prize has always been lobster.

Angus McPhail has been lobstering all his life. He and his sons Charlie and Jesse agree to take me on board for a morning. ‘So long as I do my share of work.’ Hum. Work, eh? I’m in television …

‘You come aboard, you work. You can help empty and bait the pots.’

The pots are actually traps: crates filled with a tempting bag of stinky bait (for lobsters are aggressive predators of the deep and will not be lured by bright colours or attractively arranged slices of tropical fruit) that have a cunning arrangement of interior hinged doors designed to imprison any lobster that strays in. These cages are laid down in long connected lines on the American side of the border. Angus, skippering the boat, has all the latest sat nav technology to allow him to mark with an X on his screen exactly where the lures have been set. To help the boys on the deck, a buoy marked with the name of the vessel floats on the surface above each pot. Americans, as you may know, pronounce ‘buoy’ to rhyme not with ‘joy’ but with ‘hooey’.

How is it that work clothes know when they are being worn by an amateur, a dilettante, an interloper? I wear exactly the same aprons and boots and gloves as Charlie and Jesse. They look like fishermen, I look like ten types of gormless arse. Heigh ho. I had better get used to this ineluctable fact, for it will chase me across America.

It is extraordinarily hard work. The moment we reach a trap, the boys are hooking the line and hauling in the pot. In the meantime I have been stuffing the bait nets with hideously rotted fish which I am told are in fact sardines. The pot arrives on deck and instantly I must pull the lobsters from each trap and drop them on the great sorting table that forms much of the forward part of the deck. If there are good-looking crabs in the traps they can join the party too, less appetising specimens and species are thrown back into the ocean.

Lobsters of course, are mean, aggressive animals. But who can blame them for wanting a piece of my hand? They are fighting for their lives. Equipped with homegrown cutlery expressly designed to snip off bits of enemy, they don’t take my handling without a fight.

As soon as the trap has been emptied I’m at the table, sorting. This sorting is important. Livelihoods are at stake. The Maine lobstermen and marine authorities are determined not to allow over-fishing to deplete their waters and there is fierce legislation in place to protect the stocks. Jesse explains.

‘If it’s too small, it goes back in. Use this to measure.’

He hands me a complicated doodad that is something between a calibrated nutcracker and an adjustable spanner.

‘Any undersized lobsters they gotta go back in the water, okay?’

‘Don’t they taste as good?’

A look somewhere between pity and contempt meets this idiotic remark. ‘They won’t be full-grown, see? Gotta let them breed first. Keep the stocks up.’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. Duh! Sorreee!’ I always feel a fool when in the company of people who work for a living. It brings out my startling lack of common sense.

‘If you find a female in egg, notch her tail with these pliers and throw her back in too.’

‘In egg? How do I …?’

‘You’ll know.’

How right he was. A pregnant lobster is impossible to miss: hundreds and hundreds of thousands of glistening black beads stuck all round her body like an over-fertile bramble hedge thick with blackberries.

‘Notch her tail’ is one of the things that takes a second to say and three and a half minutes of thrashing, wrestling and swearing to accomplish. The blend of curiosity, amusement and disbelief with which I am watched by Jesse and Charlie only makes me feel hotter and clumsier.

‘Is this strictly necessary?’

‘The inspectors find any illegal lobsters in our catch they’ll fine us more’n we can afford. They’ll even take the boat.’

‘How cruel!’

‘Just doing their job. I went to school with most of them. Go out hunting in the woods with them weekends. That wouldn’t stop them closing us down if they had to.’

‘Done it!’ I hold up one properly notched pregnant female. Jesse takes a look and nods, and I throw her back into the ocean.

‘Good. Now you gotta band the keepers.’

‘I’ve got to what the which?’

The mature, full-sized, non-pregnant lobsters the crew don’t have to throw back are called ‘keepers’ and it seems that a rubber band must be pulled over their claws and that I am the man to do it.

Charlie hands me the device with which one is supposed to pick up a band, stretch it and get it round the lobster’s formidably thick weaponry in one swift movement. Charlie demonstrates beautifully: this implement however marks me down as an amateur as soon as I attempt to pick it up and in a short while I am sending elastic bands flying around the deck like a schoolboy at the back of the bus.

‘Otherwise they’ll injure each other,’ explains Charlie.

‘Yes, fine. Of course. Whereas this way they only injure me. I see the justice in that.’ I try again. ‘Ouch. I mean, quite seriously, ouch!’

It transpires that lobsters, if they had their way, would prefer not to have elastic bands limiting their pincers’ reach, range and movement and they are quite prepared to make a fuss about it. The whole operation of sorting and banding is harder than trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wildcat’s left ear with a red-hot needle in a darkened room, as someone once said about something. And what really gets me is that just as I finish sorting and am ready to turn my mind to a nice cup of tea and a reminisce about our famous victory over the lobsters, Charlie and Jesse send down a fresh pot, Angus moves the boat on and another trap is being pulled aboard.

‘You mean one has to do more than one of these?’ I gasp.

‘We make about thirty drafts a day.’

A draft being the pulling-up, emptying and re-baiting of a trap.

Oh my. This is hard work. Gruellingly hard work. The morning we make our run is a fine sparkling one with only the mildest of swells. The McPhails go out in all weathers and almost all seas.

You have probably seen TV chefs like Rick Stein spend the day with fishermen and pay testament to their bravery and fortitude. We can all admire the bold hunters of the deep, especially these artisanal rather than industrial fishers like the McPhails, crewing their small craft and husbanding the stocks with respect, skill and sensitivity. But until you have joined them, even for one morning, it is hard truly to appreciate the toil, skill, hardiness and uncomplaining courage of these men, and yes it is exclusively men who go out to sea in fishing boats.

They do it for one reason and one reason only. Their families. They have wives and children and they need to support them. There are not many jobs going in Down East Maine, not much in the way of industry, no sign of Starbucks, malls and service-sector employment. This is work on the nineteenth-century model. This is labour.

Given how hard their days are you might think they end each night in bars drinking themselves silly. Actually they need to be home in time for a bath and bed, for the next morning they will be up again at four. It is perhaps unsurprising to hear Jesse tell me that he wants his own sons to do any work other than this. Maybe we should prepare for the price of lobster to go up in our restaurants and fishmongers. Whatever these men make, it surely isn’t enough.

From the Sea to the Table

Lobsters, it seems to me, are simply giant marine insects. Huge bugs in creepy armour. Look at a woodlouse and then a lobster. Cousins, surely? And look at the flesh of a lobster and then at a maggot. Exactly. Cover them in mayonnaise and Frenchify them all you will, lobsters are insects: scary scuttling insects.

None of which stops them from tasting de-mothering-licious of course. And it is with lip-smacking anticipation that I jump off Angus’s lobsterman and prepare to feast on our catch at Bob del Papa’s Chowder House right on the quayside. Bob del Papa is … well, he is as his name leads you to hope he might be, big, amiable, powerful-looking and hospitable. He came up from Rhode Island many years ago having served his country and learned his seamanship with the United States Coastguard. There doesn’t seem to be much in Eastport that Bob doesn’t own, including the lobsters themselves. He buys them from the fishermen and sells them on to whoever then gets them finally to the restaurant kitchens of America. Bob is far from your typical desk and chair entrepreneur however – he drives the forklift, hauls the crates, cooks the food and sweeps the yard. He is very determined that I should enjoy a Maine lobster properly served with all the correct accoutrements and habiliments traditionally associated with a Maine lobster dinner and takes great pleasure in preparing a grand feast.

We eat right out on the dockside. A big pot is hauled onto a gas ring and a long trestle table laid against the wall and under a canopy to protect it from the rain that is beginning to fall. Bad weather instantly sends the British inside, but in Maine they seem to be made of hardier stuff. An al fresco banquet was prepared and an al fresco banquet we shall all have. One by one Bob’s friends and neighbours start to arrive; everyone is grinning and rubbing their hands with pleasurable anticipation.

Before tossing each lobster to its boiling fate it is possible to hypnotise them, or at least send them into a strange cataleptic trance. Bob teaches me how to place one upright on a table and firmly stroke the back of its neck: after a surprisingly short while it freezes and stays there immobile. It is to be hoped that this state will deprive it of even a millisecond of scalding agony when finally into the pot it falls. While dozens of them boil away in the cauldron for nine or ten minutes, turning from browny-bluey-coral to bright cardinal red, I sit myself down and allow Bob’s staff of smiling waitresses to serve the first course.

We start with cups of Clam Chowder, the celebrated New England soup of cream, potatoes, onions, bacon, fish stock and quahogs. These last, now made immortal in the name of the home town in Family Guy, are Atlantic hard-shelled clams, a little larger than the cherrystone or little-neck clams which also abound in these fruitful waters. From Maine to Massachusetts a cup of chowder is traditionally served with ‘oyster’ crackers, small saltine-style biscuits crumbled into the soup to thicken it further. A little white pepper makes the whole experience even more toothsome, but don’t even think of adding tomato. This is actually illegal in Maine, thanks to a piece of 1939 legislation specifically outlawing the practice. It may be good enough for ‘Manhattan Chowder’, which I am told is no more than Italian clam soup rebranded, but the real New England deal must be creamy white and tomato free. Like so many enduring local dishes, chowder has an especial greatness when consumed in its land of origin. We all know how delicious retsina is sipped on a Greek island and yet how duff it tastes back home. Well, I don’t think Clam Chowder is ever duff, but eaten on a quayside in Down East Maine, even in the driving rain, it is to my mind and stomach as close to perfect as any dish can be. Until the lobster arrives, that is.

Each of us is given a pair of crackers, a pot of coleslaw, a bib, a tub of melted and clarified butter and a great red lobster. I recognise mine as one who gave me an especially painful nip earlier in the day so it is with regrettable but understandable savagery that I tear him to pieces, dipping his maggot-flesh with frenzied delight into the ghee and fully justifying the bib, which – I notice – I am the only one wearing.

Bob del Papa claps me on the shoulder. ‘Dunt get much bedder ’n this, does it?’

I take another sip of the supernacular wine and swallow another piece of the sensational blueberry pie that Bob himself baked. The late afternoon sun pushes through the clouds on its way down west where all the rest of America lies.

‘No, Bob, it doesn’t. It truly does not.’

But I was wrong.

Left Right Center

That night Bob takes me to the Happy Crab, a magnificent eatery run by two expat Britons from Leicester, where he initiates me into Left Right Center (the American spelling of centre is, one feels, obligatory), a dice game of startling simplicity and fun. He even gives me a set of dice. I plan to make it the latest gaming sensation in London.

It was inexpressibly touching to discover how much the Mainers want me to love their state. An easy wish to grant. At one point Bob even speculates on which states I might prefer, as if this grand tour was a competition. ‘I’m worried about Montana. Ve-e-ery beautiful. Nice people. Hell, if it had a coastline I might even live there myself. Yep, I’m worried you might like Montana more than Maine. But you think we’ll be in the top ten?’

I do not laugh, for I see how seriously the issue concerns him.

‘There are no top tens,’ I say, ‘but I can assure you of this. If I find a friendlier, more welcoming and kinder set of people in all America than the Down East Mainers I will send you film of me eating my hat.’

NEW HAMPSHIRE

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:

NH

Nickname:

The Granite State

Capital:

Concord

Flower:

Purple lilac

Tree:

White birch

Bird:

Purple finch

Motto:

Live Free or Die

Well-known residents and natives:

Josiah Bartlett, Daniel Webster, Horace ‘Go West, Young Man’ Greeley, Mary Baker Eddy, Brooke Astor, Robert Frost, Grace Metalious, J.D. Salinger, John Irving, P.J. O’Rourke, Ken Burns, Adam Sandler.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

‘What is it with Americans and cinnamon?’

If the word lobster is forever yoked to Maine then who can separate from New Hampshire the word ‘primary’? But what the heck is a primary, let alone a New Hampshire one? Something to do with politics one is almost certain but what, precisely?

Primaries in the USA are election races for the presidential nomination. There are, as I expect you know, two parties in American politics: the Democrats (symbol, a donkey or jackass) and the Republicans (the Grand Old Party, symbol an elephant). When the time for presidential elections comes, each party must field a candidate: and who that candidate might be is decided by the outcome of primaries (and caucuses and conventions, but we’ll leave them for the time being). Only registered members of the Republican Party can vote for Republican candidates and only registered Democrats for theirs. Like many American institutions it makes sense, is very democratic, transparent and open but comes down, fundamentally, to race, religion, media and – most of all – money.

And why is the New Hampshire primary so important? Because it is traditionally the first of the cycle to be held. The primacy of the New Hampshire primary derives primarily from its prime position as the primary primary. To lose badly here can dish a candidate’s chances from the get-go, as they like to say, while to win first out of the traps can impart valuable momentum. Huge amounts of money and effort are expended by all the runners and riders here.

The people of New Hampshire, one of the smallest states in physical size and population, although also one of the most prosperous, are treated every four years to more political speeches, sincere promises, sunny compliments and rosy blandishments than any other citizens in America … in the world possibly.

The presidential election takes place every four years, 2004, 2008, 2012 and so on. The primaries begin in the preceding years, 2003, 2007, 2011. I arrive in Manchester, New Hampshire in October, 2007 – just as the primary season for the 2008 elections is hotting up. We now all know who won, of course, but as I knock on the door of a certain campaign office, I am certain of nothing other than that it appears to be a close race for both parties. The Democrats are going to have to choose between Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson. The Republicans have Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. So the next US President could be a woman, a Mormon, a Latino, an African-American, a Baptist minister or a television actor … there are certainly plenty of firsts on offer.

On the Road with Mitt

I am welcomed to the office by a very pretty young girl called Deirdra, the name and the red hair offering picture-book testament to her Irish ancestry. She is one of the many hundreds, indeed thousands, of students and young people who dedicate their time at this season to helping their chosen candidate. Her guy, and for this day my guy too, is Republican Mitt Romney.

‘I just love him. He’s awesome.’

‘What’s different about him?’ I wonder.

‘I saw him last year, just about like before he announced? Just listening to him speak, his charisma and such is mindboggling.’

Whatever my own political views, and they happen not to coincide strikingly with those of Governor Romney, I am touched to be trusted so much by the campaign team, who leave me free to follow Deirdra around, handing out fliers, badges (Americans call them buttons) and posters and attending to the low-level but necessary grunt work that devolves to a young campaign keenie.

As a matter of fact, my production team and I had also approached Clinton’s and Obama’s people on the Democratic side who, true to their donkey nature, were obstinate and would not budge: no behind the scenes filming. Both Giuliani’s and Romney’s teams were only too happy to help us out, no strings attached. I was simultaneously impressed and disappointed by the laid-back, friendly and calm atmosphere of the campaign office. I had expected and rather looked forward to the frenzy, paranoia and brilliant, fast-talking, wise-cracking repartee of the TV series West Wing.

Deirdra and I watched Mitt make a speech at a hospital and then at a family home. These ‘house parties’ are ‘Meet Mitt’ events where local people turn up and are encouraged to ‘just go ahead and ask Mitt anything’. A tidy lower-middle-class home in Hooksett, NH, has been chosen complete with standard Halloween garden decorations and an aroma of cinnamon. What is it with Americans and cinnamon? The smell is everywhere; they flavour chewing gum with it, they ruin wine and coffee with it, they slather it over chicken and fish … it is all most peculiar.

Deirdra and I turn up armed with pamphlets only minutes before the Governor himself arrives. The excitement is palpable: the householders, Rod and Patricia, are so proud and pleased they look as if they might burst; all their friends and neighbours have gathered, video news crews are lined up pointing at the fireplace whose mantelpiece is replete with miniature pumpkins, artfully stuffed scarecrows and dark-red candles scented with, of course, cinnamon.

With a great flurry of handshakes and smiles Mitt is suddenly in the house, marching straight to the space in front of the fireplace where a mike on a stand awaits him, as for a stand-up comedian. He is wearing a smart suit, the purpose of which, it seems, is to allow him to whip off the jacket in a moment of wild unscripted anarchy, so as to demonstrate his informality and desire to get right down to business and to hell with the outrage and horror this will cause in his minders. British MPs and candidates of all stripes now do the same thing. The world over, male politicians have trousers that wear out three times more quickly than their coats. And who would vote for a man who kept his jacket on? Why, it is tantamount to broadcasting your contempt for the masses. Politicians who wear jackets might as well eat the common people’s children and have done with it.

Romney is impressive in a rather ghastly kind of way, which is not really his fault. He has already gone over so many of his arguments and rehearsed so many of his cunningly wrought lines that, try as he might, the techniques he employs to inject a little life and freshness into them are identical to those used by game-show hosts, the class of person Governor Romney most resembles: lots of little chuckled-in phrases, like ‘am I right?’ and ‘gosh, I don’t know but it seems to me that’, ‘heck, maybe it’s time’ and so on. In fact he is so like an American version of Bob Monkhouse in his verbal and physical mannerisms that I become quite distracted. Rod and Patricia beam so hard and so shiningly they begin to look like the swollen pumpkins that surround them.