Stephen Fry - Stephen Fry in America

New Hampshire is more than just a political Petri dish, however; it is also home to some of the most beautiful scenery in America. The White Mountains are a craggy range that form part of the great Appalachian chain that sweeps down from Canada to Alabama, reaching their peak at Mount Washington, the highest point in America east of the Mississippi, at whose foothills sprawls the enormous Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods. Damn – politics again.

I never studied economics at school and for some reason I had always thought that the ‘Bretton Woods Agreement’ was, like the Hoare – Laval pact, the product of two people, one called Bretton and one called Woods. No, the system that gave the world the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and stable exchange rates based on a decided value for gold was the result of a conference in 1944 here in Bretton Woods, attended by all the allied and non-aligned nations who knew that the post-war world would have to be reconstructed and developed within permanent and powerful institutions. The economic structure of the world since, for good and ill, has largely flowed from that momentous meeting – if structures can be said to flow.

The hotel is certainly big enough to house such a giant convention. It is hard not to think of Jack Nicholson and The Shining as I get repeatedly lost in its vast corridors and verandas. I sip tea and watch the huge vista of a misty, drizzly afternoon on the mountains recede into a dull evening. If fate is kind to me, the next day will dawn bright and sunny. Perfect for an expedition to the summit. Unlikely, for Mount Washington sees the least sunshine and the worst weather of anywhere in America. That is an official fact.

Fate is immensely kind, however. Not only does she send a day as sparklingly clear as any I have seen, but she also makes sure that the train and cog line are in prime working order so I can make my way up the 6,000 feet in comfort and without the expenditure of a single calorie, all of which – thanks to my American diet – have far too much to do swelling my tummy to be bothered with exercise. A steam locomotive – nuzzle pointing cutely down ready to push us all up the hill – puffs gently at the foothills. This rack and pinion line has been taking tourists and skiers to the top of Mount Washington for over a hundred and forty years. I join a happy crowd of people on board. The ‘engineer’ (which is American for engine driver) does something clever with levers at the back of the train and after enough clanking and grinding we are off. Up front, the grimy-faced brakeman tells me a little about the locomotive.

‘This was the first,’ he says proudly.

‘What the first in the world?’

‘Yep.’

It wasn’t actually, but I haven’t the heart to tell him. The world’s first cog railway was in Leeds, England, but the Mount Washington line was the first ever to go up a mountain, and that’s what counts.

Up we go, pushed by the engine at no more than a fast walking pace. You can almost hear the locomotive wheeze ‘gonnamakeit, gonnamakeit, gonnamakeit!’ And make it we do.

New Hampshire? The highest point in Old Hampshire that I have ever visited is Watership Down, a round green hillock famous for its bunny rabbits. The great granite crags of the White Mountains are a world away from the soft chalk downs of the mother country. The sheer scale is dizzying. I feel as if I have visited two huge countries already and all I have done is take a look round a couple of America’s smaller states.

The Appalachians and I have a long way still to go before we reach the south. I gaze down as they march off out of view. What a monumentally, outrageously, heart-stoppingly beautiful country this is. And how frighteningly big.

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:

MA

Nickname:

The Bay State

Capital:

Boston

Flower:

Mayflower

Tree:

American elm

Bird:

Chickadee

Motto:

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (‘By the sword she seeks peace under liberty’)

Well-known residents and natives:

Paul Revere, John Adams (2nd President), John Quincy Adams (6th), Calvin Coolidge (30th), John F. Kennedy (35th), George H.W. Bush (41st), John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, John Harvard, Eli Whitney, Elias Howe, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, James McNeill Whistler.

‘By twelve o’clock it’s all over and everyone is in bed. There’s more true Gothic horror in a digestive biscuit, but never mind.’

Massachusetts prides herself on being a commonwealth rather than a state. It is a meaningless distinction constitutionally but says something about the history and special grandeur of this, the most populous of the New England states. Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, the Kennedys, Harvard University, Boston … there is a sophisticated patina, a ritzy finish to the place. It has its blue-collar Irish, its rural poor but the image is still that of patrician wealth and founding history. And a quick glance up at the list of notable natives shows that American literature in the first two hundred years of the nation would not have amounted to much without Massachusetts. Maybe having to learn how to spell the name of the state inculcated a literary precision early on …

Much of the prosperity of nineteenth-century Massachusetts derived from the now disgraced industry of whaling. The centre of this grisly trade was the island town of Nantucket, now a neat and pretty, if somewhat sterile, heritage and holiday resort. It is a pompous and priggish error to judge our ancestors according to our own particular and temporary moral codes, but nonetheless it is hard to understand how once we slaughtered so many whales with so little compunction.

I am shown round the whaling museum by Nathaniel Philbrick, the leading historian of the area, a man boundlessly enthusiastic about all things Nantuckian.

‘The whaling companies were the BPs and Mobils of their day,’ he says as we pass an enormous whale skeleton. ‘The oil from sperm whales lit the lamps of the western world and lubricated the moving parts of industry.’

‘But it was such a slaughter …’

Nathaniel hears this every day. ‘Can’t deny it. But look what we’re doing now in order to get today’s equivalent. Petroleum.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘The Nantucket whalers depredated one species for its oil, which I don’t defend, but we tear the whole earth to pieces, endangering hundreds of thousands of species. We fill the air with a climate-changing pollution that threatens all life, including all whales.’

The awful devastation to the whale on the one hand and the unquestionable courage, endurance and skill displayed by the whalers on the other has been Nathaniel’s theme as a writer for many years now.

‘How will our descendants look at us?’ he wonders, as we look down on Nantucket from the roof of the museum. ‘Only a sanctimonious fool could deny the valour and hardiness of the New England whalers. But will our great-grandchildren say the same about the oil explorers and oil-tanker crews?’