Personal

Rural America

Joanna put her finger on it today: in all the times I've been to the USA, I've never been to a rural location. Work has dragged me round the conference circuit and last year I sent myself to New York on a holiday, but not once have I strayed beyond the city blocks, the streets and avenues, the reach of the subway.

This week I'm staying with my sister and her family at their home in Saranac Lake. It's in New York State, but the differences between here and the city couldn't be more marked.

Last year I read Michael Moore's Stupid White Men as we crossed the Atlantic. We visited New York and Washington DC. We bathed in the noise of the cities. We even saw Bush himself. And as I looked down from the Empire State Building, I saw a country that I loved but that I somehow felt greater than. Full of cynicism - and maybe a little anger and jealousy - I revelled in Moore's nit-picking. America for me was brash, rude, a little bit dangerous and had a lot of growing up to do. How different my thoughts are now!

I've been listening to Over the Rhine's OHIO a lot this week. It's an album I've grown to love over the past month, aching with warmth and beauty like the bruised and dying autumn leaves. It's a gift to small-town America. It'll now remind me of Saranac Lake.

In Saranac Lake I see community. Instead of the rigid divisions and locks between apartments I find houses whose borders blur out of focus, one garden merging with the next or rolling forwards to the road. Here houses are never locked, cars are left with their engines running and children play in their extended yard: extended to encompass the whole neighbourhood.

Hello, America. I think I know you better now.