Fire and Ice

If I had to instruct a stranger on the contrasts between the United States and Britain, I would start with some televised weather reports from the two countries.

In Britain, the weather is presented in a mild, diffident, terribly-sorry-for-the-inconvenience manner. There’s not much variety or excitement. The typical British weatherman appears in front of the camera with his head lowered, shoulders hunched, hands clasped and jacket buttoned. He speaks softly, almost meekly, as if telling a child’s bedtime story. He points to curvy isobars that bend into the country from the sea. They all seem to mean the same thing. He might talk positively about ‘sun and showers’ or ‘sunny spells’, but usually the day will be ‘dull’. In Britain the weather is so lacking in spirit that it is reported apologetically.

In America, on the other hand, the weather is pitched with the verve customarily reserved for a used-car lot. American weathermen report the next day’s outlook as if they were trying to sell it to you. There’s always a lot to talk about and big things are happening out there. Most prognostications are delivered in a you’re-not-going-to-believe-me tone of voice. There are heatwaves in one part of the country and blizzards in another. Hot fronts and cold fronts march across the map. A freeze oozes ominously down from the Canadian wastes, and a tropical storm builds up in the Caribbean. American weather is raucous, and so are American weathermen.

American weather is also intimidating in a manner you hardly ever see in the equable British climate. Americans know their weather and they watch it warily. In my wife’s home town in South Carolina, for example, the heat comes early in the year, balmy and lulling at the start of spring. But by the summer high it spreads out across the land like a heavy duvet. You can almost cup the humidity in your hands, and it’s impossible to take more than a few steps without breaking into a glistening sweat. There is no relief at night. And when it rains there, it rains apocalyptically. The heat gathers itself up in a darkening sky, and by the afternoon there is a still, humid anticipation that something epic is about to burst. The trees rustle and the land goes quiet until a sudden split of lightning streaks across the black heaven and a cracking slip of thunder makes the clouds rumble. The earth shakes and the rain comes down as if the bottom of the sky had collapsed under its weight. It beats against the land in fat, hammering drops, filling the streets with torrents.

As rainy as it is in Britain, it never rains this way. Here, the sky looks like a grey veil. It often seems about to rain but it takes for ever to get on with it. And when the rain finally comes, it sprays down as if the sky had sprung a couple of small leaks, and you think more of nourishment than calamity.

The American climate can be so quixotic and so destructive that the federal government and the National Weather Service have established a network of 450 radio transmitters across the nation to beam warnings of potential hazards to unwary communities, and commercial radio stations are required to test their civil emergency systems at regular intervals. An American cable television channel offers twenty-four-hour coverage of the weather. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is geared to respond to the natural disasters that regularly afflict the nation, and a president or state governor runs major political risks if he fails to react swiftly enough to a civil calamity.

The moderation of British weather and the volatility of American weather fit naturally with the character of the two countries. The climate in Britain is hardly ever out of sorts. A wind storm or drought are major aberrations. Except for the swings of daylight, it’s sometimes difficult to tell one season from another, so subtle are the shifts in pattern.

American weather is the opposite. A meteorological study once concluded that there were two places on earth which could boast the world’s worst weather; the Gobi Desert and Amarillo, Texas. For extremes of heat, cold, wind, rain and so forth, it’s hard to beat Amarillo. But what is true of Texas is more or less true of the rest of the country as well. In 1995, a heatwave incinerated the Midwest and East Coast with temperatures as high as 43°C reported daily for a week. On average there are 106 complete days of fog in the appropriately named Cape Disappointment, Washington, and in nearby and inappropriately named Paradise 3, 109 cm of snow fell in the winter of 1972. And in the winter of 1993, the wind chill temperature in Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin touched -33°C.

Drizzle and sunny spells in Britain. The climate is moderate and restrained, with no extremes of anything, and so the isle is green and providential. Fire and ice in America. The climate is fearsome and doesn’t work by half-measures.