THE EDITORIAL WE

Not from Around Here

It is the spring of 1964 and a white Volkswagen Beetle loaded with immigrants and their belongings hurtles south on the Golden State Highway in northern California en route to Los Angeles. They are making good time. The young mother and her three children left Vancouver, British Columbia—their way station on the immigration trail from Great Britain—the day before, and now they are approaching Red Bluff, some eight hundred miles south. They are traveling at ninety miles an hour.

“Isn’t it lovely to be driving on an American freeway, children?” the mother says in an ethereal voice not unlike that of Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins. “You can go as fast as you like!” The round-faced seven-year-old boy in the front passenger seat puts down the map he has been wrestling with to gaze at the impressively maxed-out speedometer.

The round-faced boy—the navigator on this voyage of discovery—is me. My younger brother is wedged in among cardboard boxes in the back seat. Behind him, in the luggage slot, is my two-year-old sister. And behind my sister, a tiny flashing red light is vaguely discernible in the distance.

Everything is fresh and exciting in the Golden State. The orange globes that rotate above Union 76 filling stations like minor planets. Fritos, my first taste of corn in any form other than flakes, bought at a dimly lit saloon where gnarled men wrap themselves around bottles of Schlitz at eleven in the morning and leer after the sylphlike woman with the British accent. Oil derricks and palm trees—both of which I’ve glimpsed only on TV.

What excites me most is the thought of being reunited with my father. He ventured south half a year earlier to get settled. I have heard tales of the gleaming 1963 Ford Falcon that awaits us and the apartment with glints of colored glass in its stuccoed ceilings and the surfers and the freeway cloverleafs. And I am bursting with anticipation. Thank goodness for a land without speed limits.

The highway patrolman finally catches up with us and waves my mother over.

“Ma’am, do you have any idea how fast you were going?” he asks incredulously.

“Oh, yes!” my mother replies. “I was going ninety miles an hour.”

The officer exhales sharply. “The speed limit is sixty-five, Ma’am.”

“Well, you see, I thought people could go as fast as they liked.”

The patrolman considers the evidence that my mother is not from around here, not from this hemisphere, possibly not of this earth. Kindly, he lets her off with a warning. We continue on our way, deflated now, to fifty years of similar misunderstandings and embarrassments, after which we will begin to feel at least a little bit like Americans.

—DAVID BRITTAN
EDITOR