What does America mean to me?

People have been asking me this for what feels like my whole life and most of the time I struggle to answer. It's where this blog derives its name from, hireath is probably the best word to describe what America means to me. It's a Welsh word that has no direct translation to English but roughly means "A blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing" (BBC, 2021).

My family left America when I was very young and with two British parents to raise me most of my experience of America as a teen and adult has been from a book or through second hand stories. It's a strange way to cobble together an identity. 

Some of my earliest memories are of the first few months after we moved to the UK when I was learning to be English. That first summer when my parents were so busy trying to establish a new life in a country that they hadn't lived in for over a decade and I was handed some box sets of kids show and left to my own devices. I guess this is where the other half of the definition of hiraeth made it feel so appropriate "a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost" (BBC, 2021). That feeling that my Englishness is pasted over my Americanness, hiding it so well that most people would never know often makes me wonder what it would have been like if I'd only had to be American and never needed to learn how to be something else. 

As I've gotten older the question of "How does an American become British" has flipped. And whereas I turned to DangerMouse, Fawlty Towers, and Basil Brush to teach me at seven how to pass as English. My adult self has turned to Seth Meyers, George Carlin, M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, NPR, and the Constitution. 

Before I flew I watched a comedy special called "What The Constitution Means To Me" by Heidi Schreck. Based on her real life experience as a teen giving debate speeches for prize money to pay for her college education it's a dissection on how the constitution has systematically failed to protect women and people of color. I realised as I watched it that I have been unwittingly giving my own mini renditions for most of the last twenty years. Living in Europe I tended to focus a lot more on the Second Amendment than Heidi does. But, nonetheless, I have armed myself with the Fourteenth Amendment and gone to battle with anyone who dared question my answer to "so, where are you from?"

I've sometimes explained to Europeans that the Pledge of Allegiance or devotion to the Constitution makes total sense in an American context. The USA is, especially at its founding, was more of an idea than a coherent country the way we see in Europe. 

Yes. Those are deliberate attempts to brainwash their children into the belief of a single American identity. You have to understand there are no Charlemanges or Alfreds or Justinians and Theodoras to gather around, leaders who are half mythic and distant partially lost to history. Instead each generation is taught the Constitution, the Founders, and the pledge. This is so that belief in the idea of America can be passed from one generation to the next. We do this in the UK with William the Conqueror, the Reformation, and the 1966 World cup win.

I actually think the US has been really really good at this, to the extent that even most non-Americans can quote parts of its foundations. But I'm missing a lot of the nuances of the day to day aspects. When it comes to understanding how people in the US seem themselves, especially in the so called "flyover states". Mostly rural Western, Midwestern, and some Southern  states where millions of people live. States that have recently been in the forefront in the news as they have a….shall we say creative interpretation of the Nineth Amendment's unenumerated provisions. As Heidi Schreck explains it the Ninth Amendment "Just because the right is not listed in the constitution doesn't mean you don't have it...you have the right to brush your teeth. Yes, you've got it. But how long do you want this document to be!". When Roe vs Wade was over turned in 2022 Supreme Court Justice Thomas recieved a lot of criticism for his brief which implied that an overreliance on the Ninth's provisions of unenumerated rights was the root of Roe's unconstitutionality and allowed for it to be oveturned. 

When I decided that I was going to bite the bullet and quit my job I knew that I wanted to spend some time in the US. I have spent so long, and literally taken university courses, learning the US in theory. I can continue armchair lawyering you on supermen court rulings but what those legal briefs and examples miss is that fundamentally good, kind people will lobby to make political and legislative decisions based on an imperfect ethical framework.

I learned when I was seven and practising my new accent to fit in at school was that the ability to quote Basil Brush is only the foot in the door. Just as to become British I actually had to talk to British people. Any British person who's been trapped on a long plane ride with an overly enthusiastic non-brit (usually American) who is telling you at great length of their love of Monty Python and Downton Abby knows just how incomplete that image is. 

So the next time someone asks me if I've been back to the US since I was a kid I want to be able to say "Yes and I did this amazing trip where I travelled down both coasts and drove Route 66" and that the food in some two stop light town in Texas is amazing. There's so much more nuance to a country that takes up half a continent than can ever be captured in an article or a book or TV show. I did not flyover "flyover states". I want to see the National Mall, the Redwoods of California, try Gumbo even if that's probably a really really bad idea, and work out the purpose of the Bean in Chicago.

So I guess that's why I'm spending the next two and a bit months living out of a backpack and why I named my blog hiraeth. And I guess that's what America means to me. This revolutionary, if extremely flawed, idea codified into a document that acknowledges that it could never capture every nuance it needed to and could certainly never capture the intricacies of the people. But most of all a sense of hiraeth. 

Planned stops

Philadelphia 

Washington DC

Richmond, Va /Colonial Williamsburg 

New Orleans 

Nashville 

Route 66

Chicago, Il

St Louis, Il

Tulsa, Ok

McLean, Tx

Amarillo, Tx

Roswell, Nm

Albuquerque, Nm

Petrified Forest National Park, Az

Flagstaff, Az

Sunset Creater Volcano National Park, Az

Monument Valley, Az

Grand Canyon, Az

Las Vegas, Nv

Needles, Ca

Death Valley National Park, Ca

Los Angeles 

San Francisco 

Portland, Or

Seattle 

Vancouver 

Big sky national park

Yellowstone National Park 

Mount Rushmore 

Chicago 

Niagara falls

Toronto 

Montreal 

Prince Edward Island 

Portland, Me

Boston

New York