An teenage affair with America that has lasted a lifetime

Laid up in bed, Cameron Stewart’s bored gaze fell upon the America wall map, and stuck. Decades later he is still looking.

Cameron Stewart's travels in America.

Cameron Stewart

@camstewarttheoz

4 min read

12:00AMJanuary 02, 2023.

Updated 9:11AMJanuary 03, 2023

It was a lucky break that led me to my first true love: a spiral fracture of the tibia to be precise. Breaking my leg while skiing in Victoria’s high country when I was 16 left me stuck in a bed in a sparsely furnished room with just one thing on the wall – a map of America.

I was sore, sorry, bedridden and bored. So I passed the days by staring at the map, soaking in every one of the 50 US states until, somewhat tragically, I could recite them in geographical order. Did you know Iowa is directly under Minnesota? I did.

It might have ended there, before our first date. But the next year my father, a history buff, moved to upstate New York to study for a year. I went to visit him and before long I was strolling the civil war battlefield at Gettysburg, tracing George Washington’s victory over the Brits at Yorktown and learning about the quirks of American history. I was intrigued by how the battlefields of the American Civil War were such solemn sites, because that terrible war against each other still haunts American souls. Yet the battlefields of their victorious War of Independence bear no such pain so they are more like a celebratory Disneyland, full of tacky souvenir shops and flag-waving folk in period costumes. I came back home wanting to learn more about this strange country. A flame was lit inside me.

Two years later, at 19, I went back and travelled across the country by bus. It was a trip in search of the America that I had found in books such as On the Road, Catcher in the Rye, Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I remember arriving in Vegas on the midnight bus sitting next to a 200cm African-American man who invited me to hang out with him while he gambled. We roamed from casino to casino all night long while he lost more and more money and got ever more drunk. He finally exploded, telling me I was a “bad luck charm’’ who needed to get lost. I did.

From the windows of my Greyhound bus the cities began to blur into each other but I met enough God-fearing farmers, big-city liberals and random eccentrics to further feed my curiosity. So much about America made little sense to my teenage mind, which might be why it felt so compelling. The northern states were like a different country compared with the south. How could one country contain such wild contrasts, I wondered? How could terrible urban ghettos sit alongside NASA space centres?

I had no idea then that my first love would also become my future home when this newspaper sent me twice, for almost eight years, to be its US correspondent, first to New York and then to Washington. Suddenly it wasn’t completely useless for me to know, courtesy of my broken leg, that Iowa was under Minnesota.

I arrived in New York in 1996 with a toddler and a baby in tow, living for the next 3½ years in a high-rise building in Manhattan where we were, by some way, the poorest tenants. Our building was 44 floors high, each floor commanding more rent and better views, so we lived near the bottom. Each Halloween I took my little kids for trick-and-treat straight up to the top-floor penthouses where wealthy Upper East Side matrons draped in pearls and holding white poodles would fill the kids’ buckets with more candy than a Hershey’s factory.

It was a golden time to live in New York. The mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, had cleaned the city of major crime, a new show called Sex and the City was being filmed on street corners, and we would catch up with friends for drinks on the top floor of the World Trade Centre.

In 1996 I was lucky enough to cover my first of three US presidential campaigns, which ended with me standing outside the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas, on election night watching a victorious Bill Clinton walk out with wife Hillary and a teenage Chelsea.

As a correspondent in the US I quickly learned that having an Australian accent opened doors and got me out of sticky situations. Once, finding myself the only white person in a bad part of Atlanta, a kindly African-American man spared me from a possible beating by his mates by telling them “he ain’t white, he’s Australian”.

Twenty years later, when I was returned as the paper’s Washington correspondent, my accent gave me a similar get-out-of-jail free card at Donald Trump’s rallies. Whereas the Trump crowd would berate and scream at the so-called American “fake news media”, they were often so surprised to stumble across a journalist from Australia that they were more inclined to buy me a beer than yell at me.

As intoxicating as it was to cover the Trump era, there were times when America tested my relationship with it. These included standing outside the Capitol in Washington as it was being invaded by thugs, or arriving outside a school after yet another gunman had shot his classmates, or stepping around dozens of homeless people sleeping out in the snow.

One day a policeman in Washington even put a gun to the head of our chocolate labrador and threatened to shoot her after she ran, tail wagging, towards his police horse.

But for me the good always outweighed the bad. The relentless optimism of Americans and their can-do spirit is infectious. Add to that the gobsmacking beauty of their canyons, mountains and deserts and mesmerising metropolises such as New York and New Orleans.

My youngest son, who was just 12 when we returned home to Melbourne in 2021 after four years in Washington, wanted to go back in June last year to attend a summer camp in Virginia with his best American school friend. I said to him, “Are you sure? There’s a lot of Americana at summer camps – they raise the flag at dawn each day and sing the anthem and a bugle plays the last post as it is lowered each evening …” But he chose to go anyway, spending the days hiking, swimming and playing basketball and nights around the campfire roasting marshmallows and hearing American stories. “The best three weeks of my life,” he declared with a grin as we picked him up from camp. “Can I go again next year, please, please?”

It made me think about the sins of the father. Is America also going to become my young son’s first love? Will he one day say to me: “Hey Dad, did you know that Iowa is under Minnesota?”

Cameron Stewart is an associate editor at The Australian.

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An teenage affair with America that has lasted a lifetime

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