Only in America. Matt Frei
house we eventually ended up calling home has Georgian-style windows, flanked by duck-egg blue wooden shutters and a façade of whitewashed brick distressed less by age than by bitter winters and baking summers. It is described as ‘genuine colonial’, which means it was built in 1953.
The shutters on our house don’t open or close. They have been nail-gunned to the walls and are only for show. Most of the house is made of wood, so fragile that a small troupe of termites could devour it as a mid-morning snack. If our house is ‘colonial’, then the one on our left might as well be ‘imperial’, or ‘impérial’. It has a hint of Versailles about it, offering the faintest architectural nod towards a miniature French château. Three doors down is a log cabin, which looks as if it has been beamed down from Montana via the Swiss Alps. It is hideous. Across the road is the last antebellum – pre-Civil War – residence in Washington, which means that the vultures from the local planning commission guard it as if it were the Holy Grail. Two hundred and thirty years ago the whole area was a vineyard planted by George Washington. Today it could be an international exhibition of different architectural styles. Curiously, this mishmash has conspired to produce a very attractive street. What all the houses have in common is that they are overshadowed and threatened by a cluster of enormous trees. The District of Columbia takes no responsibility for trees growing on private property and, since ‘tree work’ is even more expensive than ‘face work’, the willows, oaks and poplars have been allowed to grow to an obscene height.
As a result we await every hurricane season with trepidation. Not only could our fragile house be blown away by a robust wind but it is ‘challenged’ by a poplar that is more than 100 feet tall and hangs over our ‘colonial’ residence like the Sword of Damocles. It could slice our house in half like cheese wire. During the hurricane season the Freis sleep badly in the basement. Penny pins her hopes on the fact that the previous tenant was the founder of the Sierra Club, America’s most influential lobby for tree lovers.
Although we live a mere fifteen minutes from the White House and three minutes from the Homeland Security compound – the mega-agency that controls a staff of over 170,000 bureaucrats and is the nerve centre of America’s ‘war on terror’ – the power cables in our street droop like washing lines attached to flimsy poles, above roads pitted with potholes the size of bathtubs. I have seen better roads in Mozambique. The last tropical storm dislodged a branch which ploughed through the cables, plunging Tilden Street into darkness for a whole week, disabling the telephones and the TV. When we finally got hooked up to civilization again it was thanks to Barbara, our neighbour and street kommissar. Barbara, a sturdy fifty-year-old matriarch who wears starched jeans and sports a flowing mane of grey hair, organizes everything from the Labor Day neighbourhood working breakfast – ‘a new season brings new challenges’ – to the Earth Day ‘neighbourhood trash sweep’ – ‘this year I am counting on all the Freis!’ – to the bruising trench warfare with the private school at the end of the road and its team of bedraggled architects. For Barbara getting the power back on line is a cinch. It is a battle she has fought and won many times. After two decades of storms she knows who to call, when, and how to threaten them. In fact, she prefers to outsource the small stuff to her neighbour and understudy, Susan, so that she can focus on the mother of all battles: getting the District of Columbia education department to authorize a new playground and clean up the tangled jungle of poison ivy, rampant bamboo and leaning willows otherwise known as Hearst Park. Barbara, whose own children have grown up, genuinely cares about the safety of ours. ‘We need new blood on Tilden Street!’ is her battle cry to get the playground fixed and to minimize the menace and maximize the attractions of our little corner of Washington. With whatever nasty surprises lie in wait for Osama bin Laden’s least favourite city, I want Barbara on my side and by my side. When she isn’t berating us about our neighbourly negligence she seeks to protect us, mainly via e-mail circulars. ‘Beware the swarm of bees on the corner of Idaho and Tilden’ read one. ‘My dog and I were bitten this morning!’
Barbara is the boss and although our neighbours include the former head of the American Peace Corps, two senior partners in a big law firm, the CEO of a biotech firm, a nuclear scientist, a deacon and the chief of staff of one of America’s best-known senators, it is Barbara who runs Tilden Street. It was Barbara who gave the reluctant nod to the wooden fence in our front garden, erected to prevent our small children from spilling over onto the street and being run over. When Alice, our fourth child and the only genuine American in our ranks, was born at nearby Sibley Hospital, it became even more important to herd our brood into a secure location. Some of the neighbours couldn’t be deterred from their displeasure. The Frei fence ruined the ‘line’ of the street. It was Barbara who organized the ‘working brunch’ in her house to discuss the controversial school extension at the end of the road. As we sat around her plush living room with adhesive name tags on our shirts, munching on bagels and smoked salmon, Barbara took us patiently through a PowerPoint presentation, outlining each aspect of the extension as if she was planning a counterinsurgency. The detail was as mind-boggling as the earnest-ness with which it was delivered. I snuck out after two hours feeling as if I had walked out in the middle of a High Mass. The next day Barbara accosted me in the street: ‘I know why you had to leave early,’ she said with a mixture of menace and sympathy. ‘The kids must keep you so busy!’
I was seized by paranoia. Had she seen me sneaking out and then chatting to my neighbour for half an hour? Did she know that my wife had taken the kids to the zoo and that my childminding services weren’t even required? Had my facial twitches revealed the fact that I was bored to death by the whole presentation?
Barbara’s PowerPoint briefing is part of a civic spirit that has thrived in parts of Washington – and in much of the rest of America – despite, or perhaps because of, the increasing transience of modern life. Almost none of our neighbours was born in Washington or grew up here. They have all lived elsewhere, many have been posted overseas, and yet they all behave as if they are tenth-generation residents in a Shropshire hamlet. When I first walked down Tilden Street to case the neighbourhood, two future neighbours stopped their cars and asked me what I was doing. The British accent immediately reassured them and news that we had just bought the Tuplings’ house triggered smiles and a wave of questions about our children. One ageing neighbour reiterated Barbara’s call for new blood in the place, making me wonder whether we had just bought into a suburban version of Rosemary’s Baby. But the Tilden Street solidarity has been a refreshing experience. If we forget to lock our front door at night we don’t wake up in a cold sweat. When Penny’s father passed away suddenly in January 2005, Lisa, one of our friends, who was born in Kentucky, turned up on the doorstep with baked rigatoni: ‘In the South it is a tradition to cook for our neighbours when they are busy grieving.’ This was a first. Steve and Betsy’s daughters Olivia and Mona regularly babysit ours. In Rome we lived in a three-hundred-year-old block of flats that was still inhabited by the descendants of the noble family for whom it was originally built. In five years we barely managed to extract a greeting from our neighbours, let alone a bowl of rigatoni. In Hong Kong the couple living below us regularly had screaming rows that went from threats of homicide to protestations of passion, finishing only about three hours before we had to get up with our young children. Our relationships could best be described as AMA – assured mutual annoyance. In Singapore the house next door was deserted apart from those days when it was apparently used by the secret service for interrogations. So the whole neighbourly package on Tilden Street came to us as a novel and welcome surprise.
What also cements the spirit of Tilden Street are the annual rituals, repeated all over America. On Memorial Day, which marks the beginning of a sweltering summer, the Stars and Stripes are displayed in a flurry of patriotic fervour, even though almost everyone in our street is a sworn Democrat and hates George W. Bush. Under the red STOP sign at the top of the street, one wag has added the letters BUSH! Before Halloween the street is transformed into a witch’s cavern, with fake skeletons, giant spider’s webs and glowing skulls adorning every porch and front garden. Even the neighbours without children feel the urge to hang a few cobwebs from their front door or prop a glowing cauldron on the lawn.
A few weeks later, when the last Halloween gourd has rotted, it is time for the Christmas fairy lights. Barbara deploys a twinkling regiment of reindeer and sledges. Her next-door neighbours have gone one better: the single sparkling