But 46 years ago, nobody was especially interested in it anyway. The whole apparatus of suspicion and fingerprints which now besets the arriving visitor did not even exist. The main problem lay in getting there at all. British visitors to America were in those days greatly restricted by our own government’s refusal to let us spend scarce hard currency abroad. There was a special page in your passport to record how much money you had taken with you. Thus English visitors in America were so rare that I was repeatedly and bafflingly asked if I was Australian. I grasped after a while that this was because I did not speak American properly, and there may in those days have been more Australian visitors to the USA than British ones.

As we rode into Washington on a silver bus which in those days went through Langley, Virginia, I had the great delight of seeing the letters “CIA” actually marking a right-turn lane. Here was the difference between our two nations beautifully encapsulated. Coming from a country which still pretended it did not even have a spy service, the sight was thrilling and shocking. Poor, earnest Jimmy Carter was in the White House, and Ronald Reagan still some way off, but it all still seemed hugely rich and powerful to me.

Even my first American train ride, from the largely boarded-up Union Station in D.C. to the sweaty basement of Penn Station in Manhattan, was thrilling. As we pulled out of the capital, our northbound Metroliner crept past a last ghost of real American rail travel, a train in the lush green and gold livery of the Southern Railway, through whose windows I could see white-jacketed waiters serving mint juleps in the diner to stately gentlemen bound for New Orleans.

I later worried that this must have been a mirage, and it still seems as if it must have been, but the internet allowed me to check the dates. That day was one of the very last times I could have seen such a sight, before the Southern was swallowed up in Amtrak and became just like all the rest. Later, somewhere in New Jersey, we also passed an antique train of cars from the Erie and Lackawanna Railroad, ornate and peeling, a ghost out of the era of Warren Harding.

On another occasion, at a tiny station in Massachusetts I followed the instructions in my Amtrak timetable, and stepped into the middle of the tracks to flag down the oncoming express, which responded by flashing its headlight fiercely at me and hooting wildly, sights and sounds unknown back home. I held my nerve. When the train pulled in the crew were all but weeping with laughter. The requirement to flag the train down had been abolished months before, and they had been wondering what this madman thought he was doing. But why wouldn’t I do this? Trains were America to me (and in a way always will be). To parody Stephen Vincent Benet, “I have fallen in love with American trains, the huge trains that never go fast….” I had seen America in the movies and on TV since I had been a tiny child, and had been left with an impression of a country in which (let us simplify a bit) Monument Valley began where the suburbs of Chicago ended, and where vast continental trains rolled into minuscule wayside towns, so that the hero could step on or off them.

Then, after the obvious sights, we were embraced by the matchless hospitality of Americans. My wife’s Swiss-German uncle, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had married into a Boston family who treated us, cashless, ignorant nobodies from a poor and faraway country, as honored guests. It was hugely moving, and still is, as was our introduction to New England, long days of unlooked-for beauty with frequent intervals for lobster. How could we not fall in love with it? The supersonic journey home, despite the luxury and the champagne, was an unwelcome plunge back into gloom (at supersonic speed, flying east, the evening came on so fast that it was like being smothered).

Well, I went again as soon as I could, and again, and again. I liked it so much that after a posting in Moscow I came to live in D.C. in 1993, in that era an especially exhilarating place to be—or so I then thought, with the Cold War won and the world on the brink of a new birth of liberty. I arrived direct from Siberia via the Bering Strait, a thrilling leap from one planet to another, as it were. We loved almost everything, the heartbreakingly wistful autumn skies in the North-East in the weeks after Labor Day, the neighbors on our shady street who welcomed us and our children without hesitation or reservation, the local volunteer rescue squad, the radio station we helped raise funds for, the local hardware store with its huge axes and storm lanterns, all ready for a hurricane to strike, the glorious ease of travel to anywhere. 

The Washington Metro, clean and new, running through its majestic, vaulted stations, seemed to destroy the idea, until then fixed in my mind, that Americans had chosen private affluence at the price of public squalor. We liked the giant bookstores, the food, the different cadence of the language, the children’s books born from a different civilization (especially one called Blueberries for Sal), the local swim team, the thrilling closeness, in time and space, of the Civil War battlefields and the Founding Fathers. I think Monticello is still my ideal of what a house should be like. We were in love and when, for reasons beyond our control, we had to leave, we felt bereft and perplexed as we watched Manhattan sink below the horizon from the stern of the Cunard liner that took us home.