What makes America’s heart beat? Roads. No other civilisation is so in thrall to the Roman-esque facilitation of travel as the citizens of the United States. Great highways are not divided and watered down by tributaries and offshoots and streams and roundabouts in these United States, they flow manfully deep into the crux of the metropolis, washing hard against the skyscrapers and tenements, flowing evenly like canals as they criss-cross the cities.

Just as they bulge like foaming insulation from the city maps they seek absolute freedom in the countryside. Countryside is not, however, an American word. In England the countryside is where the fields meet the trees, and where both are studded, self-deprecatingly, by the humble A roads.

America’s forests do not allow of taming. Cut them down, shoot roads through them like bullets through concrete, you will only divide them. They are not encircled. The great lakes are small storage for the American’s dreams. Where the British keep their happy memories in their fishing ponds and brooks, the American mind is surrounded on all sides by the void of the unconscious.

We lounge out of Cambridge, taking wrong turns around the turnpike, until we hit the freeway. After an hour’s driving past out of town shopping malls, restaurants and gas stations we leave the fast lane and pass straight into Stephen King neighbourhood. We spin around a Burger King by accident a couple of times, finally getting onto a country road. We immediately stop to buy cheese, salad and bread for the trip up to Conway and the White Mountains. The non-hurricane proof one-story store used to sell petrol, but a hand-written sign placed in front of the pump says CLOSED BECAUSE OF RECESSION.

Back in Portsmouth, over breakfast, a couple from Boston gave us a bunch of maps and the smart directions to get up into the heights via Kancamanga and the Spalding Pike. They tell us that we can shave off a couple of hours if we avoid the usual way the tourist maps recommend. We follow their instructions as best we can. The Burger King episode is a minor blip in an otherwise easy journey.

We cross a couple of bridges, weaving inland and out again, following route 95 towards Dover and Concord, scene of the first battle of the Revolution.

On the boat trip yesterday we heard that the first true action of the war was the storming of a munitions store on the Piscataqua. Five colonials conscripted to guard the store by the British were besieged by a few hundred locals. The conscripts opened fire on the besiegers, but aimed their muskets high into the air to avoid shooting down their neighbours. The weapons were captured and distributed around town. It was said that every preacher’s pulpit in Portsmouth sat on top of a cache of gunpowder.

Mum and dad are changing over driving duties. Mum jumps into the driving seat bemoaning the fact she has to hill-start the big 4 x 4. We’re in the true country now, ringed by thick woodland. It starts to rain, heavily. We’re rising into the mountains, and into the mist. It’s 62 degrees outside now, and falling. The lakes and rivers are high, barely a foot below the road, and the forests seem to be drowning in all the moisture. Now and then we pass a clearing in the woods with a sign featuring a bear dressed as Uncle Sam advertising maple products. Route 16 passes through Conway on its way to Flume Gorge and an outlet village. A smattering of traffic leads us further towards Maine and the scenic areas of northern New Hampshire. The White Mountains are all around us, seething with carpets of steam. The name is appropriate; they’re enshrouded with low cloud for 300 days a year. The first place we stop in the Mountains is a fast running river that we’ve followed for twenty miles or so after the first steep rise. I open the car door and shuffle the umbrella open, hoping desperately that it doesn’t become sodden and useless within seconds of entering the downpour. Running over mud and

 It’s hard to tell at times how high we really are; the initial jumps in altitude seem to be balanced out by sudden headlong slides back into the dense carpet of the multitudinous valleys that form the patchwork quilt at the base of the mountain range. We stop a couple of times, more to attune ourselves to the shock of the change in temperature and atmosphere of the last two hours driving.

At last we jump back onto the highway having crossed the mountains; we see signs for Flume Gorge again. Mum suggests we check it out, so we roll up into a nearly empty car park surrounded by high cliffs and spotted here and there with raised mounds of earth bearing bent-over maple trees. The visitor centre is a log cabin structure with a little carp pond out front. The rain has shifted to drizzle now so the surface of the pond wriggles under the deluge. No carp are visible beneath the surface. We pay our money and pass through the visitor centre, past the cafe and gift shop and out onto a black asphalt trail that runs through the trees presumably up to the gorge. Two huge standing stones greet us; a plaque commemorates them as having been split by the force of a glacier that ran through the valley, creating the present gorge and leaving high walls like an entrance hall of jagged granite into which we pass. The asphalt stops at the gorge; from here we’re walking along a wooden walkway greased to a golden smooth finish by the perpetual spray from the river. I took a video on Pip’s camera of us trudging up the slippery walkway into the narrowest point of the gorge. We’re soaked through and dripping with the sheets of moisture that roll between the rock faces and beneath the umbrella I’m trying desperately to protect the camera with. Pip is laughing, running out ahead out of me and I’m a little embarrassed to be so uncertain on my feet, one hand on the glossy maple handrail.