Last of the summer beer

It's a shame that American beer has such a poor reputation abroad. Budweiser and its ilk have a lot to answer for, because one of the most pleasant surprises about moving to California has been discovering the high quality and wide variety of the local brews. This came as a particular delight after so many years of drinking flat, lukewarm lager in London pubs.

Sure, the names Bud, Coors, and Miller can still be spotted in most places where drinkers gather here (and the dreaded word "lite" is rarely far behind), but almost every local bar and corner store will also sell at least a few far superior all-American alternatives. Some of these lesser-known beers are made locally, while others are shipped in from neighbouring states, but almost are made by small-scale, microbrew-style operations.

In fact, sometimes the choice can be quite bewildering. The bar closest to my work offers 17 different beers on draft, and is by no means an exception. To make room, bars will often mount taps on both the front and back of the bar area (which can make it tough for short-sighted foreigners like myself to work out what's available). And, just in case all that choice wasn't enough, most local breweries also produce a few seasonal beers to spice things up a little at different times of the year.

Which brings me to the sad news that the beer which has become my favourite since arriving on these shores is currently nowhere to be found. Skinny Dip, made by the New Belgium Brewing Company in Colorado, is a summer beer and therefore unavailable for the next few months. I had my last bottle (pictured above) a few weeks ago and now face a long wait until spring for my next.

Our time apart is going to be made even more difficult by the fact that I'm not a big fan of the winter beers now appearing all over town. Admittedly, these dark, spicy ales would be perfect to sip while sitting next to a warming fire on a nasty December night back home in the UK. But here in San Francisco, despite the grumbling of the locals, the weather never strays very far beyond a kind of half-hearted attempt at autumn, so fiercely festive winter warmers seem strangely out of place – kind of like Christmas decorations on palm trees (another fairly common sight around here).

At times it feels as if people here are actually pining for bad weather, just to make their winter experience more authentic. And maybe there will come a time when I'm one of them, but right now the only thing I'm missing is my summer beer.

En fuego

Summer in California means wildfire season, and this year's is looking set to be one of the worst ever. A rare lightning storm last month ignited forest fires across the state, and the fire services have been battling ever since to get them under control.

The scale of the problem is hard to comprehend. California has huge areas of natural woodland, and recent winters have been drier than normal. All that dense, dry underbrush is just waiting for a spark, and once the flames take hold they're hard to stop. The recent fires have burned more than 1,300 square miles of land, an area twice the size of Greater London. At one point there were a total of 1,781 individual blazes, apparently a state record. That this total is now down to under 300 is partly due to the efforts of the 20,000 firefighters tackling them, but also because many of the smaller blazes combined to form larger conflagrations.

Here in San Francisco, the only sign of the fires still burning comes when the wind swings round to the wrong direction, blowing smoke over the city like a dense smog. The air becomes noticeably harder to breath, and sunsets take on an apocalyptic beauty. But earlier this year, during a visit to Tahoe, I went for a walk through the "burn zone" (pictured) which had been left near where we were staying by a major fire there in 2007. The ground was still scorched down to the dirt and, while the black stumps of some trees had been left standing, others had been consumed completely. All that remained of them were holes in the ground where their roots had continued to smolder down into the earth.

But, like earthquakes, the threat of devastating wildfires is just a fact of life in California. My wife and I visited Malibu for a wedding in October last year, and the rehearsal dinner was held in the groom's parent's house, which had a spectacular view over this celebrity-strewn stretch of southern Californian coastline. It looks like the safest place in the world, but the groom's father told me that the family's first home on the same spot had been destroyed by a wildfire a few years before. He was philosophical about it, saying that they had been able to rebuild and, while they had lost almost everything, at least they were all alive and well.

This was true, of course, but I was still surprised at how relaxed he seemed about it all. Then, just over a week later another series of fires broke out in southern California, one of which led to the evacuation of Malibu and the destruction of some homes there. And then the same thing happened again in November. With the help of good insurance, it's amazing what you can get used to living with.

Me-Haul

Like Hoover in the UK, U-Haul has become a byword for the service it offers. But, as a Brit, my only previous contact with this removal behemoth was in American films and TV shows, where characters who move house never seem to want any generic rental truck: it is always a U-Haul.

The reality, of course, is far less glamorous than such starry introductions led me to expect. Our recent house move was split over two separate days, and the two trucks we hired had over a third of a million miles on the clock between them - and it showed.

They were both Arizona-registered GMC trucks of a characteristically American build: longer, wider and several tons heavier than they needed to be. The exaggerated proportions make you feel like a little kid in comparison. This feeling is magnified when get into the cab and instantly sink deep into the enormous, pillow-soft bench seat. This also causes the far end of the bonnet (and pretty much anything within 50 feet of it) to disappear behind the towering dashboard.

The wheezing engine of the first truck I hired managed to polish off an impressive six gallons of petrol in the space of just 40 miles, all driven at a necessarily pedestrian pace. Meanwhile, the slushy suspension of both trucks caused them to tilt drunkenly into corners, quickly displacing any less-than-perfectly packed cargo in the back. (U-Haul tries to turn this last peculiarity into a selling point, by writing the words “gentle-ride” on the side of the vans in big letters.)

At least the brakes worked, a miracle considering our ridiculously steep street. Or at least they did once I discovered where they were. It turns out that what we call the “hand” brake in Britain is sometimes located on the far left of the foot well here, like an extra foot brake (which probably explains why it’s called the “emergency” brake in America). However, this is not the sort of thing you really want to have to work out while sitting in a fully loaded 3.5-ton truck on a one-in-four gradient.

When I dropped off the first truck in Oakland, I asked one of the workers when (or if) the trucks are ever retired. “Oh, they just go on forever,” she breezed, before insisting that important parts are normally replaced prior to them falling off or failing completely. And these beasts certainly had been worked on: neither of them had a body part that hadn’t been dented or scraped at some point. Major damage is patched and repaired, but minor injuries are left like scars.

Unfortunately, the staff at my second U-Haul location, this time in San Francisco, were rather less friendly. They refused to rent me a truck on account of my weird foreign driving licence, blithely ignoring the fact that I had successfully rented a truck from the same company a few days earlier.

Anyone labouring under the delusion that the States is some utopia of flawless customer service has obviously never suffered the contemptuous indifference of a U-Haul employee doing their very best to be as unhelpful as they possibly can. After our initial “U-Haul requires a US driving licence” / “you didn’t last week” exchanges proved fruitless, the woman serving me offered to consult a higher authority. Confident that right would be done, I agreed, not suspecting for a second that she would begin her telephone call upstairs with a line as brilliantly unhelpful as: “We can’t hire trucks to foreigners, can we?”

So I located a friend with a Californian licence, he hired the truck for me and our stuff was moved. But, just as I began to feel an entirely unexpected wave of fuzzy nostalgia for all the crappy Transit-type vans I hired to shift my belongings around London, I remembered that none of them were ever called upon to drive several thousand miles across the continental United States. Nor, it should be noted, would they be as useful in a game of chicken.

A-political

When I recently visited the town of Monterey, which lies just over 100 miles south of San Francisco, the town was filled with strange signs saying either "Yes on A" or "No on A". Disappointingly, this wasn't a surrealist campaign concerning that pushy, me-first letter of the alphabet (and, in a town whose name manages to include an "a" sound without need for the letter itself, such militant feelings would perhaps be understandable). Instead, it referred to Proposition A, a local political initiative being put before the voters there today (5 June 2007).

I was quite tickled by these cryptic posters which seemed like a send up of the meaningless slogans politicians love to trot out these days (the Labour and Conservative party website front pages, for example, currently feature the headlines "Join the winning team" and "The future for Britain" - it doesn't really matter which is which). But a bit of asking around and a visit to the Monterey County Elections website revealed that Proposition A - along with its excitingly named siblings B and C - concern the county's Orwellian-sounding General Plan, a set of policies that define the area's long-term planning and land-use policy.

More specifically, Prop A is a vote on whether or not to amend the county's 1982 plan. Prop B, meanwhile, seeks to repeal a new, 2006 plan - the existence of which one would think makes the 1982 version rather redundant, with or without amendment. And Prop C, seemingly ignorant of Prop B's plans, perversely wants to enact the 2006 version. Keeping up at the back? No wonder the posters didn't go into specifics.

It turns out that this confusing tangle is a common occurrence here, thanks to the fact that California - like many US states - lets its citizens create, change or repeal laws without waiting for their legislators to do it for them. The only restriction is that you need to submit a suitably large petition in support of your plan to get it on to ballot papers. At the local county level where I am in San Francisco city, you need just over 10,000 names, while a California state initiative requires 434,000 signatures (the latter may sound like a lot, but it is only about 1.3 per cent of the state's 34 million-strong population - also, bear in mind that a recent petition on the Downing Street website attacking the Government's road pricing plans attracted 1.8 million signatures despite the fact that it had no power to change anything at all).

The relative simplicity of this process means voters here can end up with a bewildering array of choices on election day. In the November 2004 general election, voters in San Francisco not only had to pick candidates for the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and a whole bunch of local offices, but also had to decide whether they supported or opposed no less than 32 separate state-wide and county-level initiatives.

To add to the confusion, many propositions and measures are - like those in Monterey - overlapping or contradictory. For example, one may seek to increase funding to schools by 2.5 per cent, the next may want to increase funding by an additional percentage point or two but make the whole thing performance-related, and a third may seek to increase funding on a sliding scale of 3.25 to 9.5 per cent, with the exact amount to be decided by how far a randomly picked group of parents can throw their children on a TV show created specifically for this purpose ("Do you really want little Jimmy to learn? Then let's see him fly!").

And then an electorate desperate to secure any improved funding for schools might vote in favour of them all - it seems the paradox of choice isn't restricted to supermarkets here.

Incidentally, anyone interested in finding out what happens to the A in Monterey (as well as the B and C, presumably), should be able to find the results via either the local Monterey Herald newspaper, or the official Monterey County website.

Footnote: The townspeople of Monterey also seem to have a peculiar Brit-fetish. The town centre is home to no less than five "British" pubs (the London Bridge, Britannia Arms, Mucky Duck, Crown & Anchor and Bulldog) and one strange little shop selling British goods.Despite doing extensive research (okay, so I looked up Wikipedia) I can't find any good reason for this: Monterey was the California state capital under first Spanish and then Mexican rule, and only became part of the wider United States after the war of independence. In fact, the only vaguely British connections I can find are that Robert Louis Stevenson stayed there for a couple of months in 1879 (hardly notable when John Steinbeck was a Monterey resident for many years) and Francis Drake sailed past the then-townless bay in 1579. Any pointers on the missing transatlantic link gratefully received.

Shop local

Wandering home the other day, I decided to take a closer look at one of the small shops just round the corner from my new flat: High Bridge Arms Inc. Actually, I only intended to have a nosey peek in from the outside but, as I cupped my hand to the glass to try to see what lay behind the rather dusty camouflage netting in the window, the door buzzed to let me in. At that point it seemed rude to stay standing outside - and it's probably best to be as polite as you can be with your neighbourhood arms dealer.

Of course, not every street corner in SF has a gun shop - far from it. A quick search of the local Yellow Pages lists only one other gunsmith in the city, and slightly confusingly that one appears to also sell cosmetics and fragrances. (Now there's a great retail combination: "Come on down to Betty's Bullets'n'Beauty Supplies - everything you need to knock him dead or take him out".)

Inside High Bridge, glass cabinets display rows of square-edged handguns lying on top of the kind of plastic cases that - in my experience, at least - usually hold power tools. There are also all sorts of bullets, knives, handcuffs and T-shaped batons on offer, while a rack behind the counter holds a selection of shotguns with a uniformly urban rather than country gent aesthetic - all utilitarian plastic in place of the polished walnut I'm more used to seeing on the one type of firearm still legal in the UK. In fact, almost everything for sale here seems to be matt black.

It was a surprise to see guns being sold without reference - no matter how spurious - to sport, in the shape of either hunting animals or target shooting. But, as the "law enforcement supplies" sign outside implies, these guns aren't being sold for fun. The posters and catalogues for gun manufacturers such as SigArms and Glock remain pointedly neutral, while others for the likes of BlackHawk tactical nylons (a company which disappointingly doesn't supply tights to the special forces) use images of black-clad figures in ski masks waving their laser sights through smoke-filled rooms to full effect.

I suppose at least there is an honesty to this, but not one that is particularly comforting.