We present the seventh in a series of interviews conducted by Tom Sykes, author of the new travelogue The Years of Travelling Anxiously. In this instalment, geologist and political activist Alan Burgess talks about an ill-fated American road trip during which he was incarcerated for illegal immigration – and how he coped with it all.
Tom Sykes (TS): What’s your earliest memory of having anxiety when travelling?
Alan Burgess (AB): The big one was my trip to America in 1979. The anxiety started in England while I was preparing to travel. I had this massive argument with my mother, really visceral, and I wouldn’t let her take me to the airport. I woke up in the middle of the night and I walked with my rucksack from Rusper in Sussex, where I lived, to Gatwick Airport to catch the 6 am flight. It was quite a long distance with a rucksack. But I had this kind of young man’s mentality of ‘I’m going to do this on my own.’
That kicked off a pattern of high anxiety. On the flight over, I found a copy of Newsweek magazine which had an article about prisoners in a US state penitentiary. They were reported as being really beastly to each other, committing extreme violence. They had burned each others’ testicles off and that kind of thing. This, I think, fuelled my subconscious fear and fed into the bad things that happened to me later.
TS: What did you do in the US when you arrived?
AB: I went to stay with a family on their farm in Wisconsin. My family are Irish and that may have been the connection with this family because on Thanksgiving Day the patriarch was a big fan of John F Kennedy.
I started developing bipolar symptoms while staying on this farm. I did crazy things like going to a supermarket and buying a knife – not just any knife, a curved hunting knife with an eight-inch blade the likes of which you never see in England. I had no clue as to what I was going to use it for but to an 18-year-old boy it seemed like an exciting item to own. When I took the knife back to the farm the family were a little bit put off by this aspect of my behaviour.
TS: Did they question you about the knife?
TS: Because you never know in America, people might just think that carrying guns is okay so why not knives?
AB: They had young children and they wanted to know what my intention was with this knife. I said I didn’t have an intention – I hadn’t really thought it through.
TS: Did they ask you to leave?
AB: They did. They told me that I’d been here three weeks and I should make plans to move on. It was November and the snow was beginning to fall in Wisconsin, so I hitchhiked to Florida where I heard it was hot. That felt like a real continental journey and it gave me the sense of the scale of the United States. The land was incredibly flat, especially in states like Indiana, and compared to the geological diversity of the British Isles and its variety of hills and mountains.
While I was walking along a highway the interstate patrol picked me up. I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t realise you can’t walk here.’ They asked me if I was Irish. I said yes and one of the state troopers said, ‘Oh, my great granddaddy’s Irish. Hop in and I’ll give you a ride.’ So I got a ride. This happened a couple of times, actually.
TS: It could have been quite an anxious situation if they’d arrested you or moved you on, but you were able to avoid that by being Irish?
AB: The blarney got me out of trouble time and again. When I arrived in Florida, I got a job as a short order cook in a restaurant and then it closed at Christmas for two weeks. So I went to Lantana Beach and pitched my tent, put my rucksack inside and went round the corner to pick up a burger. And in that time, my rucksack was nicked along with my passport and traveller’s checks. In that situation you’re f***** especially in a hyper-capitalist society like the US.
My anxiety went off the scale. It had been building ever since that row with my mum and my bipolar experience in Wisconsin. My only option was to go back to work in the restaurant.
TS: And that was cash in hand work, presumably?
AB: It was a lifeline. But after work I’d go straight to the bar and American bars don’t really have closing times, so I’d end up spending all my pay in there.
TS: You were still in the tent at that point?
AB: I moved the tent around a bit. Then I met these young guys who were interested in my story. We smoked some reefer together and then one of them nicked my tent and I was homeless.
That was my state of maximum vulnerability and I think the experience has since shaped my politics. If you experience vulnerability, it conjures a compassion for your fellow man. Not that I got much compassion shown towards me in America, because soon after that I bumped into the immigration police. They asked me where I was from. I said Ireland. ‘Where’s your passport?’ ‘I got it nicked.’ ‘Oh, so you’re an illegal immigrant without papers?’ I was gobsmacked – I didn’t have an answer to that. ‘You’re coming downtown with us,’ they said.
Suddenly society was looking at me as the scum of the earth. I’d come from a relatively privileged situation as a tourist but because of unfortunate circumstances, now I was the lowest of the low in the eyes of the state.
TS: Did you try the British embassy?
AB: The nearest consulate was in Atlanta, Georgia but I couldn’t leave the state of Florida. I made a phone call to my brother-in-law Bob to reassure him that I was okay. But I really wasn’t okay.
TS: Did having to pretend not to be anxious make you more anxious in that situation?
AB: Well, I was really head-f***** by that stage. The immigration police put me in a Miami jail.
TS: What was that like?
AB: Pretty horrendous. It was a dormitory block with a dozen people in a dozen beds.
TS: Was it violent?
AB: There were these big Black guys who were inside for cocaine offences. The deal they had with the law was that, if they came off drugs, they were free to go. In order to detox they were doing bench presses and pull-ups all the time. That’s when I remembered the magazine article I’d read on the plane over and I got really frightened. That was peak anxiety because I was convinced that I was going to be raped.
TS: Were you?
AB: I wasn’t.
TS: Were you able to make friends with any other prisoners?
AB: There was a lifer whose job was to look after the newer guys. He was about 50 with grey hair and acted like the father of the dormitory block. He was able to pacify others when they got angry and could mediate between people.
TS: Sounds like a progressive setup for an American prison. But this wasn’t a very high security prison?
AB: It was a jail, which is a different thing to a prison there. It was adjacent to the police station because they had such a high turnover. The types of offences they dealt with would be processed in a day or a week. In my case I had to serve two weeks.
TS: What did you do to pass the time?
AB: There was no kind of recreation. There was nothing to do but lie on your bed day and night. Meals would be brought into the dormitory. Grits and boiled meat, mostly. It was crap. I lost it a few times and shouted at a jail officer, but it had no effect.
I was saved by my sister, Barbara, and the guy who sponsored my visa, Ron, flying out to Florida. When Barbara first saw me she was shocked – I looked like Cat Weasel because I had all this growth on my chin and was very skinny. Ron was an American citizen, so he vouched for me. They paid a fine and I was allowed out. We drove to Atlanta, Georgia, got a passport and flew out the next day.
We eventually got an apology from the American authorities. They said that my situation should never have happened. They have a teenage guardianship policy that should have been followed and it wasn’t.
TS: Does an anxious travel experience like that toughen you up or bring trauma?
AB: I’ve dined out on this story all my life! On the whole, it didn’t do me any harm. I didn’t have lasting trauma from it. I do have trauma from childhood, which has been more difficult to deal with and process. But this particular trip didn’t traumatise me, I don’t think.
