No one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in the Clinch Mountains above the town of Sneedville in northeastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons (no one knows where the name comes from) have most of the characteristics of Europeans-blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build-but a dark, almost Negroid skin coloring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names--Bro-gan, Collins, Mullins-but no one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been. They are as much of a mystery as the lost settlers of Roanoke Island. Indeed, it has been suggested that they may be the lost settlers of Roanoke.
Peter Dunn, a colleague at the Independent in London, put me onto the Melungeon story when he heard that I was going to that part of the world, and kindly dug out an article he had done for the Sunday Times Magazine some years before. This was illustrated with remarkable photographs of Melungeons. It is impossible to describe them except to say that they looked like white Negroes.
They were simply white people with very dark skins. Their appearance was, to say the least, striking. For this reason they have long been outcasts in their own county, consigned to shacks in the hills in an area called Snake Hollow. In Hancock County, "Melungeon" is equivalent to
"Nigger." The valley people-who are themselves generally poor and backward-regard the Melungeons as something strange and shameful, and the Melungeons as a consequence keep to themselves, coming down from the mountains only at widely scattered intervals to buy provisions.
They don't like outsiders. Neither do the valley people. Peter Dunn told me that he and the photographer who accompanied him were given a reception that ranged from mild hostility to outright intimidation. It was an uncomfortable assignment. A few months later a reporter from Time magazine was actually shot near Sneedville for asking too many questions.
So you can perhaps imagine the sense of foreboding that seeped over me as I drove up Tennessee Highway 31 through a forgotten landscape of poor and scattered tobacco farms, through the valley of the twisting Clinch River, en route to Sneedville. This was the seventh poorest county in the nation and it looked it. Litter was adrift in the ditches and most of the farmhouses were small and unadorned. In every driveway there stood a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back window, and where there were people in the yards they stopped what they were doing to watch me as I passed. It was late afternoon, nearly dusk, when I reached Sneedville. Outside the Hancock County Courthouse a group of teenagers were perched on the fronts of pickup trucks, talking to each other, and they too stared at me as I passed. Sneedville is so far from anywhere, such an improbable destination, that a strangers car attracts notice. There wasn't much to the town: the courthouse, a Baptist church, some box houses, a gas station. The gas station was still open, so I pulled in. I didn't particularly need gas, but I wasn't sure when I would find another station. The guy who came out to pump the gas had an abundance of fleshy warts-a veritable crop-scattered across his face like button mushrooms. He looked like a genetic experiment that had gone horribly wrong. He didn't speak except to establish what kind of gas I wanted and he didn't remark on the fact that I was from out of state. This was the first time on the trip that a gas station attendant hadn't said in an engaging manner, "You're a long way from home, aren'tcha?" or "What brings you all the way here from I-o-way?" or something like that. (I always told them that I was on my way east to have vital heart surgery in the hope that they would give me extra Green Stamps.) I was very probably the first person from out of state this man had seen all year, yet he appeared resolutely uninterested in what I was doing there. It was odd. I said to him-blurted really-"Excuse me, but didn't I read somewhere that some people called Melungeons live around here somewhere?"
He didn't answer. He just watched the pump counter spin. I thought he hadn't heard me, so I said, "I say, excuse me, but didn't I hear that some people-"
"Don't know," he said abruptly without looking at me. Then he looked at me. "Don't know nothin'
about that. You want your oil checked?"
I hesitated, surprised by the question. "No thank you."
"That's eleven dollars." He took my money without thanks and went back inside. I was fairly dumbfounded. I don't know quite why. Through the window I could see him pick up his telephone and make a call. He looked at me as he did it. Suddenly I felt alarmed. What if he was calling the police to tell them to come out and shoot me? I laid a small patch of rubber on his driveway as I departed-something you don't often see achieved with a Chevette-and made the pistons sing as I floored the accelerator and hurtled out of town at a breakneck twenty-seven miles an hour. But a mile or so later I slowed down. Partly this was because I was going up an almost vertical hill and the car wouldn't go any faster-for one breathless moment I thought it might actually start rolling backwards-and partly because I told myself not to be so jumpy. The guy was probably just calling his wife to remind her to buy more wart lotion. Even if he was calling the police to report an outsider asking impertinent questions, what could they do to me? It was a free country. I hadn't broken any laws. I had asked an innocent question, and asked it politely. How could anyone take offense at that? Clearly I was being silly to feel any sense of menace. Even so, I found myself glancing frequently into the rearview mirror and half expecting to see the hill behind me crawling with flashing squad cars and posses of volunteer vigilantes in pickup trucks coming after me.
Judiciously, I stepped up my speed from eleven to thirteen miles an hour.
High up the hill I began to encounter shacks set back in clearings in the woods, and peered at them in the hope of glimpsing a Melungeon or two. But the few people I saw were white. They stared at me with a strange look of surprise as I lumbered past, the way you might stare at a man riding an ostrich, and generally made no response to my cheerful wave, though one or two did reply with an automatic and economical wave of their own, a raised hand and a twitch of fingers.
This was real hillbilly country. Many of the shacks looked like something out of "Li'l Abner," with sagging porches and tilting chimneys. Some were abandoned. Many appeared to have been handmade, with rambling extensions that had clearly been fashioned from scraps of plundered wood. People in these hills still made moonshine, or stump liquor as they call it. But the big business these days is marijuana, believe it or not. I read somewhere that whole mountain villages sometimes band together and can make $i00,000 a month from a couple of acres planted in some remote and lofty hollow. That, more than the Melungeons, is an excellent reason not to be a stranger asking questions in the area.
Although I was clearly climbing high up into the mountains, the woods all around were so dense that I had no views. But at the summit the trees parted like curtains to provide a spectacular outlook over the valley on the other side. It was like coming over the top of the earth, like the view from an airplane. Steep green wooded hills with alpine meadows clinging to their sides stretched away for as far as the eye could see until at last they were consumed by a distant and colorful sunset. Before me a sinuous road led steeply down to a valley of rolling farms spread out along a lazy river. It was as perfect a setting as I had ever seen. I drove through the soft light of dusk, absorbed by the beauty.
And the thing was, every house along the roadside was a shack. This was the heart of Appalachia, the most notoriously impoverished region of America, and it was just inexpressibly beautiful. It was strange that the urban professionals from the cities of the eastern seaboard, only a couple of hours'
drive to the east, hadn't colonized an area of such arresting beauty, filling the dales with rusticky weekend cottages, country clubs and fancy restaurants.
It was strange, too, to see white people living in poverty. In America, to be white and impoverished really takes some doing. Of course, this was American poverty, this was white people's poverty, which isn't like poverty elsewhere. It isn't even like the poverty in Tuskegee. It has been suggested with more than a touch of cynicism that when Lyndon Johnson launched his great War on Poverty in 1964, the focus was placed on Appalachia not because it was so destitute but because it was so white. A littlepublicized survey at the time showed that 40 percent of the poorest people in the region owned a car and a third of those had been bought new. In 1964, my future father-in-law in England was, like most people there, years away from owning his first car and even now he has never owned a new one, yet no one ever called him destitute or sent him a free sack of flour and some knitting wool at Christmas. Still, I can't deny that by American standards the scattered shacks around me were decidedly modest. They had no satellite dishes in the yard, no Weber barbecues, no station wagons standing in the drive. And I daresay they had no microwaves in the kitchen, poor devils, and by American standards that is pretty damn deprived.
CHAPTER 11
I DROVE THROUGH a landscape of gumdrop hills, rolling roads, neat farms. The sky was full of those big fluffy clouds you always see in nautical paintings, and the towns had curious and interesting names: Snowflake, Fancy Gap, Horse Pasture, Meadows of Dan, Charity. Virginia went on and on. It never seemed to end. The state is nearly 400 miles across, but the twisting road must have added at least l00 miles to that. In any case, every time I looked at the map I seemed to have moved a remarkably tiny distance. From time to time I would pass a sign that said HISTORICAL
MARKER AHEAD, but I didn't stop. There are thousands of historical markers all over America and they are always dull. I know this for a fact because my father stopped at every one of them. He would pull the car up to them and read them aloud to us, even when we asked him not to. They would say something like:
SINGING TREES SACRED BURIAL SITE
For centuries this land, known as the Valley of the Singing Trees, was a sacred burial site for the Blackbutt Indians. In recognition of this the US Government gave the land to the tribe in perpetuity in 1880. However, in 1882 oil was discovered beneath the singing trees and, after a series of skirmishes in which 27,413 Blackbutts perished, the tribe was relocated to a reservation at Cyanide Springs, New Mexico.
What am I saying? They were never as good as that. Usually they would commemorate something palpably obscure and uninteresting-the site of the first Bible college in western Tennessee, the birthplace of the inventor of the moist towelette, the home of the author of the Kansas state song. You knew before you got there that they were going to be boring because if they had been even remotely interesting somebody would have set up a hamburger stand and sold souvenirs. But Dad thrived on them and would never fail to be impressed. After reading them to us he would say in an admiring tone, "Well, I'll be darned," and then without fail would pull back onto the highway into the path of an oncoming truck, which would honk furiously and shed part of its load as it swerved past. "Yes, that was really very interesting," he would add reflectively, unaware that he had just about killed us all.
I was heading for the Booker T. Washington National Monument, a restored plantation near Roanoke where Booker T. Washington grew up. He was a remarkable man. A freed slave, he taught himself to read and write, secured an education and eventually founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the first college in America for blacks. Then, as if that were not achievement enough, he finished his career as a soul musician, churning out a series of hits in the 1960s on the Stax record label with the backup group the MGs. As I say, a remarkable man. My plan was to visit his monument and then zip over to Monticello for a leisurely look around Thomas Jefferson's home.
But it was not to be. Just beyond Patrick Springs, I spied a side road leading to a place called Critz, which I calculated with a glance at the map could cut thirty miles off my driving distance.
Impulsively I hauled the car around the corner, making the noise of squealing tires as I went. I had to make the noise myself because the Chevette couldn't manage it, though it did shoot out some blue smoke.
I should have known better. My first rule of travel is never go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz clearly was an incurable disease involving flaking skin. The upshot is that I got hopelessly lost. The road, once I lost sight of the high--way, broke up into a network of unsignposted lanes hemmed in by tall grass. I drove for ages, with that kind of glowering, insane resolve that you get when you are lost and become convinced that if you just keep moving you will eventually end up where you want to be. I kept coming to towns that weren't on my mapSanville, Pleasantville, Preston. These weren't two-shack places. They were proper towns, with schools, gas stations, lots of houses. I felt as if I should call the newspaper in Roanoke and inform the editor that I had found a lost county.
Eventually, as I passed through Sanville for the third time, I decided I would have to ask directions.
I stopped an old guy taking his dog out to splash urine around the neighborhood and asked him the way to Critz. Without batting an eyelid he launched into a set of instructions of the most breathtaking complexity. He must have talked for five minutes. It sounded like a description of Lewis and Clark's journey through the wilderness. I couldn't follow it at all, but when he paused and said "You with me so far?" I lied and said I was.
"Okay, well that takes you to Preston," he went on. "From there you follow the old drovers road due east out of town till you come to the McGregor place. You can tell it's the McGregor place because there's a sign out front saying: the McGregor Place. About a hundred yards further on there's a road going off to the left with a sign for Critz. But whatever you do don't go down there because the bridge is out and you'll plunge straight into Dead Man's Creek." And on he went like that for many minutes. When at last he finished I thanked him and drove off without conviction in the general direction of his last gesture. Within two hundred yards I had come to a T-junction and didn't have a clue which way to go. I went right. Ten minutes later, to the surprise of both of us, I was driving past the old guy and his everurinating dog again. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him gesturing excitedly, shouting at me that I had gone the wrong way, but as this was already abundantly evident to me, I ignored his hopping around and went left at the junction. This didn't get me any nearer Critz, but it did provide me with a new set of dead ends and roads to nowhere. At three o'clock in the afternoon, two hours after I had set off for Critz, I blundered back onto Highway 58. I was 150 feet further down the road than I had been when I left it. Sourly I pulled back onto the highway and drove for many long hours in silence. It was too late to go to the Booker T.
Washington National Monument or to Monticello, even assuming I could summon the intelligence to find them. The day had been a complete washout. I had had no lunch, no life-giving infusions of coffee. It had been a day without pleasure or reward. I got a room in a motel in Fredericksburg, ate at a pancake house of ineffable crappiness and retired to my room in a dim frame of mind.
In the morning I drove to Colonial Williamsburg, a restored historic village near the coast. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the East and even though it was early on a Tuesday morning in October when I arrived, the parking lots were already filling up. I parked and joined a stream of people following the signs to the visitors' center. Inside it was cool and dark. Near the door was a scale model of the village in a glass case. Oddly, there was no you-are-here arrow to help you get oriented. Indeed, the visitors' center wasn't even shown. There was no way of telling where the village was in relation to where you were now. That seemed strange to me and I became suspicious. I stood back and watched the crowds. Gradually it became clear to me that the whole thing was a masterpiece of crowd management. Everything was contrived to leave you with the impression that the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket, pass through a door ominously marked PROCESSING and then climb aboard a shuttle bus which would whisk you off to the historic site, presumably some distance away. Unless, like me, you pulled out of the river of people, you found yourself standing at the ticket counter making an instant decision on which of three kinds of tickets to buy-a Patriot's Pass for $24.50, a Royal Governor's Pass for $20 or a Basic Admission Ticket for $15.50, each allowing entrance to a different number of restored buildings. Most visitors found themselves parted from a lot of money and standing in the line to the processing doorway before they knew what had hit them.
I hate the way these places let you get all the way there before disclosing just how steep and confiscatory the admission price is. They should be required to put up roadside signs saying, THREE MILES TO COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG. GET YOUR CHECKBOOKS READY! or ONE MILE TO COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG. ITS PRETTY GOOD, BUT REAL EXPENSIVE.
I felt that irritation, bordering on wild hate, that I generally experience when money is being tugged out of me through my nostrils. I mean honestly, $24.50 just to walk around a restored village for a couple of hours. I gave silent thanks that I had ditched the wife and kids at Manchester Airport. A day out here with the family could cost almost $75-and that's before paying for ice creams and soft drinks and sweatshirts saying, Boy, WERE WE SCREWED AT COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG.
There was something wrong with the whole setup, something deeply fishy about the way it worked.
I had lived in America long enough to know that if the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket there would be an enormous sign on the wall saying, YOU MUST HAVE A TICKET. DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT TRYING TO GET IN WITHOUT ONE. But there wasn't any such sign. I went outside, back out into the bright sunshine, and watched where the shuttle buses were going. They went down the driveway, joined a highway and disappeared around a bend.
I crossed the highway, dodging the traffic, and followed a path through some woods. In a few seconds I was in the village. It was as simple as that. I didn't have to pay a penny. Nearby the shuttle buses were unloading ticketholders. They had had a ride of roughly Z00 yards and were about to discover that what their tickets entitled them to do was join long, ill-humored lines of other ticketholders standing outside each restored historic building, sweating in silence and shuffling forward at a rate of one step every three minutes. I don't think I had ever seen quite so many people failing to enjoy themselves. The glacial lines put me in mind of Disney World, which was not altogether inappropriate since Williamsburg is really a sort of Disney World of American history.
All the ticket takers and street sweepers and information givers were dressed in period costumes, the women in big aprons and muffin hats, the men in tricornered caps and breeches. The whole idea was to give history a happy gloss and make you think that spinning your own wool and dipping your own candles must have been bags of fun. I half expected to see Goofy and Donald Duck come waddling along dressed as soldiers in the Colonial army.
The first house I came to had a sign saying DR. MCKENZIE'S APOTHECARY. The door was open, so I went inside, expecting to see eighteenth-century apothecary items. But it was just a gift shop selling overprecious reproductions at outrageous prices-brass candle snuffers at $28, reproduction apothecary jars at $35, that sort of thing. I fled back outside, wanting to stick my head in Ye Olde Village Puking Trough. But then, slowly and strangely, the place began to grow on me.
As I strolled up Duke of Gloucester Street I underwent a surprising transformation. Slowly, I found that I was becoming captivated by it all. Williamsburg is big--173 acres-and the size of it alone is impressive. There are literally dozens of restored houses and shops. More than that, it really is quite lovely, particularly on a sunny morning in October with a mild wind wandering through the ash and beech trees. I ambled along the leafy lanes and broad greens. Every house was exquisite, every cobbled lane inviting, every tavern and vine-clad shoppe remorselessly adrip with picturesque charm. It is impossible, even for a flinty-hearted jerk-off such as your narrator, not to be won over.
However dubious Williamsburg may be as a historical document-and it is plenty dubious-it is at least a model town. It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.
A lot of Williamsburg isn't as old as they like you to think it is. The town was the capital of Colonial Virginia for eighty years, from 1699 to 1780. But when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg fell into decline. In the 1920s John D. Rockefeller developed a passion for the place and began pouring money into its restoration-$9o million so far. The problem now is that you never quite know what's genuine and what's fanciful. Take the Governors Palace. It looks to be very old-and, as I say, no one discourages you from believing that it is-but in fact it was only built in 1933. The original building burned down in 1781 and by 1930 had been gone for so long that nobody knew what it had looked like. It was only because somebody found a drawing of it in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that they were able to make a reasonable stab at reproducing it. But it isn't old and it may not even be all that accurate.
Everywhere you turn you are confronted, exasperatingly, with bogus touches. At the Bruton Parish Church, the gravestones looked like they were faked or at least the engravings had been reground.
Rockefeller or someone else in authority had obviously been disappointed to discover that after a couple of centuries in the open air gravestones become illegible, so now the inscriptions are as fresh and deep-grooved as if they had been cut only last week, which they may well have been. You find yourself constantly wondering whether you are looking at genuine history or some Disneyesque embellishment. Was there really a Severinus Dufray and would he have had a sign outside his house saying, GENTEEL TAILORING? Possibly. Would Dr. McKenzie have a note in florid lettering outside his dispensary announcing, DR. MCKENZIE BEGS LEAVE TO INFORM THE PUBLIC
THAT HE HAS JUST RECEIVED A LARGE QUANTITY OF FINE GOODS, vlz: TEA, COFFEE, FINE SOAP, TOBACCO, ETC., TO BE SOLD HERE AT HIS SHOP? Who can say?
Thomas Jefferson, a man of some obvious sensitivity, disliked Williamsburg and thought it ugly.
(This is something else they don't tell you.) He called the college and hospital "rude, misshapen piles" and the Governor's Palace "not handsome." He can't have been describing the same place because the Williamsburg of today is relentlessly attractive. And for that reason I liked it.
I drove on to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home for most of his life. Washington deserves his fame. What he did in running the Colonial army was risky and audacious, not to say skillful.
People tend to forget that the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years and that Washington often didn't get a whole lot of support. Out of a populace of 5.5 million, Washington sometimes had as few as 5,000 soldiers in his army-one soldier for every 1,100 people. When you see what a tranquil and handsome place Mount Vernon is, and what an easy and agreeable life he led there, you wonder why he bothered. But that's the appealing thing about Washington, he is such an enigma.
We don't even know for sure what he looked like. Almost all the portraits of him were done by, or copied from the works of, Charles Willson Peale. Peale painted sixty portraits of Washington, but unfortunately he wasn't very hot at faces. In fact, according to Samuel Eliot Morison, Peale's pictures of Washington, Lafayette and John Paul Jones all look to be more or less the same person.
Mount Vernon was everything Williamsburg should have been and was not-genuine, interesting, instructive. For well over a century it has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and what a lucky thing it is we have them. Amazingly, when the house was put up for sale in 1853, neither the federal government nor the state of Virginia was prepared to buy it for the nation. So a group of dedicated women hastily formed the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, raised the money to buy the house and two hundred acres of grounds, and then set about restoring it to precisely as it was in Washington's day, right down to the correct pigments of paint and patterns of wallpaper.
Thank God John D. Rockefeller didn't get ahold of it. Today the association continues to run it with a dedication and skill that should be models to preservation groups everywhere, but alas are not.
Fourteen rooms are open to the public and in each a volunteer provides an interesting and well-informed commentary-and is sufficiently clued up to answer almost any question-on how the roorn was used and decorated. The house was very much Washington's creation. He was involved in the daintiest questions of decor, even when he was away on military campaigns. It was strangely pleasing to imagine him at Valley Forge, with his troops dropping dead of cold and hunger, agonizing over the purchase of lace ruffs and tea cozies. What a great guy. What a hero.
CHAPTER 12
I SPENT THE NIGHT on the outskirts of Alexandria and in the morning drove into Washington. I remembered Washington from my childhood as hot and dirty and full of the din of jackhammers. It had that special kind of grimy summer heat you used to get in big cities in America before airconditioning came along. People spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it-wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans. Even at night there was no relief. It was tolerable enough outside where you might catch a puff of breeze, but indoors the heat never dissipated. It just sat, thick and stifling. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner bag. I can remember lying awake in a hotel in downtown Washington listening to the sounds of an August night wash in through the open window: sirens, car horns, the thrum of neon from the hotel sign, the swish of traffic, people laughing, people yelling, people being shot.
We once saw a guy who had been shot, one sultry August night when we were out for a late snack after watching the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 4-3 at Griffith Stadium. He was a black man and he was lying among a crowd
of legs in what appeared to me at the time to be a pool of oil, but which was of course the blood that was draining out of the hole in his head. My parents hustled us past and told us not to look, but we did of course. Things like that didn't happen in Des Moines, so we gaped extensively. I had only ever seen murders on TV on programs like "Gunsmoke" and "Dragnet." I thought it was something they did just to keep the story moving. It had never occurred to me that shooting someone was an option available in the real world. It seemed such a strange thing to do, to stop someone's life just because you found him in some way disagreeable. I imagined my fourth--grade teacher, Miss Bietlebaum, who had hair on her upper lip and evil in her heart, lying on the floor beside her desk, stilled forever, while I stood over her with a smoking gun in my hand. It was an interesting concept.
It made you think.
At the diner where we went for our snack, there was yet another curious thing that made me think.
White people like us would come in and take seats at the counter, but black people would place an order and then stand against the wall. When their food was ready, it would be handed to them in a paper bag and they would take it home or out to their car. My father explained to us that Negroes weren't allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It wasn't against the law exactly, but they didn't do it because Washington was enough of a Southern city that they just didn't dare. That seemed strange too and it made me even more reflective.
Afterwards, lying awake in the hot hotel room, listening to the restless city, I tried to understand the adult world and could not. I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted-stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered that if you didn't measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall.
My dad regarded me over the top of a book and said he didn't think so. I asked him what would happen if a Negro tried to sit at a luncheon counter, even though he wasn't supposed to. What would they do to him? My dad said he didn't know and told me I should go to sleep and not worry about such things. I lay down and thought about it for a while and supposed that they would shoot him in the head. Then I rolled over and tried to sleep, but I couldn't, partly because it was so hot and I was confused and partly because earlier in the evening my brother had told me that he was going to come over to my bed when I was asleep and wipe boogers on my face because I hadn't given him a bite of my frosted malt at the ball game, and I was frankly unsettled by this prospect, even though he seemed to be sleeping soundly now.
The world has changed a lot since those days, of course. Now if you lie awake in a hotel room at night, you don't hear the city anymore. All you hear is the white sound of your air conditioner. You could be in a jet over the Pacific or in a bathysphere beneath the sea for all you hear. Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly laundered shirt. People don't wipe their necks much anymore or drink sweating glasses of lemonade or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda fountains because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or from your office to the luncheon counter down the block. Nowadays, black people sit at luncheon counters, so it's not as easy to get a seat, but it's more fair. And no one goes to Washington Senators games anymore because the Washington Senators no longer exist. In 1972 the owner moved the team to Texas because he could make more money there. Alas. But perhaps the most important change, at least as far as I am concerned, is that my brother no longer threatens to wipe boogers on me when I annoy him.
Washington feels like a small city. Its metropolitan population is three million, which makes it the seventh largest in America. And if you add Baltimore, right next door, it rises to over five million.
But the city itself is quite small, with a population of just 637,000, less than Indianapolis or San Antonio. You feel as if you are in some agreeable provincial city, but then you turn a corner and come up against the headquarters of the FBI or the World Bank or the IMF and you realize what an immensely important place it is. The most startling of all these surprises is the White House. There you are, shuffling along downtown, looking in department store windows, browsing at cravats and negligees, and you turn a corner and there it is-the White House-right in the middle of the downtown. So handy for shopping, I thought. It's smaller than you expect. Everybody says that.
Across the street there is a permanent settlement of disaffected people and crazies, living in cardboard boxes, protesting at the Central Intelligence Agency controlling their thoughts from outer space. (Well, wouldn't you?) There was also a guy panhandling for quarters. Can you believe that?
Right there in our nation's capital, right where Nancy Reagan could have seen him from her bedroom window. I refused to give him a penny. "Why don't you go and mug somebody?" I told him. "It has more dignity."
Washington's most fetching feature is the Mall, a broad, grassy strip of parkland which stretches for a mile or so from the Capitol building at the eastern end to the Lincoln Memorial at the western side, overlooking the Potomac. The dominant landmark is the Washington Monument. Slender and white, shaped like a pencil, it rises 555 feet above the park. It is one of the simplest and yet handsomest structures I know, and all the more impressive when you consider that its massive stones had to be brought from the Nile delta on wooden rollers by Sumerian slaves. I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Anyway, it is a real feat of engineering and very pleasing to look at. I had hoped to go up it, but there was a long line of people, mostly restive schoolchildren, snaked around the base and some distance into the park, all waiting to squeeze into an elevator about the size of a telephone booth, so I headed east in the direction of Capitol Hill, which isn't really much of a hill at all.
Scattered around the Mall's eastern end are the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution-the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Mu seum and so on. The Smithsonian-which, incidentally, was donated to America by an Englishman who had never been there-used to be all in one building, but they keep splitting off sections of it and putting them in new buildings all over town. Now there are fourteen Smithsonian museums. The biggest ones are arrayed around the Mall, the others are mostly scattered around the city. Partly they had to do this because they get so much stuff every year-about a million items. In 1986, just to give you some idea, the Smithsonian's acquisitions included ten thousand moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a MiG-25 jet fighter. All of this used to be kept in a wonderful old Gothic brick building on the Mall called the Castle, but now the Castle is just used for administration and to show an introductory film.
I strolled down towards the Castle now. The park was full of joggers. I found this a little worrying. I kept thinking, shouldn't they be running the country, or at least destabilizing some Central American government? I mean to say, don't you usually have something more important to do at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning than pull on a pair of Reeboks and go sprinting around for forty-five minutes?
At the Castle I found the entrance area blocked with wooden trestles and lengths of rope. American and Japanese security men in dark suits were standing around. They all looked as if they spent a lot of time jogging. Some of them had headphones on and were talking into radios. Others had dogs on long leashes or mirrors on poles and were checking out cars parked along Jefferson Drive in front of the building. I went up to one of the American security men and asked him who was coming, but he said he wasn't allowed to tell me. I thought this was bizarre. Here I was in a country where, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I could find out how many suppositories Ronald Reagan's doctor had prescribed for him in 1986,* (*1472) but I couldn't be told which foreign dignitary would shortly be making a public appearance on the steps of a national institution. The lady next to me said, "It's Nakasone. President of Japan."
"Oh, really," I replied, always ready to see a celebrity. I asked the security man when he would be arriving. "I'm not allowed to tell you that either, sir," he said and passed on.
I stood with the crowd for a while and waited for Mr. Nakasone to come along. And then I thought,
"Why am I standing here?" I tried to think of anyone I knew who would be impressed to hear that I had seen with my own eyes the prime minister of Japan. I imagined myself saying to my children,
"Hey, kids, guess who I saw in Washington-Yasuhiro Nakasone!" and being met with silence. So I walked on to the National Air and Space Museum, which was more interesting.
But not nearly as interesting as it ought to be, if you ask me. Back in the 1950s and '60s, the Smithsonian was the Castle. Everything was crammed into this one wonderfully dark and musty old building. It was like the nation's attic and, like an attic, it was gloriously random. Over here was the shirt Lincoln was wearing when he was shot, with a dried brown bloodstain above the heart. Over there was a diorama showing a Navajo family fixing dinner. Up above you, hanging from the gloomy rafters, were the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers' first plane. You didn't know where to look next or what you would find around each corner. Now it is as if everything has been sorted out by a fussy spinster, folded neatly and put in its proper place. You go to the Air and Space Museum and you see the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers' plane and lots of other famous planes and rocket ships and it's all highly impressive, but it is also clinical and uninspired. There is no sense of discovery. If your brother came running up to you and said, "Hey, you'll never guess what I found in this room over here!" you would in fact guess, more or less, because it would have to be either an airplane or a rocket ship. At the old Smithsonian it could have been absolutely anything-a petrified dog, Custer's scalp, human heads adrift in bottles. There's no element of surprise anymore. So I spent the day trudging around the various museums dutifully and respectfully, with interest but not excitement. Still, there was so much to see that a whole day passed and I had seen only a part of it.
In the evening I came back to the Mall, and walked across it to the Jefferson Memorial. I had hoped to see it at dusk, but I arrived late and the darkness fell like a blanket. Before I was very far into the park it was pitch dark. I expected to be muggedindeed, I took it as my due wandering into a city park like this on a dark night-but evidently the muggers couldn't see me. The only physical risk I ran was being bowled over by one of the many joggers who sprinted invisibly along the dark paths. The Jefferson Memorial was beautiful. There's not much to it, just a large marble rotunda in the shape of Monticello, with a gigantic statue of Jefferson inside and his favorite sayings engraved on the walls ("Have a nice day," "Keep your shirt on," "You could have knocked me over with a feather," etc.), but when it is lit up at night it is entrancing, with the lights of the memorial smeared across the pool of water called the Tidal Basin. I must have sat for an hour or more just listening to the rhythmic swish of the distant traffic, the sirens and car horns, the distant sounds of people shouting, people singing, people being shot.
I lingered so long that it was too late to go to the Lincoln Memorial and I had to come back in the morning. The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits there in his big high chair looking grand and yet kindly. There was a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head.
I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him. Afterwards, as I strolled across the Mall, I spied yet more trestles and draped ropes, with security men hanging about. They had closed off a road across the park and had brought in two helicopters with the presidential seal on their sides and seven cannons and the Marine Corps Band.
It was quite early in the morning and there were no crowds, so I went and stood beside the roped enclosure, the only spectator, and none of the security men bothered me or even seemed to notice me.
After a couple of minutes, a wailing of sirens filled the air and a cavalcade of limousines and police motorcycles drew up. Out stepped Nakasone and some other Japanese men, all in dark suits, escorted by some junior-looking Aryans from the State Department. They all stood politely while the Marine Corps Band blared a lively tune, which I didn't recognize. Then there was a twenty-one-gun salute, but the cannons didn't go "BOOM!" as you would expect. They went "PUFF." They were filled with some kind of noiseless powder, presumably so as not to waken the president in the White House across the way, so when the battery commander shouted, "Ready, steady, go!" or whatever it was he shouted, there followed seven quick puff sounds and then a dense cloud of smoke drifted over us and went on a long slow waft across the park. This was done three times because there were only seven cannons. Then Nakasone gave a friendly wave to the crowd-which is to say, to me-and sprinted with his party to the presidential helicopters, whose blades were already whirring to life. After a moment they rose up, tilted past the Washington Monument and were gone, and everyone back on the ground relaxed and had a smoke.
Weeks afterwards, back in London, I told people about my private encounter with Nakasone and the Marine Corps Band and the noiseless cannons and how the prime minister of Japan had waved to me alone. Most of them would listen politely, then allow a small pause and say, "Did I tell you that Mavis has to go back into hospital next week to have her feet done?" or something like that. The English can be so crushing sometimes.
From Washington I took US 301 out past Annapolis and the US Naval Academy and over a long, low bridge across the Chesapeake Bay into eastern Maryland. Before 1952, when the bridge was built, the eastern side of the bay had enjoyed centuries of isolation. Ever since then, people have been saying that outsiders will flood in and ruin the peninsula, but it still looked pretty unspoiled to me, and my guess is that it's the outsiders who have kept it that way. It's always the outsiders who are the most fiercely opposed to shopping malls and bowling alleys, which the locals in their simple, trusting way tend to think might be kind of handy.
Chestertown, the first town of any size I came to, confirmed this. The first thing I saw was a woman in a bright pink track suit zipping past on a bicycle with a wicker basket on the front. Only an urban emigre would have a bicycle with a wicker basket. A local person would have a Subaru pickup truck. There seemed to be a lot of these bike ladies about and between them they had clearly made Chestertown into a model community. The whole place was as neat as a pin. The sidewalks were paved with brick and lined with trees, and there was a well-tended park in the middle of the business district. The library was busy. The movie theater was still in business and not showing a Death Wish movie. Everything about the place was tranquil and appealing. This was as nice a town as I had seen. This was almost Amalgam.
I drove on through the low, marshy flatlands, much taken with the simple beauty of the Chesapeake peninsula, with its high skies and scattered farms and forgotten little towns. Late in the morning I crossed into Delaware, en route to Philadelphia. Delaware may well be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and couldn't think of a single thing to say to her. I said, "So you come from Delaware? Gosh. Wow." And she moved quickly on to someone more verbally dextrous, and also better-looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they'd say,
"You know, I don't think I ever have," and then they'd look kind of troubled too.
I determined that I would read up on Delaware so that the next time I met a girl from there I could say something droll and apposite and she might go to bed with me. But I could find almost nothing written about Delaware anywhere. Even the entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence, as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children's drawing slates on which you erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted up behind me as I drove, expunging the experience as it unfolded.
Looking back now, I can just vaguely recall some semi-industrial landscape and some signs for Wilmington.
And then I was in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the city that gave the world Sylvester Stallone and Legionnaires' disease, among other things, and was too preoccupied with the disturbing thoughts that this called up to give Delaware any further consideration.
CHAPTER 13
WHEN I was a child, Philadelphia was the third biggest city in America. What I remembered of it was driving through endless miles of ghettos, one battered block after an other, on a hot July Sunday, with black children playing in the spray of fire hydrants and older people lounging around on the street corners or sitting on the front stoops. It was the poorest place I had ever seen. Trash lay in the gutters and doorways, and whole buildings were derelict. It was like a foreign country, like Haiti or Panama. My dad whistled tunelessly through his teeth the whole time, as he always did when he was scared, and told us to keep the windows rolled up even though it was boiling in the car. At stoplights people would stare stonily at us and Dad would whistle in double time and drum the steering wheel with his fingers and smile apologetically at anyone who looked at him, as if to say, "Sorry, we're from out of state."
Things have changed now, naturally. Philadelphia is no longer the third biggest city in America. Los Angeles pushed it into fourth place in the 1960s, and now there are freeways to whisk you into the heart of town without soiling your tires in the ghettos. Even so, I managed a brief, inadvertent visit to one of the poorer neighborhoods when I wandered off the freeway in search Of a gas station.
Before I could do anything about it, I found myself sucked into a vortex of one-way streets that carried me into the most squalid and dangerous-looking neighborhood I had ever seen. It may have been, for all I know, the very ghetto we passed through all those years before-the brownstone buildings looked much the same-but it was many times worse than the one I remembered. The ghetto of my childhood, for all its poorness, had the air of a street carnival. People wore colorful clothes and seemed to be having a good time. This place was just bleak and dangerous, like a war zone. Abandoned cars, old refrigerators, burned-out sofas littered every vacant lot. Garbage cans looked as if they had been thrown to the street from the rooftops. There were no gas stations-I wouldn't have stopped anyway, not in a place like this, not for a million dollars-and most of the storefronts were boarded with plywood. Every standing object had been spray-painted with graffiti.
There were still a few young people on the stoops and corners, but they looked listless and cold-it was a chilly day-and they seemed not to notice me. Thank God. This was a neighborhood where clearly you could be murdered for a pack of cigarettes-a fact that was not lost on me as I searched nervously for a way back onto the freeway. By the time I found it, I wasn't whistling through my teeth so much as singing through my sphincter.
It really was the most uncomfortable experience I had had in many years. God, what it must be like to live there and to walk those streets daily. Do you know that if you are a black man in urban America you now stand a one-in-nineteen chance of being murdered? In World War 11, the odds of being killed were one in fifty. In New York City there is one murder every four hours. Murder there has become the most common cause of death for people under thirty-five-and yet New York isn't even the most murderous city in America. At least eight other cities have a higher murder rate. In Los Angeles there are more murders on schoolgrounds alone each year than there are in the whole of London. So perhaps it is little wonder that people in American cities take violence as routine. I don't know how they do it.
On my way to Des Moines to start this trip, I passed through O'Hare Airport in Chicago, where I ran into a friend who worked for a St. Louis newspaper. He told me he had been working extra hard lately because of something that had happened to his boss. The boss had been driving home from work late one Saturday night when he had stopped at some traffic lights. As he waited for the lights to change, the passenger door opened and a man with a gun got in. The gunman made the boss drive down to the riverfront, where he shot him in the head and took his money. The boss had been in a coma for three weeks and they weren't sure whether he was going to live.
My friend was telling me this not because it was such an incredible story, but simply by way of elucidating why he was having to work so damned hard lately. As for his boss, my friend's attitude seemed to be that if you forget to lock your car doors when you're driving through St. Louis late at night, well, you've got to expect to take a bullet in the head from time to time. It was very odd, his deadpan attitude, but it seems to be more and more the way in America now. It made me feel like a stranger.
I drove downtown and parked near City Hall. On top of the building is a statue of William Penn. It's the main landmark downtown, visible from all around the city, but it was covered in scaffolding. In 1985, after decades of neglect, the city fathers decided to refurbish the statue before it fell down. So they covered it in scaffolding. However, this cost so much that there was no money left to do the repairs. Now, two years later, the scaffolding was still there and not a lick of work had been done. A city engineer had recently announced with a straight face that before long the scaffolding itself would need to be refurbished. This is more or less how Philadelphia works, which is to say not very well. No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm. When it comes to asinine administration, Philadelphia is in a league of its own.
Consider: in 1985, a bizarre sect called MOVE barricaded itself into a tenement house on the west side of town. The police chief and mayor considered the options open to them and decided that the most intelligent use of their resources would be to blow up the house-but of course!-even though they knew there were children inside and it was in the middle of a densely populated district. So they dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter. This started a fire that quickly grew out of control and burned down most of the neighborhood-sixty-one houses in all-and killed eleven people, including all the children in the barricaded home.
When they aren't being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption. Just as I was driving into town I heard on the radio that a former city councilman had been sen tenced to ten years in jail and his aide to eight years for attempted extortion. The judge called it a gross breach of public trust. He should know. Across town a state review board was calling for the dismissal of nine of the judge's colleagues for taking cash gifts from members of the roofers' union. Two of those judges were already awaiting trial on, extortion charges. This sort of thing is routine in Philadelphia. A few months earlier when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke. Q. What is the difference between Bud Dwyer and Bud Lite? A. Bud Lite has a head on it.
Yet for all its incompetence and criminality, Philadelphia is a likable place. For one thing, unlike Washington, it feels like a big city. It had skyscrapers and there was steam rising through vents in the sidewalk and on every corner stood a stainless steel hot-dog stand, with a chilly-looking guy in a stocking cap bobbing around behind it. I wandered over to Independence Square-actually it's now called Independence National Historical Park-and looked respectfully at all the historic buildings.
The main building is Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and the Constitution ratified. When I had first been there in 1960, there was a long line stretching out of the building. There still was-in fact, it seemed not to have moved in twenty-seven years. Deep though my respect is for both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, I was disinclined to spend my afternoon in such a long and immobile line. I went instead to the visitors'
center. National park visitors' centers are always the same. They always have some displays in glass cases that manage to be both boring and uninformative, a locked auditorium with a board out front saying that the next showing of the free twelve-minute introductory film will be at 4 P.M. (just before 4 P.M. somebody comes and changes it to 10 A.M.), some racks of books and brochures with titles like Pewter in History and Vegetables of Old Philadelphia, which are too boring even to browse through, much less buy, and a drinking fountain and rest rooms, which everyone makes use of because there's not much else to do. Every visitor to every national park goes into the visitors'
center, stands around kind of stupidly for a while, then has a pee and a drink of water and wanders back outside. That is what I did now.
From the visitors' center I ambled along Independence Mall to Franklin Square, which was full of winos, many of whom had the comical idea that I might be prepared to give them twenty five cents of my own money. According to my guidebook, Franklin Square had "lots of interesting things" to see-a museum, a working book bindery, an archaeological exhibit and "the only post office in the United States which does not fly the American flag" (don't ask me why)-but my heart wasn't in it, especially with piteous and unwashed winos tugging at my sleeves all the while, and I fled back to the real world of downtown Philadelphia.
Late in the afternoon, I found my way to the offices of the Philadelphia Inquirer, where an old friend from Des Moines, Lucia Herndon, was lifestyle editor. The Inquirer offices were like news paper offices everywhere grubby, full of junk, littered with coffee cups in which cigarette butts floated like dead fish in a polluted lake-and Lucia's desk, I was impressed to note, was one of the messiest in the room. This may have accounted in part for her impressive rise at the Inquirer. I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will-but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.
We drove in my car out to the district of Mount Airy, where, conveniently for me-and for her too, come to that-Lucia lived with another old friend of mine from Des Moines, her husband, Hal. All day long I had been wondering, vaguely and intermittently, why Hal and Lucia liked Philadelphia so much-they had moved there about a year before-but now I understood. The road to Mount Airy led through the most beautiful city park I had ever been in. Called Fairmount Park and covering almost q,000 acres, it is the largest municipal park in America and it is full of trees and flowering shrubs and bosky glades of infinite charm. It stretches for miles along the banks of the Schuylkill River.
We drove through a dreamy twilight. Boats sculled along the water. It was perfection.
Mount Airy was out in the Germantown section of the city. It had a nice settled feeling to it, as if people had lived there for generations-which is in fact the case in Philadelphia, Lucia told me. The city was still full of the sort of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else. Many people scarcely ever ventured more than a few hundred yards from their homes. It was not uncommon to get lost and find that hardly anybody could reliably direct you to a neighborhood three miles away.
Philadelphia also had its own vocabulary-downtown was called "center city," sidewalks were called
"pavements," as in England-and peculiarities of pronunciation.
In the evening I sat in Hal and Lucia's house, eating their food, drinking their wine, admiring their children and their house and furniture and possessions, their easy wealth and comfort, and felt a sap for ever having left America. Life was so abundant here, so easy, so convenient. Suddenly I wanted a refrigerator that made its own ice cubes and a waterproof radio for the shower. I wanted an electric orange juicer and a room ionizer and a wristwatch that would keep me in touch with my biorhythms. I wanted it all. Once in the evening I went upstairs to go to the bathroom and walked past one of the children's bedrooms. The door was open and a bedside light was on. There were toys everywhere-on the floor, on shelves, tumbling out of a wooden trunk. It looked like Santa's workshop. But there was nothing extraordinary about this: it was just a typical middle-class American bedroom.
And as for American closets, they seem to be always full of yesterday's enthusiasms: golf clubs, scuba diving equipment tennis rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, darkroom equipment, objects that once excited their owner and then were replaced by other objects even more shiny and exciting. That is the great, seductive thing about America-the people always get what they want, right now, whether it is good for them or not. There is something deeply worrying, and awesomely irresponsible, about this endless self-gratification, this constant appeal to the baser instincts.
I should point out that I am not talking about Hal and Lucia in all this. They are good people and lead modest and responsible lives. Their closets aren't full of scuba diving equipment and seldom-used tennis rackets. They are full of mundane items like buckets and galoshes, ear muffs and scouring powders. I know this for a fact because late in the night when everyone was asleep I crept out of bed and had a good look.
In the morning, I dropped Hal at his office downtown-correction, center city-and the drive through Fairmount Park was as enchanting in the morning sunshine as it had been at dusk. All cities should have parks like this, I thought. He told me some more interesting things about Philadelphia: that it spent more money on public art than any other city in America-1 percent of the total city budget-and yet it had an illiteracy rate of 40 percent. He pointed out to me, in the middle of Fairmount Park, the palatial Philadelphia Museum of Art, which had become the city's top tourist attraction, not because of its collection of 500,000 paintings, but because its front steps were the ones Sylvester Stallone sprinted up in Rocky. People were actually coming to the museum in buses, looking at the steps and leaving without ever going inside to see the pictures. As we were driving we listened to a radio talk show hosted by a man named Howard Stern. Howard Stern had a keen interest in sex and was engagingly direct with his callers. "Good morning, Marilyn," he would say to a caller, "are you wearing panties?" This, we agreed, beat most early-morning talk shows hands down. Howard queried his callers with arresting candor and a measure of prurience I had not before encountered on American radio.
Unfortunately, I lost the station soon after dropping Hal off and spent the rest of the morning searching for it without success, and eventually ended up listening to a competing program in which an ear specialist gave advice to callers with hearing difficulties. Later there was a woman who was an expert on dealing with intestinal worms in dogs. As this principally consisted of giving the dogs a tablet to make the worms die, it was not long before I felt as if I were something an expert on the matter too. And so the morning passed.
I drove to Gettysburg, where the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought over three days in July 1863. There were over 50,000 casualties. I parked at the visitors' center and went inside. It contained a small, ill-lit museum with glass cases containing bullets, brass buttons, belt buckles and that sort of thing, each with a yellowed typed caption beside it saying, "Buckle from uniform of 13th Tennessee Mountaineers. Found by Festus T. Scrubbins, local farmer, and donated by his daughter, Mrs. Marienetta Stumpy." There was precious little to give you any sense of the battle itself. It was more like the gleanings of a treasure hunt.
The only truly interesting thing was a case devoted to the Gettysburg Address, where I learned that Lincoln was invited to speak only as an afterthought and that everyone was taken aback when he accepted. It was only ten sentences long and took just two minutes to deliver. I was further informed that he gave the address many months after the battle. I had always imagined him making it more or less immediately afterwards, while there were still bodies lying around and wraiths of smoke rising from the ruins of distant houses and people like Festus T. Scrubbins poking around among the twitching casualties to see what useful souvenirs they could find. The truth, as so often in this life, was disappointing.
I went outside and had a look at the battlefield, which sprawls over 3,500 acres of mostly flat countryside, fringed by the town of Gettysburg with its gas stations and motels. The battlefield had the great deficiency common to all historic battle fields. It was just countryside. There was nothing much to distin_ guish this stretch of empty fields from that one. You had to take their word for it that a great battle was fought there. There were a lot of cannons scattered about, I'll give them that.
And along the road leading to the site of Pickett's charge, the attack by Confederate troops that turned the tide of battle in the Union's favor, many of the regiments had erected obelisks and monuments to their own glory, some of them very grand. I strolled down there now. Through my dad's old binoculars I could clearly see how Pickett's troops had advanced from the direction of the town, a mile or so to the north, sweeping across the Burger King parking lot, skirting the Tastee Delite Drive-In and regrouping just outside the Crap-o-Rama Wax Museum and Gift Shop. It's all very sad. Ten thousand soldiers fell there in an hour; two out of every three Confederate soldiers didn't make it back to base. It is a pity, verging on the criminal, that so much of the town of Gettysburg has been spoiled with tourist tat and that it is so visible from the battlefield.
When I was little, my dad bought me a Union cap and a toy rifle and let me loose on the battlefield.
I was in heaven. I dashed about the whole day crouching behind trees, charging over to Devil's Den and Little Round Top, blowing up parties of overweight tourists with cameras around their necks.
My dad was in heaven too because the park was free and there were literally hundreds of historical plaques for him to read. Now,, however, I just found it boring.
I was about to depart, feeling guilty that I had come so far without getting anything much out of the experience, when I saw a sign at the visitors' center for tours to the Eisenhower home. I had forgotten that Ike and Mamie Eisenhower had lived on a farm just outside Gettysburg. Their old home was now a national historical monument and could be toured for $2.50. Impulsively I bought a ticket and went outside where a bus was just about to depart to take half a dozen of us to the farm four or five miles away down a country lane.
Well, it was great. I can't remember the last time I had such a good time in a Republican household.
You are greeted at the door by a fragrant woman with a chrysanthemum on her bosom, who tells you a little about the house, about how much Ike and Mamie loved to sit around and watch TV and play canasta, and then gives you a leaflet describing each room and lets you wander off on your own so that you can linger or stride on as it pleases you. Each doorway was blocked off with a sheet of clear plastic, but you could lean against it and gaze into the interior. The house has been preserved precisely as it was when the Eisenhowers lived there. It was as if they had simply wandered off and never come back (something that either of them was quite capable of doing towards the end). The decor was quintessentially early ig60s Republican. When I was growing up we had some neighbors, the McGibbonses, who were rich Republicans and this was practically a duplicate of their house.
There was a big TV console in a mahogany cabinet, table lamps made out of pieces of driftwood, a padded leather cocktail bar, French-style telephones in every room, bookshelves containing about twelve books (usually in matching sets of three) and otherwise filled with large pieces of flowery gilt-edged porcelain of the sort favored by homosexual French aristocrats.
When the Eisenhowers bought the place in I950, a 200year-old farmhouse stood on the site, but it was drafty and creaked on stormy nights, so they had it torn down and replaced with the present building, which looks like a Zoo-year-old farmhouse. Isn't that great? Isn't that just so Republican? I was enchanted. Every room contained things I hadn't seen for years1960s kitchen appliances, old copies of Life magazine, boxy black-and-white portable TVs, metal alarm clocks. Upstairs the bedrooms were just as Ike and Mamie had left them. Mamie's personal effects were on her bedside table-her diary, reading glasses, sleeping pills-and I daresay that if you knelt down and looked under the bed you would find all her old gin bottles.
In Ike's room his bathrobe and slippers were laid out and the book he had been reading on the day he died was left open on the chair beside the bed. The book was-and I ask you to remem ber for a moment that this was one of the most important men of this century, a man who held the world's destiny in his hands throughout much of World War II and the Cold War, a man chosen by Columbia University to be its president, a man venerated by Republicans for two generations, a man who throughout the whole of my childhood had his finger on The Button-the book was West of the Pecos by Zane Grey.
From Gettysburg, I headed north up US 15 towards Bloomsburg, where my brother and his family had recently moved. For years they had lived in Hawaii, in a house with a swimming pool, near balmy beaches, beneath tropical skies and whispering palms, and now, just when I had landed a trip to America and could go anywhere I wanted, they had moved to the Rust Belt. Bloomsburg, as it turned out, was actually very nice-a bit short on balmy beaches and hula girls with swaying hips, but still nice for all that.
It's a college town, with a decidedly sleepy air. You feel at first as if you should be wearing slippers and a bathrobe. Main Street was prosperous and tidy and the surrounding streets were mostly filled with large old houses sitting on ample lawns. Here and there church spires poked out from among the many trees. It was pretty well an ideal town-one of those rare American places where you wouldn't need a car. From almost any house in town it would be a short and pleasant stroll to the library and post office and stores. My brother and his wife told me that a developer was about to build a big shopping mall outside town and most of the bigger merchants were going to move out there. People, it appeared, didn't want to stroll to do their shopping. They actually wanted to get in their cars and drive to the edge of town, where they could then park and walk a similar distance across a flat, treeless parking lot. That is how America goes shopping and they wanted to be part of it. So now downtown Bloomsburg is likely to become semiderelict and another nice little town will be lost. So the world progresses.
Anyway, it was a pleasure to see my brother and his family, as you can imagine. I did all the things you do when you visit relatives-ate their food, used their bathtub, washing machine and telephone, stood around uselessly while they searched for spare blankets and grappled with a truculent sofa bed, and of course late at night when everyone was asleep I crept out of my room and had a good look in their closets. (Nothing very interesting, I'm afraid.) As it was the weekend and as they had some spare time, my brother and his wife decided to take me down to Lancaster County to show me the Amish country. It was a two-hour drive.
En route, my brother pointed out the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor at Harrisburg, where a few years before some careless employees had very nearly irradiated the whole of the eastern seaboard, and then forty-five miles further on we passed the Peach Bottom nuclear facility, where seventeen employees had recently been dismissed after it had been revealed that they spent their working hours sleeping, taking drugs, having rubber-band fights and playing video games. At some times every person in the plant was dozing, according to investigators. Allowing state utilities in Pennsylvania to run nuclear power stations is a bit like letting Prince Philip fly through London air space. In any case, I made a mental note to bring an antiradiation suit with me next time I came to Pennsylvania.
Lancaster County is the home of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish and Mennonites. The Mennonites are named after a well-known brand of speed-stick deodorant. They aren't really.
I just made that up. They are named after Menno Simons, one of their early leaders. In Europe they were called Anabaptists. They came to Lancaster County 250 years ago. Today there are 12,500
Amish people in the county, almost all of them descended from 30 original couples. The Amish split from the Mennonites in 1693, and there have been countless subdivisions since then, but the thing that they all have in common is that they wear simple clothes and shun modern contrivances.
The problem is that since about 1860 they've been squabbling endlessly over just how rigorous they should be in their shunning. Every time anybody invents something useful or notable, like television or rubber gloves, they argue about whether it is ungodly or not, and the ones who don't like it go off and form a new sect. First, they argued over whether they should have steel rims or rubber rims on their buggies, then whether they should have tractors, then electricity, then telephones and television. Now presumably they argue over whether they should have a frost-free refrigerator and whether their instant coffee should be powdered or freeze-dried.
The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named after either the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave.
But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passersby such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postmark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.
Americans are so fascinated by the Amish way of life, by the idea of people living z00 years in the past, that they come quite literally by the millions to gawk. There were hundreds and hun dreds of tourists thronging Intercourse when we arrived, and cars and buses choking the roads into town.
Everyone hoped to see and photograph some genuine Amish. Up to five million people a year visit the county and non-Amish businessmen have erected vast souvenir palaces, replica farms, wax museums, cafeterias and gift shops to soak up the $350 million that the visitors are happy to spend each year. Now there is almost nothing left in these towns for the Amish themselves to buy, so they don't come in and the tourists have nothing to do but take pictures of each other.
Travel articles and movies like Witness generally gloss over this side of things, but the fact is that Lancaster County is now one of the most awful places in America, especially on week ends when traffic jams sometimes stretch for miles. Many of the Amish themselves have given up and moved to places like Iowa and upper Michigan where they are left alone. Out in the countryside, particularly on the back roads, you can still sometimes see the people in their funny dark clothes working in the fields or driving their distinctive black buggies down the highway, with a long line of tourist cars creeping along behind, pissed off because they can't get by and they really want to be in Bird in Hand so they can get some more funnel cakes and SnoCones and perhaps buy a wrought-iron wine rack or combination mailbox-weather vane to take back home to Fartville with them. I wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now there isn't a real Amish person left in the county. It is an unspeakable shame. They should be left in peace.
In the evening, along with everyone else in the whole of Pennsylvania, we went to one of the many barnlike family-style Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants that are scattered across the county. The parking lot was packed with buses and cars and there were people waiting everywhere, inside the building and out. We went in and were given a ticket with the number 621 on it and went with it to a tiny patch of floor space just vacated by another party. Every few minutes a man would step to the door and call out a series of numbers ridiculously lower than ours-220, 221, 222-and a dozen or so people would follow him into the dining room. We debated leaving, but a party of fat people beside us told us not to give up because it was worth the wait, even if we had to stay there until eleven o'clock. The food was that good, they said, and where food was concerned these people clearly had some experience. Well, they were right. Eventually our number was called and we were ushered into the dining room with nine strangers and all seated together at one big trestle table.
There must have been fifty other such tables in the room, all with a dozen or so people at them. The din and bustle were enormous. Waitresses rushed back and forth with outsized trays and everywhere you looked people were shoveling food into their mouths, elbows flapping, as if they hadn't eaten for a week. Our waitress made us introduce ourselves to each other, which everybody thought was kind of dopey, and then she started bringing food, great platters and bowls of it-thick slabs of ham, mountains of fried chicken, buckets of mashed potatoes and all kinds of vegetables, rolls, soups and salads. It was incredible. You helped yourself and with two hands heaved the platter on to the next person. You could have as much of anything as you wanted-indeed, when a bowl was empty the waitress brought back another and practically ordered you to clear it.
I've never seen so much food. I couldn't see over the top of my plate. It was all delicious and pretty soon everybody knew everybody else and was having a great time. I ate so much my armpits bulged.
But still the food kept coming. Just when I thought I would have to summon a wheelchair to get me to the car, the waitress took away all the platters and bowls, and started bringing desserts-apple pies, chocolate cakes, bowls of homemade ice cream, pastries, flans and God knows what else.
I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt; my trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shoveling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate more food that night than some African villagers eat in a lifetime. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
We got in the car, too full to speak, and headed towards the greenish glow of Three Mile Island. I felt as if I had eaten the contents of a cement mixer. I lay on the back seat of the car, my feet in the air, and moaned softly. I vowed that I would never eat again, and meant it. But two hours later, when we arrived back at my brother's house, the agony had abated and my brother and I were able to begin a new cycle of gross overconsumption, beginning with a twelve-pack of beer and bucket of pretzels from his kitchen and concluding, in the early hours of the morning, with a plate of onion rings and two-foot-long submarine sandwiches, full of goo and spices, at an all-night eatery out on Highway 11.
CHAPTER I4
IT WAS TEN MINUTES to seven in the morning and it was cold. Standing outside the Bloomsburg bus station, I could see my breath. The few cars out this early trailed clouds of vapor. I was hung over and in a few minutes I was going to climb onto a bus for a five-hour ride into New York. I would sooner have eaten cat food.
My brother had suggested that I take the bus because it would save having to find a place to park in Manhattan. I could leave the car with him and come back for it in a day or two. At two in the morning, after many beers, this had seemed a good plan. But now, standing in the early-morning chill, I realized I was making a serious mistake. You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or-and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America-you cannot afford a car. Being unable to afford a car in America is the last step before living out of a plastic sack. As a result, most of the people on long-distance buses are one of the following: mentally defective, actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, just released from prison or nuns. Occasionally you will also see a pair of Norwegian students. You can tell they are Norwegian students because they are so pink faced and healthy-looking and they wear little pale blue ankle socks with their sandals.
By and large a ride on a long-distance bus in America combines most of the shortcomings of prison life with those of an ocean crossing in a troopship. So when the bus pulled up before me, heaving a pneumatic sigh, and its doors flapped open, 1 boarded it with some misgivings. The driver himself didn't look any too stable. He had the sort of hair you associate with people who have had accidents involving live wires. There were about half a dozen other passengers, though only two of them looked seriously dangerous and just one was talking to himself. I took a seat near the back and settled down to get some sleep. I had drunk far too many beers with my brother the night before, and the hot spices from the submarine sandwich were now expanding ominously inside my abdomen and drifting around like that stuff they put in lava lamps. Soon from one end or the other it would begin to seep out.
I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind. Through the gap in the seat I could see it was an Indian man-by that I mean a man from India, not an American Indian. "Can I smoke on this bus?" he asked me.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't smoke anymore, so I don't pay much attention to these things."
"But do you think I can smoke on this bus?" "I really don't know."
He was quiet for a few minutes, then his hand was on my shoulder again, not tapping it but resting there. "I can't find an ashtray," he said.
"No fooling," I responded wittily, without opening my eyes. "Do you think that means we're not allowed to smoke?" "I don't know. I don't care."
"But do you think it means we're not allowed to smoke?" "If you don't take your hand off my shoulder I am going to dribble vomit on it," I said.
He removed his hand quickly and was silent for perhaps a minute. Then he said, "Would you help me look for an ashtray?" It was seven in the morning and I was deeply unwell. I jumped up. "WILL
YOU PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!" I said to him. Two seats back a pair of Norwegian students looked shocked. I gave them a look as if to say, "And don't you try anything either, you wholesome little shits!" and sank back into my seat. It was going to be a long day.
I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semiconscious sleep in which you incorporate into your dreams the things going on around you-the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamed of the bus plunging over a cliff face, sailing into a void; in my dream, we fell for miles, tumbling through the clouds, peacefully, with just the sound of air whisking past outside, and then the Indian saying to me, "Do you think it would be all right if I smoked now?"
When I awoke there was drool on my shoulder and a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank gray hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously. They were the sort of burps children make to amuse themselves-rich, resonant, basso profundo burps. The woman was completely unselfconscious about it. She would look at me and open her mouth and out would roll a burp. It was amazing. Then she would take a drag of her cigarette and burp a large puff of smoke.
That was amazing too. I glanced behind me. The Indian man was still there, looking miserable.
Seeing me, he started to lean forward to ask a supplementary question, but I stopped him with a raised finger and he sank back. I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. But apart from being dead or at a Bee Gees concert I couldn't think of a single thing.
We reached New York in the afternoon. I got a room in a he el near Times Square. The room cost $110 a night and was so small I had to go out into the corridor to turn around. I had never been in a room where I could touch all four walls at once. I did all the things you do in hotel rooms-played with the lights and TV, looked in the drawers, smelled the little cake of soap in the bathroom, put all the towels and ashtrays in my suitcase-and then wandered out to have a look at the city.
The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were living there then. They had an apartment in a strange, Kafkaesque apartment complex in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen identical tall, featureless buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain puddles stand for weeks and the flowerbeds are littered with supermarket carts. Each building was like a vertical city, with its own grocery store, drugstore, laundromat and so on. I don't remember the details except that each building was taller than the tallest building in Des Moines and that the total population was something like 50,000--bigger than most Iowa towns. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn't understand why in such a big, open country as America people would choose to live like that. It wasn't as if this were something temporary, a place to spend a few months while waiting for their ranch house in the suburbs to be built. This was home. This was it. Thousands and thousands of people would live out their lives never having their own backyard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket carts grew wild, like weeds.
In the evenings, when my brother and his wife went out, Stan and I would sit with binoculars and scan the windows of the neighboring buildings. There were hundreds of windows to choose from, each containing a ghostly glow of television, a separate glimpsed life, another chapter in the endless story of the naked city. What we were looking for, of course, were naked women-and to our amazement we did actually see some, though usually this resulted in such excited grappling for control of the binoculars that the women had dressed and gone out for the evening by the time we got their windows back in view. Mostly what we saw, however, were other men with binoculars scanning the windows of our building. It was all very strange. This was August 1968. In the background, I remember, the television was filled with news of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and Mayor Daley's men kicking the crap out of demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was a strange time to be young, full of lust and bodily juices.
What I particularly remember was the sense of menace whenever we left the building. Groups of hoody-looking teenagers with no place to go would sit on the walls around the complex watching anyone who passed. I always expected them to fall in behind us as we went by and to take our money and stick us with knives they had made in the prison workshop, but they never bothered us, they just stared.
New York still frightened me. I felt the same sense of menace now as I walked down to Times Square. New York scared me. I had read so much for so long about murders and street crime that I felt a personal gratitude to everyone who left me alone. I wanted to hand out cards that said, "Thank you for not killing me." But the only people who assaulted me were panhandlers. There are 36,000
vagrants in New York and in two days of walking around every one of them asked me for money.
Some of them asked twice. People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging. I began to regret that I didn't live in an age when a gentleman could hit such people with his stick.
One guy, my favorite, came up and asked if he could borrow a dollar. That knocked me out. I wanted to say, "Borrow a dollar? Certainly. Shall we say interest at 1 percent above prime and we'll meet back here on Thursday to settle?" I wouldn't give him a dollar, of course-I wouldn't give my closest friend a dollar-but I pressed a dime into his grubby mitt and gave him a wink for his guile.
Times Square is incredible. You've never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It's like a storm on an electronic sea.
There are perhaps forty of these massive inducements to spend and consume, and all but two of them are for Japanese companies: Mita Copiers, Canon, Panasonic, Sony. My mighty homeland was represented by just Kodak and Pepsi-Cola. The war is over, Yankee dog, I thought bleakly.
The most riveting thing about New York is that anything can happen there. Only the week before a woman had been eaten by an escalator. Can you beat that? She had been on her way to work, minding her own business, when suddenly the stair beneath her gave way and she plummeted into the interior mechanisms, into all the whirring cogs and gears, with the sort of consequences you can well imagine. How would you like to be the cleaner in that building? ("Bernie, can you come in early tonight? And listen, you'd better bring along a wire brush and a lot of Ajax.") New York is always full of amazing and unpredictable things. A front-page story in the New York Post was about a pervert with AIDS who had been jailed that day for raping little boys. Can you believe that?
"What a city!" I thought. "Such a madhouse!" For two days I walked and stared and mumbled in amazement. A large black man on Eighth Avenue reeled out of a doorway, looking seriously insane, and said to me, "I been smoking ice! Big bowls of ice!" I gave him a quarter real fast, even though he hadn't asked for anything, and moved off quickly. On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen-all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it.
Here it was everywhere-on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza. "Incredible," I muttered and walked on. Next door a store sold pornographic videos, right there on Fifth Avenue. My favorite was Yiddish Erotica, Volume 2. What could this possibly consist of-rabbis with their trousers down, tarty women lying spreadeagled and saying, "You wanna fuck already?" "Superb, incredible," I mumbled and plodded on.
In the evening, as I strolled back along Times Square, my eye was caught by a striptease club with a photograph of the strippers in the window. They were nice-looking girls. One of the photos was of f Samantha Fox. Since Ms. Fox was at this time being paid something like £250,000 a year to show off her comely udders to readers of British newspapers such as the Sun, it seemed to me improbable, to say the least, that she would be peeling off for strangers in a smoky basement room on Times Square. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that there was a little fraud at work here. It's a mean trick to play on a horny person.
They always used to do this to you at the Iowa State Fair. The strippers' tents at the back of the midway would be covered with wildly erotic paintings of the most beautiful, silky-haired, full-breasted, lithe-bodied women you ever saw-women whose moist and pouty lips seemed to be saying, "I want you-yes, you there, with the zits and glasses. Come and fulfill me, little man." Aged fourteen and delirious with lust, you would believe these pictures with all your heart and many of the neighboring organs. You would hand over a crumpled dollar and go inside into a dusty tent that smelled of horse manure and rubbing alcohol and find onstage a weary stripper looking not unlike your own mother. It was the sort of disappointment from which you never really recover, and my heart went out now to the lonely sailors and Japanese photocopier salesmen who were down there drinking sweet, warm cocktails and having a night of overpriced disappointment. "We learn from our mistakes," I remarked sagely to myself with a rueful smile and told a panhandler to piss off.
I went back to my room, pleased not to have been mugged, more pleased not to have been murdered. On top of my television was a card saying that for $6.50 I could have an in-room movie.
There was, as I recall, a choice of four-Friday the Thirteenth, Part 19, in which a man with a personality disorder uses knives, hatchets, Cuisinarts and a snowblower to kill a succession of young women just as they are about to step into the shower; Death Wish 11, in which Charles Bronson tracks down and kills Michael Winner; Bimbo, in which Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has a sexchange operation and then blows up a lot of Oriental people; and, on the adult channel, My Panties Are Dripping, a sensitive study of interpersonal relationships and social conflict in postmodern Denmark, with a lot of vigorous bonking thrown in for good measure. I toyed for a moment with the idea of watching a bit of the last one-just t0 help me relax, as they say in evangelical circles-but I was too cheap to spend $6.50, and, anyway, I've always suspected that if I did punch the requisite button (which was worn to a nubbin, I can tell you), the next day a bellboy would confront me with a computer printout and tell me that if I didn't give him fifty dollars he would send a copy of the room receipt tp my mother with "Miscellaneous charges: Deviant Porno Movie, $6.50" circled in red. So instead I lay on the bed and watched a rerun on normal television of "Mr. Ed," a 1960s comedy series about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr. Ed wrote his own material. But at least there was nothing in it that would get me blackmailed.
And thus ended my day in New York, the most exciting and stimulating city in the world. I couldn't help but reflect that I had no reason to feel superior to my fellow lonely hearts in the strip tease club twenty floors below. I was just as lonesome as they were. Indeed, all over this big, heartless city there were n0 doubt tens 0f thousands 0f people just as solitary and friendless as me. What a melancholy thought.
"But I wonder how many of them can do this?" I remarked to myself and with my hands and feet reached out and touched all four walls at once.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS THE Columbus Day weekend and the roads were busy. Columbus has always seemed t0
me an odd choice 0f hero for a country that celebrates success as America does because he was such a dismal failure. Consider the facts: he made four long voyages t0 the Americas, but never once realized that he wasn't in Asia and never found anything worthwhile. Every other explorer was coming back with exciting new products like potatoes and tobacco and nylon stockings, and all Columbus found t0 bring home were some puzzled-looking Indians-and he thought they were Japanese. ("Come 0n, you guys, let's see a little sumo.") But perhaps Columbus's most remarkable shortcoming was that he never actually saw the land that was t0 become the United States. This surprises a lot 0f people. They imagine him trampling over Florida, saying, "You know, this would make a nice resort." But in fact his voyages were all spent in the Caribbean and bouncing around the swampy, bug-infested coasts 0f Central America. If you ask me, the Vikings would make far more worthy heroes for America. For one thing, they did actually discover it. On top 0f that, the Vikings were manly and drank out 0f skulls and didn't take any crap from anybody. Now that's the American way.
When I lived in America Columbus Day was one Of those semibogus holidays that existed only for the benefit Of public workers with strong unions. There was no mail on Columbus Day and if you innocently drove all the way over to the east side of town to the Iowa State Vehicle Licensing Center to renew your driver's license you would find the door locked and a notice hanging in the window saying, CLOSED FOR COLUMBUS DAY HOLIDAY. So TOUCH SHIT TO You. But otherwise life was no different than on any other day. Now, however, it appeared that the Columbus Day holiday had spread. There were lots of cars and recreational vehicles on the highway and the radio announcers kept talking about things like the number of fatalities that were expected "this Columbus Day weekend." (How do they know these things anyway? Is there some kind of secret quota?) I had been looking forward to reaching New England because I wanted to see the autumn color. In addition, the states would be small and varied and there wouldn't be that awful rolling tedium that comes with all the other American states, even the attractive ones. But I was wrong. Of course, New England states are indubitably tiny-Connecticut is only eighty miles across; Rhode Island is smaller than London-but they are crowded with cars, people and cities. Connecticut appeared to be just one suburb. I drove up US 202 towards Litchfield, which was marked on my map as a scenic route, and it was, to be sure, more scenic than a suburb, but it wasn't exactly spectacular.
Perhaps I was expecting too much. In the movies in the 1940s people were always going to Connecticut for the weekend, and it always looked wonderfully green and rustic. It was always full of empty roads and stone cottages in leafy glades. But this was just semisuburban: ranch houses with three-car garages and lawns with twirling sprinklers and shopping centers every six blocks.
Litchfield itself was very handsome, the quintessential New England town, with an old courthouse and a long sloping green with a cannon and a memorial to the war dead. On one side of the green stood pleasant shops and on the other was a tall, white, steepled church, dazzling in the October sunshine. And there was color-the trees around the green were a rich gold and lemon. This was more like it.
I parked in front of MacDonald Drug and crossed the green through a scuffle of fallen leaves. I strolled along residential streets where big houses squatted on wide lawns. Each was a variation on the same theme: rambling clapboard with black shutters. Many had wooden plaques on them pertaining to their history--OLIVER BOARDMAN 1785; 1830 COL. WEBB. I spent over an hour just poking around. It was a pleasant town for poking.
Afterwards I drove east, sticking to back highways. Soon I was in the suburbs of Hartford, and then in Hartford itself, and then in the suburbs on the other side of Hartford. And then I was in Rhode Island. I stopped beside a sign saying WELCOME To RHODE ISLAND and stared at the map. Was that really all there was to Connecticut? I considered turning back and having another sweep across the state-there had to be more to it than that-but it was getting late, so I pressed on, venturing into a deep and rather more promising pine forest. Considering Rhode Island's microscopic size it seemed to take me ages to find my way out of the forest. By the time I hit Narragansett Bay, a heavily islanded inlet which consumes almost a quarter of the state's modest square mileage, it was almost dark, and there were lights winking from the villages scattered along the shoreline.
At Plum Point a long bridge crossed the sound to Conanicut Island, which rode low and dark on the water, like a corpse. I crossed the bridge and drove around the island a little, but by now it was too dark to see much. At one place where the shore came in near the road, I parked and walked to the beach. It was a moonless night and I could hear the sea before I could see it, coming in with a slow, rhythmic whoosh-whoosh. I went and stood at the waters edge. The waves fell onto the beach like exhausted swimmers. The wind played at my jacket. I stared for a long time out across the moody sea, the black vastness of the Atlantic, the fearsome, primordial, storm-tossed depths from which all of life has crawled and will no doubt one day return, and I thought, "I could murder a hamburger."
In the morning I drove into Newport, America's premier yachting community, home of the America's Cup races. The old part of town had been fixed up in recent years, by the look of it. Shops with hanging wooden signs out front lined the streets. They all had jauntily nautical names like the Flying Ship and Shore Thing. The harbor was almost too picturesque, with its crowds of white yachts and bare masts undulating beneath a sky in which gulls danced and reeled. But all around the fringe of the downtown there were unsightly parking lots, and a busy four-lane road, more freeway than city street, divided the waterfront from the town. Spindly trees stood along it like scrawny afterthoughts. The city had also built a little park, Perrott Park, but it was unkempt and full of graffiti. I had not encountered this kind of neglect before. Most American towns are spotless, and this really surprised me, especially considering the importance of tourism to Newport. I walked up Thames Street, where some fine old sea captains' homes were fighting a losing battle with litter and dog shit and the encroachment of gas stations and car transmission places. It was all very sad. This was a place where the people didn't seem to care, or perhaps just didn't notice, how shabby they had let things grow. It reminded me of London.
I drove out to Fort Adams State Park across the bay. From there Newport looked another town altogether-a charming cutout of needle-shaped church spires and Victorian rooftops protruding from a parkland of trees. The bay glittered in the sunshine and its scores of sailboats bobbed on the gentle waves. It was captivating. I drove on along the shore road, past Brenton Point, and then down Bellevue Avenue, where the most fabulous summer homes ever built line the road on both sides and spill over onto many of the streets beyond.
Between about 1890 and 1905, America's richest families--the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Belmonts, dozens of others tried to outdo each other by building magnificent homes, which they insisted on calling cottages, all along this half-mile strip of imposing cliffs. Most were loosely modeled on French chateaux and filled with furniture, marble and tapestries shipped at huge expense from Europe. Hostesses routinely spent $300,000 or more on entertainment for a season that listed only six or eight weeks. For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.
Most of the houses are now run as museums. They charge an arm and a leg to get in and in any case the lines outside most of them were enormous (this was the Columbus Day weekend, remember).
You can't see much from the street-the owners didn't want common people staring at them as they sat on the lawn counting their money, so they put up dense hedges and high walls-but I discovered quite by chance that the city had built an asphalt footpath all along the cliff edge, from which I could see the backs of the grander mansions, as well as enjoy giddying views of the ocean breaking onto the rocks far below. I had the path almost to myself and walked along it in a state of quiet amazement, with my mouth open. I had never seen such a succession of vast houses, such an excess of architecture. Every house looked like a cross between a wedding cake and a state capitol building. I knew that the grandest of all the houses was The Breakers, built by the Vanderbilts, and I kept thinking, "Well, this must be it" and "Now surely this must be it," but then the next house along would be even more awesome. When at last I reached The Breakers, it was absolutely enormous, a mountain with windows. You can't look at it without thinking that nobody, with the possible exception of oneself, deserves to be that rich.
On the other side of the fence, the lawns and terraces were full of pudgy tourists in Bermuda shorts and silly hats, wandering in and out of the house, taking pictures of each other and tram pling the begonias, and I wondered what Cornelius Vanderbilt would make of that, the dog-faced old prick.
I drove on to Cape Cod, another place I had never been and for which I had high expectations. It was very picturesque, with its old salt-box homes, its antique shops and wooden inns, its pretty villages with quaint names: Sagamore, Sandwich, Barnstable, Rock Harbor. But it was jam-packed with tourists in overloaded cars and rumbling motor homes. Boy, do I hate motor homes! Especially on crowded peninsulas like Cape Cod where they clog
the streets and block the views-and all so that some guy and his dumpy wife can eat lunch and empty their bladders without stopping.
The traffic was so dense and slow moving that I almost ran out of gas and just managed to limp into a two-pump station outside West Barnstable. It was run by a man who was at least ninety-seven years old. He was tall and rangy and very spry. I've never seen anybody pump gas with such abandon. First he slopped a quantity of it down the side of the car and then he got so engaged in talking about where I came from-"Ioway, eh? We don't get many from Ioway. I think you're the first this year. What's the weather like in Ioway this time of year?"-that he let the pump run over and I had to point out to him that gasoline was cascading down the side of the car and gathering in a pool at our feet. He withdrew the nozzle, sloshing another half-gallon over the car and down his trousers and shoes, and kind of threw it back at the pump, where it dribbled carelessly.
He had a cigarette butt plugged into the side of his mouth and I was terrified he would try to light it.
And he did. He pulled out a crumpled book of matches and started to fidget one of them to life. I was too stunned to move. All I could think of was a television newscaster saying, "And in West Barnstable today a tourist from Iowa suffered third-degree burns over 98 percent of his body in an explosion at a gas station. Fire officials said he looked like a marshmallow that had fallen on the campfire. The owner of the gas station has still not been found." But we didn't explode. The little stub of cigarette sprouted smoke, which the man puffed up into a good-sized billow, and then he pinched out the match with his fingers. I suppose after all these decades of pumping gas he had become more or less incombustible, like those snake handlers who grow immune to snake venom.
But I wasn't inclined to test this theory too closely. I paid him hastily and pulled straight back onto the highway, much to the annoyance of a man in a forty-foot motor home who dripped mustard on his lap in braking to avoid me. "That'll teach you to take a building on vacation," I muttered uncharitably and hoped that something heavy had fallen on his wife in back.
Cape Cod is a long, thin peninsula that sprouts out of the base of Massachusetts, runs out to sea for twenty miles or so and then curls back in on itself. It looks like an arm flexed to make a muscle-in fact, it looks remarkably like my arm because there's almost no muscle in it. There are three roads along the lower part of the peninsula-one along the north shore, one along the south shore and one up the middle-but at the peninsula's elbow at Rock Harbor, where it narrows and abruptly turns north, the three roads come together and there is just one long slow highway up the forearm to Provincetown at the fingertips. Provincetown was swarming with tourists. The town has just one route in and one route out. Only a few hundred people live there, but they get as many as 50,000
visitors a day during the summer and on holiday weekends such as this one. Parking was not allowed in the town itself-there were mean-spirited towaway warnings everywhere-so I paid a couple of bucks to leave my car with several hundred others out in the middle of nowhere and trudged a long way into town.
Provincetown is built on sand. All around it stand rolling dunes broken only by occasional clumps of straw-colored grass. The names of the businesses-Windy Ridge Motel, Gale Force Gift Shop-suggested that wind might be something of a local feature, and indeed there was sand drifted across the roads and piled in the doorways, and with every whipping breeze it flew in your eyes and face and dusted whatever food you happened to be eating. It must be an awful place to live. I might have disliked it less if Provincetown had tried just a little harder to be charming. I had seldom seen a place so singularly devoted to sucking money out of tourists. It was filled with ice cream parlors and gift shops and places selling T-shirts, kites and beach paraphernalia.
I walked around for a while and had a hot dog with mustard and sand and a cup of coffee with cream and sand and had a look in a window of a real estate agency, where I noticed that a basic two-bedroom house by the beach was on offer at $l90,000, though it did include a fireplace and all the sand you could eat. The beaches looked nice enough, but apart from that I couldn't see a single real attraction in the place.
Provincetown is where the Pilgrim fathers first touched American soil in 1620. There's a big campanile-type tower in the middle of the town to commemorate the event. The Pilgrims, curiously enough, didn't mean to land on Cape Cod at all. They were aiming for Jamestown in Virginia, but missed their target by a mere b00 miles. I think that is a considerable achievement. Here's another curious thing: they didn't bring with them a single plow or horse or cow or even a fishing line. Does that strike you as just a little bit foolish? I mean to say, if you were going to start a new life in a land far, far away, don't you think you would give some thought to how you were going to fend for yourself once you got there? Still, for all their shortcomings as planners, the Pilgrim fathers were sufficiently on the ball not to linger in the Provincetown area and at the first opportunity they pushed on to mainland Massachusetts. So did I.
I had hoped to go to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys had their summer home, but the traffic was so slow, especially around Woods Hole, where the ferry to Martha's Vineyard departs, that I dared not. Every motel I passed-and there were hundredssaid N0 VACANCY. I got on Interstate 93, thinking I would follow it for a few miles just to get away from Cape Cod, and start looking for a room, but before I knew it I was in Boston, caught in the evening rush hour. Boston's freeway system was insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains. Every few hundred yards I would find my lane vanishing beneath me and other lanes merging with it from the right or left, or sometimes both. This wasn't a road system, it was mobile hysteria.
Everybody looked worried. I had never seen people working so hard to keep from crashing into each other. And this was a Saturday-God knows what it must be like on a weekday.
Boston is a big city and its outer suburbs dribble on and on all the way up to New Hampshire. So, late in the evening, without having any clear idea of how I got there, I found myself in one of those placeless places that sprout up along the junctions of interstate highways-purplishly lit islands of motels, gas stations, shopping centers and fast-food places-so brightly lit they must be visible from outer space. This one was somewhere in the region of Haverhill. I got a room in a Motel 6 and dined on greasy fried chicken and limp french fries at a Denny's Restaurant across the way. It had been a bad day, but I refused to get depressed. Just a couple of miles down the road was New Hampshire and the start of the real New England. Things could only get better.
CHAPTER 16
I HAD ALWAYS thought that New England was nothing but maple trees and white churches and old guys in checkered shirts sitting around iron stoves in country general stores swapping tall tales and spitting in the cracker barrel. But if lower New Hampshire was anything to go by, clearly I had been misinformed. There was just modern commercial squalorshopping centers, gas stations, motels. Every once in a while there would be a white church or clapboard inn standing incongruously in the midst of Burger Kings and Texacos. But far from mollifying the ugliness, it only intensified it; reminding you what had been thrown away for the sake of drive-through burgers and cheap gasoline.
At Salisbury, I joined old Route 1, intending to follow it up the coast through Maine. Route 1, as the name suggests, is the patriarch of American roads, the first federal highway. It stretches for 2,500 miles from the Canadian border to the Florida Keys. For forty years it was the main highway along the eastern seaboard, connecting all the big cities of the North-Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington-with the beaches and citrus groves of the South. It must have been wonderful in the i930s and 1940s to drive from Maine to Florida on vacation, going through all those big marvelous cities and then passing on to the hills of Virginia and the green mountains of the Carolinas, getting warmer with the passing miles. But by the 1960s Route I had become too congested to be practical-a third of all Americans live within twenty miles of it-and Interstate 9s was built to zip traffic up and down the coast with only the most fleeting sense of a changing landscape.
Today Route i is still there, but you would need weeks to drive its entire length. Now it is just a local road, an endless city street, an epic stretch of shopping malls.
I had hoped that here in rural New England it would retain something of its former charm, but it seemed not to. I drove through a chill morning drizzle and wondered if ever I would find the real New England. At Portsmouth, an instantly forgettable little town, I crossed over into Maine on an iron bridge over the gray Piscataqua River. Seen through the rhythmic swish of windshield wipers, Maine too looked ominously unpromising, a further sprawl of shopping centers and muddy new housing developments.
Beyond Kennebunkport the suburbs at last gave way to forest. Here and there massive brown boulders emerged eerily from the earth, like subterranean creatures coming up for air, and occasionally I caught glimpses of the sea-a gray plane, cold and bleak. I drove and drove, thinking that any moment now I would encounter the fabled Maine of lobster pots and surf-battered shores and lonely lighthouses standing on rocks of granite, but the towns I passed through were just messy and drear, and the countryside was wooded and unmemorable. Once, outside Falmouth, the road ran for a mile or so along a silvery bay with a long, low bridge leading over it to a landscape of snug farms nestled in a fold of hills, and I got briefly excited. But it was a false alarm and the landscape quickly grew dull again. The rest of the time the real Maine eluded me. It was always just over there, like the amusement parks my dad used to miss.
At Wiscasset, a third of the way up the coast to New Brunswick, I lost heart altogether. Wiscasset bills itself on the signboard at the edge of town as the prettiest village in Maine, which doesn't say a whole lot for the rest of the state. I don't mean to suggest that Wiscaset was awful, because it wasn't.
It had a steep main street lined with craft shops and other yuppie emporia sloping down to a placid inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. Two old wooden ships sat rotting on the bank. It was OK. It just wasn't worth driving four hours to get there.
Abruptly I decided to abandon Route 1 and plunge northward, into the dense pine forests of central Maine, heading in an irregular line for the White Mountains, on a road that went up and down, up and down, like a rucked carpet. After a few miles I began to sense a change of atmosphere. The clouds were low and shapeless, the daylight meager. Winter clearly was closing in. I was only seventy miles of so from Canada and it was evident that winters here were long and severe. It was written in the crumbling roads and in the huge stacks of firewood that stood outside each lonely cabin. Many chimneys were already sprouting wintry wisps of smoke. It was barely October, but already the land had the cold and lifeless feel of winter. It was the kind of atmosphere that makes you want to turn up your collar and head for home.
Just beyond Gilead I passed into New Hampshire and the landscape became more interesting. The White Mountains rose up before me, big and round, the color of wood ash. Presumably they take their name from the birch trees that cover them. I drove on an empty highway through a forest of trembling leaves. The skies were still flat and low, the weather cold, but at least I was out of the monotony of the Maine woods. The road rose and fell and swept along the edge of a boulder-strewn creek. The scenery was infinitely better-but still there was no color, none of the brilliant golds and reds of autumn that I had been led to expect. Everything from the ground to the sky was a dull, cadaverous gray.
I drove past Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeastern United States (6,288 feet, for those of you who are keeping notes). But its real claim to fame is as the windiest place in America.
It's something to do with ... well, with the way the wind blows, of course. Anyway, the highest wind speed ever recorded anywhere on earth was logged on the top of Mount Washington in April 1934
when a gust of-pencils ready?-231 miles an hour whistled through. That must have been an experience and a half for the meteorologists who worked up there. Can you imagine trying to describe a wind like that to somebody? ,,Well, it was, you know, real ... windy. I mean, really windy. Do you know what I'm saying?" It must be very frustrating to have a truly unique experience.
Just beyond it, I came to Bretton Woods, which I had always pictured as a quaint little town. But in fact there was no town at all, just a hotel and a ski lift. The hotel was huge and looked like a medieval fortress, but with a bright red roof. It looked like a cross between Monte Cassino and a Pizza Hut. It was here in 1944 that economists and politicians from twenty-eight nations got together and agreed to set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It certainly looked a nice place to make economic history. As John Maynard Keynes remarked at the time in a letter to his brother, Milton, "It has been a most satisfactory week. The negotiations have been cordial, the food here is superb and the waiters are ever so pretty."
I stopped for the night at Littleton, which, as the name suggests, is a little town near the Vermont border. I pulled into the Littleton Motel on the main street. On the office door was a sign that said,
"If you want ice of advice, come before 6:30. I'm taking the wife to dinner. ('And about time too!'-wife)." Inside was an old guy on crutches who told me I was very lucky because he had just one room left. It would be forty-two dollars plus tax. When he saw me start to froth and back off, he hastily added, "It's a real nice room. Got a brand-new TV. Nice carpets. Beautiful little shower.
We've got the cleanest rooms in town. We're famous for that." He swept an arm over a selection of testimonials from satisfied customers which he displayed under glass on the countertop. "Our room must have been the cleanest room in town!"A.K., Aardvark Falls, Ky. "Boy, was our room ever clean! And such nice carpets!"-Mr. and Mrs. J.F., Spotweld, Ohio. That soft of thing.
Somehow I doubted the veracity of these claims, but I was too weary to return to the road, so with a sigh I said all fight and signed in. I took my key and a bucket of ice (at forty-two dollars plus tax I intended to have everything that was going) and went with them to my room. And by golly, it was the cleanest room in town. The TV was brand-new and the carpet was plush. The bed was comfortable and the shower really was a beauty. I felt instantly ashamed of myself and retracted all my bad thoughts about the proprietor. ("I was a pompous little shit to have doubted you."-Mr. B.B., Des Moines.)
I ate fourteen ice cubes and watched the early evening news. This was followed by an old episode of
"Gilligan's Island," which the TV station had thoughtfully put on as an inducement to its non-brain-damaged viewers to get up immediately and go do something more useful. This I did. I went out and had a look around the town. The reason I had chosen to stop for the night at Littleton was that an American Heritage book I had with me referred to it as picturesque. In point of fact, if Littleton was characterized by anything it was a singular lack of picturesqueness. The town consisted principally of one long street of mostly undistinguished buildings, with a supermarket parking lot in the middle and the shell of a disused gas station a couple of doors away. This, I think we can agree, does not constitute picturesqueness. Happily, the town had other virtues. For one thing, it was the friendliest little place I had ever seen. I went into the Topic of the Town restaurant. The other customers smiled at me, the lady at the cash register showed me where to put my jacket, and the waitress, a plump and dimpled little lady, couldn't do enough for me. It was as if they had all been given some kind of marvelous tranquilizer.
The waitress brought me a menu and I made the mistake of saying thank you. "You're welcome,"
she said. Once you start this there's no stopping. She came and wiped the table with a damp cloth.
"Thank you," I said. "You're welcome," she said. She brought me some cutlery wrapped in a paper napkin. I hesitated, but I couldn't stop myself. "Thank you," I said. "You're welcome," she said.
Then came a place mat with "Topic of the Town" written on it, and then a glass of water, and then a clean ashtray, and then a little basket of saltine crackers wrapped in cellophane, and at each we had our polite exchange. I ordered the fried chicken special. As I waited I became uncomfortably aware that the people at the next table were watching me and smiling at me in a deranged fashion. The waitress was watching me too, from a position by the kitchen doorway. It was all rather unnerving.
Every few moments she would come over and top up my iced water and tell me that my food would only be a minute.
"Thank you," I'd say.
"You're welcome," she'd say.
Eventually the waitress came out of the kitchen with a tray the size of a tabletop and started setting down plates of food in front of me-soup, salad, a platter of chicken, a basket of steaming rolls. It all looked delicious. Suddenly I realized that I was starving.
"Can I get you anything else?" she said.
"No, this is just fine, thank you," I answered, knife and fork plugged in my fists, ready to lunge at the food.
"Would you like some ketchup?" "No thank you."
"Would you like a little more dressing for your salad?" "No thank you."
"Have you got enough gravy?"
There was enough gravy to drown a horse. "Yes, plenty of gravy, thank you."
"How about a cup of coffee?" "Really, I'm fine."
"You sure there's nothing I can do for you?"
"Well, you might just piss off and let me eat my dinner," I wanted to say, but I didn't, of course. I just smiled sweetly and said no thank you and after a while she withdrew. But she stood with a pitcher of iced water and watched me closely the whole meal. Every time I took a sip of water, she would come forward and top up my glass. Once when I reached for the pepper, she misread my intentions and started forward with the water pitcher, but then had to retreat. After that, whenever my hands left the cutlery for any reason, I would semi-mime an explanation to her of what I was about to do-"I'm just going to butter my roll now"-so that she wouldn't rush over to give me more water. And all the while the people at the next table watched me eat and smiled encouragingly. I couldn't wait to get out of there.
When at last I finished the waitress came over and offered me dessert. "How about a piece of pie?
We've got blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, boysenberry, huckleberry, whortleberry, cherry berry, hairy berry, chuckberry and berry-berry."
"Gosh, no thanks, I'm too full," I said placing my hands on my stomach. I looked as if I had stuffed a pillow under my shirt.
"Well, how about some ice cream? We've got chocolate chip, chocolate fudge, chocolate ripple, chocolate-vanilla fudge, chocolate nut fudge, chocolate marshmallow swirl, chocolate mint with fudge chips, and fudge nut with or without chocolate chips."
"Have you got just plain chocolate?"
"No, I'm afraid there's not much call for that." "I don't think I'll have anything then."
"Well, how about a piece of cake? We've got-" "Really, no thank you."
"A cup of coffee?" "No thank you." "You sure now?" "Yes, thank you."
"Well, I'll just get you a little more water then," and she was off for the water jug before I could get her to give me my bill. The people at the next table watched this with interest and smiled a smile that said, "We are completely off our heads. How are you?"
Afterwards, I had a walk around the town-that is to say, I walked up one side of the street and down the other. For the size of the place it was a nice town. It had two bookstores, a picture gallery, a gift shop, a movie house. People on the sidewalk smiled at me as I passed. This was beginning to worry me. Nobody, even in America, is that friendly. What did they want from me? Up at the far end of the street there was a BP service station, the first one I had seen in America. Feeling vaguely homesick for Blighty, I walked up to have a look at it and was disappointed to see that there wasn't anything particularly British about it. The guy behind the counter wasn't even wearing a turban.
When he saw me looking in the window he smiled at me with that same strange, unsettling smile.
Suddenly I realized what it was-it was the look of someone from outer space, that odd, curiously malevolent B-movie smile of a race of interplanetary creatures who have taken over a small town in the middle of nowhere as their first step towards becoming ... Earth Masters. I know this sounds improbable, but crazier things have happened-look who was in the White House, for Christ's sake.
As I strolled back to the motel, I gave everyone I passed that same eerie smile, thinking I ought to keep on their good side, just in case. "And you never know," I remarked to myself in a low voice, "if they do take over the planet, there might be some openings for a guy of your talents."
In the morning I arose very early to a day that promised splendor. I peered out of my motel window.
A pink dawn was spilled across the sky. I dressed quickly and hit the road before Littleton had even begun to stir. A few miles out of town I crossed the state line. Vermont presented an altogether greener, tidier prospect than New Hampshire. The hills were fat and soft, like a sleeping animal.
The scattered farms looked more prosperous and the meadows climbed high up the rolling hillsides, giving the valleys an alpine air. The sun was soon high and warm. On a ridge overlooking an expanse of hazy foothills, I passed a sign that said PEACHAM, SETTLED 1776 and beyond that stood a village. I parked beside a red general store and got out to have a look around. There was no one about. Presumably the people of Littleton had come in the night and taken them off to the planet Zog.
I walked past the Peacham Inn-white clapboard, green shutters, no sign of life-and wandered up a hill, past a white Congregational church and pleasant, dozing houses. At the crest of the hill stood a broad green, with an obelisk and flagpole, and beside it an old cemetery. A zephyr wind teased the flag. Down the hill, across a broad valley, a series of pale green and brown hills rolled away to the horizon, like the swells of a sea. Below me the church bell tolled the hour, but otherwise there was not a sound. This was as perfect a spot as I had ever seen. I had a look at the obelisk.
COMMEMORATING PEACHAM SOLDIERS 1569, it said, and had names carved in it, good New England names like Elijah W. Sargent, Lowell Sterns, Horace Rowe. There were forty-five names in all, too many surely for a mere hamlet in the hills. But then the cemetery beside green also looked far too large for the size of town. It covered the hillside and the grandeur of many of the monuments suggested that this had once been a place of wealth.
I went through the gate and had a look around. My eye was caught by one particularly handsome stone, an octagonal marble column surmounted by a granite sphere. The column logged the copious deaths of Hurds and their near relatives from Capt. Nathan Hurd in 1818 to Frances H. Bement in 1889. A small panel on the back said:
Nathan H. died July 24 1852 AE. 4 Y'S 1 M'O.
Joshua F. died July 31 1852 AE. 1 YR 11 M'S.
Children of J. & C. Pitkin.
What could it have been, I wondered, that carried off these two little brothers just a week apart? A fever? It seemed unlikely in July. An accident in which one died and the other lingered? Two unrelated events? I pictured the parents crouched at Joshua F.'s bedside, watching his life ebb, praying to God not to take him as well, and having their hopes crushed. Isn't life shitty? Everywhere I looked there was disappointment and heartbreak re corded in the stones: JOSEPH, SON OF
EPHRAIM AND SARAH CARTER, DIED MARCH 18 1846, AGED 18 YRS, ALMA FOSTER, DAUT. OF ZADOCK AND HANNAH RICHARDSON, D. MAY 22, 1847, AE. 17 yrs. So many were so young. I became infected with an inexpressible melancholy as I wandered alone among these hundreds of stilled souls, the emptied lives, the row upon row of ended dreams. Such a sad place! I stood there in the mild October sunshine, feeling so sorry for all these luckless people and their lost lives, reflecting bleakly on mortality and on my own dear, cherished family so far away in England, and I thought, "Well, fuck this," and walked back down the hill to the car.
I drove west across Vermont, into the Green Mountains. The mountains were dark and round and the valleys looked rich. Here the light seemed softer, sleepier, more autumnal. There was color everywhere-trees the color of mustard and rust, meadows of gold and green, colossal white barns, blue lakes. Here and there along the highways roadside produce stands brimmed with pumpkins and squash and other autumn fruits. It was like a day trip to heaven. I wandered around on back roads.
There was a surprising lot of small houses, some little better than shacks. I supposed there couldn't be much work in a place like Vermont. The state has hardly any towns or industry. The biggest city, Burlington, has a population of just 37,000. Outside Groton I stopped at a roadside cafe for coffee and listened along with the other three customers to a fat young woman with a pair of illkempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter. "I still only get four dollars an hour," she was saying. "Harvey, he's been at Fibberts for three years and he's only just got his first raise. You know what he gets now? Four dollars and sixty-five cents an hour. Isn't that pathetic? I told him, I said, 'Harvey, they're just walkin all over you.' But he won't do nothin' about it." She broke off here to rearrange the features on one of her children's faces with the back of her hand. "HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU NOT TO INNARUP ME WHEN
I'M TALKING?" she inquired rhetorically of the little fellow, and then in a calmer voice turned back to the cafe lady and launched into a candid list of Harvey's other shortcomings, which were manifold.
Only the day before in Maine I had seen a sign in a McDonald's offering a starting wage of five dollars an hour. Harvey must have been immensely moronic and unskilled-doubtless both not to be able to keep pace with a sixteen-year-old burger jockey at McDonald's. Poor guy! And on top of that here he was married to a woman who was slovenly and indiscreet, and had a butt like a barn door. I hoped old Harvey had sense enough to appreciate all the incredible natural beauty with which God had blessed his native state because it didn't sound as if He had blessed Harvey very much. Even his kids were ugly as sin. I was half tempted to give one of them a clout myself as I went out the door.
There was just something about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him.
I drove on, thinking what an ironic thing it was that the really beautiful places in America-the Smoky Mountains, Appalachia, and now Vermont-were always inhabited by the poorest, most undereducated people. And then I hit Stowe and realized that when it comes to making shrewd generalizations, I am a cretin. Stowe was anything but poor. It was a rich little town, full of chichi boutiques and expensive ski lodges. In fact, for most of the rest of the day, as I wandered around and through the Green Mountain ski resorts, I saw almost nothing but wealth and beauty-rich people, rich houses, rich cars, rich resorts, beautiful scenery. I drove around quite struck by it all, wandered over to Lake Champlain-also immensely beautiful-and idled down the western side of the state, just over the border from New York State.
Below Lake Champlain the landscape became more open, more rolling, as if the hills had been flattened out from the edges, like someone pulling a crease out of a bedspread. Some of the towns and villages were staggeringly pretty. Dorset, for instance, was an exquisite little place, standing around an oval green, full of,beautiful white clapboard houses, with a summer playhouse and an old church and an enormous inn. And yet. And yet there was something about these places. They were too perfect, too rich, too yuppified. At Dorset there was a picture shop called the Dorset Framery. At Bennington, just down the road, I passed a place called the Publyk House Restaurant. Every inn and lodge had a quaint and picturesque name-the Black Locust Inn, the Hob Knob, the Blueberry Inn, the Old Cutter Inn-and a hanging wooden sign out front. There was always this air of quaint artifice pushing in on everything. After a while I began to find it oddly oppressive. I longed to see a bit of neon and a restaurant with a good old family name-Ernie's Chop House, Zweikers New York Grille-with a couple of blinking beer signs in the front window. A bowling alley or drive-in movie theater would have been most welcome. It would have made it all seem real. But this looked as if it had been designed in Manhattan and brought in by truck.
One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. I couldn't think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a $200 sweater but not a can of baked beans. Actually, I could think of a lot of worse things-cancer of the brain, watching every episode of a TV miniseries starring Joan Collins, having to eat at a Burger Chef more than twice in one year, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finding that you've just taken a drink from your grandmothers denture cup, and so on. But I think you get my point.
CHAPTER 17
I SPENT THE night in Cobleskill, New York, on the northern fringes of the Catskills, and in the morning drove to Cooperstown, a small resort on Lake Otsego. Cooperstown was the home of James Fenimore Cooper, from whose family the town takes its name. It was a handsome town, as handsome as any I had seen in New England, and more replete with autumn color, with a main street of square-topped brick buildings, old banks, a movie theater, family stores. The Cooperstown Diner, where I went for breakfast, was busy, friendly and cheap-all that a diner should be.
Afterwards I went for a stroll around the residential streets, shuffling hands-in-pockets through the dry leaves, and down to the lakeside. Every house in town was old and pretty; many of the larger ones had been converted into inns and expensive B&Bs. The morning sunlight filtered through the trees and threw dappled shadows across the lawns and sidewalks. This was as nice a little town as I had seen on the trip; it was almost Amalgam.
The only shortcoming with Cooperstown is that it is full of tourists, drawn to the town by its most famous institution, the Baseball Hall of Fame, which stands by a shady park at the far end of Main Street. I went there now, paid $8.50 admission and walked into its cathedral-like calm. For those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics, the Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get. I walked serenely through its quiet and softly lit halls, looking at the sacred vestments and venerated relics from America's national pastime. Here, beautifully preserved in a glass case, was "the shirt worn by Warren Spahn when registering win No. 305, which tied him with Eddie Plank for most by a left-hander." Across the aisle was "the glove used by Sal Maglie in September 25, 1958, no-hitter vs. Phillies." At each case people gazed reverently or spoke in whispers.
One room contained a gallery of paintings commemorating great moments in baseball history, including one depicting the first professional night game under artificial lighting, played in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 2, 1930. This was exciting news to me. I had no idea that Des Moines had played a pivotal role in the history of both baseball and luminescence. I looked closely to see if the artist had depicted my father in the press box, but then I realized that my father was only fifteen years old in 1930 and still in Winfield. This seemed kind of a pity.
In an upstairs room I suppressed a whoop of joy at the discovery of whole cases full of the baseball cards that my brother and I had so scrupulously collected and cataloged, and which my parents, in an early flirtation with senility, had taken to the dump during an attic spring cleaning in 1981. We had the complete set for 1959 in mint condition; it is now worth something like $1,500. We had Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra as rookies, Ted Williams from the last year he hit .400, the complete New York Yankees teams for every year between 1956 and 1962. The whole collection must have been worth something like $8,000--enough, at any rate, to have sent Mom and Dad for a short course of treatment at a dementia clinic. But never mind! We all make mistakes. It's only because everyone throws these things out that they grow so valuable for the lucky few whose parents don't spend their retirements getting rid of all the stuff they spent their working lives accumulating.
Anyway it was a pleasure to see all the old cards again. It was like visiting an old friend in the hospital.
The Hall of Fame is surprisingly large, much larger than it looks from the road; and extremely well presented. I wandered through it in a state of complete contentment, reading every label, lingering at every display, reliving my youth, cocooned in a happy nostalgia, and when I stepped back out onto Main Street and glanced at my watch I was astonished to discover that three hours had elapsed.
Next door to the Hall of Fame was a shop selling the most wonderful baseball souvenirs. In my day all we could get were pennants and baseball cards and crummy little pens in the shape of baseball bats that stopped working about the second time you tried to sign your name with them. But now little boys could get everything with their team's logo on it-lamps, towels, clocks, throw rugs, mugs, bedspreads and even Christmas tree ornaments, plus of course pennants, baseball cards and pens that stop working about the second time you use them. I don't think I have ever felt such a pang of longing to be a child again. Apart from anything else, it would mean I'd get my baseball cards back and I could put them somewhere safe where my parents couldn't get at them; then when I got to my age I could buy a Porsche.
I was so taken with all the souvenirs that I began to fill my arms with stuff, but then I noticed that the store was full of Do NOT TOUCH signs and on the counter by the cash register had been taped a notice that said, DO NOT LEAN ON GLASS-IF YOU BREAK, COST TO YOU is $50. What a jerky thing to say on a sign. How could you expect kids to come into a place full of wonderful things like this and not touch them? This so elevated my hackles that I deposited my intended purchases on the counter and told the girl I didn't want them after all. This was perhaps just as well because I'm not altogether sure that my wife would have wanted St. Louis Cardinals pillowcases.
My ticket to the Hall of Fame included admission to a place on the edge of town called the Farmers Museum, where a couple of dozen old buildings-a schoolhouse, a tavern, a church and the like-have been preserved on a big site. It was about as exciting as it sounds, but having bought the ticket I felt obliged to go and have a look at it. If nothing else, the walk through the afternoon sunshine was pleasant. But I was relieved to get back in the car and hit the road again. It was after four by the time I left town. I drove on across New York State for several hours, through the Susquehanna Valley, which was very beautiful, especially at this time of day and year in the soft light of an autumn afternoon: watermelon-shaped hills, golden trees, slumbering towns. To make up for my long day in Cooperstown, I drove later than usual, and it was after nine by the time I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Elmira.
I went straight out for dinner, but almost every place I approached was closed, and I ended up eating in a restaurant attached to a bowling alley-in clear violation of Bryson's second rule of dining in a strange town. Generally, I don't believe in doing things on principle-it's kind of a principle of mine-but I do have six rules of public dining to which I try to adhere. They are: 1. Never eat in a restaurant that displays photographs of the food it serves. (But if you do, never believe the photographs.)
2. Never eat in a restaurant attached to a bowling alley.
3. Never eat in a restaurant with flocked wallpaper.
4. Never eat in a restaurant where you can hear what they are saying in the kitchen.
5. Never eat in a restaurant that has live entertainers with any of the following words in their titles: Hank, Rhythm, Swinger, Trio, Combo, Hawaiian, Polka.
6. 6. Never eat in a restaurant that has bloodstains on the walls.
In any event, the bowling alley restaurant proved quite acceptable. Through the wall I could hear the muffled rumblings of falling bowling pins and the sounds of Elmira's hairdressers and grease monkeys having a happy night out. I was the only customer in the restaurant. In fact, I was quite clearly the only thing standing between the waitresses and their going home. As I waited for my food, they cleared away the other tables, removing the ashtrays, sugar bowls and tablecloths, so that after a while I found myself dining alone in a large room, with a white tablecloth and flickering candle in a little red bowl, amid a sea of barren Formica tabletops.
The waitresses stood against the wall and watched me chew my food. After a while they started whispering and tittering, still watching me as they did so, which frankly I found a trifle unsettling. I may only have imagined it, but I also had the distinct impression that someone was little by little turning a dimmer switch so that the light in the room was gradually disappearing. By the end of my meal I was finding my food more or less by touch and occasionally by lowering my head to the plate and sniffing. Before I was quite finished, when I just paused for a moment to grope for my glass of iced water somewhere in the gloom beyond the flickering candle, my waitress whipped the plate away and put down my bill.
"You want anything else?" she said in a tone that suggested I had better not. "No thank you," I answered politely. I wiped my mouth with the tablecloth, having lost my napkin in the gloom, and added a seventh rule to my list: never go into a restaurant ten minutes before closing time. Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
I sighed and arose. I shuffled around the room in my old-man posture, gathered up my things, washed, dressed and without enthusiasm hit the highway. I drove west through the Alleghenies and then into a small, odd corner of Pennsylvania. For z00 miles the border between New York and Pennsylvania is a straight line, but at Pennsylvania's northwestern corner, where I was now, it abruptly juts north, as if the draftsman's arm had been jogged. The reason for this small cartographical irregularity was to let Pennsylvania have its own outlet onto Lake Erie so that its residents wouldn't have to cross New York State, and it remains today a 200-Year-old reminder of how the early states Weren't at all confident that the Union was going to work. That it did was far more of an achievement than is often appreciated nowadays.
Just inside the Pennsylvania state line, the highway merged with interstate 90. This is the main northern route across America, stretching 3,016 miles from Boston to Seattle, and there were lots of long-distance travelers on it. You can always tell long distance travelers because they look as if they haven't been out of the car for weeks. You only glimpse them when they pass, but you can see that they have already started to set up home inside there are pieces of washing hanging in the back, remnants of takeout meals on the windowsill and books, magazines and pillows scattered around.
There's always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back. You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past. You glance at each other's license plates and feel envy or sympathy in proportion to your comparative distances from home. One car I saw had Alaska plates on it. This was unbelievable. I had never seen Alaska license plates before. The man must have driven over 4,500 miles, the equivalent of going from London to Zambia. He was the most forlorn-looking character I had ever seen. There was no sign of a wife and children. I expect by now he had killed them and put their bodies in the trunk.
A drizzly rain hung in the air. I drove along in that state of semimindlessness that settles over you on interstate .highways. After a while Lake Erie appeared on the right. Like all the Great Lakes, it is enormous, more an inland sea than a lake, stretching 200 miles from west to east and about 40 miles across. Twenty-five years ago Lake Erie was declared dead. Driving along its southern shore, gazing out at its flat gray immensity, I thought this appeared to be a remarkable achievement. It hardly seemed possible that something as small as man could kill something as large as a Great Lake. But just in the space of a century or so we managed it. Thanks to lax factory laws and the triumph of greed over nature in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Sandusky and other bustling centers of soot and grit, Lake Erie was transformed in just three generations from a bowl of blue water into a large toilet. Cleveland was the worst offender. Cleveland was so vile that its river, a slow-moving sludge of chemicals and half-digested solids called the Cuyahoga, once actually caught fire and burned out of control for four days. This also was a remarkable achievement, I feel. Things are said to be better now. According to a story in the Cleveland Free Press, which I read during a stop for coffee near Ashtabula, an official panel with the ponderous title of the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Water Quality Board had just released a survey of chemical substances in the lake, and it had found only 362 types of chemicals in the lake compared with more than a thousand the last time they had counted. That still seemed an awful lot to me and I was surprised to see a pair of fishermen standing on the shore, hunched down in the drizzle, hurling lines out onto the greenish murk with long poles. Maybe they were fishing for chemicals.
Through dull rain I drove through the outer suburbs of Cleveland, past signs for places that were all called Something Heights: Richmond Heights, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Warrensville Heights, Parma Heights. Curiously, the one outstanding characteristic of the surrounding landscape was its singular lack of eminences. Clearly what Cleveland was prepared to consider the heights was what others would regard as distinctly middling. Somehow this did not altogether surprise me. After a time Interstate 90 became the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, and followed the sweep of the bay. The windshield wipers of the Chevette flicked hypnotically and other cars threw up spray as they swished past. Outside my window the lake sprawled dark and vast until it was consumed by a distant mist. Ahead of me the tall buildings of downtown Cleveland appeared and slid towards me, like shopping on a supermarket conveyor belt.
Cleveland has always had a reputation for being a dirty, ugly, boring city, though now they say it is much better. By
"they" I mean reporters from serious publications like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the New York Times Sunday magazine, who visit the city at five-year intervals and produce long stories with titles like "Cleveland Bounces Back" and "Renaissance in Cleveland." No one ever reads these articles, least of all me, so I couldn't say whether the improbable and highly relative assertion that Cleveland is better now than it used to be is wrong or right What I can say is that the view up the Cuyahoga as I crossed it on the freeway was of a stew of smoking factories that didn't look any too clean or handsome. And I cant say that the rest of the town looked such a knockout either. It may be improved, but all this talk of a renaissance is clearly exaggerated. I somehow doubt that if the Duc d'Urbino were brought back to life and deposited in downtown Cleveland he would say, "Goodness, I am put in mind of fifteenth-century Florence and the many treasures therein."
And then, quite suddenly, I was out of Cleveland and on the James W. Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike in the rolling rural emptiness between Cleveland and Toledo, and highway mindlessness once more seeped in. To relieve the tedium I switched on the radio. In fact, I had been switching it on and off all day, listening for a while but then giving up in despair. Unless you have lived through it, you cannot conceive of the sense of hopelessness that comes with hearing "Hotel California" by the Eagles for the fourteenth time in three hours. You can feel your brain cells disappearing with little popping sounds. But it's the disc jockeys that make it intolerable. Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys? In South America there is a tribe of Indians called the Janamanos, who are so backward they cannot even count to three. Their counting system goes, "One, two ... oh, gosh, a whole bunch." Obviously disc jockeys have a better dress sense and possess a little more in the way of social skills, but I think we are looking at a similar level of mental acuity.
Over and over I searched the airwaves for something to listen to, but I could find nothing. It wasn't as if I was asking for all that much. All I wanted was a station that didn't play endless songs by bouncy prepubescent girls, didn't employ disc jockeys Who said "H-e-y-y-y-y" more than once every six seconds and didn't keep telling me how much Jesus loved me. But no such station existed. Even when I did find something halfway decent, the sound would begin to fade after ten or twelve miles, and the old Beatles song that I was listening to with quiet pleasure would gradually be replaced by a semidemented man talking about the word of God and telling me that I had a friend in the Lord.
Many American radio stations, particularly out in the hinterland, are ridiculously small and cheap. I know this for a fact because when I was a teenager I used to help out at KCBC in Des Moines.
KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball games' but it was too cheap to send its sportscaster, a nice young guy named Steve Shannon' on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio-really just a tin but standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer's field somewhere southeast of Des Moinesand he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha. It was bizarre. Every couple of innings someone at the ballpark would call me on the phone and give me a bare summary of the game, which I would scribble into a scorebook and pass to Shannon, and on the basis of this he would give a two-hour broadcast.
It was a remarkable experience to sit there in a windowless but on a steaming August night listening to the crickets outside and watching a man talking into a microphone and saying things like, "Well, it's a cool evening here in Omaha, with a light breeze blowing in off the Missouri River. There's a special guest in the crowd tonight' Governor Warren T. Legless, who I can see sitting with his pretty young wife, Bobbi Rae, in a box seat just below us here in the press box." Shannon was a genius at this sort of thing. I remember one time the phone call from the ballpark didn't come through-the guy at the other end had gotten locked in a toilet or something-and Shannon didn't have anything to tell the listeners. So he delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said that it was a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged somebody there to let him know what was going on. Funnily enough, I later read that the exact same thing happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sportscaster in Des Moines. In Reagan's case he had the batter hit foul balls one after the other for over half an hour while pretending there was nothing implausible in this, which when you think about it is more less how he ran the country as president.
Late in the afternoon, I happened onto a news broadcast by some station in Crudbucket, Ohio, or some such place. American radio news broadcasts usually last about thirty seconds. It went like this:
"A young Crudbucket couple, Dwayne and Wanda Dreary and their seven children, Ronnie, Lonnie, Connie, Donnie, Johnny and Tammy-Wynette, were killed when a light airplane crashed into their house and burst into flames. Fire Chief Walter Water said he could not at this stage rule out arson.
On Wall Street, shares had their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points. And the weather outlook for greater Crudville: clear skies with a 2 percent chance of precipitation. You're listening to radio station L-R-U-D where you get more rock and less talk." There then followed "Hotel California" by the Eagles.
I stared at the radio, wondering whether I had heard that second item right. The biggest one-day fall in shares in history? The collapse of the American economy? I twirled the dial and found another news broadcast: "...but Senator Pootang denied that the use of the four Cadillacs and the trips to Hawaii were in any way connected with the $120 million contract to build the new airport. On Wall Street, shares suffered their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points in just under three hours. And the weather outlook here in Crudbucket is for cloudy skies and a 98 percent chance of precipitation. We'll have more music from the Eagles after this word."
The American economy was coming apart in shreds and all I could get were songs by the Eagles. I twirled the twirled the dial, thinking that surely somebody somewhere must be giving the dawn of a new Great Depression more than a passing mention --and someone was, thank goodness. It was CBC, the Canadian network, with an excellent and thoughtful program called "As It Happens,"
which was entirely devoted that evening to the crash of Wall Street. I will leave you, reader, to consider the irony in an American citizen, traveling across his own country, having to tune in to a foreign radio network to find out the details of one of the biggest domestic news stories of the year.
To be scrupulously fair, I was later told that the public-radio network in America-possibly the most grossly underfunded broadcast organization in the developed world-also devoted a long report to the crash. I expect it was given by a man sitting in a tin but in a field somewhere, reading scribbled notes off a sheet of paper.
At Toledo, I joined Interstate 75, and drove north into Michigan, heading for Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, where I intended spending the night. Almost immediately I found myself in a wilderness of warehouses and railroad tracks and enormous parking lots leading to distant car factories. The parking lots were so vast and full of cars that I half wondered if the factories were there just to produce sufficient cars to keep the parking lots full, thus eliminating any need for consumers.
Interlacing all this were towering electricity pylons. If you have ever wondered what becomes of all those pylons you see marching off to the horizon in every country in the world, like an army of invading aliens, the answer is that they all join up in a field just north of Toledo, where they discharge their loads into a vast estate of electrical transformers, diodes and other contraptions that looks for all the world like the inside of a television set, only on a rather grander scale, of course.
The ground fairly thrummed as I drove past and I fancied I felt a crackle of blue static sweep through the car, briefly enlivening the hair on the back of my neck and leaving a strangely satisfying sensation in my armpits. I was half inclined to turn around at the next intersection and go back for another dose. But it was late and I pressed on. For some minutes I thought I smelled smoldering flesh and kept touching my head tentatively. But this may only have been a consequence of having spent too many lonely hours in a car.
At Monroe, a town halfway between Toledo and Detroit, a big sign beside the highway said, WELCOME TO MONROE-HOME OF GENERAL CUSTER. A mile or so later there was another sign, even
larger, saying, MONROE, MICHIGAN-HOME OF LA-Z-BOY FURNITURE. Goodness, I thought, will the excitement never stop? But it did, and the rest of the journey was completed without drama.
CHAPTER 18
I SPENT THE NIGHT in Dearborn for two reasons. First, it would mean not having to spend the night in Detroit, the city with the highest murder rate in the country. In 1987, there were 635
homicides in Detroit, a rate of 58.2 per ioo,ooo people, or eight times the national average. Just among children, there were 365 shootings in which both the victim and gunman were under sixteen (of whom 40 died). We are talking about a tough city-and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn't bear thinking about.
People will have to start carrying bazookas for protection.
My second and more compelling reason for going to Dearborn was to see the Henry Ford Museum, a place my father had taken us when I was small and which I remembered fondly. After breakfast in the morning, I went straight there. Henry Ford spent his later years buying up important Americana by the truckload and crating it to his museum, beside the big Ford Motor Company Rouge Assembly Plant. The parking lot outside the museum was enormous-on a scale to rival the factory parking lots I had passed the day before-but at this time of year there were few cars in it. Most of them were Japanese.
I went inside and discovered without surprise that the entrance charge was steep: $15 for adults and $7.50 for children. Americans are clearly prepared to fork out large sums for their pleasures.
Grudgingly I paid the admission charge and went in. But almost from the moment I passed through the portals I was enthralled. For one thing, the scale of it is almost breathtaking. You find yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff-machinery, railway trains, refrigerators, Abraham Lincoln's rocking chair, the limousine in which John F. Kennedy was killed (nope, no bits of brains on the floor), George Washington's campaign chest, General Tom Thumb's ornate miniature billiard table, a bottle containing Thomas Edison's last breath. I found this last item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison's last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the deathbed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, "Is that it?"
This was the way the Smithsonian once was and still should be-a cross between an attic and a junk shop. It was as if some scavenging genius had sifted through all the nation's collective memories and brought to this one place everything from American life that was splendid and fine and deserving fondness. It was possible here to find every single item from my youth-old comic books, lunchpails, bubblegum cards, Dick and Jane reading books, a Hotpoint stove just like the one my mom used to have, a soda pop dispenser like the one that used to stand in front of the pool hall in Winfield.
There was even a collection of milk bottles exactly like those that Mr. Morrisey, the deaf milkman, used to bring to our house every morning. Mr. Morrisey was the noisiest milkman in America. He was about sixty years old and wore a large hearing aid. He always traveled with his faithful dog, Skipper. They would arrive like clockwork just before dawn. Milk had to be delivered early, you see, because in the Midwest it spoiled quickly once the sun came up. You always knew when it was 5:3o because Mr. Morrisey would arrive, whistling for all he was worth, waking all the dogs for blocks around, which would get Skipper very excited and set him to barking. Being deaf, Mr.
Morrisey tended not to notice his own voice and you could hear him clinking around on your back porch with his rack of milk bottles and saying to Skipper, "WELL, I WONDER WHAT THE
BRYSONS WANT TODAY! LET'S SEE ... FOUR QUARTS OF SKIMMED AND SOME
COTTAGE CHEESE. WELL, SKIPPER, WOULD YOU FUCKING BELIEVE IT, I LEFT THE
COTTAGE CHEESE ON THE GODDAMN TRUCK!" And then you would look out the window to see Skipper urinating on your bicycle and lights coming on in houses all over the neighborhood.
Nobody wanted to get Mr. Morrisey fired, on account of his unfortunate disability, but when Flynn Dairies discontinued home deliveries in about 1960 on economic grounds ours was one of the few neighborhoods in the city from which there was no outcry.
I walked through the museum in a state of sudden, deep admiration for Henry Ford and his acquisitive instincts. He may have been a bully and an anti-Semite, but he sure could build a nifty museum. I could happily have spent hours picking around among the memorabilia. But the hangar is only a fractional part of it. Outside there is a whole village-a little town-containing eighty homes of famous Americans. These are the actual homes, not replicas. Ford crisscrossed the country acquiring the residences and workshops of the people he most admired-Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Luther Burbank, the Wright brothers and of course himself. All these he crated up and shipped back to Dearborn where he used them to build this 250-acre fantasyland-the quintessential American small town, a picturesque and timeless community where every structure houses a man of genius (almost invariably a white, Christian man of genius from the Middle West). Here in this perfect place, with its broad greens and pleasing shops and churches, the lucky resident could call on Orville and Wilbur Wright for a bicycle inner tube, go to the Firestone farm for milk and eggs (but not for rubber yet-Harvey's still working on it!), borrow a book from Noah Webster and call on Abraham Lincoln for legal advice, always assuming he's not too busy with patent applications for Charles Steinmetz or emancipating George Washington Carver, who lives in a tiny cabin just across the street.
It is really quite entrancing. For a start, places like Edison's workshop and the boardinghouse where his employees lodged have been scrupulously preserved. You can really see how these people worked and lived. And there is a certain undeniable convenience in having the houses all brought together. Who in a million years would go to Columbiana, Ohio, to see the Harvey Firestone birthplace, or to Dayton to see where the Wright brothers lived? Not me, brother. Above all, bringing these places together makes you realize just how incredibly inventive America has been in its time, what a genius it has had for practical commercial innovation, often leading to unspeakable wealth, and how many of the comforts and pleasures of modern life have their roots in the small towns of the American Middle West. It made me feel proud.
I drove north and west across Michigan, lost in a warm afterglow of pleasure from the museum. I was past Lansing and Grand Rapids and entering the Manistee National Forest, -loo miles away, almost before I knew it. Michigan is shaped like an oven mitt and is often about as exciting. The Manistee forest was dense and dull-endless groves of uniform pine trees-and the highway through it was straight and flat. Occasionally I would see a cabin or little lake in the woods, both just glimpsable through the trees, but mostly there was nothing of note. Towns were rare and mostly squalid-scattered dwellings and ugly prefab buildings where they made and sold ugly prefab cabins, so that people could buy their own little bit of ugliness and take it out into the woods.
After Baldwin, the road became wider and emptier and the commercialism grew sparser. At Manistee, the highway ran down to Lake Michigan, and then followed the shoreline off and on for miles, going through rather more pleasant little communities of mostly boarded-up summer homes-Pierport, Arcadia, Elberta ("A Peach of A Place"), Frankfort. At Empire I stopped to look at the lake. The weather was surprisingly cold. A blustery wind blew in from Wisconsin, seventy miles away across the steely gray water, raising whitecaps and wavelets. I tried to go for a stroll, but I was out for only about five minutes before the wind blew me back to the car.
I went on to Traverse City, where the weather was milder, perhaps because it was more sheltered.
Traverse City looked to be a wonderful old town that seemed not to have changed since about 1948.
It still had a Woolworth's, a J. C. Penney, an oldfashioned movie theater called the State and a timeless cafe, the Sydney, with black booths and a long soda fountain. You just don't see places like that anymore. I had coffee and felt very pleased to be there. Afterwards I drove north on a road running up one side of Grand Traverse Bay and down the other, so that you could always see where you were going or where you had been, sometimes veering inland past farms and cherry orchards for a couple of miles and then sweeping back down to the water's edge. As the afternoon progressed, the wind settled and the sun came out, tentatively at first, like a shy guest, and then stayed on, giving the lake bright patches of silver and blue. Far out over the water, perhaps twenty miles away, dark clouds dumped rain on the lake. It fell in a pale gray curtain. And high above a faint rainbow reached across the sky. It was inexpressibly beautiful. I drove transfixed.
In the early evening I reached Mackinaw City, on the tip of the oven mitt, the point where the shorelines of southern and northern Michigan pinch together to form the Straits of Mackinac, which separate Lake Michigan from Lake Huron. A suspension bridge, five miles long, spans the gap.
Mackinaw City-they are fairly casual about how they spell the word up this way-was a scattered and unsightly little town, full of gift shops, motels, ice cream parlors, pizzerias, parking lots and firms operating ferries to Mackinac Island. Almost every place of business, including the motels, was boarded up for the winter. The Holiday Motel, on the shore of Lake Huron, seemed to be open so I went inside and rang the desk bell. The young guy who came out looked surprised to have a customer. "We were just about to close up for the season," he said. "In fact, everybody's gone out to dinner to celebrate. But we've got rooms if you want one."
"How much?" I asked.
He seemed to snatch a figure from the air. "Twenty dollars?" he said.
"Sounds good to me," I said and signed in. The room was small but nice and it had heating, which was a good thing. I went out and had a walk around, to look for something to eat. It was only a little after seven, but it was dark already and the chill air felt more like December than October. I could see my breath. It was odd to be in a place so full of buildings and yet so dead. Even the McDonald's was closed, with a sign in the window telling me to have a good winter.
I walked down to the Shepler's Ferry terminal-really just a big parking lot with a shed-to see what time the ferry to Mackinac Island would depart in the morning. That was my reason for being here.
There was one at eleven. I stood beside the pier, facing into the wind, and gazed for a long time out across Lake Huron. Mackinac Island was berthed a couple of miles out in the lake like a glittering cruise ship. Nearby, even larger but with no lights, was Bois Blanc Island, dark and round. Off to the left, Mackinac Bridge, lit up like a Christmas decoration, spanned the strait. Everywhere the lights shimmered on the water. It was odd that such a nothing little town could have such a wonderful view.
I ate dinner in a practically empty restaurant and then had some beers in a practically empty bar.
Both places had turned on the heating. It felt good, cozy. Outside the wind beat against the plate-glass windows, making a woppa-woppa sound. I liked the quiet bar. Most bars in America are dark and full of moody characters-people drinking alone and staring straight ahead. There's none of that agreeable coffeehouse atmosphere that you find in bars in Europe. American bars are, by and large, just dark places to get drunk in. I don't like them much, but this one was OK. It was snug and quiet and well lit, so I could sit and read. Before too long I was fairly well lit myself. This was also OK.
In the morning I awoke early and gave the steamy window a wipe with my hand to see what kind of day it was. The answer was: not a good one. The world was full of sleety snow, dancing about in the wind like a plague of white insects. I switched on the TV and crept back into the warm bed. The local PBS station came on. PBS is the Public Broadcasting System, what we used to call educational TV. It is supposed to show quality stuff, though because it is always strapped for funds this consists mostly of BBC melodramas starring Susan Hampshire and domestically produced programs that cost about twelve dollars to make_ cookery programs, religious discussions, local high-school wrestling matches. It's pretty well unwatchable most of the time, and it's getting worse. In fact, the station I was watching was holding a telethon to raise funds for itself. Two middle-aged men in casual clothes were sitting in swivel chairs, with a pair of phones on a table between them, asking for money. They were trying to look perky and cheerful, but there was a kind of desperation in their eyes.
"Wouldn't it be tragic for your children if they didn't have 'Sesame Street' anymore?" one of them was saying to the camera. "So come on, moms and dads, give us a call and make a pledge now." But nobody was calling. So the two talked to each other about all the wonderful programs on PBS. They had clearly been having this conversation for some time. After a while one of them had a phone call.
"I've had my first caller," he said as he put the phone down. "It was from Melanie Bitowski of Traverse City and it's her fourth birthday today. So happy birthday, honey. But next time you or any of you other kids call in, why don't you get your mom or dad to pledge some money, sweetheart?"
These guys were clearly begging for their jobs, and the whole of northern Michigan was turning a blind eye to their pleadings.
I showered and dressed and packed up my bag, all the while keeping an eye on the TV to see if anyone made a pledge, and no one ever did. When I switched off, one of them was saying, with just a hint of peevishness, "Now come on, I can't believe that nobody out there is watching us.
Somebody must be awake out there. Somebody must want to preserve quality public television for themselves and their children." But he was wrong.
I had a large breakfast in the same place I had eaten the night before and then, because there was absolutely nothing else to do, I went and stood on the quayside, waiting for the ferry. The wind had died. The last sleet melted as it hit the ground and then stopped falling altogether. Everywhere there was the tip-tip-tip sound of dripping, off the roofs, off branches, off me. It was only ten o'clock and nothing was happening at the quayside-the Chevette, dressed with sleety snow, stood alone and forlorn in the big parking lot-so I went and walked around, down to the site of the original Fort Mackinac and then along residential streets full of treeless lawns and one-story ranch houses. When I returned to the ferry site, about forty minutes later, the Chevette had gained some company and there was a fair crowd of people-twenty or thirty at least-already boarding the boat.
We all sat on rows of seats in one small room. The hydrofoil started up with a noise like a vacuum cleaner, then turned and slid out onto the green bleakness of Lake Huron. The lake was choppy, like a pan of water simmering on a low heat, but the ride was smooth. The people around me were strangely excited. They kept standing up to take pictures and point things out to each other. It occurred to me that many of them had never been on a ferry before, perhaps had never even seen an island, not one big enough to be inhabited anyway. No wonder they were excited. I was excited too, though for a different reason.
I had been to Mackinac Island before. My dad took us there when I was about four and I remembered it fondly. In fact, it was probably my oldest clear memory. I remembered that it had a big white hotel with a long porch and banks of flowers, positively dazzling in the July sunshine, and I could remember a big fort on a hill, and that the island had no cars, but just horse-drawn carriages, and that there was horse manure everywhere, and that I stepped in some, warm and squishy, and that my mother cleaned my shoe with a twig and a Kleenex, gagging delicately, and that as soon as she put the shoe back on my foot, I stepped backwards into some more with my other shoe, and that she didn't get cross. My mother never got cross. She didn't exactly do cartwheels, you understand, but she didn't shout or snap or look as if she were suppressing apoplexy, as I do with my children when they step in something warm and squishy, as they always do. She just looked kind of tired for a moment, and then she grinned at me and said it was a good thing she loved me, which was very true. She's a saint, my mother, especially where horse shit is concerned.
Mackinac Island is small-only about five miles long, a couple of miles wide-but like most islands it seems bigger when you are on it. Since 1901 no cars or motorized vehicles of any type have been allowed on the island, so when you step off the boat onto Main Street you find a lineup of horse-drawn carriages waiting at the curb-a fancy one to take customers to the Grand Hotel, open phaetons to take people on expensive tours of the island, and a kind of sledge to deal with luggage and freight. Mackinac village was just as perfect as I remembered it, a string of white Victorian buildings along a sloping Main Street, snug cottages climbing up the steep hill to old Fort Mackinac, built in 1780 to defend the strait, still standing guard over the town.
I wandered off through the town, picking my way around little piles of horse manure. Without cars, the silence was almost complete. The whole island appeared to be on the brink of a six-month coma.
Almost all the stores and restaurants along Main Street were shut for the season. I expect it's awful there in the summer with all the thousands of day-trippers. A brochure that I picked up by the harbor listed sixty gift shops alone and more than thirty restaurants, ice cream parlors, pizzerias and cookie stalls. But now at this time of year it all looked quaint and restful and incredibly pretty.
For a while, Mackinac Island was the biggest trading post in the New World-John Jacob Astor's fur trading company was based here-but its real glory dates from the late nineteenth century when wealthy people from Chicago and Detroit came to escape the city heat and enjoy the pollen-free air.
The Grand Hotel, the biggest and oldest resort hotel in America, was built and the country's wealthiest industrialists constructed ornate summer houses on the bluffs overlooking Mackinac village and Lake Huron. I walked up there now. The views across the lake were fantastic, but the houses were simply breathtaking. They are some of the grandest, most elaborate houses ever built of wood, twenty-bedroomed places with every embellishment known to the Victorian mind-cupolas, towers, domes, dormers, gables, turrets, and front porches you could ride a bike around.
Some of the cupolas had cupolas. They are just incredibly splendid and there are scores of them, standing side by side on the bluffs flanking Fort Mackinac. What it must be to be a child and play hide-and-seek in those houses, to have a bedroom in a tower and be able to lie in bed and gaze out on such a lake, and to go bicycling on carless roads to little beaches and hidden coves, and above all to explore the woodlands of beech and birch that cover the back three-quarters of the island.
I wandered into them now, along one of the many paved paths that run through the dark woods, and felt like a seven-year-old on a grand adventure. Every turn in the path brought up some exotic surprise-Skull Cave, where, according to a sign beside it, an English fur trader hid from the Indians in 1763; Fort Holmes, an old British redoubt on the highest point on the island, 325 feet above Lake Huron; and two mossy old cemeteries out in the middle of nowhere, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both seemed impossibly big for such a small island, and they consisted mostly of the same few names going back generations-the Truscotts, Gables, Sawyers. I happily wandered for three hours without seeing a soul or hearing a sound made by man, and only barely sampled the island. I could easily have stayed for days. I returned to the village by way of the Grand Hotel, quite the most splendid and obnoxiously hoity-toity such institution I have ever come across. A rambling white wooden building with the biggest porch in the world (660 feet), it is indubitably swish and expensive. A single room at the time I was there cost $135 a night. A sign in the street leading down to the hotel said, GRAND HOTELPROPER DRESS REQUIRED AT THE HOTEL AND HOTEL-OWNED STREET. GENTLEMEN AFTER 6 P.M. MUST BE ATTIRED IN A COAT AND TIE.
LADIES MAY NOT BE ATTIRED IN SLACKS. This is possibly the only place in the world where you are told how to dress just to walk down the street. Another sign said a charge would be levied on anyone coming into the hotel just to gawp. Honestly. I suppose they have a lot of trouble with day-trippers. I walked stealthily down the road towards the hotel half expecting to see a sign saying,
"ANYONE PASSING BEYOND THIS POINT WEARING PLAID PANTS OR WHITE SHOES
WILL BE ARRESTED." But there wasn't anything. I had it in my mind to put my head in the front door, just to see what lifeis like for really rich people, but there was a liveried doorman standing guard, so I had to beat a retreat.
I caught the afternoon ferry back to the mainland, and drove over the Mackinac Bridge to the chunk of land Michigan people call the Upper Peninsula. Before the bridge was built in '1957, this bit of Michigan was pretty well cut off from its own state, and even now it has an overwhelming sense of remoteness. It is mostly just a bleak and sandy peninsula, '150 miles long, squeezed between three of the Great Lakes, Superior, Huron and Michigan. Once again, I was almost in Canada. Sault Ste.
Marie was just to the north. Its great locks connect Lake Huron and Lake Superior and are the busiest in the world, carrying a greater volume of tonnage than the Suez and Panama canals combined, believe it or not.
I was on Route 2, which follows the northern shoreline of Lake Michigan for most of its length. It is impossible to exaggerate the immensity of the Great Lakes. There are five of them, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior and Ontario, and they stretch 700 miles from top to bottom, g00 miles from east to west. They cover 94,500 square miles, making them almost precisely the size of the United Kingdom. Together they form the largest expanse of fresh water on earth.
More squally storms were at work far out on the lake, though where I was it was dry. About twenty miles offshore were a group of islands-Beaver Island, High Island, Whiskey Island, Hog Island and several others. High Island was once owned by a religious sect called the House of David, whose members all had beards and specialized, if you can believe it, in playing baseball. In the 1920s and
'30s they toured the country taking on local teams wherever they went and I guess they were just about unbeatable. High Island was reputedly a kind of penal colony for members of the sect who committed serious infractionsgrounded into too many double plays or something. It was said that people were sent there and never heard from again. Now, like all the other islands in the group except Beaver, it is uninhabited. I felt a strange pang of regret that I couldn't go over and explore them. In fact, the whole of the Great Lakes was exerting a strange hold on me, which I couldn't begin to understand. There was something alluring about the idea of a great inland sea, about the thought that if you had a boat you could spend years just bouncing around from one Great Lake to another, chugging from Chicago to Buffalo, Milwaukee to Montreal, pausing en route to investigate islands, bays and towns with curious names like Deadman's Point, Egg Harbor, Summer Island. A lot of people do just that, I guess-buy a boat and disappear. I can see why.
All over the peninsula I kept encountering roadside food stands with big signs on them saying PASTIES. Most of them were closed and boarded up, but at Menominee, the last town before I crossed into Wisconsin, I passed one that was open and impulsively I turned the car around and went back to it. I had to see if they were real Cornish pasties or something else altogether but with the same name. The guy who ran the place was excited to have a real Englishman in his store. He had been making pasties for thirty years but he had never seen a real Cornish pasty or a real Englishman, come to that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that actually I came from Iowa, the next state over. Nobody ever gets excited at meeting an Iowan. The pasties were the real thing, brought to this isolated corner of Michigan by nineteenthcentury Cornishmen who came to work in the local mines. "Everybody eats them up here in the Upper Peninsula," the man told me. "But nobody's ever heard of them anywhere else. You cross the state line into Wisconsin, just over the river, and people don't know what they are. It's kind of strange."
The man handed me the pasty in the paper bag and I went with it out to the car. It did seem to be a genuine Cornish pasty except that it was about the size of a rugby ball. It came on a Styrofoam platter with a plastic fork and some sachets of ketchup. Eagerly I tucked into it. Apart from anything else I was starving.
It was awful. There wasn't anything wrong with it exactly--it was a genuine pasty, accurate in every detail-it was just that after more than a month of eating American junk food it tasted indescribably bland and insipid, like warmed cardboard. "Where's the grease?" I thought. "Where's the melted cheese patty and pan-fried chicken gravy? Where, above all, is the chocolate fudge frosting?" This was just meat and potatoes, just natural unenhanced flavor. "No wonder it's never caught on over here," I grumbled and pushed it back into the bag.
I started the car and drove on into Wisconsin, looking for a motel and a restaurant where I could get some real food-something that would squirt when I bit into it and run down my chin. That, of course, is the way food should be.
CHAPTER 19
"AT NORTHERN WISCONSIN General Hospital, we'll help you to achieve your birthing goals,"
said a voice on the radio. Oh, God, I thought. This was yet another new develop ment since I had left America-the advent of hospital advertising. Everywhere you go you now encounter hospital ads.
Who are they for? A guy gets hit by a bus, does he say, "Quick, take me to Michigan General.
They've got a magnetic resonance imager there"? I don't understand it. But then I don't understand anything to do with American health care.
Just before I left on this trip, I learned that my uncle was in Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. So I looked up the number in the phone book and under Mercy Hospital there were ninety-four telephone numbers listed. The phone numbers started with Admitting and proceeded alphabetically through Biofeedback, Cancer Hotline, Impotency Program, Infant Apnea Hotline, Osteoporosis Program, Public Relations, something called Share Care Ltd., Sleep Referral Services, Smoke Stoppers and on and on. Health care in America is now a monolithic industry and it is completely out of control.
The person I was visiting, my elderly uncle, had just suffered a severe heart attack. As a complication arising from this, he also had pneumonia. As you might imagine, he looked a trifle under the weather. While I was with him, a social worker came in and gently explained to him some of the costs involved in his treatment. My uncle could, for instance, have Medicine A, which would cost five dollars a dose, but which he would have to take four times a day, or he could have Medicine B, which would cost eighteen dollars a dose, but which he would have to take only once a day. That was the social worker's job, to act as a liaison between the doctor, the patient and the insurance company, and to try to see to it that the patient wasn't hit with a lot of bills that the insurance company wouldn't pay. My uncle would, of course, be billed for this service. It seemed so crazy, so unreal, to be watching him sucking air from an oxygen mask, all but dead, and giving weak yes-or-no nods to questions concerning the continuance of his own life based on his ability to pay.
Contrary to popular belief abroad, it is possible, indeed quite easy, to get free treatment in America by going to a county hospital. They aren't very cheery places, in fact they are generally pretty grim, but they are no worse than any National Health Service hospital. There has to be free treatment because there are 40 million people in America without hospital insurance. God help you, however, if you try to sneak into a county hospital for a little free health care if you've got money in the bank.
I worked for a year at the county hospital in Des Moines and I can tell you that they have batteries of lawyers and debt collectors whose sole job is to dig into the backgrounds of the people who use their facilities and make sure they really are as destitute as they claim to be.
Despite the manifest insanities of private health care in America, there is no denying that the quality of treatment is the best in the world. My uncle received superb and unstinting care (and, not incidentally, they restored his health). He had a private room with a private bath, a remote control television and video recorder, his own telephone. The whole hospital was carpeted and full of exotic palms and cheerful paintings. In government hospitals in Britain, the only piece of carpet or color TV you find is in the nursing officers' lounge. I worked in an NHS hospital years ago and once late at night I sneaked into the nursing officers' lounge just to see what it was like. Well, it was like the queen's sitting room. It was all velvety furniture and half-eaten boxes of Milk Tray chocolates.
The patients, in the meantime, slept beneath bare light bulbs in cold and echoing barrack halls, and spent their days working on jigsaw puzzles that had at least a fifth of the pieces missing, awaiting a fortnightly twenty-second visit by a swift-moving retinue of doctors and students. Those were, of course, the good old days of the NHS. Things aren't nearly so splendid now.
Forgive me. I seem to have gone off on a little tangent there. I was supposed to be guiding you across Wisconsin, telling you interesting facts about America's premier dairy state, and instead I go off and make unconstructive remarks about British and American health care. This was unwarranted.
Anyway, Wisconsin is America's premier dairy state, producing 17 percent of the nation's cheese and milk products, by golly, though as I drove across its rolling pleasantness I wasn't particularly struck by an abundance of dairy cows. I drove for long hours, south past Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh and then west towards Iowa. This was quintessential Midwestern farming country, a study in browns, a landscape of low wooded hills, bare trees, faded pastures, tumble-down corn. It all had a kind of muted beauty. The farms were large, scattered and prosperous looking. Every half-mile or so I would pass a snug-looking farmhouse, with a porch swing and a yard full of trees. Standing nearby would be a red barn with a rounded roof and a tall grain silo. Everywhere corncribs were packed to bursting. Migrating birds filled the pale sky. The corn in the fields looked dead and brittle, but often I passed large harvesters chewing up rows and spitting out bright yellow ears.
I drove through the thin light of afternoon along back highways. It seemed to take forever to cross the state, but I didn't mind because it was so fetching and restful. There was something uncommonly alluring about the day, about the season, the sense that winter was drawing in. By four o'clock the daylight was going. By five the sun had dropped out of the clouds and was slotting into the distant hills, like a coin going into a piggy bank. At a place called Ferryville, I came suddenly up against the Mississippi River. It fairly took my breath away, it was so broad and beautiful and graceful lying there all flat and calm. In the setting sun it looked like liquid stainless steel.
On the far bank, about a mile away, was Iowa. Home. I felt a strange squeeze of excitement that made me hunch up closer to the wheel. I drove for twenty miles down the eastern side of the river, gazing across to the high dark bluffs on the Iowa side. At Prairie du Chien I crossed the river on an iron bridge full of struts and crossbars. And then I was in Iowa. I actually felt my heart quicken. I was home. This was my state. My license plate matched everyone else's. No one would look at me as if to say, "What are you doing here?" I belonged.
In the fading light, I drove almost randomly around northeast Iowa. Every couple of miles I would pass a farmer on a tractor juddering along the highway, heading home to dinner on one of the sprawling farms up in these sheltered hills above the Mississippi. It was Friday, one of the big days of the farmers week. He would wash his arms and neck and sit down with his family to a table covered with great bowls of food. They would say grace together. After dinner the family would drive into Hooterville and sit out in the cold October air and through their steamy breath watch the Hooterville High Blue Devils beat Kraut City 28-7 at football. The farmer's son, Merle, Jr., would score three of the touchdowns. Afterwards Merle senior would go to Ed's Tavern to celebrate (two beers, never more) and receive the admiration of the community for his son's prowess. Then it would be home to bed and up early in the frosty dawn to go out hunting for deer with his best friends, Ed and Art and Wally, trudging across the fallow fields, savoring the clean air and companionship. I was seized with a huge envy for these people and their unassuming lives. It must be wonderful to live in a safe and timeless place, where you know everyone and everyone knows you, and you can all count on each other. I envied them their sense of community, their football games, their bring-and-bake sales, their church socials. And I felt guilty for mocking them. They were good people.
I drove through the seamless blackness, past Millville, New Vienna, Cascade, Scotch Grove. Every once in a while I would pass a distant farmhouse whose windows were pools of yellow light, warm and inviting. Occasionally there would be a larger town, with a much larger pool of light scooped out of the darkness-the high-school football field, where the week's game was in progress. These football fields lit up the night; they were visible from miles off. As I drove through each town, it was clear that everybody was out at the game. There was nobody on the streets. Apart from one forlorn teenaged girl standing behind the counter in the local Dairy Queen, waiting for the postgame rush, everyone in town was at the football game. You could drive in with a fleet of trucks and strip the town during a high-school football game in Iowa. You could blow open the bank with explosives and take the money out in wheelbarrows and no one would be there to see it. But of course nobody would think of such a thing because crime doesn't exist in rural Iowa. Their idea of a crime in these places would be to miss the Friday football game. Anything worse than that only exists on television and in the newspapers, in a semimythic distant land called the Big City.
I had intended to drive on to Des Moines, but on an impulse I stopped at Iowa City. It's a college town, the home of the University of Iowa, and I still had a couple of friends living there-people who had gone to college there and then never quite found any reason to move on. It was nearly ten o'clock when I arrived, but the streets were packed with students out carousing. I called my old friend John Horner from a street-corner phone and he told me to meet him in Fitzpatrick's Bar. I stopped a passing student and asked him the way to Fitzpatrick's Bar, but he was so drunk that he had lost the power of speech. He just gazed numbly at me. He looked to be about fourteen years old.
I stopped a group of girls, similarly intoxicated, and asked them if they knew the way to the bar.
They all said they did and pointed in different directions, and then became so convulsed with giggles that it was all they could do to stand up. They moved around in front of me like passengers on a ship in heavy seas. They looked about fourteen years old too.
"Are you girls always this happy?" I asked.
"Only at homecoming," one of them said.
Ah, that explained it. Homecoming. The big social event of the college year. There are three ritual stages attached to homecoming celebrations at American universities: (1) Get grossly in toxicated; (2) throw up in a public place; (3) wake up not knowing where you are or how you got there and with your underpants on backwards. I appeared to have arrived in town somewhere between stages one and two, though in fact a few of the more committed revelers were already engaged in gutter serenades. I picked my way through the weaving throngs in downtown Iowa City asking people at random if they knew the way to Fitzpatrick's Bar. No one seemed to have heard of itbut then many of the people I encountered probably could not have identified themselves in a roomful of mirrors.