Bill Bryson Read online

  "What the-" and then you realize it is a commercial. In fact, it is several minutes of commercials.

  You could go out for cigarettes and a pizza during commercial breaks in America, and still have time to wash the toilet bowl before the program resumed.

  The Preparation H commercial vanished and a micro-instant later, before there was any possibility of the viewer reflecting on whether he might wish to turn to another channel, was replaced by a clapping audience, the perky sound of steel guitars and happy but mildly brain-damaged people in sequined outfits. This was "Grand Ole Opry." I watched for a couple of minutes. By degrees my chin dropped onto my shirt as I listened to their singing and jesting with a kind of numb amazement.

  It was like a visual lobotomy. Have you ever watched an infant at play and said to yourself, "I wonder what goes on in his little head"? Well, watch "Grand Ole Opry" for five minutes sometime and you will begin to have an idea.

  After a couple of minutes another commercial break noisily intruded and I was snapped back to my senses. I switched off the television and went out to investigate Bryson City. There was more to it than I had first thought. Beyond the Swain County Courthouse was a small business district. I was gratified to note that almost everything had a Bryson City sign on it-Bryson City Laundry, Bryson City Coal and Lumber, Bryson City Church of Christ, Bryson City Electronics, Bryson City Police Department, Bryson City Fire Department, Bryson City Post Office. I began to appreciate how George Washington might feel if he were to be brought back to life and set down in the District of Columbia. I don't know who the Bryson was whom this town was so signally honoring, but I had certainly never seen my name spread around so lavishly, and I regretted that I hadn't brought a crowbar and monkey wrench because many of the signs would have made splendid keepsakes. I particularly fancied having the Bryson City Church of Christ sign beside my front gate in England and being able to put up different messages every week like REPENT Now, LIMEYS.

  It didn't take long to exhaust the possibilities for diversion in downtown Bryson City, and almost before I realized it I found myself on the highway out of town leading towards Cherokee, the next town along the valley. I followed it for a way but there was nothing to see except a couple of derelict gas stations and barbecue shacks, and hardly any shoulder to walk on so that cars shot past only inches away and whipped my clothes into a disconcerting little frenzy. All along the road were billboards and large hand-lettered signs in praise of Christ: GET A GRIP ON YOUR LIFE-PRAISE

  JESUS; GOD LOVES YOU, AMERICA; and the rather more enigmatic WHAT WOULD

  HAPPEN IF YOU DIED TOMORROW? (Well I thought, there would be no more payments on the freezer for a start.) I turned around and went back into town. It was 5:30 in the afternoon, Bryson City was a crypt with sidewalks and I was at a complete loss. Down a small hill, beside the rushing river, I spied an A&P supermarket, which appeared to be open, and I went down there for want of something better to do. I often used to hang out in supermarkets. Robert Swanson and I, when we were about twelve and so obnoxious that it would have been a positive mercy to inject us with something lethal, would often go to the Hinky-Dinky supermarket on Ingersoll Avenue in Des Moines during the summer because it was air-conditioned and pass the time by doing things I am now ashamed to relateloosening the bottom of a bag of flour and then watching it pour onto the floor when some unsuspecting woman picked it up, or putting strange items like goldfish food and emetics in people's shopping carts when their backs were turned. I didn't intend to do anything like that in the A&P now-unless of course I got really bored-but I thought it would be comforting, in this strange place, to look at foodstuffs from my youth. And it was. It was almost like visiting old friends-Skippy Peanut Butter, PopTarts, Welch's Grape Juice, Sara Lee cakes. I wandered the aisles, murmuring tiny cries of joy at each sighting of an old familiar nutrient. It cheered me up no end.

  Then suddenly I remembered something. Months before, in England, I had noticed an ad for panty shields in the New York Times Magazine. These panty shields had dimples on them and the dimples had a name that was trademarked. This struck me as remarkable. Can you imagine being given the job of thinking up a catchy name for dimples on a panty shield? But I couldn't remember what it was. So now, for no reason other than that I had nothing better to do, I went over and had a look at the A&P's panty shield section. There was a surprising diversity of them. I would never have guessed that the market was so buoyant or indeed that there were so many panties in Bryson City that needed shielding. I had never paid much attention to this sort of thing before and it was really kind of interesting. I don't know how long I spent poking about among the various brands and reading the instructions for use, or whether I might even have started talking to myself a little, as I sometimes do when I am happily occupied. But I suppose it must have been quite some time In any case, at the very moment that I picked up a packet of New Freedom Thins, with Funnel-Dot Protection TM, and cried triumphantly, "Aha! There you are, you little buggers!" I turned my head a fraction and noticed that at the far end of the aisle the manager and two female assistants were watching me. I blushed and clumsily wedged the packet back on the shelves. "Just browsing!" I called in an unconvincing voice, hoping I didn't look too dangerous or insane, and made for the exit.

  I remembered reading some weeks before that it is still against the law in twenty US states, most of them in the Deep South, for heterosexuals to engage in oral or anal intercourse. I had nothing like that in mind just now, you understand, but I think it indicates that some of these places can be doggedly unenlightened in matters pertaining to sex and could well have ordinances with respect to the unlawful handling of panty shields. It would be just my luck to pull a five-to-ten stretch for some unintended perversion in a place like North Carolina. At all events, I felt fortunate to make it back to my motel without being intercepted by the authorities, and spent the rest of my short stay in Bryson City behaving with the utmost circumspection.

  The Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers 500,000 acres in North Carolina and Tennessee.

  I didn't realize it before I went there, but it is the most popular national park in America, attracting nine million visitors a year, three times as many as any other national park, and even early on a Sunday morning in October it was crowded. The road between Bryson City and Cherokee, at the park's edge, was a straggly collection of motels, junky-looking auto repair shops, trailer courts and barbecue shacks perched on the edge of a glittering stream in a cleft in the mountains. It must have been beautiful once, with the dark mountains squeezing in from both sides, but now it was just squalid. Cherokee itself was even worse. It is the biggest Indian reservation in the Eastern United States and it was packed from one end to the other with souvenir stores selling tawdry Indian trinkets, all Of them with big signs on their roofs and sides saying, MOCCASINS! INDIAN

  JEWELRY! TOMAHAWKS! POLISHED GEMSTONES! CRAPPY ITEMS OF EVERY

  DESCRIPTION! Some of the places had a caged brown bear out front--the Cherokee mascot, I gathered--and around each of these was a knot of small boys trying to provoke the animal into a show of ferocity, encouraged from a safe distance by their fathers. At other stores you could have your photograph taken with a genuine, hung-over, flabby-titted Cherokee Indian in war dress for five dollars, but not many people seemed interested in this and the model Indians sat slumped in chairs looking as listless as the bears. I don't think I had ever been to a place quite so ugly, and it was jammed with tourists, almost all of them also ugly-fat people in noisy clothes with cameras dangling on their bellies. Why is it, I wondered idly as I nosed the car through the throngs, that tourists are always fat and dress like morons?

  Then, abruptly, before I could give the question the consideration it deserved, I was out of Cherokee and in the national park and all the garishness ceased. People don't live in national parks in America as they do in England. They are areas of wilderness often of enforced wilderness. The Smoky Mountains were once full of hillbillies who lived in
cabins up in the remote hollows, up among the clouds, but they were moved out and now the park is sterile as far as human activities go. Instead of trying to preserve an ancient way of life, the park authorities eradicated it. So the dispossessed hillbillies moved down to valley towns at the park's edge and turned them into junkvilles selling crappy little souvenirs. It seems a very strange approach to me. Now a few of the cabins are preserved as museum pieces. There was one at a visitors' center just inside the park, which I dutifully stopped to have a look at. It was exactly like the cabins at the Lincoln village at New Salem in Illinois. I had not realized that it is actually possible to overdose on log cabins, but as I drew near the cabin I began to feel a sudden onset of brainstem death and I retreated to the car after only the briefest of looks.

  The Smoky Mountains themselves were a joy. It was a perfect October morning. The road led steeply up through broadleaved forests of dappled sunshine, full of paths and streams, and then higher up, opened out to airy vistas. All along the road through the park there were lookout points where you could pull the car over and go "ooh!" and "wow!" at the views. They were all named for mountain passes that sounded like condominium developments for yuppies-Pigeon Gap, Cherry Cove, Wolf Mountain, Bear Trap Gap. The air was clear and thin and the views were vast. The mountains rolled away to a distant horizon, gently shading from rich green to charcoal blue to hazy smoke. It was a sea of trees-like looking out over a landscape from Colombia or Brazil, so virginal was it all. In all the rolling vastness there was not a single sign of humanity, no towns, no water towers, no plume of smoke from a solitary farmstead. It was just endless silence beneath a bright sky, empty and clear apart from one distant bluish puff of cumulus, which cast a drifting shadow over a far-off hill.

  The Oconaluftee Highway across the park is only thirty miles long, but it is so steep and winding that it took me all morning to cross it. By 10 A.M. there was a steady stream of cars in both directions, and free spaces at the lookout points were hard to find. This was my first serious brush with real tourists-retired people with trailer homes heading for Florida, young families taking off-season vacations, honeymooners. There were cars and trailers, campers and motor homes from thousands of miles away-California, Wyoming, British Columbia-and at every lookout point people were clustered around their vehicles with the doors and trunks opened, feeding from ice coolers and portable fridges. Every few yards there was a Winnebago or Komfort Motor Home-massive, self-contained dwellings on wheels that took up three parking spaces and jutted out so far that cars coming in could only barely scrape past.

  All morning I had been troubled by a vague sense of something being missing, and then it occurred to me what it was. There were no hikers such as you would see in England-no people in stout boots and short pants, with knee-high tasseled stockings. No little rucksacks full of sandwiches and flasks of tea. and baker's caps laboring breathlessly up the mountainsides, slowing up traffic. What slowed the traffic here were the massive motor homes lumbering up and down the mountain passes. Some of them, amazingly, had cars tethered to their rear bumpers, like dinghies. I got stuck behind one on the long, sinuous descent down the mountain into Tennessee. It was so wide that it could barely stay within its lane and kept threatening to nudge oncoming ing cars off into the picturesque void to our left. That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience-indeed, not to breathe fresh air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you, you pile into your thirteen-ton tin palace and drive 400

  miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you don't have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave facilities. These things, these RVs, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts go to the moon with less backup. RV people are another breed-and a largely demented one at that. They become obsessed with trying to equip their vehicles with gadgets to deal with every possible contingency. Their lives become ruled by the dread thought that one day they may find themselves in a situation in which they are not entirely self-sufficient. I once went camping for two days at Lake Darling in Iowa with a friend whose father-an RV

  enthusiastkept trying to press labor-saving devices on us. "I got a great little solar-powered can opener here," he would say. "You wanna take that?"

  "No thanks," we would reply. "We're only going for two days."

  "How about this combination flashlight-carving knife? You can run it off the car cigarette lighter if you need to, and it doubles as a flashing siren if you get lost in the wilderness."

  "No thanks."

  "Well, at least take the battery-powered microwave." "Really, we don't want it."

  "Then how the hell are you going to pop popcorn out tnere in the middle of nowhere? Have you thought about that?"

  A whole industry (in which no doubt the Zwingle Company of New York is actively involved) has grown up to supply this market. You can see these people at campgrounds all over the country, standing around their vehicles comparing gadgets--methane-powered ice-cube makers, portable tennis courts, antiinsect flame throwers, inflatable lawns. They are strange and dangerous people and on no account should be approached.

  At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America-a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature. The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad taste. It is the world capital of tat. It made Cherokee look decorous. There is not much more to it than a single milelong main street, but it was packed from end to end with the most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter-the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax Museum, two haunted houses, the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusions, the Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo's Police Museum ("See 'Walking Tall' Sheriff Buford Pusser's Death Car!"), Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center and, not least, the Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall. In between this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants, junk-food stalls, ice cream parlors and gift shops of the sort that sell

  "wanted" posters with YOUR NAME HERE and baseball caps with droll embellishments, like a coil of

  realistic-looking plastic turd on the brim. Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice creams, cotton candy and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously, and wearing baseball caps with plastic turds jauntily attached to the brim.

  I loved it. When I was growing up, we never got to go to places like Gatlinburg. My father would rather have given himself brain surgery with a Black and Decker drill than spend an hour in such a place. He had just two criteria for gauging the worth of a holiday attraction: Was it educational and was it free? Gatlinburg was patently neither of these. His idea of holiday heaven was a museum without an admission charge. My dad was the most honest man I ever met, but vacations blinded him to his principles. When I had pimples scattered across my face and stubble on my chin he was still swearing at ticket booths that I was eight years old. He was so cheap on vacations that it always surprised me he didn't make us sift in litter bins for our lunch. So Gatlinburg to me was a heady experience. I felt like a priest let loose in Las Veg
as with a sockful of quarters. All the noise and glitter, and above all the possibilities for running through irresponsible sums of money in a short period, made me giddy.

  I wandered through the crowds, and hesitated at the entrance to the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. I could sense my father, a thousands miles away, beginning to rotate slowly in his grave as I looked at the posters. They told me that inside I would see a man who could hold three billiard balls in his mouth at once, a two-headed calf, a human unicorn with a horn protruding from his forehead and hundreds of other riveting oddities from all over the globe collected by the tireless Robert Ripley and crated back to Gatlinburg for the edification of discerning tourists such as myself.

  The admission fee was five dollars. The pace of my father's rotating quickened as I looked into my wallet and then sped to a whirring blur as I fished out a five-dollar bill and guiltily handed it to the unsmiling woman in the ticket booth. "What the hell," I thought as I went inside, "at least it will give the old man some exercise."

  Well, it was superb. I know five dollars is a lot of money for a few minutes' diversion. I could just see my father and me standing outside on the sidewalk bickering. My father would say, "No, it's a big gyp. For that kind of money, you could buy something that would give you years of value."

  "Like what-a box of carpet tiles?" I would reply with practiced sarcasm. "Oh, please, Dad, just this once don't be cheap. There's a two-headed calf in there."

  "No, son, I'm sorry."

  "I'll be good forever. I'll take out the garbage every day until I get married. Dad, there is a guy in there who can hold three billiard balls in his mouth at once. There is a human unicorn in there. Dad, we could be throwing away the chance of a lifetime here.

  But he would not be moved. "I don't want to hear any more about it. Now let's all get in the car and drive I-75 miles to the Molasses Point Historical Battlefield. You'll learn lots of worth while things about the little-known American war with Ecuador of 1802 and it won't cost me a penny."