Bill Bryson Read online

  Perhaps they would let me be their grandson. At the very least, I had assumed that my grandparents'

  house would be just as I had last seen it.

  It was not to be. The road leading to the house was still graveled with gleaming gypsum pebbles and still threw up satisfying clouds of dust, but the railroad tracks were gone. There was no sign that they had ever been there. The Victorian mansion was gone too, replaced by a ranch house-style home with cars and propane gas cylinders scattered around the yard like a toddler's playthings.

  Worse still, the field of cows was now an estate of box houses. My grandparents' home had stood well outside the town, a cool island of trees in an ocean of fields. Now cheap little houses crowded in on it from all sides. With shock, I realized that the barn was gone. Some jerk had torn down my barn! And the house itself-well, it was a shack. Paint had abandoned it in chunks. Bushes had been pointlessly uprooted, trees chopped down. The grass was high and littered with overspill from the house. I stopped the car on the road out front and just gaped. I cannot describe the sense of loss.

  Half my memories were inside that house. After a moment a hugely overweight woman in pink shorts, talking on a phone with an apparently endless cord, came and stood in the open doorway and stared at me, wondering what I was doing staring at her.

  I drove on into the town. When I was growing up Main Street in Winfield had two grocery stores, a variety store, a tav ern, a pool hall, a newspaper, a bank, a barbershop, a post office, two gas stations-all the things you would expect of any thriving little town. Everyone shopped locally; everyone knew everyone else. Now all that was left was a tavern and a place selling farm equipment. There were half a dozen vacant lots, full of patchy grass, where buildings had been torn down and never replaced. Most of the remaining buildings were dark and boarded up. It was like an abandoned film set which had long since been left to decay.

  I couldn't understand what had happened. People now must have to drive thirty miles to buy a loaf of bread. Outside the tavern a group of young thuggy-looking motorcyclists were hanging out. I was going to stop to ask them what had happened to their town, but one of them, seeing me slow down, gave me the finger. For no reason. He was about fourteen. Abruptly, I drove on, back out towards Highway 78, past the scattered farms and gentle slopes that I knew like my own left leg. It was the first time in my life that I had turned my back on a place knowing that I would never see it again. It was all very sad, but I should have known better. As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

  CHAPTER 3

  I DROVE ON, without the radio of much in the way of thoughts, to Mount Pleasant, where I stopped for coffee. I had the Sunday New York Times with me-one of the greatest improvements in life since I had been away was that you could now buy the New York Times out of machines on the day of publication in a place like Iowa, an extraordinary feat of distribution-and I spread out with it in a booth. Boy, do I love the Sunday New York Times. Apart from its many virtues as a newspaper, there is just something wonderfully reassuring about its very bulk. The issue in front of me must have weighed ten or twelve pounds. It could've stopped a bullet at twenty yards. I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times-and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em.

  My favorite parts of the Times are the peripheral bits-the parts that are so dull and obscure that they exert a kind of hypnotic fascination, like the home improvements column ("All You Need to Know About Fixings and Fastenings") and the stamps column ("Post Office Marks 25 Years of Aeronautic Issues"). Above all, I love the advertising supplements. If a Bulgarian asked me what life was like in America, I would without hesitation tell him to get ahold of a stack of New York Times advertising supplements. They show a life of richness and variety beyond the wildest dreams of most foreigners.

  As if to illustrate my point, the issue before me contained a gift catalog from the Zwingle Company of New York offering scores of products of the things-younever-knew-you-needed variety-musical shoe trees, an umbrella with a transistor radio in the handle, an electric nail buffer. What a great country! My favorite was a small electric hot plate you could put on your desk to keep your coffee from going cold. This must be a real boon to people with brain damage, the sort of injuries that lead them to wander off and neglect their beverages. Really, who buys these things-silver toothpicks and monogrammed underpants and mirrors that Say MAN OF THE YEAR on them? I have often thought that if I ran one of these companies I would produce a polished mahogany plaque with a brass plate on it saying, HEY, HOW ABOUT ME? I PAID $22.95 FOR THIS COMPLETELY

  USELESS PIECE OF CRAP. I'm certain they would sell like hotcakes.

  Once in a deranged moment I bought something myself from one of these catalogs knowing deep in my mind that it would end in heartbreak. It was a little reading light that you clipped onto your book so as not to disturb your bedmate as she slumbered beside you. In this respect it was outstanding because it barely worked. The light it cast was absurdly feeble (in the catalog it looked like the sort of thing you could signal ships with if you got lost at sea) and left all but the first two lines of a page in darkness. I have seen more luminous insects. After about four minutes its little beam fluttered and failed altogether, and it has never been used again. And the thing is that I knew all along that this was how it was going to end, that it would all be a bitter disappointment. On second thought, if I ever ran one of those companies I would just send people an empty box with a note in it saying,

  "We have decided not to send you the item you've ordered because, as you well know, it would never properly work and you would only be disappointed. So let this be a lesson to you for the future."

  From the Zwingle catalog I moved on to the food and household products advertisements. There is usually a wad of these bright and glossy inducements to try out exciting new products things with names like Hunk o' Meat Beef Stew 'n' Gravy ("with rich 'n' meaty chunks of beef-textured fiber") and Sniff a-Snax ("An Exciting New Snack Treat You Take Through the Nose!") and Country Sunshine Honey-Toasted Wheat Nut 'n' Sugar Bits Breakfast Cereal ("Now with Vitamin-Enriched ChocolateCovered Raisin Substitute!"). I am endlessly fascinated by these new products. Clearly some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining bathroom bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher. All over America you can see countless flabby-butted couples quietly searching supermarket shelves for new combinations of flavors, hoping to find some untried product that will tingle in their mouths and excite, however briefly, their leaden taste buds.

  The competition for this market is intense. The food inserts not only offered fifty-cent discounts and the like, but also if you sent off two or three labels the manufacturers would dispatch to you a Hunk o' Meat Beach Towel, or Country Sunshine Matching Apron and Oven Mitt, or a Sniff a-Snax hot plate for keeping your coffee warm while you slipped in and out of consciousness from a surfeit of blood sugar. Interestingly, the advertisements for dog food were much the same, except that they weren't usually chocolate flavored. In fact, every single product-from the lemon-scented toilet bowl cleansers to the scent-o'-pine trash bags-promised to give you a brief buzz. It's no wonder that so many Americans have a glazed look. They are completely junked out.

  I drove on south on Highway 218 to Keokuk. This stretch of the road was marked on my map as a scenic route, though these things are decidedly relative. Talking about a scenic route in southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

  Compared with an afternoon in a darkened room, it wasn't bad. But compared with, say, the
coast road along the Sorrentine peninsula, it was perhaps a little tame. Certainly it didn't strike me as being any more or less scenic than any of the other roads I had been on today. Keokuk is a Mississippi River town where Iowa, Illinois and Missouri face each other across a broad bend in the river. I was heading towards Hannibal in Missouri and was hoping to see a bit of the town en route to the bridge south. But before I knew it, I found myself on a bridge going east to Illinois. I was so disconcerted by this that I only caught a glimpse of the river, a glistening smear of brown stretching off in two directions, and then, chagrined, I was in Illinois. I had really looked forward to seeing the Mississippi. Crossing it as a child had always been an adventure. Dad would call, "Here's the Mississippi, kids!" and we would scramble to the window to find ourselves on a bridge practically in the clouds, so high it made our breath catch, and the silvery river far, far below, wide, majestic, serene, going about its timeless business of just rolling on. You could see for miles-a novel experience in Iowa. You could see barges and islands and riverside towns. It looked wonderful. And then, abruptly, you were in Illinois and it was flat and full of corn and you realized with a sinking heart that that was it. That was your visual stimulation for the day. Now you had hundreds of miles more of arid cornland to cross before you would experience even the most fractional sense of pleasure.

  And now here I was in Illinois, and it was flat and full of corn and boring. A childlike voice in my head cried, "When are we going to be there? I'm bored. Let's go home. When are we going to be there?" Having confidently expected at this stage to be in Missouri, I had my book of maps opened to the Missouri page, so I pulled over to the side of road, in a state of some petulance, to make a cartographical adjustment. A sign just ahead of me said, BUCKLE UP. ITS THE LAW IN

  ILLINOIS. Clearly, however, it was not an offense to be unable to punctuate. Frowning, I studied my maps. If I turned off at Hamilton, just down the road, I could drive along the east bank of the river and cross into Missouri at Quincy. It was even marked on the map as a scenic route; perhaps my blundering would turn out to be no bad thing.

  I followed the road through Warsaw, a run-down little river town. It plunged down a steep hill towards the river, but then turned inland and again I caught no more than a glimpse of the river.

  Almost immediately, the landscape spread out into a broad alluvial plain. The sun was sinking in the sky. To the left hills rose up, flecked with trees that were just beginning to show a blush of autumn color. To the right the land was as flat as a tabletop. Teams of combine harvesters labored in the fields, kicking up dust, working late to bring in the harvest. In the far distance, grain elevators caught the fading sun and glowed an opalescent white, as if lit from within. Somewhere out there, unseen, was the river.

  I drove on. The road was completely unsignposted. They do this to you a lot in America, particularly on country roads that go from nowhere to nowhere. You are left to rely on your own sense of direction to find your way-which in my case, let us not forget, had only recently delivered me to the wrong state. I calculated that if I was going south the sun should be to my right (a conclusion I reached by imagining myself in a tiny car driving across a big map of America), but the road twisted and wandered, causing the sun to drift teasingly in front of me, first to this side of the road, then to that. For the first time all day, I had a sense of being in the heart of a vast continent, in the middle of nowhere.

  Abruptly the highway turned to gravel. Gypsum nuggets, jagged as arrowheads, flew up against the underside of the car and made a fearful din. I had visions of hoses rupturing, hot oil spraying everywhere, me rolling to a steamy, hissing halt out here on this desolate road. The wandering sun was just settling onto the horizon, splashing the sky with faint pinks. Uneasily I drove on, and steeled myself for the prospect of a night spent beneath the stars, with doglike animals sniffing at my feet and snakes finding warmth up a trouser leg. Ahead of me on the road an advancing storm of dust became after a moment a pickup truck, which passed in a hellbent fashion, spraying the car with rocky projectiles, which thumped against the sides and bounced off the windows with a cracking sound, and then left me adrift in a cloud of dust. I trundled on, peering helplessly through the murk. It cleared just in time to show me that I was twenty feet from a T-junction with a stop sign. I was going fifty miles an hour, which on gravel leaves you with a stopping distance of about three miles. I lumped on the brakes with all my teet and made a noise like Tarzan missing a vine as the car went into a skid. It slide sideways past the stop sign and out onto a paved highway, where it came to a halt, rocking gently from side to side. At that instant an enormous semitrailer truck-all silver horns and flashing lights-blared mightily at me as it swept past, setting the car to rocking again. Had I slid out onto the highway three seconds earlier it would have crushed the car into something about the size of a bouillon cube. I pulled onto the shoulder and got out to examine the damage. It looked as if the car had been divebombed with bags of flour. Bits of raw metal showed through where paint had been pinged away. I thanked God that my mother was so much smaller than me. I sighed, suddenly feeling lost and far from home, and noticed ahead a road sign pointing the way to Quincy. I had come to a halt facing in the right direction, so at least something had come of it.

  It was time to stop. Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.

  On the edge of town was an old motel which looked pretty seedy, though judging by the absence of charred furniture in the front yard it was clearly a step up from the sort of place my dad would have chosen. I pulled onto the gravel drive and went inside. A woman of about seventy-five was sitting behind the desk. She wore butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo. She was doing one of those books that require you to find words in a mass of letters and circle them. I think it was called Word Puzzles for Morons.

  "Help yew?" she drawled without looking up.

  "I'd like a room for the night, please."

  "That'll be thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents," she replied, as her pen fell greedily on the word yup.

  I was nonplussed. In my day a motel room cost about twelve dollars. "I don't want to buy the room,"

  I explained. "I just want to sleep in it for one night."

  She looked at me gravely over the tops of her glasses. "The room is thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents. Per night. Plus tax. You want it or not?" She had one of those disagreeable accents that add a syllable to every word. Tax came out as tayax.

  We both knew that I was miles from anywhere. "Yes, please," I said contritely. I signed in and crunched across the gravel to my suite du nuit. There appeared to be no other customers.

  I went into my room with my bag and had a look around, as you do in a new place. There was a black-and-white TV, which appeared to get only one channel, and three bent coat hangers. The bathroom mirror was cracked, and the shower curtains didn't match. The toilet seat had a strip of paper across it saying SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION, but floating beneath it was a cigarette butt, adrift in a little circle of nicotine. Dad would have liked it here, I thought.

  I had a shower-that is to say, water dribbled onto my head from a nozzle in the wall-and afterwards went out to check out the town. I had a meal of gristle and baked whiffle ball at a place called-aptly-Chuck's. I didn't think it was possible to get a truly bad meal anywhere in the Midwest, but Chuck managed to provide it. It was the worst food I had ever had-and remember, I've lived in England. It had all the attributes of chewing gum, except flavor. Even now when I burp I can taste it.

  Afterwards I had a look around the town. There wasn't much. It was mostly just one street, with a grain silo and railroad tracks at one end and my motel at the other, with a couple of gas stations and grocery stores in between. Everyone regarded me with interest. Years ago, in the midst of a vivid and impressionable youth, I read a chilling story by Richard Matheson about a remote hamlet
whose inhabitants waited every year for a lone stranger to come to town so that they could roast him for their annual barbecue. The people here watched me with barbecue eyes.

  Feeling self-conscious, I went into a dark place called Vern's Tap and took a seat at the bar. I was the only customer, apart from an old man in the corner with only one leg. The barmaid was friendly.

  She wore butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo. You could see in an instant that she had been the local good-time girl since about 193-1. She had "Ready for Sex" written all over her face, but

  "Better Bring a Paper Bag" written all over her body. Somehow she had managed to pour her capacious backside into some tight red toreador pants and to stretch a clinging blouse over her bosom. She looked as if she had dressed in her granddaughter's clothes by mistake. She was about sixty. I could see why the guy with one leg had chosen to sit in the farthest corner.

  I asked her what people in Dullard did for fun. "What exactly did you have in mind, honey?" she said and rolled her eyes suggestively. "Well, perhaps something in the way of legitimate theater or maybe an international chess congress," I croaked weakly. However, once we established that I was only prepared to love her for her mind, she became quite sensible and even rather charming. She told me in great and frank detail about her life, which seemed to have involved a dizzying succession of marriages to guys who were now in prison or dead as a result of shootouts, and dropped in breathtakingly candid disclosures like, "Now Jimmy kilt his mother, I never did know why, but Curtis never kilt nobody except once by accident when he was robbing a gas station and his gun went off. And Floyd-he was my fourth husband-he never kilt nobody neither, but he used to break people's arms if they got him riled."

  "You must have some interesting family reunions," I ventured politely.