Bill Bryson Read online

  And the system of roads is only cruelly hinted at. You look at the map and think you spy a shortcut between, say, WienerVille and Bewilderment, a straight gray line of county road that promises to shave thirty minutes from your driving time. But when you leave the main highway, you find yourself in a network of unrecorded back roads, radiating out across the countryside like cracks in a broken pane of glass.

  The whole business of finding your way around becomes laden with frustration, especially away from the main roads. Near Jacksonville I missed a left turn for Springfield and had to go miles out of my way to get back to where I wanted to be. This happens a lot in America. The highway authorities are curiously reluctant to impart much in the way of useful information, like where you are or what road you are on. This is all the more strange when you consider that they are only too happy to provide all kinds of peripheral facts-Now ENTERING BUBB COUNTY SOIL

  CONSERVATION DISTRICT, NATIONAL SPRAT HATCHERY 5 MILES, NO PARKING

  WED 3AM TO 6AM, DANGER: Low FLYING GEESE, Now LEAVING BUBB COUNTY SOIL

  CONSERVATION DISTRICT. Often on country roads you will come to a crossroads without signposts and then have to drive twenty miles or more without having any confidence in where you are. And then abruptly, without warning, you round a bend and find yourself at an eight-lane intersection with fourteen traffic lights and the most bewildering assortment of signs, all with arrows pointing in different directions. Lake Maggot State Park this way. Curtis Dribble Memorial Expressway over there. US Highway 41 South. US Highway 53 North. Interstate 11/78. Business District this way. Dextrose County Teachers' College that way. Junction 17 West. Junction 17 Not West. No U-Turn. Left Lane Must Turn Left. Buckle Your Seat Belt. Sit Up Straight. Did You Brush Your Teeth This Morning?

  Just as you realize that you should be three lanes to the left, the lights change and you are swept off with the traffic, like a cork on a fast river. This sort of thing used to happen to my father all the time.

  I don't think Dad ever went through a really big and important intersection without getting siphoned off to somewhere he didn't want to be-a black hole of one-way streets, an expressway into the desert, a long and expensive toll bridge to some offshore island, necessitating an embarrassing and costly return trip. ("Hey, mister, didn't you come through here a minute ago from the other direction?") My father's particular specialty was the ability to get hopelessly lost without ever actually losing sight of his target. He never arrived at an amusement park or tourist attraction without first approaching it from several directions, like a pilot making passes over an unfamiliar airport. My sister and brother and I, bouncing on the back seat, could always see it on the other side of the freeway and cry, "There it is! There it is!" Then after a minute we would spy it from another angle on the far side of a cement works. And then across a broad river. And then on the other side of the freeway again. Sometimes all that would separate us from our goal would be a high chain-link fence. On the other side you could see happy, carefree families parking their cars and getting ready for a wonderful day. "How did they get in there?" my dad would cry, the veins on his forehead lively. "Why can't the city put up some signs, for Christ's sake? It's no wonder you can't find your way into the place," he would add, conveniently overlooking the fact that 18,ooo other people, some of them of decidedly limited mental acuity, had managed to get onto the right side of the fence without too much difficulty.

  Springfield was a disappointment. I wasn't really surprised. If it were a nice place, someone would have said to me, "Say, you should go to Springfield. It's a nice place." I had high hopes for it only because I had always thought it sounded promising. In a part of the world where so many places have harsh, foreignsounding names full of hard consonants-De Kalb, Du Quoin, Keokuk, Kankakee-Springfield is a little piece of poetry, a name suggesting grassy meadows and cool waters.

  In fact, it was nothing of the sort. Like all small American cities, it had a downtown of parking lots and tallish buildings surrounded by a sprawl of shopping centers, gas stations and fast-food joints. It was neither offensive nor charming. I drove around a little bit, but finding nothing worth stopping for, I drove on to New Salem, twelve miles to the north.

  New Salem had a short and not very successful life. The original settlers intended to cash in on the river trade that passed by, but in fact the river trade did just that-passed by-and the town never prospered. In 1837 it was abandoned and would no doubt have been lost to history altogether except that one of its residents from 1831 to 1837 was a young Abraham Lincoln. So now, on a 620-acre site, New Salem has been rebuilt just as it was when Lincoln lived there, and you can go and see why everybody was pretty pleased to clear off. Actually it was very nice. There were about thirty or forty log cabins distributed around a series of leafy clearings. It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon, with a warm breeze and soft sunlight adrift in the trees. It all looked impossibly quaint and appealing. You are not allowed to go in the houses. Instead you walk up to each one and peer through the windows or front door and you get an idea of what life was like for the people who lived there. Mostly it must have been pretty uncomfortable. Every house had a sign telling you about its residents. The historical research was impressively diligent. The only problem was that it all became a little repetitive after a while. Once you have looked through the windows of fourteen log cabins, you find yourself approaching number 15 with a certain diminution of enthusiasm, and by the time you reach number 20 it is really only politeness that impels you onward. Since they've taken the trouble to build all these cabins and scour the country digging out old rocking chairs and chamber pots, you feel that the least you can do is walk around and feign interest at each one. But in your heart you are really thinking that if you never saw a log cabin again you'd be pretty damn pleased. I'm sure that was what Lincoln was thinking when he packed his cases and decided not to be a backwoods merchant anymore, but to take up a more rewarding career emancipating Negroes and being president.

  Down at the far end of the site, I met an older couple plodding towards me, looking tired. The man gave me a sympathetic look as he passed and said, "Only two more to go." Down the path from where they had come I could see one of the two remaining cabins, looking distant and small. I waited until the older couple were safely out of sight around a bend, and then sat down beneath a tree, a handsome oak into whose leaves the first trace of autumn gold was delicately bleeding. I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders and wondered why it was that I had been so enchanted by this place when I was five years old. Were childhoods so boring back then? I knew my own little boy, if driven to this place, would drop to the ground and start hyperventilating at the discovery that he had spent a day and a half sealed in a car only to come and see a bunch of boring log cabins. And looking at it now, I couldn't have blamed him. I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

  But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.

  After New Salem, I took Interstate 55 south, and drove for an hour and a half towards St. Louis. It was boring, too. On a road as straight and as wide as an American interstate, fifty-five miles an hour is just too slow. It feels like walking speed. Cars and trucks coming towards you in the opposite direction seem to be traveling on one of those pedestrian conveyer belts you find in airports. You can see the people inside, get a long, lingering glimpse into their lives, as they slide past. And there's no sense of driving. You need to put a hand to the wheel occasionally just to confirm your course, but you can take time out to do the most intricate things-count your money, brush your hair, tidy up the car, use the rearview mirror to search and destroy blackheads, read maps and guidebooks, put on or discard articles of clothing. If your car possessed cruise control you could just about climb in the back and take a nap. It is certai
nly quite easy to forget that you are in charge of two tons of speeding metal, and it is only when you start to scatter emergency cones at roadwork sites or a truck honks at you as you drift into its path that you are jolted back to reality and you realize that henceforth you probably shouldn't leave your seat to search for snack food.

  The one thing that can be said is that it leaves you time to think, and to consider questions like why is it that the trees along highways never grow? Some of them must have been there for forty years by now, and yet they are still no more than six feet tall and with only fourteen leaves on them. Is it a particular low-maintenance strain, do you suppose? And here's another one. Why can't they make cereal boxes with pouring spouts? Is some guy at General Foods splitting his sides at the thought that every time people pour out a bowl of cornflakes they spill some of them on the floor? And why is it that when you clean a sink, no matter how long you let the water run or how much you wipe it with a cloth, there's always a strand of hair and some bits of wet fluff left behind? And just what do the Spanish see in flamenco music?

  In a forlorn effort to keep from losing my mind, I switched on the radio, but then I remembered that American radio is designed for people who have already lost their minds. The first thing I came across was a commercial for Folgers coffee. An announcer said in a confidential whisper, "We went to the world--famous Napa Valley Restaurant in California and-without telling the customers-served them Folgers instant coffee instead of the restaurant's usual brand. Then we listened in on hidden microphones." There followed an assortment of praise for the coffee along the lines of "Hey, this coffee is fantastic!" "I've never tasted such rich, full-bodied coffee before!" "This coffee is so good I can hardly stand it!" and that sort of thing. Then the announcer leaped out and told the diners that it was Folgers coffee, and they all shared a good laugh-and an important lesson about the benefits of drinking quality instant coffee. I twirled the dial. A voice said, "We'll return to our discussion of maleness in sixty seconds." I twirled the dial. The warbling voice of a female country singer intoned,

  His hands are tiny and his legs are short But I lean upon him For my child support.

  I twirled the dial. A voice said, "This portion of the news is brought to you by the Airport Barber Shop, Biloxi." There was then a commercial for said barbershop, followed by thirty sec onds of news, all of it related to deaths by cars, fires and gunfire in Biloxi in the last twenty-four hours.

  There was no hint that there might be a wider, yet more violent world beyond the city limits. Then there was another commercial for the Airport Barber Shop, in case you were so monumentally cretinous that you had forgotten about it during the preceding thirty seconds of news. I switched the radio off.

  At Litchfield, I left the interstate, vowing not to get on one again if I could possibly help it, and joined a state highway, Illinois 127, heading south towards Murphysboro and Carbon dale. Almost immediately life became more interesting. There were farms and houses and little towns to look at. I was still going fifty-five miles an hour, but now I seemed to be fairly skimming along. The landscape flashed past, more absorbing than before, more hilly and varied, and the foliage was a darker blur of green. Signs came and went: TEE PEE MINI MART, B-RITE FOOD STORE, BETTY'S BEAUTY Box, SAV-A-LOT FOOD CENTER, PINCKNEYVILLE COON CLUB, BALD KNOB TRAILER COURT, DAIRY DELITE, ALL U CAN EAT. In between these shrines to dyslexia and free enterprise there were clearings on the hillsides where farmhouses stood. Almost every one had a satellite dish in the yard, pointed to the sky as if tapping into some life-giving celestial force. I suppose in a sense they were. Here in the hills, the light failed more quickly. I noticed with surprise that it was past six o'clock and I decided that I had better find a room. As if on cue, Carbondale hove into view.

  It used to be that when you came to the outskirts of a town you would find a gas station and a Dairy Queen, maybe a motel or two if it was a busy road or the town had a college. Now every town, even a quite modest one, has a mile or more of fast-food places, motor inns, discount cities, shopping malls-all with thirty-foot-high revolving signs and parking lots the size of Shropshire. Carbondale appeared to have nothing else. I drove in on a road that became a two-mile strip of shopping centers and gas stations, K Marts, J. C. Penneys, Hardees and McDonald's. And then, abruptly, I was in the country again. I turned around and drove back through town on a parallel street that offered precisely the same sort of things but in slightly different configurations and then I was in the country again. The town had no center. It had been eaten by shopping malls.

  I got a room in the Heritage Motor Inn, then went out for a walk to try once more to find Carbondale. But there really was nothing there. I was perplexed and disillusioned. Before I had left on this trip I had lain awake at night in my bed in England and pictured myself stopping each evening at a motel in a little city, strolling into town along wide sidewalks, dining on the blueplate special at Betty's Family Restaurant on the town square, then plugging a scented toothpick in my mouth and going for a stroll around the town, very probably stopping off at Vern's Midnite Tavern for a couple of draws and a game of eight-ball with the boys or taking in a movie at the Regal or looking in at the Val-Hi Bowling Alley to kibitz the Mid-Week Hairdressers' League matches before rounding off the night with a couple of games of pinball and a grilled cheese sandwich. But here there was no square to stroll to, no Betty's, no blue-plate specials, no Vern's Midnite Tavern, no movie theater, no bowling alley. There was no town, just six-lane highways and shopping malls.

  There weren't even any sidewalks. Going for a walk, as I discovered, was a ridiculous and impossible undertaking. I had to cross parking lots and gas station forecourts, and I kept coming up against little white-painted walls marking the boundaries between, say, Long John Silver's Seafood Shoppe and Kentucky Fried Chicken. To get from one to the other, it was necessary to clamber over the wall, scramble up a grassy embankment and pick your way through a thicket of parked cars.

  That is if you were on foot. But clearly from the looks people gave me as I lumbered breathlessly over the embankment, no one had ever tried to go from one of these places to another under his own motive power. What you were supposed to do was get in your car, drive twelve feet down the street to another parking lot, park the car and get out. Glumly I clambered my way to a Pizza Hut and went inside, where a waitress seated me at a table with a view of the parking lot.

  All around me people were eating pizzas the size of bus wheels. Directly opposite, inescapably in my line of vision, an overweight man of about thirty was lowering wedges into his mouth whole, like a sword swallower. The menu was dazzling in its variety. It went on for pages. There were so many types and sizes of pizza, so many possible permutations, that I felt quite at a loss. The waitress appeared. "Are you ready to order?"

  "I'm sorry," I replied, "I need a little more time."

  "Sure," she said. "You take your time." She went off to somewhere out of my line of vision, counted to four and came back. "Are you ready to order now?" she asked.

  "I'm sorry," I said, "I really need just a little more time." "OK," she said and left. This time she may have counted as high as twenty, but when she returned I was still nowhere near understanding the many hundreds of options open to me as a Pizza Hut patron.

  "You're kinda slow, aren'tcha?" she observed brightly.

  I was embarrassed. "I'm sorry. I'm out of touch. I've ... just got out of prison."

  Her eyes widened. "Really?"

  "Yes. I murdered a waitress who rushed me."

  With an uncertain smile she backed off and gave me lots and lots of time to make up my mind. In the end I had a medium-sized deep-dish pepperoni pizza with extra onions and mushrooms, and I can recommend it without hesitation.

  Afterwards, to round off a perfect evening, I clambered over to a nearby K Mart and had a look around. K Marts are a chain of discount stores and they are really depressing places. You could take Mother Teresa to a K Mart and she would get depressed. It's not that there
's anything wrong with the K Marts themselves, it's the customers. K Marts are always full of the sort of people who give their children names that rhyme: Lonnie, Donnie, Ronnie, Connie, Bonnie. The sort of people who would stay in to watch "The Munsters." Every woman there has at least four children and they all look as if they have been fathered by a different man. The woman always weighs 250 pounds. She is always walloping a child and bawling, "If you don't behave, Ronnie, I'm not gonna bring you back here no more!" As if Ronnie could care less about never going to a K Mart again. It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake. If you go shopping at K Mart you know that you've touched bottom. My dad liked K Marts.

  I went in and looked around. I picked up some disposable razors and a pocket notebook, and then, just to make an occasion of it, a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which were attractively priced at $1.29. I paid for these and went outside. It was 7:30 in the evening. The stars were rising above the parking lot. I was alone with a small bag of pathetic treats in the most boring town in America and frankly I felt sorry for myself. I clambered over a wall and dodged across the highway to a Kwik-Krap minisupermarket, purchased a cold six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and returned with it to my room where I watched cable TV, drank beer, messily ate Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (wiping my hands on the sheets) and drew meager comfort from the thought that in Carbondale, Illinois, that was about as good a time as you were ever likely to get.

  CHAPTER 5

  IN THE MORNING I rejoined Highway 127 south. This was marked on my map as a scenic route and for once this proved to be so. It really was attractive countryside, better than anything I knew Illinois possessed, with rolling hills of winebottle green, prosperous-looking farms and deep woods of oak and beech. Surprisingly, considering I was heading south, the foliage here was more autumnal than elsewhere-the hillsides were a mixture of mustard, dull orange and pale green, quite fetching-and the clear, sunny air had an agreeable crispness to it. I could live here, in these hills, I thought.