Bill Bryson Page 9

  Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown. What a difference it makes, how much more vibrant and alive it all seems, to see children playing ball in the street or skipping rope on the front stoops. I wandered along the cobbled sidewalk of Oglethorpe Avenue to the Colonial Park Cemetery, full of moldering monuments and densely packed with the gravestones of people famous to the state's history-Archibald Bulloch, the first president of Georgia, James Habersham, "a leading merchant," and Button Gwinnett, who is famous in America for being one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and for having the silliest first name in Colonial history. The people of Savannah, in a careless moment, appear to have lost old Button. The historical marker said that he might be buried where I was standing now or then again he might be over in the corner or possibly somewhere else altogether. You could walk around all day and never know when you were on the Button, so to speak.

  The business district in Savannah was frozen in a perpetual 1959--the Woolworth store didn't appear to have changed its stock since about then. There was a handsome old movie house, Weis's, but it was shut. Downtown movie houses are pretty much a thing of the past in America, alas, alas.

  You are always reading how buoyant the movie industry is in America, but all the theaters now are at shopping malls in the suburbs. You go to the movies there and you get a choice of a dozen pictures, but each theater is about the size of a large fridge-freezer and only marginally more comfortable. There are no balconies. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine movie theaters without balconies? To me going to the movies means sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes onto the people below (or, during the more boring love scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing Nibs at the screen. Nibs were a licorice-flavored candy, thought to be made from rubber left over from the Korean War, which had a strange popularity in the 1950s. They were practically inedible, but if you sucked on one of them for a minute and then threw it at the screen, it would stick with an interesting pock sound. It was a tradition on Saturdays for everybody to take the bus downtown to the Orpheum, buy a box of Nibs and spend the afternoon bombarding the screen.

  You had to be careful when you did this because the theater manager employed vicious usherettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn't been born into Hitler's Germany, who patrolled the aisles with highpowered flashlights looking for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times during the film their darting lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing position with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before being turned over to the police for a long period of mental readjustment in a reform school. Those were the days! You cannot tell me that some suburban multiplex with shoebox theaters and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and community spirit of a cavernous downtown movie house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet, but ours could well be the last generation for which moviegoing has anything like a sense of magic.

  On this sobering thought I strolled down to Water Street, on the Savannah River, where there was a new riverside walk. The river itself was dark and smelly and on the South Carolina side opposite there was nothing to look at but down-at-heel warehouses and, further downriver, factories dispensing billows of smoke. But the old cotton warehouses overlooking the river on the Savannah side were splendid. They had been restored without being overgentrified. They contained boutiques and oyster bars on the ground floor, but the upper floors were left a tad shabby, giving them that requisite raffish air I had been looking for since Hannibal. Some of the shops were just a bit chichi, I must admit. One of them was called The Cutest Little Shop in Town, which made me want to have the quickest little dry heave in the county. A sign on the door said, ABSOTIVELY, POSILUTELY NO FOOD OR DRINK IN SHOP. I sank to my knees and thanked God that I had never had to meet the proprietor. The shop was closed so I wasn't able to go inside and see what was so cute about it.

  Towards the end of the street stood a big new Hyatt Regency hotel, an instantly depressing sight.

  Massive and made of shaped concrete, it was from the Fuck You school of architecture so favored by the big American hotel chains. There was nothing about it in scale or appearance even remotely sympathetic to the old buildings around it. It just said, "Fuck you, Savannah." The city is particularly ill favored in this respect. Every few blocks you come up against some discordant slab-the De Soto Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Best Western Riverfront, all about as appealing as spittle on a johnnycake, as they say in Georgia. Actually, they don't say anything of the sort in Georgia. I just made it up. But it has a nice Southern ring to it, don't you think? I was just about at the point where I was starting to get personally offended by the hotels, and in serious danger of becoming tiresome here, when my attention was distracted by a workman in front of the city courthouse, a large building with a gold dome. He had a leaf blower, a noisy contraption with miles of flex snaking back into the building behind him. I had never seen such a thing before. It looked something like a vacuum cleaner-actually, it looked like one of the Martians in It Came from Outer Space-and it was very noisy. The idea, I gathered, was that you would blow all the leaves into a pile and then gather them up by hand. But every time the man assembled a little pile of leaves, a breeze would come along and unassemble it. Sometimes he would chase one leaf half a block or more with his blower, whereupon all the leaves back at base would seize the opportunity to scuttle off in all directions. It was clearly an appliance that must have looked nifty in the catalog but would never work in the real world, and I vaguely wondered, as I strolled past, whether the people at the Zwingle Company were behind it in some way.

  I left Savannah on the Herman Talmadge Memorial Bridge, a tall, iron-strutted structure that rises up and up and up and flings you, wide-eyed and quietly gasping, over the Savannah River and into South Carolina. I drove along what appeared on my map to be a meandering coast road, but was in fact a meandering inland road. This stretch of coast is littered with islands, inlets, bays and beaches of rolling sand dunes, but I saw precious little of it. The road was narrow and slow. It must be hell in the summer when millions of vacationers from all over the eastern seaboard head for the beaches and resorts-Tybee Island, Hilton Head, Laurel Bay, Fripp Island.

  It wasn't until I reached Beaufort (pronounced "Bew-furt") that I got my first proper look at the sea.

  I rounded a bend to find myself, suddenly and breathtakingly, gazing out on a looking glass bay full of boats and reed beds, calm and bright and blue, the same color as the sky. According to my Mobil Travel Guide, the three main sources of income in the area are tourism, the military and retired people. Sounds awful, doesn't it? But in fact Beaufort is lovely, with many mansions and an oldfashioned business district. I parked on Bay Street, the main road through town, and was impressed to find that the meter fee was only five cents. That must be just about the last thing a nickel will buy you in America-thirty minutes of peace of mind in Beaufort, South Carolina. I strolled down to a little park and marina, which had been recently built, from the look of it. This was only the fourth time I had seen the Atlantic from this side. When you come from the Midwest, the ocean is a thing rarely encountered. The park was full of signs instructing you not to enjoy yourself or do anything impertinent. They were every few yards, and said, No SWIMMING OR DIVING FROM

  SEAWALL. NO BIKE RIDING IN PARK. CUTTING OR DAMAGING FLOWERS, PLANTS, TREES OR SHRUBS PROHIBITED. No CONSUMPTION OR POSSESSION OF BEER, WINE, OR ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IN CITY PARKS WITHOUT SPECIAL PERMISSION OF THE

  CITY
. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I don't know what sort of mini-Stalin they have running the council in Beaufort, but I've never seen a place so officially unwelcoming. It put me off so much that I didn't want to be there anymore, and abruptly I left, which was a shame really because I still had twelve minutes of unexpired time on the meter.

  As a result of this, I arrived in Charleston twelve minutes earlier than planned, which was good news. I had thought that Savannah was the most becoming American city I had ever seen, but it thumped into second place soon after my arrival in Charleston. At its harbor end, the city tapers to a rounded promontory which is packed solid with beautiful old homes, lined up one after the other along straight, shady streets like oversized books on a crowded shelf. Some are of the most detailed Victorian ornateness, like fine lace, and some are plain white clapboard with black shutters, but all of them are at least three stories high and imposing-all the more so as they loom up so near the road.

  Almost no one has any yard to speak of-though everywhere I looked there were Vietnamese gardeners minutely attending to patches of lawn the size of tablecloths-so children play on the street and women, all of them white, all of them young, all of them rich, gossip on the front steps. This isn't supposed to happen in America. Wealthy children in America don't play on the street; there isn't any need. They lounge beside the pool or sneak reefers in the $3,000 treehouse that Daddy had built for them for their ninth birthday. And their mothers, when they wish to gossip with a neighbor, do it on the telephone or climb into their airconditioned station wagons and drive a hundred yards. It made me realize how much cars and suburbs-and indiscriminate wealth-have spoiled American life.

  Charleston had the climate and ambience of a Naples, but the wealth and style of a big American city. I was enchanted. I walked away the afternoon, up and down the peaceful streets, secretly admiring all these impossibly happy and good-looking people and their wonderful homes and rich, perfect lives.

  The promontory ended in a level park, where children wheeled and bounced on BMXs and young couples strolled hand in hand and Frisbees sailed through the long strips of dark and light caused by the lowering sun filtering through the magnolia trees. Every person was youthful, good-looking and well scrubbed. It was like wandering into a Pepsi commercial. Beyond the park, a broad stone promenade overlooked the harbor, vast and shimmery and green. I went and peered over the edge.

  The water slapped the stone and smelled of fish. Two miles out you could see the island of Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began. The promenade was crowded with cyclists and sweating joggers, who weaved expertly among the pedestrians and shuffling tourists. I turned around and walked back to the car, the sun warm on my back, and had the sneaking feeling that after such perfection things were bound to be downhill from now on.

  CHAPTER 9

  SOUTH CAROLINA was boring. For the sake of haste I got on Interstate 26, which runs in a Zoo-mile diagonal across the state, through a monotonous landscape of dormant tobacco fields and salmon-colored soil. According to my Mobil Travel Guide, I was no longer in the Deep South but in the Middle Atlantic states. But it had the heat and glare of the South and the people in gas stations and cafes along the way sounded Southern. Even the radio announcers sounded Southern, in attitude as much as accent. According to one news broadcast, the police in Spartanburg were looking for two black men "who raped a white girl." You wouldn't hear that outside the South.

  As I neared Columbia, the fields along the road began to fill with tall signs advertising motels and quick-food places. These weren't the squat, rectangular billboards of my youth, with allur ing illustrations and three-dimensional cows, but just large unfriendly signs standing atop sixty-foot-high metal poles. Their messages were terse. They didn't invite you to do anything interesting or seductive. The old signs were chatty and would say things like WHILE IN COLUMBIA, WHY

  NOT STAY IN THE MODERN SKYLINER MOTOR INN, WITH OUR ALL NEW SENSU-MATIC VIBRATING BEDS. YOU'LL LOVE 'EM! SPECIAL RATES FOR CHILDREN. FREE

  TV. AIR COOLED ROOMS. FREE ICE. PLENTY OF PARKING. PETS WELCOME. ALL-U_

  CAN-EAT CATFISH BUFFET EVERY TUES 5-7 PM. DANCE NITELY TO THE VERNON

  STURGES GUITAR ORCHESTRA IN THE STARLITE ROOM. (PLEASE No NEGROES). The old signs were like oversized postcards, with helpful chunks of information. They provided something to read, a little food for thought, a snippet of insight into the local culture. Attention spans had obviously contracted since then. The signs now simply announced the name of the business and how to get there. You could read them from miles away: HOLIDAY INN, EXIT 26E, 4 MI. Sometimes these instructions were more complex and would say things like BURGER KING-31 MILES. TAKE EXIT 17B 5 MI TO US49 SOUTH, TURN RIGHT AT LIGHTS, THEN WEST

  PAST AIRPORT FOR 21/Z MI. Who could want a Whopper that-much? But the signs are effective, no doubt about it. Driving along in a state of idle mindlessness, suffering from hunger and a grease deficiency, you see a sign that says MCDONALD'S--EXIT HERE, and it's almost instinctive to swerve onto the exit ramp and follow it. Over and over through the weeks I found myself sitting at plastic tables with little boxes of food in front of me which I didn't want or have time to eat, all because a sign had instructed me to be there.

  At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly, as if by decree. Suddenly the countryside rose and fell in majestic undulations, full of creeping thickets of laurel, rhodo dendron and palmetto. At each hilltop the landscape opened out to reveal hazy views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain. The Appalachians stretch for 2,100 miles from Alabama to Canada and were once higher than the Himalayas (I read that on a book of matches once and have been waiting years for an opportunity to use it), though now they are smallish and rounded, fetching rather than dramatic. All along their length they go by different names-the Adirondacks, Poconos, Catskills, Alleghenies. I was headed for the Smokies, but I intended to stop en route at the Biltmore Estate, just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Biltmore was built by George Vanderbilt in 1895 and was one of the biggest houses ever constructed in America-a 255-room pile of stone in the style of a Loire chateau, on grounds of 1o,000 acres. When you arrive at Biltmore you are directed to park your car and go into a building by the gate to purchase your ticket before proceeding onto the estate.

  I thought this was curious until I went into the building and discovered that a gay afternoon at Biltmore would involve a serious financial commitment. The signs telling you the admission fee were practically invisible, but you could see from the ashen-faced look on people as they staggered away from the ticket windows that it must be a lot. Even so I was taken aback when my turn came and the unpleasant-looking woman at the ticket window told me that the admission fee was $17.50

  for adults and $13 for children. "Seventeen dollars and fifty cents!" I croaked. "Does that include dinner and a floor show?"

  The woman was obviously used to dealing with hysteria and snide remarks. In a monotone she said,

  "The admission fee includes admission to the George Vanderbilt house, of which 50 Of the 250

  rooms are open to the public. You should allow two to three hours for the self-guided tour. It also includes admission to the extensive gardens for which you should allow thirty minutes to one hour.

  It also includes admission and guided tour of the winery with audiovisual presentation and complimentary wine tasting. A guide to the house and grounds, available for a separate charge, is recommended. Afterwards you may wish to spend further large sums of money in the Deerpark Restaurant or, if you are a relatively cheap person, in the Stable Cafe, as well as avail yourself of the opportunity to buy expensive gifts and remembrances in the Carriage House Gift Shop."

  But by this time I was already on the highway again, heading for the Great Smoky Mountains, which, thank God, are free.

  I drove ten miles out of my way in order to spend the night in Bryson City, a modest self-indulgence. It was a small, nondescript place of motels and barbecue shacks strung out along a narrow river
valley on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There is little reason to go there unless your name happens to be Bryson, and even then, I have to tell you, the pleasure is intermittent. I got a room in the Bennett's Court Motel, a wonderful old place that appeared not to have changed a bit since 1956, apart from an occasional light dusting. It was precisely as motels always used to be, with the rooms spread out along a covered verandah overlooking a lawn with two trees and a tiny concrete swimming pool, which at this time of year was empty but for a puddle of wet leaves and one pissed-off-looking frog. Beside each door was a metal armchair with a scallopshaped back. By the sidewalk an old neon sign thrummed with the sound of coursing neon gas and spelled out BENNETT'S COURT / VACANCY / AIR CONDITIONED / GUEST POOL. /

  TV, all in green and pink beneath a tasteful blinking arrow in yellow. When I was small all motels had signs like that. Now you see them only occasionally in small forgotten towns on the edge of nowhere. Bennett's Court clearly would be the motel in Amalgam.

  I took my bags inside, lowered myself experimentally onto the bed and switched on the TV.

  Instantly there came up a commercial for Preparation H, an unguent for hemorrhoids. The tone was urgent. I don't remember the exact words, but they were something like: "Hey, you! Have you got hemorrhoids? Then get some Preparation H! That's an order! Remember that name, you inattentive moron! Preparation H! And even if you haven't got hemorrhoids, get some Preparation H anyway!

  Just in case!" And then a voice-over quickly added, "Now available in cherry flavor." Having lived abroad so long, I was unused to the American hard sell and it made me uneasy. I was equally unsettled by the way television stations in America can jump back and forth between commercials and programs without hesitation or warning. You'll be lying there watching "Kojak," say, and in the middle of a gripping shootout somebody starts cleaning a toilet bowl and you sit up, thinking,