The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
Bill Bryson’s travel through rural USA is something right down my lane along with the great writings of Paul Theroux, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Some notes from Bryson’s travels that I found.
I drove and drove, through flat farming country and little towns devoid of life: Hull, Pittsfield, Barry, Oxville. On my map, Springfield was two inches to the right of Hannibal, but it seemed to take hours to get there. In fact it does not take hours to get there. I was only slowly adjusting to the continental scale of America, where states are the size of countries. Illinois is nearly twice as big as Austria, four times the size of Switzerland. There is so much emptiness, so much space between towns. You go through a little place and the dinette looks crowded, so you think, ‘oh, I’ll wait till I get to Fuddville before I stop for coffee’, because it’s only just down the road and then you get out on the highway and a sign says FUDDVILLE 102 Miles. And you realize that you are dealing with another scale of geography altogether. There is corresponding lack of detail on the maps. On British maps every church and public house is dutifully recorded. Rivers of laughable minuteness - rivers you can step across - are landmarks of importance, known for miles around. In America, whole towns go missing - places with schools, businesses, hundreds of quite little lives, just vanish, as effectively as if they had been vaporized.
Context: Bill Bryson is in Philadelphia living at his friend’s place
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 refridgerator that made its own ice-cubes and a waterproof radio for the shower. I wanted an electric orange juicer and room ionizer and a write watch that would keep in touch with biorythms. 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 the 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 you should see American closets. They are always full of yesterday’s enthusiasm: golf-clubs, scuba diving equipment, tennis-rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, darkroom equipments, 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.
“Do you want zillions of your state taxes even at the risk of crippling education?” “Oh, yes!", the people cry.
“Do you want TV that would make an imbecile weep?” “Yes, please!”
Shall we indulge ourselves with the greatest orgy of consumer spending that the world has even known? ‘Sounds neat, let’s go for it’.
The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two percent of the world’s population. If Americans suddenly stopped indulging themselves, or ran out of closet space, the world would fall apart. If you ask me, that’s crazy.
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, earmuffs and scouring powder. 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 drove to Wyoming, through scenery that looked like illustration from some marvellous children’s book of western tales - snowy peaks, pine forests, snug farms, a twisting river, a mountain vale whith a comely name: Swan Valley. That is the one thing that must be said for the men and women who carved out the West. They certainly knew how to name a place. Just on this corner of the map I could see Soda Springs, Massacre Rocks, Steam boat Mountain, Wind River, Flaming Gorge, Calamity Falls - places whose very names promised adventure and excitment, even if in reality all they contained were a DX gas station and a Taster-Freer drive-in.
Most of the early settlers in America were oddly inept at devising place-names. They either chose unimaginative semi-recycled names - New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England - or toadying, kiss-ass names like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Jamestown in a generally pitiable attempt to secure favour with some monarch or powdered aristocrat back home. Or else they just accepted the name Indians told them, not knowing whether Squashaninsect meant ‘Land of the Twinkling Lakes’ or ‘Place where Big Chief Thunderclap paused to pass water’.
The Spanish were even worse because they gave everything religious names so that every place in the South-West is called San this or Santa that. Driving across the South-West is like an 800-mile religion procession. The worst name on the whole continent is Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which means ‘Blood of Christ Mountains’. Have you heard of a more inane name of any geographical feature? It was only here in the real West, the land of beaver trappers and mountain men, that a dollop of romance and colour was brought to the business of giving names. And here I was about to enter one of the most beautiful and understatedly romantic of them all: Jackson Hole.