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Here I was in a country where, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I could find out how many suppositories Ronald Reagan’s doctor had prescribed for him in 1986,* but I couldn’t be told which foreign dignitary would shortly be making a public appearance on the steps of a national institution.
Before 1952, when the bridge was built, the eastern side of the bay had enjoyed centuries of isolation. Ever since then, people have been saying that outsiders will flood in and ruin the peninsula, but it still looked pretty unspoiled to me, and my guess is that it’s the outsiders who have kept it that way.
I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they’d say, “You know, I don’t think I ever have,” and then they’d look kind of troubled too.
That shit sure changed
Do you know that if you are a black man in urban America you now stand a one-in-nineteen chance of being murdered? In World War II, the odds of being killed were one in fifty. In New York City there is one murder every four hours. Murder there has become the most common cause of death for people under thirty-five—and yet New York isn’t even the most murderous city in America.
No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm. When it comes to asinine administration, Philadelphia is in a league of its own.
Yeah buddy dig deeper in the South
The road to Mount Airy led through the most beautiful city park I had ever been in. Called Fairmount Park and covering almost 9,000 acres, it is the largest municipal park in America and it is full of trees and flowering shrubs and bosky glades of infinite charm. It stretches for miles along the banks of the Schuylkill River. We drove through a dreamy twilight. Boats sculled along the water. It was perfection.
Impulsively I bought a ticket and went outside where a bus was just about to depart to take half a dozen of us to the farm four or five miles away down a country lane. Well, it was great. I can’t remember the last time I had such a good time in a Republican household.
From Gettysburg, I headed north up US 15 towards Bloomsburg, where my brother and his family had recently moved. For years they had lived in Hawaii, in a house with a swimming pool, near balmy beaches, beneath tropical skies and whispering palms, and now, just when I had landed a trip to America and could go anywhere I wanted, they had moved to the Rust Belt.
Everywhere else in America towns are named after either the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave.
On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen—all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere—on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody’s stomach after he’d eaten pizza.
Lol sigh
They always used to do this to you at the Iowa State Fair. The strippers’ tents at the back of the midway would be covered with wildly erotic paintings of the most beautiful, silky-haired, full-breasted, lithe-bodied women you ever saw—women whose moist and pouty lips seemed to be saying, “I want you—yes, you there, with the zits and glasses. Come and fulfill me, little man.” Aged fourteen and delirious with lust, you would believe these pictures with all your heart and many of the neighboring organs. You would hand over a crumpled dollar and go inside into a dusty tent that smelled of horse
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Columbus has always seemed to me an odd choice of hero for a country that celebrates success as America does because he was such a dismal failure. Consider the facts: he made four long voyages to the Americas, but never once realized that he wasn’t in Asia and never found anything worthwhile. Every other explorer was coming back with exciting new products like potatoes and tobacco and nylon stockings, and all Columbus found to bring home were some puzzled-looking Indians—and he thought they were Japanese.
History marches on
When at last I reached The Breakers, it was absolutely enormous, a mountain with windows.
I might have disliked it less if Provincetown had tried just a little harder to be charming. I had seldom seen a place so singularly devoted to sucking money out of tourists. It was filled with ice cream parlors and gift shops and places selling T-shirts, kites and beach paraphernalia.
Lol just you wait buddy
I noticed that a basic two-bedroom house by the beach was on offer at $190,000, though it did include a fireplace and all the sand you could eat.
Lolsob
Just a couple of miles down the road was New Hampshire and the start of the real New England. Things could only get better.
Wrrrrrrong!
But by the 1960s Route 1 had become too congested to be practical—a third of all Americans live within twenty miles of it—and Interstate 95 was built to zip traffic up and down the coast with only the most fleeting sense of a changing landscape.
Abruptly I decided to abandon Route 1 and plunge northward, into the dense pine forests of central Maine, heading in an irregular line for the White Mountains, on a road that went up and down, up and down, like a rucked carpet.
King Country
Just beyond it, I came to Bretton Woods, which I had always pictured as a quaint little town. But in fact there was no town at all, just a hotel and a ski lift. The hotel was huge and looked like a medieval fortress, but with a bright red roof. It looked like a cross between Monte Cassino and a Pizza Hut.
I stood there in the mild October sunshine, feeling so sorry for all these luckless people and their lost lives, reflecting bleakly on mortality and on my own dear, cherished family so far away in England, and I thought, “Well, fuck this,” and walked back down the hill to the car.
I drove on, thinking what an ironic thing it was that the really beautiful places in America—the Smoky Mountains, Appalachia, and now Vermont—were always inhabited by the poorest, most undereducated people. And then I hit Stowe and realized that when it comes to making shrewd generalizations, I am a cretin.
And yet there was something about these places. They were too perfect, too rich, too yuppified. At Dorset there was a picture shop called the Dorset Framery. At Bennington, just down the road, I passed a place called the Publyk House Restaurant.
I longed to see a bit of neon and a restaurant with a good old family name—Ernie’s Chop House, Zweiker’s New York Grille—with a couple of blinking beer signs in the front window.
Should have gone to Burlington
this looked as if it had been designed in Manhattan and brought in by truck.
Pretty much was
We had the complete set for 1959 in mint condition; it is now worth something like $1,500. We had Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra as rookies, Ted Williams from the last year he hit .400, the complete New York Yankees teams for every year between 1956 and 1962. The whole collection must have been worth something like $8,000—enough, at any rate, to have sent Mom and Dad for a short course of treatment at a dementia clinic.
Ouch
It’s only because everyone throws these things out that they grow so valuable for the lucky few whose parents don’t spend their retirements getting rid of all the stuff they spent their working lives accumulating.
Never eat in a restaurant where you can hear what they are saying in the kitchen.
The 90s must have been rough
In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
For 200 miles the border between New York and Pennsylvania is a straight line, but at Pennsylvania’s northwestern corner, where I was now, it abruptly juts north, as if the draftsman’s arm had been jogged. The reason for this small cartographical irregularity was to let Pennsylvania have its own outlet onto Lake Erie so that its residents wouldn’t have to cross New York State, and it remains today a 200-year-old reminder of how the early states weren’t at all confident that the Union was going to work.
Twenty-five years ago Lake Erie was declared dead. Driving along its southern shore, gazing out at its flat gray immensity, I thought this appeared to be a remarkable achievement. It hardly seemed possible that something as small as man could kill something as large as a Great Lake. But just in the space of a century or so we managed it.
Unless you have lived through it, you cannot conceive of the sense of hopelessness that comes with hearing “Hotel California” by the Eagles for the fourteenth time in three hours.
All I wanted was a station that didn’t play endless songs by bouncy prepubescent girls, didn’t employ disc jockeys who said “H-e-y-y-y-y” more than once every six seconds and didn’t keep telling me how much Jesus loved me. But no such station existed.
KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball games, but it was too cheap to send its sportscaster, a nice young guy named Steve Shannon, on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio—really just a tin hut standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer’s field somewhere southeast of Des Moines—and he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha.
I remember one time the phone call from the ballpark didn’t come through—the guy at the other end had gotten locked in a toilet or something—and Shannon didn’t have anything to tell the listeners. So he delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said that it was a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged somebody there to let him know what was going on.
We are talking about a tough city—and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn’t bear thinking about.
Oh man
Outside there is a whole village—a little town—containing eighty homes of famous Americans. These are the actual homes, not replicas. Ford crisscrossed the country acquiring the residences and workshops of the people he most admired—Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Luther Burbank, the Wright brothers and of course himself.
For a start, places like Edison’s workshop and the boardinghouse where his employees lodged have been scrupulously preserved. You can really see how these people worked and lived. And there is a certain undeniable convenience in having the houses all brought together.
For a while, Mackinac Island was the biggest trading post in the New World—John Jacob Astor’s fur trading company was based here—but its real glory dates from the late nineteenth century when wealthy people from Chicago and Detroit came to escape the city heat and enjoy the pollen-free air.
There are five of them, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior and Ontario, and they stretch 700 miles from top to bottom, 900 miles from east to west. They cover 94,500 square miles, making them almost precisely the size of the United Kingdom. Together they form the largest expanse of fresh water on earth.
High Island was once owned by a religious sect called the House of David, whose members all had beards and specialized, if you can believe it, in playing baseball. In the 1920s and ’30s they toured the country taking on local teams wherever they went and I guess they were just about unbeatable. High Island was reputedly a kind of penal colony for members of the sect who committed serious infractions—grounded into too many double plays or something. It was said that people were sent there and never heard from again.
The pasties were the real thing, brought to this isolated corner of Michigan by nineteenth-century Cornishmen who came to work in the local mines. “Everybody eats them up here in the Upper Peninsula,” the man told me. “But nobody’s ever heard of them anywhere else. You cross the state line into Wisconsin, just over the river, and people don’t know what they are. It’s kind of strange.”
Contrary to popular belief abroad, it is possible, indeed quite easy, to get free treatment in America by going to a county hospital. They aren’t very cheery places, in fact they are generally pretty grim, but they are no worse than any National Health Service hospital.
I was seized with a huge envy for these people and their unassuming lives. It must be wonderful to live in a safe and timeless place, where you know everyone and everyone knows you, and you can all count on each other.
And then they voted for Chump
Their idea of a crime in these places would be to miss the Friday football game. Anything worse than that only exists on television and in the newspapers, in a semimythic distant land called the Big City.
Difficult as it may be to believe, out here amid all these cornfields, the University of Iowa was for many years one of the most radical colleges in the country, at its peak exceeded in radicalness only by Berkeley and Columbia. Everybody there was a hippie, the professors as much as the students.
On Grand Avenue, near the governor’s mansion, I realized I was driving along behind my mother, who had evidently borrowed my sister’s car. I recognized her because the right turn signal was blinking pointlessly as she proceeded up the street. My mother generally puts the turn signal on soon after pulling out of the garage and then leaves it on for pretty much the rest of the day.
I was headed for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it.
Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch.
When I was growing up, I used to wonder how Nebraska came to be lived in. I mean to say, the original settlers, creaking across America in their covered wagons, had to have passed through Iowa, which is green and fertile and has, as I say, a hill, but stopped short of Colorado, which is green and fertile and has a mountain range, and settled instead for a place that is flat and brown and full of stubble and prairie dogs.
I mean you could eat the prarie dogs
For a long time I couldn’t decide whether the original settlers in Nebraska were insane or just stupid, and then I saw a stadium full of University of Nebraska football fans in action on a Saturday and realized that they must have been both.
