The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

by Bill Bryson

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

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.

surfeit

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.

Kwik-Krap mini-supermarket,

It struck me as notably ironic that Southerners could despise blacks so bitterly and yet live comfortably alongside them, while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and wished them every success, just so long as they didn’t have to mingle with them too freely.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. Living there would drive me crazy. Slowly.

I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America—a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding.

America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.

However dubious Williamsburg may be as a historical document—and it is plenty dubious—it is at least a model town. It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, “Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let’s go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings.” But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.

I tried to understand the adult world and could not. I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted—stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered that if you didn’t measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall.

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.

I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. But apart from being dead or at a Bee Gees concert I couldn’t think of a single thing.

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.

I was just as lonesome as they were. Indeed, all over this big, heartless city there were no doubt tens of thousands of people just as solitary and friendless as me. What a melancholy thought.

I couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a $200 sweater but not a can of baked beans.

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.

Generally speaking—which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking—Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences. Preserving the past for its own sake doesn’t come into it much.

It’s strange that no one ever goes east, that you never encounter anyone hitchhiking to New York in pursuit of some wild and crazy dream to be a certified public accountant or make a killing in leveraged buyouts.

That’s the thing about America. It’s so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness.

Fifty miles beyond Rapid City is the little town of Wall, home of the most famous drugstore in the West, Wall Drug. You know it’s coming because every hundred yards or so along the whole of that fifty miles you pass a big billboard telling you so: STEAKS AND CAKES—WALL DRUG, 47 MILES, HOT BEEF SANDWICHES—WALL DRUG, 36 MILES, FIVE CENT COFFEE—WALL DRUG, 25 MILES, and so on. It is the advertising equivalent of the Chinese water torture. After a while the endless drip, drip, drip of billboards so clouds your judgment that you have no choice but to leave the interstate and have a look at it. It’s an awful place, one of the world’s biggest tourist traps, but I loved it and I won’t have a word said against it.

Because Dad was a sportswriter of some standing—no, to hell with the modesty, my dad was one of the finest sportswriters in the country and widely recognized as such—he could go into the press box and onto the field before the game and to his eternal credit he always took us with him.

There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought, and turned the car for home. It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I almost felt serene.