The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

by Bill Bryson

working his way through eternity

interest, two hundred miles from people who do not habitually stick a finger in their ear and swivel it around as a preliminary to answering any question addressed to them by a stranger.

We quickly discovered during illicit forays into the picnic hamper that if you stuck a bunch of Ohio Blue Tip matches into an apple or hard-boiled egg, so that it resembled a porcupine, and casually dropped it out the tailgate window, it was like a bomb. It would explode with a small bang and a surprisingly big flash of blue flame, causing cars following behind to veer in an amusing fashion.

with a light heart headed towards Missouri. And it isn’t often you hear anyone say that.

It was like living inside Tupperware.

mighty grain elevators, the cathedrals of the Middle West,

Stand on two phone books almost anywhere in Iowa and you get a view.

Valium. It looked like the sort of tidy, friendly, clean-thinking college that Clark Kent would have attended.

Del Monte Lima Bean ’n’ Pretzels Party Snacks.

old motel which looked pretty seedy, though judging by the absence of charred furniture in the front yard it was clearly a step up from the sort of place my dad would have chosen. I

said, MISSOURI—THE SHOW ME STATE. I wondered idly if this could be short for “Show Me the Way to Any Other State.”

One of the things I was looking for on this trip was the perfect town.

on old sofas and rocking chairs, waiting for death or dinner, whichever came first.

I have never managed to read a William Faulkner novel beyond about page 3 (roughly halfway through the first sentence),

my long-sought Amalgam. I was beginning to realize that I was never going to find it in one place. I would have to collect it piecemeal—a courthouse here, a fire station there—and here I had found several pieces.

I’ve always liked college towns anyway. They are about the only places in America that manage to combine the benefits of a small-town pace of life with a dash of big-city sophistication. They

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Nibs were a licorice-flavored candy, thought to be made from rubber left over from the Korean War,

Massive and made of shaped concrete, it was from the Fuck You school of architecture

He was so cheap on vacations that it always surprised me he didn’t make us sift in litter bins for our lunch. So

You’ll learn lots of worthwhile things about the little-known American war with Ecuador of 1802

My father explained to us that Negroes weren’t allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It wasn’t against the law exactly, but they didn’t do it because Washington was enough of a Southern city that they just didn’t dare.

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.

all the more impressive when you consider that its massive stones had to be brought from the Nile delta on wooden rollers by Sumerian slaves.

shouldn’t they be running the country, or at least destabilizing some Central American government? I

There is always a pigeon on his head. I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him.

boss, my friend’s attitude seemed to be that if you forget to lock your car doors when you’re driving through St. Louis late at night, well, you’ve got to expect to take a bullet in the head from time to time.

No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm.

which was full of winos, many of whom had the comical idea that I might be prepared to give them twenty-five cents of my own money.

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.

course—I wouldn’t give my closest friend a dollar—but

fingers. I suppose after all these decades of pumping gas he had become more or less incombustible,

much to the annoyance of a man in a forty-foot motor home who dripped mustard on his lap in braking to avoid me. “That’ll teach you to take a building on vacation,” I muttered uncharitably and hoped that something heavy had fallen on his wife in back.

had a hot dog with mustard and sand and a cup of coffee with cream and sand

right or left, or sometimes both. This wasn’t a road system, it was mobile hysteria.

massive brown boulders emerged eerily from the earth, like subterranean creatures coming up for air,

This was as nice a little town as I had seen on the trip; it was almost Amalgam. The only shortcoming with Cooperstown is that it is full of tourists,

six rules of public dining

Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys?

In Reagan’s case he had the batter hit foul balls one after the other for over half an hour while pretending there was nothing implausible in this, which when you think about it is more or less how he ran the country as president.

would press on in that semiobsessional state that tends to overcome fathers when things aren’t going well.

(it isn’t often you find a store catering to the incontinent impulse shopper),

and instead start wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, walking with a lope and looking vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute.

the people who ran them were those snooty types who watch you as if they think you might do a poo in the corner given half a chance.

Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity?

Custer was an idiot and a brute and he deserved his fate. His plan was to slaughter the men, women and children of the Cheyenne and Sioux nations as