The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

by Bill Bryson

Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE.

The whole place was as tranquil as a double dose of Valium. It looked like the sort of tidy, friendly, clean-thinking college that Clark Kent would have attended.

read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times—and it’s well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck ’em.

It was a little reading light that you clipped onto your book so as not to disturb your bedmate as she slumbered beside you. In this respect it was outstanding because it barely worked. The light it cast was absurdly feeble (in the catalog it looked like the sort of thing you could signal ships with if you got lost at sea) and left all but the first two lines of a page in darkness. I have seen more luminous insects. After about four minutes its little beam fluttered and failed altogether, and it has never been used again. And the thing is that I knew all along that this was how it was going to end, that it would all be a bitter disappointment. On second thought, if I ever ran one of those companies I would just send people an empty box with a note in it saying, “We have decided not to send you the item you’ve ordered because, as you well know, it would never properly work and you would only be disappointed. So let this be a lesson to you for the future.”

The road was completely unsignposted. They do this to you a lot in America, particularly on country roads that go from nowhere to nowhere. You are left to rely on your own sense of direction to find your way—which

It was time to stop. Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor and old age. It was old age that got my grandfather.

I walked back to the car. Every parked car along the street had a license plate that said, MISSOURI—THE SHOW ME STATE. I wondered idly if this could be short for “Show Me the Way to Any Other State.”

had been so enchanted by this place when I was five years old. Were childhoods so boring back then? I knew my own little boy, if driven to this place, would drop to the ground and start hyperventilating at the discovery that he had spent a day and a half sealed in a car only to come and see a bunch of boring log cabins.

I mused for a few moments on the 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.

In a forlorn effort to keep from losing my mind, I switched on the radio, but then I remembered that American radio is designed for people who have already lost their minds.

“You’re kinda slow, aren’tcha?” she observed brightly. I was embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I’m out of touch. I’ve . . . just got out of prison.” Her eyes widened. “Really?” “Yes. I murdered a waitress who rushed me.”

It’s the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn’t care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake. If you go shopping at K Mart you know that you’ve touched bottom.

In the 1960s Lady Bird Johnson, in one of those misguided campaigns in which presidents’ wives are always engaging themselves, had most of the roadside billboards removed as part of a highway beautification program.

Wisconsin used to ban margarine to protect its dairy farmers, so everybody in Wisconsin, including all the dairy farmers, would drive to Iowa where there were big signs everywhere saying, MARGARINE FOR SALE! All the Iowans, in the meantime, were driving off to Illinois, where there was no sales tax on anything, or Missouri, where the sales tax on gasoline was 50 percent lower.

Maybe now I would see chain gangs toiling in the sun and a prisoner in heavy irons legging it across fields and sloshing through creeks while pursued by bloodhounds, and lynch mobs roaming the streets and crosses burning on lawns. The prospect enlivened me, but I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking me over with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.

I drove on to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss as it’s known. The people named the town after Oxford in England in the hope that this would persuade the state to build the university there, and the state did. This tells you most of what you need to know about the workings of the Southern mind.

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.

A sign by the highway said, DON’T LITTER. KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. “OK, I the will,” I replied cheerfully.

He explained that Southerners had become so sensitive about their reputation for being shit-squishing rednecks that all the presenters on TV and radio tried to sound as if they came from the North and had never in their whole lives nibbled a hush puppy or sniffed a grit. Nowadays it was the only way to get a job. Apart from anything else, the zippier Northern cadences meant the radio stations could pack in three or four commercials in the time it would take the average Southerner to clear his throat.

The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn’t hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. 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.

The path was lined with large rocks from each state. Every governor had evidently been asked to contribute some hunk of native stone and here they were, lined up like a guard of honor. It’s not often you see an idea that stupid brought to fruition. Many had been cut in the shape of the state, then buffed to a glossy finish and engraved. But others, clearly not catching the spirit of the enterprise, were just featureless hunks with a terse little plaque saying DELAWARE. GRANITE. Iowa’s contribution was, as expected, carefully middling. The stone had been cut to the shape of the state, but by someone who had clearly never attempted such a thing before. I imagine he had impulsively put in the lowest bid and was surprised to get the contract. At least the state had found a rock to send. I had half feared it might be a clump of dirt.

In every room there was a short taped commentary, which explained how Roosevelt worked and underwent therapy at the cottage. What it didn’t tell you was that what he really came here for was a bit of rustic bonking with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Her bedroom was on one side of the living room and his was on the other. The taped recording made nothing of this, but it did point out that Eleanor’s bedroom, tucked away at the back and decidedly inferior to the secretary’s, was mostly used as a guest room because Eleanor seldom made the trip south.

It seems a very odd practice to me. Imagine working all your life, clawing your way to the top, putting in long hours, neglecting your family, stabbing people in the back and generally being thought a shit by everyone you came in contact with, just to have a highway bridge over the Tallapoosa River named after you. Doesn’t seem right somehow. Still, at least this one was named after someone I had heard of.

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.

The park was full of signs instructing you not to enjoy yourself or do anything impertinent.

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,

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,

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers 500,000 acres in North Carolina and Tennessee. I didn’t realize it before I went there, but it is the most popular national park in America, attracting nine million visitors a year, three times as many as any other national park,

The Smoky Mountains were once full of hillbillies who lived in cabins up in the remote hollows, up among the clouds, but they were moved out and now the park is sterile as far as human activities go. Instead of trying to preserve an ancient way of life, the park authorities eradicated it. So the dispossessed hillbillies moved down to valley towns at the park’s edge and turned them into junkvilles selling crappy little souvenirs.

That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience—indeed, not to breathe fresh air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you, you pile into your thirteen-ton tin palace and drive 400 miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you don’t have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave facilities. These things, these RVs, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts go to the moon with less backup.

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.

ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad taste. It is the world capital of tat.

When I was growing up, we never got to go to places like Gatlinburg. My father would rather have given himself brain surgery with a Black and Decker drill than spend an hour in such a place.

In 1587, a group of 115 English settlers—men, women and children—sailed from Plymouth to set up the first colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. Shortly after they arrived, a child named Virginia Dare was born and thus became the first white person to arrive in America headfirst. Two years later, a second expedition set off from England to see how the settlers were getting on and to bring them their mail and tell them that the repairman from British Telecom had finally shown up and that sort of thing. But when the relief party arrived, they found the settlement deserted. There was no message of where the settlers had gone, nor any sign of a struggle, but just one word mysteriously scratched on a wall: “Croatoan.”

but fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who wore clothes and had long beards. These people, according to a contemporary account, “had a bell which they rang before they ate their meals and had a strange habit of bowing their heads and saying something in a low voice before they ate.”

Sneedville in northeastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons (no one knows where the name comes from) have most of the characteristics of Europeans—blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build—but a dark, almost Negroid skin coloring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names—Brogan, Collins, Mullins—but no one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been.

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.

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.

This is more or less how Philadelphia works, which is to say not very well. 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.

Consider: in 1985, a bizarre sect called MOVE barricaded itself into a tenement house on the west side of town. The police chief and mayor considered the options open to them and decided that the most intelligent use of their resources would be to blow up the house—but of course!—even though they knew there were children inside and it was in the middle of a densely populated district. So they dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter. This started a fire that quickly grew out of control and burned down most of the neighborhood—sixty-one houses in all—and killed eleven people, including all the children in the barricaded home.

A few months earlier when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out.

and Lucia’s desk, I was impressed to note, was one of the messiest in the room. This may have accounted in part for her impressive rise at the Inquirer. I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will—but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.

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.

When the Eisenhowers bought the place in 1950, a 200-year-old farmhouse stood on the site, but it was drafty and creaked on stormy nights, so they had it torn down and replaced with the present building, which looks like a 200-year-old farmhouse. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that just so Republican? I was enchanted.

The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named after either the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse,

Being unable to afford a car in America is the last step before living out of a plastic sack. As a result, most of the people on long-distance buses are one of the following: mentally defective, actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, just released from prison or nuns. Occasionally you will also see a pair of Norwegian students.

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.

Route 1, as the name suggests, is the patriarch of American roads, the first federal highway. It stretches for 2,500 miles from the Canadian border to the Florida Keys. For forty years it was the main highway along the eastern seaboard, connecting all the big cities of the North—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington—with the beaches and citrus groves of the South.

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. Today Route 1 is still there, but you would need weeks to drive its entire length. Now it is just a local road, an endless city street, an epic stretch of shopping malls.