The Lost Continent (23 page)

“Thank you,” I’d say.

“You’re welcome,” she’d say.

Eventually the waitress came out of the kitchen with a tray the size of a tabletop and started setting down plates of food in front of me—soup, salad, a platter of chicken, a basket of steaming rolls. It all looked delicious. Suddenly I realized that I was starving.

“Can I get you anything else?” she said.

“No, this is just fine, thank you,” I answered, knife and fork plugged in my fists, ready to lunge at the food.

“Would you like some ketchup?”

“No thank you.”

“Would you like a little more dressing for your salad?”

“No thank you.”

“Have you got enough gravy?”

There was enough gravy to drown a horse. “Yes, plenty of gravy, thank you.”

“How about a cup of coffee?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“You sure there’s nothing I can do for you?”

“Well, you might just piss off and let me eat my dinner,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t, of course. I just smiled sweetly and said no thank you and after a while she withdrew. But she stood with a pitcher of iced water and watched me closely the whole meal. Every time I took a sip of water, she would come forward and top up my glass. Once when I reached for the pepper, she misread my intentions and started forward with the water pitcher, but then had to retreat. After that, whenever my hands left the cutlery for any reason, I would semi-mime an explanation to her of what I was about to do—“I’m just going to butter my roll now”—so that she wouldn’t rush over to give me more water. And all the while the people at the next table watched me eat and smiled encouragingly. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

When at last I finished the waitress came over and offered me dessert. “How about a piece of pie? We’ve got blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, boysenberry, huckleberry, whortleberry, cherry berry, hairy berry, chuckberry and berry-berry.”

“Gosh, no thanks, I’m too full,” I said placing my hands on my stomach. I looked as if I had stuffed a pillow under my shirt.

“Well, how about some ice cream? We’ve got chocolate chip, chocolate fudge, chocolate ripple, chocolate-vanilla fudge, chocolate nut fudge, chocolate marshmallow swirl, chocolate mint with fudge chips, and fudge nut with or without chocolate chips.”

“Have you got just plain chocolate?”

“No, I’m afraid there’s not much call for that.”

“I don’t think I’ll have anything then.”

“Well, how about a piece of cake? We’ve got—”

“Really, no thank you.”

“A cup of coffee?”

“No thank you.”

“You sure now?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Well, I’ll just get you a little more water then,” and she was off for the water jug before I could get her to give me my bill. The people at the next table watched this with interest and smiled a smile that said, “We are completely off our heads. How are you?”

Afterwards, I had a walk around the town—that is to say, I walked up one side of the street and down the other. For the size of the place it was a nice town. It had two bookstores, a picture gallery, a gift shop, a movie house. People on the sidewalk smiled at me as I passed. This was beginning to worry me. Nobody, even in America, is
that
friendly. What did they want from me? Up at the far end of the street there was a BP service station, the first one I had seen in America. Feeling vaguely homesick for Blighty, I walked up to have a look at it and was disappointed to see that there wasn’t anything particularly British about it. The guy behind the counter wasn’t even wearing a turban. When he saw me looking in the window he smiled at me with that same strange, unsettling smile. Suddenly I realized what it was—it was the look of someone from outer space, that odd, curiously malevolent B-movie smile of a race of interplanetary creatures who have taken over a small town in the middle of nowhere as their first step towards becoming . . .
Earth Masters.
I know this sounds improbable, but crazier things have happened—look who was in the White House, for Christ’s sake. As I strolled back to the motel, I gave everyone I passed that same eerie smile, thinking I ought to keep on their good side, just in case. “And you never know,” I remarked to myself in a low voice, “if they do take over the planet, there might be some openings for a guy of your talents.”

In the morning I arose very early to a day that promised splendor. I peered out of my motel window. A pink dawn was spilled across the sky. I dressed quickly and hit the road before Littleton had even begun to stir. A few miles out of town I crossed the state line. Vermont presented an altogether greener, tidier prospect than New Hampshire. The hills were fat and soft, like a sleeping animal. The scattered farms looked more prosperous and the meadows climbed high up the rolling hillsides, giving the valleys an alpine air. The sun was soon high and warm. On a ridge overlooking an expanse of hazy foothills, I passed a sign that said P
EACHAM
, S
ETTLED
1776 and beyond that stood a village. I parked beside a red general store and got out to have a look around. There was no one about. Presumably the people of Littleton had come in the night and taken them off to the planet Zog.

I walked past the Peacham Inn—white clapboard, green shutters, no sign of life—and wandered up a hill, past a white Congregational church and pleasant, dozing houses. At the crest of the hill stood a broad green, with an obelisk and flagpole, and beside it an old cemetery. A zephyr wind teased the flag. Down the hill, across a broad valley, a series of pale green and brown hills rolled away to the horizon, like the swells of a sea. Below me the church bell tolled the hour, but otherwise there was not a sound. This was as perfect a spot as I had ever seen. I had a look at the obelisk. C
OMMEMORATING
P
EACHAM
S
OLDIERS
1869, it said, and had names carved in it, good New England names like Elijah W. Sargent, Lowell Sterns, Horace Rowe. There were forty-five names in all, too many surely for a mere hamlet in the hills. But then the cemetery beside the green also looked far too large for the size of the town. It covered the hillside and the grandeur of many of the monuments suggested that this had once been a place of wealth.

I went through the gate and had a look around. My eye was caught by one particularly handsome stone, an octagonal marble column surmounted by a granite sphere. The column logged the copious deaths of Hurds and their near relatives from Capt. Nathan Hurd in 1818 to Frances H. Bement in 1889. A small panel on the back said:

Nathan H. died July 24 1852
AE
. 4
Y
’
S
1
M
’
O
.

Joshua F. died July 31 1852
AE
. 1
YR
11
M
’
S
.

Children of J. & C. Pitkin.

What could it have been, I wondered, that carried off these two little brothers just a week apart? A fever? It seemed unlikely in July. An accident in which one died and the other lingered? Two unrelated events? I pictured the parents crouched at Joshua F.’s bedside, watching his life ebb, praying to God not to take him as well, and having their hopes crushed. Isn’t life shitty? Everywhere I looked there was disappointment and heartbreak recorded in the stones: J
OSEPH
,
SON
OF
E
PHRAIM
AND
S
ARAH
C
ARTER
,
DIED
M
ARCH
18 1846,
AGED
18
YRS
, A
LMA
F
OSTER
,
DAUT
.
OF
Z
ADOCK
AND
H
ANNAH
R
ICHARDSON
,
D
. M
AY
22, 1847,
AE
. 17
YRS
. So many were so young. I became infected with an inexpressible melancholy as I wandered alone among these hundreds of stilled souls, the emptied lives, the row upon row of ended dreams. Such a sad place! 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 west across Vermont, into the Green Mountains. The mountains were dark and round and the valleys looked rich. Here the light seemed softer, sleepier, more autumnal. There was color everywhere—trees the color of mustard and rust, meadows of gold and green, colossal white barns, blue lakes. Here and there along the highways roadside produce stands brimmed with pumpkins and squash and other autumn fruits. It was like a day trip to heaven. I wandered around on back roads. There was a surprising lot of small houses, some little better than shacks. I supposed there couldn’t be much work in a place like Vermont. The state has hardly any towns or industry. The biggest city, Burlington, has a population of just 37,000. Outside Groton I stopped at a roadside cafe for coffee and listened along with the other three customers to a fat young woman with a pair of ill-kempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter. “I still only get four dollars an hour,” she was saying. “Harvey, he’s been at Fibberts for three years and he’s only just got his first raise. You know what he gets now? Four dollars and sixty-five cents an hour. Isn’t that pathetic? I told him, I said, ‘Harvey, they’re just walkin’ all over you.’ But he won’t do nothin’ about it.” She broke off here to rearrange the features on one of her children’s faces with the back of her hand. “HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU NOT TO INNARUP ME WHEN I’M
TALKING?
” she inquired rhetorically of the little fellow, and then in a calmer voice turned back to the cafe lady and launched into a candid list of Harvey’s other shortcomings, which were manifold.

Only the day before in Maine I had seen a sign in a McDonald’s offering a starting wage of five dollars an hour. Harvey must have been immensely moronic and unskilled—doubtless both—not to be able to keep pace with a sixteen-year-old burger jockey at McDonald’s. Poor guy! And on top of that here he was married to a woman who was slovenly and indiscreet, and had a butt like a barn door. I hoped old Harvey had sense enough to appreciate all the incredible natural beauty with which God had blessed his native state because it didn’t sound as if He had blessed Harvey very much. Even his kids were ugly as sin. I was half tempted to give one of them a clout myself as I went out the door. There was just something about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him.

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. Stowe was anything but poor. It was a rich little town, full of chichi boutiques and expensive ski lodges. In fact, for most of the rest of the day, as I wandered around and through the Green Mountain ski resorts, I saw almost nothing but wealth and beauty—rich people, rich houses, rich cars, rich resorts, beautiful scenery. I drove around quite struck by it all, wandered over to Lake Champlain—also immensely beautiful—and idled down the western side of the state, just over the border from New York State.

Below Lake Champlain the landscape became more open, more rolling, as if the hills had been flattened out from the edges, like someone pulling a crease out of a bedspread. Some of the towns and villages were staggeringly pretty. Dorset, for instance, was an exquisite little place, standing around an oval green, full of beautiful white clapboard houses, with a summer playhouse and an old church and an enormous inn. And yet. 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. Every inn and lodge had a quaint and picturesque name—the Black Locust Inn, the Hob Knob, the Blueberry Inn, the Old Cutter Inn—and a hanging wooden sign out front. There was always this air of quaint artifice pushing in on everything. After a while I began to find it oddly oppressive. 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. A bowling alley or drive-in movie theater would have been most welcome. It would have made it all seem real. But this looked as if it had been designed in Manhattan and brought in by truck.

One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. 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. Actually, I could think of a lot of worse things—cancer of the brain, watching every episode of a TV miniseries starring Joan Collins, having to eat at a Burger Chef more than twice in one year, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finding that you’ve just taken a drink from your grandmother’s denture cup, and so on. But I think you get my point.

17

I
spent the night in Cobleskill, New York, on the northern fringes of the Catskills, and in the morning drove to Cooperstown, a small resort on Lake Otsego. Cooperstown was the home of James Fenimore Cooper, from whose family the town takes its name. It was a handsome town, as handsome as any I had seen in New England, and more replete with autumn color, with a main street of square-topped brick buildings, old banks, a movie theater, family stores. The Cooperstown Diner, where I went for breakfast, was busy, friendly and cheap—all that a diner should be. Afterwards I went for a stroll around the residential streets, shuffling hands-in-pockets through the dry leaves, and down to the lakeside. Every house in town was old and pretty; many of the larger ones had been converted into inns and expensive B&Bs. The morning sunlight filtered through the trees and threw dappled shadows across the lawns and sidewalks. This was as nice a little town as I had seen on the trip; it was almost Amalgam.