The Lost Continent (24 page)

The only shortcoming with Cooperstown is that it is full of tourists, drawn to the town by its most famous institution, the Baseball Hall of Fame, which stands by a shady park at the far end of Main Street. I went there now, paid $8.50 admission and walked into its cathedral-like calm. For those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics, the Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get. I walked serenely through its quiet and softly lit halls, looking at the sacred vestments and venerated relics from America’s national pastime. Here, beautifully preserved in a glass case, was “the shirt worn by Warren Spahn when registering win No. 305, which tied him with Eddie Plank for most by a left-hander.” Across the aisle was “the glove used by Sal Maglie in September 25, 1958, no-hitter vs. Phillies.” At each case people gazed reverently or spoke in whispers.

One room contained a gallery of paintings commemorating great moments in baseball history, including one depicting the first professional night game under artificial lighting, played in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 2, 1930. This was exciting news to me. I had no idea that Des Moines had played a pivotal role in the history of both baseball and luminescence. I looked closely to see if the artist had depicted my father in the press box, but then I realized that my father was only fifteen years old in 1930 and still in Winfield. This seemed kind of a pity.

In an upstairs room I suppressed a whoop of joy at the discovery of whole cases full of the baseball cards that my brother and I had so scrupulously collected and cataloged, and which my parents, in an early flirtation with senility, had taken to the dump during an attic spring cleaning in 1981. 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. But never mind! We all make mistakes. 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. Anyway it was a pleasure to see all the old cards again. It was like visiting an old friend in the hospital.

The Hall of Fame is surprisingly large, much larger than it looks from the road, and extremely well presented. I wandered through it in a state of complete contentment, reading every label, lingering at every display, reliving my youth, cocooned in a happy nostalgia, and when I stepped back out onto Main Street and glanced at my watch I was astonished to discover that three hours had elapsed.

Next door to the Hall of Fame was a shop selling the most wonderful baseball souvenirs. In my day all we could get were pennants and baseball cards and crummy little pens in the shape of baseball bats that stopped working about the second time you tried to sign your name with them. But now little boys could get everything with their team’s logo on it—lamps, towels, clocks, throw rugs, mugs, bedspreads and even Christmas tree ornaments, plus of course pennants, baseball cards and pens that stop working about the second time you use them. I don’t think I have ever felt such a pang of longing to be a child again. Apart from anything else, it would mean I’d get my baseball cards back and I could put them somewhere safe where my parents couldn’t get at them; then when I got to my age I could buy a Porsche.

I was so taken with all the souvenirs that I began to fill my arms with stuff, but then I noticed that the store was full of D
O
N
OT
T
OUCH
signs and on the counter by the cash register had been taped a notice that said, D
O
N
OT
L
EAN
ON
G
LASS
—I
F
Y
OU
B
REAK
, C
OST
TO
Y
OU
IS
$50. What a jerky thing to say on a sign. How could you expect kids to come into a place full of wonderful things like this and not touch them? This so elevated my hackles that I deposited my intended purchases on the counter and told the girl I didn’t want them after all. This was perhaps just as well because I’m not altogether sure that my wife would have wanted St. Louis Cardinals pillowcases.

My ticket to the Hall of Fame included admission to a place on the edge of town called the Farmers Museum, where a couple of dozen old buildings—a schoolhouse, a tavern, a church and the like—have been preserved on a big site. It was about as exciting as it sounds, but having bought the ticket I felt obliged to go and have a look at it. If nothing else, the walk through the afternoon sunshine was pleasant. But I was relieved to get back in the car and hit the road again. It was after four by the time I left town. I drove on across New York State for several hours, through the Susquehanna Valley, which was very beautiful, especially at this time of day and year in the soft light of an autumn afternoon: watermelon-shaped hills, golden trees, slumbering towns. To make up for my long day in Cooperstown, I drove later than usual, and it was after nine by the time I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Elmira.

I went straight out for dinner, but almost every place I approached was closed, and I ended up eating in a restaurant attached to a bowling alley—in clear violation of Bryson’s second rule of dining in a strange town. Generally, I don’t believe in doing things on principle—it’s kind of a principle of mine—but I do have six rules of public dining to which I try to adhere. They are:

1. Never eat in a restaurant that displays photographs of the food it serves. (But if you do, never believe the photographs.)

2. Never eat in a restaurant attached to a bowling alley.

3. Never eat in a restaurant with flocked wallpaper.

4. Never eat in a restaurant where you can hear what they are saying in the kitchen.

5. Never eat in a restaurant that has live entertainers with any of the following words in their titles: Hank, Rhythm, Swinger, Trio, Combo, Hawaiian, Polka.

6. Never eat in a restaurant that has bloodstains on the walls.

In any event, the bowling alley restaurant proved quite acceptable. Through the wall I could hear the muffled rumblings of falling bowling pins and the sounds of Elmira’s hairdressers and grease monkeys having a happy night out. I was the only customer in the restaurant. In fact, I was quite clearly the only thing standing between the waitresses and their going home. As I waited for my food, they cleared away the other tables, removing the ashtrays, sugar bowls and tablecloths, so that after a while I found myself dining alone in a large room, with a white tablecloth and flickering candle in a little red bowl, amid a sea of barren Formica tabletops.

The waitresses stood against the wall and watched me chew my food. After a while they started whispering and tittering, still watching me as they did so, which frankly I found a trifle unsettling. I may only have imagined it, but I also had the distinct impression that someone was little by little turning a dimmer switch so that the light in the room was gradually disappearing. By the end of my meal I was finding my food more or less by touch and occasionally by lowering my head to the plate and sniffing. Before I was quite finished, when I just paused for a moment to grope for my glass of iced water somewhere in the gloom beyond the flickering candle, my waitress whipped the plate away and put down my bill.

“You want anything else?” she said in a tone that suggested I had better not. “No thank you,” I answered politely. I wiped my mouth with the tablecloth, having lost my napkin in the gloom, and added a seventh rule to my list: never go into a restaurant ten minutes before closing time. Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

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.

I sighed and arose. I shuffled around the room in my old-man posture, gathered up my things, washed, dressed and without enthusiasm hit the highway. I drove west through the Alleghenies and then into a small, odd corner of Pennsylvania. 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. That it did was far more of an achievement than is often appreciated nowadays.

Just inside the Pennsylvania state line, the highway merged with Interstate 90. This is the main northern route across America, stretching 3,016 miles from Boston to Seattle, and there were lots of long-distance travelers on it. You can always tell long-distance travelers because they look as if they haven’t been out of the car for weeks. You only glimpse them when they pass, but you can see that they have already started to set up home inside—there are pieces of washing hanging in the back, remnants of takeout meals on the windowsill and books, magazines and pillows scattered around. There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back. You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past. You glance at each other’s license plates and feel envy or sympathy in proportion to your comparative distances from home. One car I saw had Alaska plates on it. This was unbelievable. I had never seen Alaska license plates before. The man must have driven over 4,500 miles, the equivalent of going from London to Zambia. He was the most forlorn-looking character I had ever seen. There was no sign of a wife and children. I expect by now he had killed them and put their bodies in the trunk.

A drizzly rain hung in the air. I drove along in that state of semimindlessness that settles over you on interstate highways. After a while Lake Erie appeared on the right. Like all the Great Lakes, it is enormous, more an inland sea than a lake, stretching 200 miles from west to east and about 40 miles across. 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. Thanks to lax factory laws and the triumph of greed over nature in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Sandusky and other bustling centers of soot and grit, Lake Erie was transformed in just three generations from a bowl of blue water into a large toilet. Cleveland was the worst offender. Cleveland was so vile that its river, a slow-moving sludge of chemicals and half-digested solids called the Cuyahoga, once actually caught fire and burned out of control for four days. This also was a remarkable achievement, I feel. Things are said to be better now. According to a story in the
Cleveland Free Press,
which I read during a stop for coffee near Ashtabula, an official panel with the ponderous title of the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board had just released a survey of chemical substances in the lake, and it had found only 362 types of chemicals in the lake compared with more than a thousand the last time they had counted. That still seemed an awful lot to me and I was surprised to see a pair of fishermen standing on the shore, hunched down in the drizzle, hurling lines out onto the greenish murk with long poles. Maybe they were fishing for chemicals.

Through dull rain I drove through the outer suburbs of Cleveland, past signs for places that were all called Something Heights: Richmond Heights, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Warrensville Heights, Parma Heights. Curiously, the one outstanding characteristic of the surrounding landscape was its singular lack of eminences. Clearly what Cleveland was prepared to consider the heights was what others would regard as distinctly middling. Somehow this did not altogether surprise me. After a time Interstate 90 became the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, and followed the sweep of the bay. The windshield wipers of the Chevette flicked hypnotically and other cars threw up spray as they swished past. Outside my window the lake sprawled dark and vast until it was consumed by a distant mist. Ahead of me the tall buildings of downtown Cleveland appeared and slid towards me, like shopping on a supermarket conveyor belt.

Cleveland has always had a reputation for being a dirty, ugly, boring city, though now they say it is much better. By “they” I mean reporters from serious publications like the
Wall Street Journal, Fortune
and the
New York Times
Sunday magazine, who visit the city at five-year intervals and produce long stories with titles like “Cleveland Bounces Back” and “Renaissance in Cleveland.” No one ever reads these articles, least of all me, so I couldn’t say whether the improbable and highly relative assertion that Cleveland is better now than it used to be is wrong or right. What I can say is that the view up the Cuyahoga as I crossed it on the freeway was of a stew of smoking factories that didn’t look any too clean or handsome. And I can’t say that the rest of the town looked such a knockout either. It may be improved, but all this talk of a renaissance is clearly exaggerated. I somehow doubt that if the Duc d’Urbino were brought back to life and deposited in downtown Cleveland he would say, “Goodness, I am put in mind of fifteenth-century Florence and the many treasures therein.”