The Lost Continent (7 page)

But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone’s time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.

After New Salem, I took Interstate 55 south, and drove for an hour and a half towards St. Louis. It was boring, too. On a road as straight and as wide as an American interstate, fifty-five miles an hour is just too slow. It feels like walking speed. Cars and trucks coming towards you in the opposite direction seem to be traveling on one of those pedestrian conveyer belts you find in airports. You can see the people inside, get a long, lingering glimpse into their lives, as they slide past. And there’s no sense of driving. You need to put a hand to the wheel occasionally just to confirm your course, but you can take time out to do the most intricate things—count your money, brush your hair, tidy up the car, use the rearview mirror to search and destroy blackheads, read maps and guidebooks, put on or discard articles of clothing. If your car possessed cruise control you could just about climb in the back and take a nap. It is certainly quite easy to forget that you are in charge of two tons of speeding metal, and it is only when you start to scatter emergency cones at roadwork sites or a truck honks at you as you drift into its path that you are jolted back to reality and you realize that henceforth you probably shouldn’t leave your seat to search for snack food.

The one thing that can be said is that it leaves you time to think, and to consider questions like why is it that the trees along highways never grow? Some of them must have been there for forty years by now, and yet they are still no more than six feet tall and with only fourteen leaves on them. Is it a particular low-maintenance strain, do you suppose? And here’s another one. Why can’t they make cereal boxes with pouring spouts? Is some guy at General Foods splitting his sides at the thought that every time people pour out a bowl of cornflakes they spill some of them on the floor? And why is it that when you clean a sink, no matter how long you let the water run or how much you wipe it with a cloth, there’s always a strand of hair and some bits of wet fluff left behind? And just what
do
the Spanish see in flamenco music?

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. The first thing I came across was a commercial for Folgers coffee. An announcer said in a confidential whisper, “We went to the world-famous Napa Valley Restaurant in California and—without telling the customers—served them Folgers instant coffee instead of the restaurant’s usual brand. Then we listened in on hidden microphones.” There followed an assortment of praise for the coffee along the lines of “Hey, this coffee is fantastic!” “I’ve never tasted such rich, full-bodied coffee before!” “This coffee is so good I can hardly stand it!” and that sort of thing. Then the announcer leaped out and told the diners that it was Folgers coffee, and they all shared a good laugh—and an important lesson about the benefits of drinking quality instant coffee. I twirled the dial. A voice said, “We’ll return to our discussion of maleness in sixty seconds.” I twirled the dial. A voice said, “This portion of the news is brought to you by the Airport Barber Shop, Biloxi.” There was then a commercial for said barbershop, followed by thirty seconds of news, all of it related to deaths by cars, fires and gunfire in Biloxi in the last twenty-four hours. There was no hint that there might be a wider, yet more violent world beyond the city limits. Then there was another commercial for the Airport Barber Shop, in case you were so monumentally cretinous that you had forgotten about it during the preceding thirty seconds of news. I switched the radio off.

At Litchfield, I left the interstate, vowing not to get on one again if I could possibly help it, and joined a state highway, Illinois 127, heading south towards Murphysboro and Carbondale. Almost immediately life became more interesting. There were farms and houses and little towns to look at. I was still going fifty-five miles an hour, but now I seemed to be fairly skimming along. The landscape flashed past, more absorbing than before, more hilly and varied, and the foliage was a darker blur of green. Signs came and went: T
EE
P
EE
M
INI
M
ART
, B-R
ITE
F
OOD
S
TORE
, B
ETTY
’
S
B
EAUTY
B
OX
, S
AV
-
A
-L
OT
F
OOD
C
ENTER
, P
INCKNEYVILLE
C
OON
C
LUB
, B
ALD
K
NOB
T
RAILER
C
OURT
, D
AIRY
D
ELITE
, A
LL
U C
AN
E
AT
. In between these shrines to dyslexia and free enterprise there were clearings on the hillsides where farmhouses stood. Almost every one had a satellite dish in the yard, pointed to the sky as if tapping into some life-giving celestial force. I suppose in a sense they were. Here in the hills, the light failed more quickly. I noticed with surprise that it was past six o’clock and I decided that I had better find a room. As if on cue, Carbondale hove into view.

It used to be that when you came to the outskirts of a town you would find a gas station and a Dairy Queen, maybe a motel or two if it was a busy road or the town had a college. Now every town, even a quite modest one, has a mile or more of fast-food places, motor inns, discount cities, shopping malls—all with thirty-foot-high revolving signs and parking lots the size of Shropshire. Carbondale appeared to have nothing else. I drove in on a road that became a two-mile strip of shopping centers and gas stations, K Marts, J. C. Penneys, Hardees and McDonald’s. And then, abruptly, I was in the country again. I turned around and drove back through town on a parallel street that offered precisely the same sort of things but in slightly different configurations and then I was in the country again. The town had no center. It had been eaten by shopping malls.

I got a room in the Heritage Motor Inn, then went out for a walk to try once more to find Carbondale. But there really was nothing there. I was perplexed and disillusioned. Before I had left on this trip I had lain awake at night in my bed in England and pictured myself stopping each evening at a motel in a little city, strolling into town along wide sidewalks, dining on the blue-plate special at Betty’s Family Restaurant on the town square, then plugging a scented toothpick in my mouth and going for a stroll around the town, very probably stopping off at Vern’s Midnite Tavern for a couple of draws and a game of eight-ball with the boys or taking in a movie at the Regal or looking in at the Val-Hi Bowling Alley to kibitz the Mid-Week Hairdressers’ League matches before rounding off the night with a couple of games of pinball and a grilled cheese sandwich. But here there was no square to stroll to, no Betty’s, no blue-plate specials, no Vern’s Midnite Tavern, no movie theater, no bowling alley. There was no town, just six-lane highways and shopping malls. There weren’t even any sidewalks. Going for a walk, as I discovered, was a ridiculous and impossible undertaking. I had to cross parking lots and gas station forecourts, and I kept coming up against little white-painted walls marking the boundaries between, say, Long John Silver’s Seafood Shoppe and Kentucky Fried Chicken. To get from one to the other, it was necessary to clamber over the wall, scramble up a grassy embankment and pick your way through a thicket of parked cars. That is if you were on foot. But clearly from the looks people gave me as I lumbered breathlessly over the embankment, no one had ever tried to go from one of these places to another under his own motive power. What you were supposed to do was get in your car, drive twelve feet down the street to another parking lot, park the car and get out. Glumly I clambered my way to a Pizza Hut and went inside, where a waitress seated me at a table with a view of the parking lot.

All around me people were eating pizzas the size of bus wheels. Directly opposite, inescapably in my line of vision, an overweight man of about thirty was lowering wedges into his mouth whole, like a sword swallower. The menu was dazzling in its variety. It went on for pages. There were so many types and sizes of pizza, so many possible permutations, that I felt quite at a loss. The waitress appeared. “Are you ready to order?”

“I’m sorry,” I replied, “I need a little more time.”

“Sure,” she said. “You take your time.” She went off to somewhere out of my line of vision, counted to four and came back. “Are you ready to order now?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I really need just a little more time.”

“OK,” she said and left. This time she may have counted as high as twenty, but when she returned I was still nowhere near understanding the many hundreds of options open to me as a Pizza Hut patron.

“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.”

With an uncertain smile she backed off and gave me lots and lots of time to make up my mind. In the end I had a medium-sized deep-dish pepperoni pizza with extra onions and mushrooms, and I can recommend it without hesitation.

Afterwards, to round off a perfect evening, I clambered over to a nearby K Mart and had a look around. K Marts are a chain of discount stores and they are really depressing places. You could take Mother Teresa to a K Mart and she would get depressed. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the K Marts themselves, it’s the customers. K Marts are always full of the sort of people who give their children names that rhyme: Lonnie, Donnie, Ronnie, Connie, Bonnie. The sort of people who would stay in to watch “The Munsters.” Every woman there has at least four children and they all look as if they have been fathered by a different man. The woman always weighs 250 pounds. She is always walloping a child and bawling, “If you don’t behave, Ronnie, I’m not gonna bring you back here no more!” As if Ronnie could care less about never going to a K Mart again. 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. My dad liked K Marts.

I went in and looked around. I picked up some disposable razors and a pocket notebook, and then, just to make an occasion of it, a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which were attractively priced at $1.29. I paid for these and went outside. It was 7:30 in the evening. The stars were rising above the parking lot. I was alone with a small bag of pathetic treats in the most boring town in America and frankly I felt sorry for myself. I clambered over a wall and dodged across the highway to a Kwik-Krap mini-supermarket, purchased a cold six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and returned with it to my room where I watched cable TV, drank beer, messily ate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (wiping my hands on the sheets) and drew meager comfort from the thought that in Carbondale, Illinois, that was about as good a time as you were ever likely to get.

5

I
n the morning I rejoined Highway 127 south. This was marked on my map as a scenic route and for once this proved to be so. It really was attractive countryside, better than anything I knew Illinois possessed, with rolling hills of wine-bottle green, prosperous-looking farms and deep woods of oak and beech. Surprisingly, considering I was heading south, the foliage here was more autumnal than elsewhere—the hillsides were a mixture of mustard, dull orange and pale green, quite fetching—and the clear, sunny air had an agreeable crispness to it. I could live here, in these hills, I thought.

It took me a while to figure out what was missing. It was billboards. When I was small, billboards thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high stood in fields along every roadside. In places like Iowa and Kansas they were about the only stimulation you got. 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. In the middle of the Rocky Mountains this was doubtless a good thing, but out here in the lonesome heartland billboards were practically a public service. Seeing one standing a mile off you would become interested to see what it said, and would watch with mild absorption as it advanced towards you and passed. As roadside excitements went, it was about on a par with the little windmills in Pella, but it was better than nothing.

The superior billboards would have a three-dimensional element to them—the head of a cow jutting out if it was for a dairy, or a cutout of a bowling ball scattering pins if it was for a bowling alley. Sometimes the billboard would be for some coming attraction. There might be a figure of a ghost and the words, V
ISIT
S
POOK
C
AVERNS
! O
KLAHOMA
’
S
G
REAT
F
AMILY
A
TTRACTION
! J
UST
69 M
ILES
! A couple of miles later there would be another sign saying, P
LENTY
OF
F
REE
P
ARKING
AT
S
POOK
C
AVERNS
. J
UST
67 M
ILES
! And so it would go with sign after sign promising the most thrilling and instructive afternoon any family could ever hope to have, at least in Oklahoma. These promises would be supported by illustrations showing eerily lit underground chambers, the size of cathedrals, in which the stalactites and stalagmites had magically fused into the shapes of witches’ houses, bubbling caldrons, flying bats and Casper the Friendly Ghost. It all looked extremely promising. So we children in the back would begin suggesting that we stop and have a look, taking it in turns to say, in a sincere and moving way, “Oh,
please,
Dad, oh, pleeeeease.”