Bill Bryson

by The Continent

  Over and over I searched the airwaves for something to listen to, but I could find nothing. It wasn't as if I was asking for all that much. All I wanted was a station that didn't play endless songs by bouncy prepubescent girls, didn't employ disc jockeys Who said "H-e-y-y-y-y" more than once every six seconds and didn't keep telling me how much Jesus loved me. But no such station existed. Even when I did find something halfway decent, the sound would begin to fade after ten or twelve miles, and the old Beatles song that I was listening to with quiet pleasure would gradually be replaced by a semidemented man talking about the word of God and telling me that I had a friend in the Lord.

  Many American radio stations, particularly out in the hinterland, are ridiculously small and cheap. I know this for a fact because when I was a teenager I used to help out at KCBC in Des Moines.

  KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball games' but it was too cheap to send its sportscaster, a nice young guy named Steve Shannon' on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio-really just a tin but standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer's field somewhere southeast of Des Moinesand he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha. It was bizarre. Every couple of innings someone at the ballpark would call me on the phone and give me a bare summary of the game, which I would scribble into a scorebook and pass to Shannon, and on the basis of this he would give a two-hour broadcast.

  It was a remarkable experience to sit there in a windowless but on a steaming August night listening to the crickets outside and watching a man talking into a microphone and saying things like, "Well, it's a cool evening here in Omaha, with a light breeze blowing in off the Missouri River. There's a special guest in the crowd tonight' Governor Warren T. Legless, who I can see sitting with his pretty young wife, Bobbi Rae, in a box seat just below us here in the press box." Shannon was a genius at this sort of thing. I remember one time the phone call from the ballpark didn't come through-the guy at the other end had gotten locked in a toilet or something-and Shannon didn't have anything to tell the listeners. So he delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said that it was a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged somebody there to let him know what was going on. Funnily enough, I later read that the exact same thing happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sportscaster in Des Moines. 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 less how he ran the country as president.

  Late in the afternoon, I happened onto a news broadcast by some station in Crudbucket, Ohio, or some such place. American radio news broadcasts usually last about thirty seconds. It went like this:

  "A young Crudbucket couple, Dwayne and Wanda Dreary and their seven children, Ronnie, Lonnie, Connie, Donnie, Johnny and Tammy-Wynette, were killed when a light airplane crashed into their house and burst into flames. Fire Chief Walter Water said he could not at this stage rule out arson.

  On Wall Street, shares had their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points. And the weather outlook for greater Crudville: clear skies with a 2 percent chance of precipitation. You're listening to radio station L-R-U-D where you get more rock and less talk." There then followed "Hotel California" by the Eagles.

  I stared at the radio, wondering whether I had heard that second item right. The biggest one-day fall in shares in history? The collapse of the American economy? I twirled the dial and found another news broadcast: "...but Senator Pootang denied that the use of the four Cadillacs and the trips to Hawaii were in any way connected with the $120 million contract to build the new airport. On Wall Street, shares suffered their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points in just under three hours. And the weather outlook here in Crudbucket is for cloudy skies and a 98 percent chance of precipitation. We'll have more music from the Eagles after this word."

  The American economy was coming apart in shreds and all I could get were songs by the Eagles. I twirled the twirled the dial, thinking that surely somebody somewhere must be giving the dawn of a new Great Depression more than a passing mention --and someone was, thank goodness. It was CBC, the Canadian network, with an excellent and thoughtful program called "As It Happens,"

  which was entirely devoted that evening to the crash of Wall Street. I will leave you, reader, to consider the irony in an American citizen, traveling across his own country, having to tune in to a foreign radio network to find out the details of one of the biggest domestic news stories of the year.

  To be scrupulously fair, I was later told that the public-radio network in America-possibly the most grossly underfunded broadcast organization in the developed world-also devoted a long report to the crash. I expect it was given by a man sitting in a tin but in a field somewhere, reading scribbled notes off a sheet of paper.

  At Toledo, I joined Interstate 75, and drove north into Michigan, heading for Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, where I intended spending the night. Almost immediately I found myself in a wilderness of warehouses and railroad tracks and enormous parking lots leading to distant car factories. The parking lots were so vast and full of cars that I half wondered if the factories were there just to produce sufficient cars to keep the parking lots full, thus eliminating any need for consumers.

  Interlacing all this were towering electricity pylons. If you have ever wondered what becomes of all those pylons you see marching off to the horizon in every country in the world, like an army of invading aliens, the answer is that they all join up in a field just north of Toledo, where they discharge their loads into a vast estate of electrical transformers, diodes and other contraptions that looks for all the world like the inside of a television set, only on a rather grander scale, of course.

  The ground fairly thrummed as I drove past and I fancied I felt a crackle of blue static sweep through the car, briefly enlivening the hair on the back of my neck and leaving a strangely satisfying sensation in my armpits. I was half inclined to turn around at the next intersection and go back for another dose. But it was late and I pressed on. For some minutes I thought I smelled smoldering flesh and kept touching my head tentatively. But this may only have been a consequence of having spent too many lonely hours in a car.

  At Monroe, a town halfway between Toledo and Detroit, a big sign beside the highway said, WELCOME TO MONROE-HOME OF GENERAL CUSTER. A mile or so later there was another sign, even

  larger, saying, MONROE, MICHIGAN-HOME OF LA-Z-BOY FURNITURE. Goodness, I thought, will the excitement never stop? But it did, and the rest of the journey was completed without drama.

  CHAPTER 18

  I SPENT THE NIGHT in Dearborn for two reasons. First, it would mean not having to spend the night in Detroit, the city with the highest murder rate in the country. In 1987, there were 635

  homicides in Detroit, a rate of 58.2 per ioo,ooo people, or eight times the national average. Just among children, there were 365 shootings in which both the victim and gunman were under sixteen (of whom 40 died). We are talking about a tough city-and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn't bear thinking about.

  People will have to start carrying bazookas for protection.

  My second and more compelling reason for going to Dearborn was to see the Henry Ford Museum, a place my father had taken us when I was small and which I remembered fondly. After breakfast in the morning, I went straight there. Henry Ford spent his later years buying up important Americana by the truckload and crating it to his museum, beside the big Ford Motor Company Rouge Assembly Plant. The parking lot outside the museum was enormous-on a scale to rival the factory parking lots I had passed the day before-but at this time of year there were few cars in it. Most of them were Japanese.

  I went inside and discovered without surprise that
the entrance charge was steep: $15 for adults and $7.50 for children. Americans are clearly prepared to fork out large sums for their pleasures.

  Grudgingly I paid the admission charge and went in. But almost from the moment I passed through the portals I was enthralled. For one thing, the scale of it is almost breathtaking. You find yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff-machinery, railway trains, refrigerators, Abraham Lincoln's rocking chair, the limousine in which John F. Kennedy was killed (nope, no bits of brains on the floor), George Washington's campaign chest, General Tom Thumb's ornate miniature billiard table, a bottle containing Thomas Edison's last breath. I found this last item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison's last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the deathbed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, "Is that it?"

  This was the way the Smithsonian once was and still should be-a cross between an attic and a junk shop. It was as if some scavenging genius had sifted through all the nation's collective memories and brought to this one place everything from American life that was splendid and fine and deserving fondness. It was possible here to find every single item from my youth-old comic books, lunchpails, bubblegum cards, Dick and Jane reading books, a Hotpoint stove just like the one my mom used to have, a soda pop dispenser like the one that used to stand in front of the pool hall in Winfield.

  There was even a collection of milk bottles exactly like those that Mr. Morrisey, the deaf milkman, used to bring to our house every morning. Mr. Morrisey was the noisiest milkman in America. He was about sixty years old and wore a large hearing aid. He always traveled with his faithful dog, Skipper. They would arrive like clockwork just before dawn. Milk had to be delivered early, you see, because in the Midwest it spoiled quickly once the sun came up. You always knew when it was 5:3o because Mr. Morrisey would arrive, whistling for all he was worth, waking all the dogs for blocks around, which would get Skipper very excited and set him to barking. Being deaf, Mr.

  Morrisey tended not to notice his own voice and you could hear him clinking around on your back porch with his rack of milk bottles and saying to Skipper, "WELL, I WONDER WHAT THE

  BRYSONS WANT TODAY! LET'S SEE ... FOUR QUARTS OF SKIMMED AND SOME

  COTTAGE CHEESE. WELL, SKIPPER, WOULD YOU FUCKING BELIEVE IT, I LEFT THE

  COTTAGE CHEESE ON THE GODDAMN TRUCK!" And then you would look out the window to see Skipper urinating on your bicycle and lights coming on in houses all over the neighborhood.

  Nobody wanted to get Mr. Morrisey fired, on account of his unfortunate disability, but when Flynn Dairies discontinued home deliveries in about 1960 on economic grounds ours was one of the few neighborhoods in the city from which there was no outcry.

  I walked through the museum in a state of sudden, deep admiration for Henry Ford and his acquisitive instincts. He may have been a bully and an anti-Semite, but he sure could build a nifty museum. I could happily have spent hours picking around among the memorabilia. But the hangar is only a fractional part of it. Outside there is a whole village-a little town-containing eighty homes of famous Americans. These are the actual homes, not replicas. Ford crisscrossed the country acquiring the residences and workshops of the people he most admired-Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Luther Burbank, the Wright brothers and of course himself. All these he crated up and shipped back to Dearborn where he used them to build this 250-acre fantasyland-the quintessential American small town, a picturesque and timeless community where every structure houses a man of genius (almost invariably a white, Christian man of genius from the Middle West). Here in this perfect place, with its broad greens and pleasing shops and churches, the lucky resident could call on Orville and Wilbur Wright for a bicycle inner tube, go to the Firestone farm for milk and eggs (but not for rubber yet-Harvey's still working on it!), borrow a book from Noah Webster and call on Abraham Lincoln for legal advice, always assuming he's not too busy with patent applications for Charles Steinmetz or emancipating George Washington Carver, who lives in a tiny cabin just across the street.

  It is really quite entrancing. For a start, places like Edison's workshop and the boardinghouse where his employees lodged have been scrupulously preserved. You can really see how these people worked and lived. And there is a certain undeniable convenience in having the houses all brought together. Who in a million years would go to Columbiana, Ohio, to see the Harvey Firestone birthplace, or to Dayton to see where the Wright brothers lived? Not me, brother. Above all, bringing these places together makes you realize just how incredibly inventive America has been in its time, what a genius it has had for practical commercial innovation, often leading to unspeakable wealth, and how many of the comforts and pleasures of modern life have their roots in the small towns of the American Middle West. It made me feel proud.

  I drove north and west across Michigan, lost in a warm afterglow of pleasure from the museum. I was past Lansing and Grand Rapids and entering the Manistee National Forest, -loo miles away, almost before I knew it. Michigan is shaped like an oven mitt and is often about as exciting. The Manistee forest was dense and dull-endless groves of uniform pine trees-and the highway through it was straight and flat. Occasionally I would see a cabin or little lake in the woods, both just glimpsable through the trees, but mostly there was nothing of note. Towns were rare and mostly squalid-scattered dwellings and ugly prefab buildings where they made and sold ugly prefab cabins, so that people could buy their own little bit of ugliness and take it out into the woods.

  After Baldwin, the road became wider and emptier and the commercialism grew sparser. At Manistee, the highway ran down to Lake Michigan, and then followed the shoreline off and on for miles, going through rather more pleasant little communities of mostly boarded-up summer homes-Pierport, Arcadia, Elberta ("A Peach of A Place"), Frankfort. At Empire I stopped to look at the lake. The weather was surprisingly cold. A blustery wind blew in from Wisconsin, seventy miles away across the steely gray water, raising whitecaps and wavelets. I tried to go for a stroll, but I was out for only about five minutes before the wind blew me back to the car.

  I went on to Traverse City, where the weather was milder, perhaps because it was more sheltered.

  Traverse City looked to be a wonderful old town that seemed not to have changed since about 1948.

  It still had a Woolworth's, a J. C. Penney, an oldfashioned movie theater called the State and a timeless cafe, the Sydney, with black booths and a long soda fountain. You just don't see places like that anymore. I had coffee and felt very pleased to be there. Afterwards I drove north on a road running up one side of Grand Traverse Bay and down the other, so that you could always see where you were going or where you had been, sometimes veering inland past farms and cherry orchards for a couple of miles and then sweeping back down to the water's edge. As the afternoon progressed, the wind settled and the sun came out, tentatively at first, like a shy guest, and then stayed on, giving the lake bright patches of silver and blue. Far out over the water, perhaps twenty miles away, dark clouds dumped rain on the lake. It fell in a pale gray curtain. And high above a faint rainbow reached across the sky. It was inexpressibly beautiful. I drove transfixed.

  In the early evening I reached Mackinaw City, on the tip of the oven mitt, the point where the shorelines of southern and northern Michigan pinch together to form the Straits of Mackinac, which separate Lake Michigan from Lake Huron. A suspension bridge, five miles long, spans the gap.

  Mackinaw City-they are fairly casual about how they spell the word up this way-was a scattered and unsightly little town, full of gift shops, motels, ice cream parlors, pizzerias, parking lots and firms operating ferries to Mackinac Island. Almost every place of business, including the motels, was boarded up for the winter. The Holiday Motel, on the shore of Lake Huron, seemed to be open so I went inside and rang the desk bell. The young guy who came out l
ooked surprised to have a customer. "We were just about to close up for the season," he said. "In fact, everybody's gone out to dinner to celebrate. But we've got rooms if you want one."

  "How much?" I asked.

  He seemed to snatch a figure from the air. "Twenty dollars?" he said.

  "Sounds good to me," I said and signed in. The room was small but nice and it had heating, which was a good thing. I went out and had a walk around, to look for something to eat. It was only a little after seven, but it was dark already and the chill air felt more like December than October. I could see my breath. It was odd to be in a place so full of buildings and yet so dead. Even the McDonald's was closed, with a sign in the window telling me to have a good winter.

  I walked down to the Shepler's Ferry terminal-really just a big parking lot with a shed-to see what time the ferry to Mackinac Island would depart in the morning. That was my reason for being here.

  There was one at eleven. I stood beside the pier, facing into the wind, and gazed for a long time out across Lake Huron. Mackinac Island was berthed a couple of miles out in the lake like a glittering cruise ship. Nearby, even larger but with no lights, was Bois Blanc Island, dark and round. Off to the left, Mackinac Bridge, lit up like a Christmas decoration, spanned the strait. Everywhere the lights shimmered on the water. It was odd that such a nothing little town could have such a wonderful view.

  I ate dinner in a practically empty restaurant and then had some beers in a practically empty bar.

  Both places had turned on the heating. It felt good, cozy. Outside the wind beat against the plate-glass windows, making a woppa-woppa sound. I liked the quiet bar. Most bars in America are dark and full of moody characters-people drinking alone and staring straight ahead. There's none of that agreeable coffeehouse atmosphere that you find in bars in Europe. American bars are, by and large, just dark places to get drunk in. I don't like them much, but this one was OK. It was snug and quiet and well lit, so I could sit and read. Before too long I was fairly well lit myself. This was also OK.