Bill Bryson

by The Continent

  In the morning I awoke early and gave the steamy window a wipe with my hand to see what kind of day it was. The answer was: not a good one. The world was full of sleety snow, dancing about in the wind like a plague of white insects. I switched on the TV and crept back into the warm bed. The local PBS station came on. PBS is the Public Broadcasting System, what we used to call educational TV. It is supposed to show quality stuff, though because it is always strapped for funds this consists mostly of BBC melodramas starring Susan Hampshire and domestically produced programs that cost about twelve dollars to make_ cookery programs, religious discussions, local high-school wrestling matches. It's pretty well unwatchable most of the time, and it's getting worse. In fact, the station I was watching was holding a telethon to raise funds for itself. Two middle-aged men in casual clothes were sitting in swivel chairs, with a pair of phones on a table between them, asking for money. They were trying to look perky and cheerful, but there was a kind of desperation in their eyes.

  "Wouldn't it be tragic for your children if they didn't have 'Sesame Street' anymore?" one of them was saying to the camera. "So come on, moms and dads, give us a call and make a pledge now." But nobody was calling. So the two talked to each other about all the wonderful programs on PBS. They had clearly been having this conversation for some time. After a while one of them had a phone call.

  "I've had my first caller," he said as he put the phone down. "It was from Melanie Bitowski of Traverse City and it's her fourth birthday today. So happy birthday, honey. But next time you or any of you other kids call in, why don't you get your mom or dad to pledge some money, sweetheart?"

  These guys were clearly begging for their jobs, and the whole of northern Michigan was turning a blind eye to their pleadings.

  I showered and dressed and packed up my bag, all the while keeping an eye on the TV to see if anyone made a pledge, and no one ever did. When I switched off, one of them was saying, with just a hint of peevishness, "Now come on, I can't believe that nobody out there is watching us.

  Somebody must be awake out there. Somebody must want to preserve quality public television for themselves and their children." But he was wrong.

  I had a large breakfast in the same place I had eaten the night before and then, because there was absolutely nothing else to do, I went and stood on the quayside, waiting for the ferry. The wind had died. The last sleet melted as it hit the ground and then stopped falling altogether. Everywhere there was the tip-tip-tip sound of dripping, off the roofs, off branches, off me. It was only ten o'clock and nothing was happening at the quayside-the Chevette, dressed with sleety snow, stood alone and forlorn in the big parking lot-so I went and walked around, down to the site of the original Fort Mackinac and then along residential streets full of treeless lawns and one-story ranch houses. When I returned to the ferry site, about forty minutes later, the Chevette had gained some company and there was a fair crowd of people-twenty or thirty at least-already boarding the boat.

  We all sat on rows of seats in one small room. The hydrofoil started up with a noise like a vacuum cleaner, then turned and slid out onto the green bleakness of Lake Huron. The lake was choppy, like a pan of water simmering on a low heat, but the ride was smooth. The people around me were strangely excited. They kept standing up to take pictures and point things out to each other. It occurred to me that many of them had never been on a ferry before, perhaps had never even seen an island, not one big enough to be inhabited anyway. No wonder they were excited. I was excited too, though for a different reason.

  I had been to Mackinac Island before. My dad took us there when I was about four and I remembered it fondly. In fact, it was probably my oldest clear memory. I remembered that it had a big white hotel with a long porch and banks of flowers, positively dazzling in the July sunshine, and I could remember a big fort on a hill, and that the island had no cars, but just horse-drawn carriages, and that there was horse manure everywhere, and that I stepped in some, warm and squishy, and that my mother cleaned my shoe with a twig and a Kleenex, gagging delicately, and that as soon as she put the shoe back on my foot, I stepped backwards into some more with my other shoe, and that she didn't get cross. My mother never got cross. She didn't exactly do cartwheels, you understand, but she didn't shout or snap or look as if she were suppressing apoplexy, as I do with my children when they step in something warm and squishy, as they always do. She just looked kind of tired for a moment, and then she grinned at me and said it was a good thing she loved me, which was very true. She's a saint, my mother, especially where horse shit is concerned.

  Mackinac Island is small-only about five miles long, a couple of miles wide-but like most islands it seems bigger when you are on it. Since 1901 no cars or motorized vehicles of any type have been allowed on the island, so when you step off the boat onto Main Street you find a lineup of horse-drawn carriages waiting at the curb-a fancy one to take customers to the Grand Hotel, open phaetons to take people on expensive tours of the island, and a kind of sledge to deal with luggage and freight. Mackinac village was just as perfect as I remembered it, a string of white Victorian buildings along a sloping Main Street, snug cottages climbing up the steep hill to old Fort Mackinac, built in 1780 to defend the strait, still standing guard over the town.

  I wandered off through the town, picking my way around little piles of horse manure. Without cars, the silence was almost complete. The whole island appeared to be on the brink of a six-month coma.

  Almost all the stores and restaurants along Main Street were shut for the season. I expect it's awful there in the summer with all the thousands of day-trippers. A brochure that I picked up by the harbor listed sixty gift shops alone and more than thirty restaurants, ice cream parlors, pizzerias and cookie stalls. But now at this time of year it all looked quaint and restful and incredibly pretty.

  For a while, Mackinac Island was the biggest trading post in the New World-John Jacob Astor's fur trading company was based here-but its real glory dates from the late nineteenth century when wealthy people from Chicago and Detroit came to escape the city heat and enjoy the pollen-free air.

  The Grand Hotel, the biggest and oldest resort hotel in America, was built and the country's wealthiest industrialists constructed ornate summer houses on the bluffs overlooking Mackinac village and Lake Huron. I walked up there now. The views across the lake were fantastic, but the houses were simply breathtaking. They are some of the grandest, most elaborate houses ever built of wood, twenty-bedroomed places with every embellishment known to the Victorian mind-cupolas, towers, domes, dormers, gables, turrets, and front porches you could ride a bike around.

  Some of the cupolas had cupolas. They are just incredibly splendid and there are scores of them, standing side by side on the bluffs flanking Fort Mackinac. What it must be to be a child and play hide-and-seek in those houses, to have a bedroom in a tower and be able to lie in bed and gaze out on such a lake, and to go bicycling on carless roads to little beaches and hidden coves, and above all to explore the woodlands of beech and birch that cover the back three-quarters of the island.

  I wandered into them now, along one of the many paved paths that run through the dark woods, and felt like a seven-year-old on a grand adventure. Every turn in the path brought up some exotic surprise-Skull Cave, where, according to a sign beside it, an English fur trader hid from the Indians in 1763; Fort Holmes, an old British redoubt on the highest point on the island, 325 feet above Lake Huron; and two mossy old cemeteries out in the middle of nowhere, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both seemed impossibly big for such a small island, and they consisted mostly of the same few names going back generations-the Truscotts, Gables, Sawyers. I happily wandered for three hours without seeing a soul or hearing a sound made by man, and only barely sampled the island. I could easily have stayed for days. I returned to the village by way of the Grand Hotel, quite the most splendid and obnoxiously hoity-toity such institution I have ever come across. A rambling white wooden building with the biggest porch in th
e world (660 feet), it is indubitably swish and expensive. A single room at the time I was there cost $135 a night. A sign in the street leading down to the hotel said, GRAND HOTELPROPER DRESS REQUIRED AT THE HOTEL AND HOTEL-OWNED STREET. GENTLEMEN AFTER 6 P.M. MUST BE ATTIRED IN A COAT AND TIE.

  LADIES MAY NOT BE ATTIRED IN SLACKS. This is possibly the only place in the world where you are told how to dress just to walk down the street. Another sign said a charge would be levied on anyone coming into the hotel just to gawp. Honestly. I suppose they have a lot of trouble with day-trippers. I walked stealthily down the road towards the hotel half expecting to see a sign saying,

  "ANYONE PASSING BEYOND THIS POINT WEARING PLAID PANTS OR WHITE SHOES

  WILL BE ARRESTED." But there wasn't anything. I had it in my mind to put my head in the front door, just to see what lifeis like for really rich people, but there was a liveried doorman standing guard, so I had to beat a retreat.

  I caught the afternoon ferry back to the mainland, and drove over the Mackinac Bridge to the chunk of land Michigan people call the Upper Peninsula. Before the bridge was built in '1957, this bit of Michigan was pretty well cut off from its own state, and even now it has an overwhelming sense of remoteness. It is mostly just a bleak and sandy peninsula, '150 miles long, squeezed between three of the Great Lakes, Superior, Huron and Michigan. Once again, I was almost in Canada. Sault Ste.

  Marie was just to the north. Its great locks connect Lake Huron and Lake Superior and are the busiest in the world, carrying a greater volume of tonnage than the Suez and Panama canals combined, believe it or not.

  I was on Route 2, which follows the northern shoreline of Lake Michigan for most of its length. It is impossible to exaggerate the immensity of the Great Lakes. There are five of them, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior and Ontario, and they stretch 700 miles from top to bottom, g00 miles from east to west. They cover 94,500 square miles, making them almost precisely the size of the United Kingdom. Together they form the largest expanse of fresh water on earth.

  More squally storms were at work far out on the lake, though where I was it was dry. About twenty miles offshore were a group of islands-Beaver Island, High Island, Whiskey Island, Hog Island and several others. High Island was once owned by a religious sect called the House of David, whose members all had beards and specialized, if you can believe it, in playing baseball. In the 1920s and

  '30s they toured the country taking on local teams wherever they went and I guess they were just about unbeatable. High Island was reputedly a kind of penal colony for members of the sect who committed serious infractionsgrounded into too many double plays or something. It was said that people were sent there and never heard from again. Now, like all the other islands in the group except Beaver, it is uninhabited. I felt a strange pang of regret that I couldn't go over and explore them. In fact, the whole of the Great Lakes was exerting a strange hold on me, which I couldn't begin to understand. There was something alluring about the idea of a great inland sea, about the thought that if you had a boat you could spend years just bouncing around from one Great Lake to another, chugging from Chicago to Buffalo, Milwaukee to Montreal, pausing en route to investigate islands, bays and towns with curious names like Deadman's Point, Egg Harbor, Summer Island. A lot of people do just that, I guess-buy a boat and disappear. I can see why.

  All over the peninsula I kept encountering roadside food stands with big signs on them saying PASTIES. Most of them were closed and boarded up, but at Menominee, the last town before I crossed into Wisconsin, I passed one that was open and impulsively I turned the car around and went back to it. I had to see if they were real Cornish pasties or something else altogether but with the same name. The guy who ran the place was excited to have a real Englishman in his store. He had been making pasties for thirty years but he had never seen a real Cornish pasty or a real Englishman, come to that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that actually I came from Iowa, the next state over. Nobody ever gets excited at meeting an Iowan. The pasties were the real thing, brought to this isolated corner of Michigan by nineteenthcentury Cornishmen who came to work in the local mines. "Everybody eats them up here in the Upper Peninsula," the man told me. "But nobody's ever heard of them anywhere else. You cross the state line into Wisconsin, just over the river, and people don't know what they are. It's kind of strange."

  The man handed me the pasty in the paper bag and I went with it out to the car. It did seem to be a genuine Cornish pasty except that it was about the size of a rugby ball. It came on a Styrofoam platter with a plastic fork and some sachets of ketchup. Eagerly I tucked into it. Apart from anything else I was starving.

  It was awful. There wasn't anything wrong with it exactly--it was a genuine pasty, accurate in every detail-it was just that after more than a month of eating American junk food it tasted indescribably bland and insipid, like warmed cardboard. "Where's the grease?" I thought. "Where's the melted cheese patty and pan-fried chicken gravy? Where, above all, is the chocolate fudge frosting?" This was just meat and potatoes, just natural unenhanced flavor. "No wonder it's never caught on over here," I grumbled and pushed it back into the bag.

  I started the car and drove on into Wisconsin, looking for a motel and a restaurant where I could get some real food-something that would squirt when I bit into it and run down my chin. That, of course, is the way food should be.

  CHAPTER 19

  "AT NORTHERN WISCONSIN General Hospital, we'll help you to achieve your birthing goals,"

  said a voice on the radio. Oh, God, I thought. This was yet another new develop ment since I had left America-the advent of hospital advertising. Everywhere you go you now encounter hospital ads.

  Who are they for? A guy gets hit by a bus, does he say, "Quick, take me to Michigan General.

  They've got a magnetic resonance imager there"? I don't understand it. But then I don't understand anything to do with American health care.

  Just before I left on this trip, I learned that my uncle was in Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. So I looked up the number in the phone book and under Mercy Hospital there were ninety-four telephone numbers listed. The phone numbers started with Admitting and proceeded alphabetically through Biofeedback, Cancer Hotline, Impotency Program, Infant Apnea Hotline, Osteoporosis Program, Public Relations, something called Share Care Ltd., Sleep Referral Services, Smoke Stoppers and on and on. Health care in America is now a monolithic industry and it is completely out of control.

  The person I was visiting, my elderly uncle, had just suffered a severe heart attack. As a complication arising from this, he also had pneumonia. As you might imagine, he looked a trifle under the weather. While I was with him, a social worker came in and gently explained to him some of the costs involved in his treatment. My uncle could, for instance, have Medicine A, which would cost five dollars a dose, but which he would have to take four times a day, or he could have Medicine B, which would cost eighteen dollars a dose, but which he would have to take only once a day. That was the social worker's job, to act as a liaison between the doctor, the patient and the insurance company, and to try to see to it that the patient wasn't hit with a lot of bills that the insurance company wouldn't pay. My uncle would, of course, be billed for this service. It seemed so crazy, so unreal, to be watching him sucking air from an oxygen mask, all but dead, and giving weak yes-or-no nods to questions concerning the continuance of his own life based on his ability to pay.

  Contrary to popular belief abroad, it is possible, indeed quite easy, to get free treatment in America by going to a county hospital. They aren't very cheery places, in fact they are generally pretty grim, but they are no worse than any National Health Service hospital. There has to be free treatment because there are 40 million people in America without hospital insurance. God help you, however, if you try to sneak into a county hospital for a little free health care if you've got money in the bank.

  I worked for a year at the county hospital in Des Moines and I can tell you that they have batteries of la
wyers and debt collectors whose sole job is to dig into the backgrounds of the people who use their facilities and make sure they really are as destitute as they claim to be.

  Despite the manifest insanities of private health care in America, there is no denying that the quality of treatment is the best in the world. My uncle received superb and unstinting care (and, not incidentally, they restored his health). He had a private room with a private bath, a remote control television and video recorder, his own telephone. The whole hospital was carpeted and full of exotic palms and cheerful paintings. In government hospitals in Britain, the only piece of carpet or color TV you find is in the nursing officers' lounge. I worked in an NHS hospital years ago and once late at night I sneaked into the nursing officers' lounge just to see what it was like. Well, it was like the queen's sitting room. It was all velvety furniture and half-eaten boxes of Milk Tray chocolates.

  The patients, in the meantime, slept beneath bare light bulbs in cold and echoing barrack halls, and spent their days working on jigsaw puzzles that had at least a fifth of the pieces missing, awaiting a fortnightly twenty-second visit by a swift-moving retinue of doctors and students. Those were, of course, the good old days of the NHS. Things aren't nearly so splendid now.

  Forgive me. I seem to have gone off on a little tangent there. I was supposed to be guiding you across Wisconsin, telling you interesting facts about America's premier dairy state, and instead I go off and make unconstructive remarks about British and American health care. This was unwarranted.

  Anyway, Wisconsin is America's premier dairy state, producing 17 percent of the nation's cheese and milk products, by golly, though as I drove across its rolling pleasantness I wasn't particularly struck by an abundance of dairy cows. I drove for long hours, south past Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh and then west towards Iowa. This was quintessential Midwestern farming country, a study in browns, a landscape of low wooded hills, bare trees, faded pastures, tumble-down corn. It all had a kind of muted beauty. The farms were large, scattered and prosperous looking. Every half-mile or so I would pass a snug-looking farmhouse, with a porch swing and a yard full of trees. Standing nearby would be a red barn with a rounded roof and a tall grain silo. Everywhere corncribs were packed to bursting. Migrating birds filled the pale sky. The corn in the fields looked dead and brittle, but often I passed large harvesters chewing up rows and spitting out bright yellow ears.