The Lost Continent (11 page)

Incidentally, I’ll tell you why they do so poorly. They answer the questions as fast as they can, at random, and then sleep. We used to do it all the time. Once a year in high school, our principal, Mr Toerag, would file the whole school into the auditorium and make us spend a tedious day answering multiple choice questions on a variety of subjects for some national examination. It didn’t take you long to deduce that if you filled in the circles without bothering to look at the questions, you could complete the work in a fraction of the time, and then shut your eyes and lose yourself in erotic eyelid movies until it was time for the next test. As long as your pencil was neatly stowed and you didn’t snore, Mr Toerag, whose job it was to wander up and down the rows looking for miscreants, would leave you alone. That was what Mr Toerag did for a living, wander around all day looking for people misbehaving. I always imagined him at home in the evening walking around the dining-room table and poking his wife with a ruler if she slouched. He must have been hell to live with. His name wasn’t really Mr Toerag, of course. It was Mr Superdickhead.

I DROVE THROUGH
bright early-morning sunshine. Here and there the road plunged into dense pine forests and led past collections of holiday cabins in the woods. Atlanta was only an hour’s drive to the north and the people here-abouts were clearly trying to cash in on that proximity. I passed through a little town called Pine Mountain, which seemed to have everything you could want in an inland resort. It was attractive and had nice shops. The only thing it lacked was a mountain, which was a bit of a disappointment considering its name. I had intentionally chosen this route because Pine Mountain conjured up to my simple mind a vision of clean air, craggy precipices, scented forests and tumbling streams – the sort of place where you might bump into John-Boy Walton. Still, who could blame the locals if they stretched the truth a little in the pursuit of a dollar? You could hardly expect people to drive miles out of their way to visit something called Pine Flat-Place.

The countryside became gradually more hilly, though obstinately uncraggy, before the road made a gentle descent into Warm Springs. For years I had been harbouring an urge to go there. I’m not sure why. I knew nothing about the place except that Franklin Roosevelt had died there. In the Register and Tribune Building in Des Moines the main corridor was lined with historic front pages
which I found strangely absorbing when I was small. One of them said ‘President Roosevelt Dies at Warm Springs’, and I thought even then that it sounded like such a nice place to pass away.

In the event, Warm Springs was a nice place. There was just a main street, with an old hotel on one side and a row of shops on the other, but they had been restored as expensive boutiques and gift shops for visitors from Atlanta. It was all patently artificial – there was even outdoor Muzak, if you can stand it – but I quite liked it.

I drove out to the Little White House, about two miles outside town. The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in some place like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bare-assed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn’t hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

I bought my ticket and quickly overtook the old people on the slope up to the Roosevelt compound. The path led through woods of tall pine trees that seemed to go up and up forever and sealed out the sunlight so effectively that the ground at their bases was bare, as if it had just been swept. The path was lined with large rocks from each state. Every governor had evidently been asked to contribute some hunk of native stone and here they were, lined up like a guard of honour. It’s not often you see an idea that stupid brought to fruition. Many had been cut in the shape of the state, then buffed to a glossy finish and engraved.
But others, clearly not catching the spirit of the enterprise, were just featureless hunks with a terse little plaque saying ‘Delaware. Granite.’ Iowa’s contribution was, as expected, carefully middling. The stone had been cut to the shape of the state, but by someone who had clearly never attempted such a thing before. I imagine he had impulsively put in the lowest bid and was surprised to get the contract. At least the state had found a rock to send. I had half feared it might be a clump of dirt.

Beyond this unusual diversion was a white bungalow, which had formerly been a neighbouring home and was now a museum. As always with these things in America, it was well done and interesting. Photographs of Roosevelt at Warm Springs covered the walls and lots of his personal effects were on display in glass cases – his wheelchairs, crutches, leg-braces and other such implements. Some of these were surprisingly elaborate and exerted a morbid interest because F.D.R. was always careful not to let the public see him as the cripple he was. And here we were viewing him with his trousers off, so to speak. I was particularly taken with a room full of all the handmade gifts that had been given to him when he was President and then presumably stuck at the back of a very large cupboard. There were carved walking-sticks by the dozen and maps of America made of inlaid wood and portraits of F.D.R. scratched on walrus tusks and etched with acid into slate. The amazing thing was how well done they all were. Every one of them represented hundreds of hours of delicate carving and tireless polishing, and all to be given away to a stranger for whom it would be just one more item in a veritable cavalcade of personalized keepsakes. I became so absorbed in these items that I scarcely noticed
when the old people barged in, a trifle breathless but none the less lively. A lady with a bluish tint to her hair pushed in front of me at one of the display cases. She gave me a brief look that said, ‘I am an old person. I can go where I want,’ and then she dismissed me from her mind. ‘Say, Hazel,’ she called in a loud voice, ‘did you know you shared a birthday with Eleanor Roosevelt?’

‘Is that so?’ answered a grating voice from the next room.

‘I share a birthday with Eisenhower myself,’ the lady with the bluish hair went on, still loudly, consolidating her position in front of me with a twitch of her ample butt. ‘And I’ve got a cousin who shares a birthday with Harry Truman.’

I toyed for a moment with the idea of grabbing the woman by both ears and driving her forehead into my knee, but instead passed into the next room where I found the entrance to a small cinema in which they showed us a crackling black and white film all about Roosevelt’s struggle with polio and his long stays at Warm Springs trying to rub life into his spindly legs, as if they had merely gone to sleep. It too was excellent. Written and narrated by a correspondent from UPI, it was moving without being mawkish, and the silent home movies, with their jerky movements that made all the participants look as if someone just out of camera range was barking at them to hurry up, exerted the same sort of voyeuristic fascination as F.D.R.’s legbraces. Afterwards we were at last released to see the Little White House itself. I fairly bounded ahead in order not to have to share the experience with the old people. It was down another path, through more pine trees and beyond a white sentry-box. I was surprised at how small it was. It was just a little white cottage in the woods,
all on one floor, with five small rooms, all panelled in dark wood. You would never believe that this could be the property of a President, particularly a rich President like Roosevelt. He did, after all, own most of the surrounding countryside, including the hotel on Main Street, several cottages and the springs themselves. Yet the very compactness of the cottage made it all the more snug and appealing. Even now, it looked comfy and lived-in. You couldn’t help but want it for yourself, even if it meant coming to Georgia to enjoy it. In every room there was a short taped commentary, which explained how Roosevelt worked and underwent therapy at the cottage. What it didn’t tell you was that what he really came here for was a bit of rustic bonking with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Her bedroom was on one side of the living-room and his was on the other. The taped recording made nothing of this, but it did point out that Eleanor’s bedroom, tucked away at the back and decidedly inferior to the secretary’s, was mostly used as a guest-room because Eleanor seldom made the trip south.

From Warm Springs I went some miles out of my way to take the scenic road into Macon, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot scenic about it. It wasn’t unscenic particularly, it just wasn’t scenic. I was beginning to suspect that the scenic route designations on my maps had been applied somewhat at random. I imagined some guy who had never been south of Jersey City sitting in an office in New York and saying, ‘Warm Springs to Macon? Ooh, that sounds nice,’ and then carefully drawing in the orange dotted line that signifies a scenic route, his tongue sticking ever so slightly out of the corner of his mouth.

Macon was nice – all the towns in the South seemed to be nice. I stopped at a bank for money and was served by a
lady from Great Yarmouth, something that brought a little excitement to both of us, and then continued on my way over the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge. There is a fashion in many parts of America, particularly the South, to name things made out of concrete after some local worthy – the Sylvester C. Grubb Memorial Bridge, the Chester Ovary Levee, that sort of thing. It seems a very odd practice to me. Imagine working all your life, clawing your way to the top, putting in long hours, neglecting your family, stabbing people in the back and generally being thought a shit by everyone you came in contact with, just to have a highway bridge over the Tallapoosa River named after you. Doesn’t seem right somehow. Still, at least this one was named after someone I had heard of.

I headed east for Savannah, down Interstate 16. It was a 173-mile drive of unspeakable tedium across the red-clay plain of Georgia. It took me five hot and unrewarding hours to reach Savannah. While you, lucky reader, have only to flit your eyes to the next paragraph.

I stood agog in Lafayette Square in Savannah, amid brick paths, trickling fountains and dark trees hung with Spanish moss. Before me rose up a cathedral of exquisite linen-fresh whiteness with twin Gothic spires, and around it stood 200-year-old houses of weathered brick, with hurricane shutters that were still clearly used. I did not know that such perfection existed in America. There are twenty such squares in Savannah, cool and quiet beneath a canopy of trees, and long straight side-streets equally dark and serene. It is only when you stumble out of this urban rain forest, out into the open streets of the modern city, exposed to the glare of the boiling sun, that you realize just
how sweltering the South can be. This was October, a time of flannel shirts and hot toddies in Iowa, but here summer was unrelenting. It was only eight in the morning and already businessmen were loosening their ties and mopping their foreheads. What must it be like in August? Every store and restaurant is air-conditioned. You step inside and the sweat is freeze-dried on your arms. Step back outside and the air meets you as something hot and unpleasant, like a dog’s breath. It is only in its squares that the climate achieved a kind of pleasing equilibrium.

Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown. What a difference it makes, how much more vibrant and alive it all seems, to see children playing ball in the street or skipping rope on the front stoops. I wandered along the cobbled sidewalk of Oglethorpe Avenue to the Colonial Park Cemetery, full of mouldering monuments and densely packed with the gravestones of people famous to the state’s history – Archibald Bulloch, the first president of Georgia, James Habersham, ‘a leading merchant’, and Button Gwinnett, who is famous in America for being one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and for having the silliest first name in Colonial history. The people of Savannah, in a careless moment, appear to have lost old Button. The historical marker said that he might be buried where I was standing now or then again he might be over in the corner or possibly somewhere else altogether. You could walk around all day and never know when you were on the Button, so to speak.

The business district in Savannah was frozen in a perpetual 1959 – the Woolworth’s store didn’t appear to have changed its stock since about then. There was a handsome old movie-house, Weis’s, but it was shut. Downtown movie-houses are pretty much a thing of the past in America, alas, alas. You are always reading how buoyant the movie industry is in America, but all the theatres now are at shopping malls in the suburbs. You go to the movies there and you get a choice of a dozen pictures, but each theatre is about the size of a large fridge-freezer and only marginally more comfortable. There are no balconies. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine movie theatres without balconies? To me, going to the movies means sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes on to the people below (or, during the more boring love-scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing Nibs at the screen. Nibs were a liquorice-flavoured candy, thought to be made from rubber left over from the Korean War, which had a strange popularity in the 1950s. They were practically inedible, but if you sucked on one of them for a minute and then threw it at the screen, it would stick with an interesting ‘pock’ sound. It was a tradition on Saturdays for everybody to take the bus downtown to the Orpheum, buy a box of Nibs and spend the afternoon bombarding the screen.

You had to be careful when you did this because the theatre manager employed vicious usherettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn’t been born into Hitler’s Germany, who patrolled the aisles with high-powered flash-lights looking for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times
during the film their darting lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing position with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before being turned over to the police for a long period of mental readjustment in a reform school. Those were the days! You cannot tell me that some suburban multiplex with shoe-box theatres and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and community spirit of a cavernous downtown movie-house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet, but ours could well be the last generation for which movie-going has anything like a sense of magic.