The Lost Continent (13 page)

I took my bags inside, lowered myself experimentally on to the bed and switched on the TV. Instantly there came up a commercial for Preparation H, an unguent for haemorrhoids. The tone was urgent. I don’t remember the exact words, but they were something like, ‘Hey, you! Have you got haemorrhoids? Then get some Preparation H! That’s an order! Remember that name, you inattentive moron! Preparation H! And even if you haven’t got haemorrhoids, get some Preparation H anyway! Just in case!’ And then a voice-over quickly added, ‘Now available in cherry flavour.’ Having lived abroad so long, I was unused to the American hard sell and it made me uneasy. I was equally unsettled by the way television stations in America can jump back and forth between commercials and programmes without hesitation or warning. You’ll be lying there watching
Kojak
, say, and in the middle of a gripping shoot-out somebody starts cleaning a toilet bowl and you sit up, thinking, ‘What the—’ and then you realize it is a commercial. In fact, it is several minutes of commercials. You could go out for cigarettes and a pizza during commercial breaks in America,
and
still have time to wash the toilet bowl before the programme resumed.

The Preparation H commercial vanished and a micro-instant later, before there was any possibility of the viewer reflecting on whether he might wish to turn to another channel, was replaced by a clapping audience, the perky sound of steel guitars and happy but mildly brain-damaged people in sequinned outfits. This was
Grand Ole Opry
. I watched for a couple of minutes. By degrees my chin dropped onto my shirt as I listened to their
singing and jesting with a kind of numb amazement. It was like a visual lobotomy. Have you ever watched an infant at play and said to yourself, ‘I wonder what goes on in his little head’? Well, watch
Grand Ole Opry
for five minutes sometime and you will begin to have an idea.

After a couple of minutes another commercial break noisily intruded and I was snapped back to my senses. I switched off the television and went out to investigate Bryson City. There was more to it than I had first thought. Beyond the Swain County Courthouse was a small business district. I was gratified to note that almost everything had a Bryson City sign on it – Bryson City Laundry, Bryson City Coal and Lumber, Bryson City Church of Christ, Bryson City Electronics, Bryson City Police Department, Bryson City Fire Department, Bryson City Post Office. I began to appreciate how George Washington might feel if he were to be brought back to life and set down in the District of Columbia. I don’t know who the Bryson was whom this town was so signally honouring, but I had certainly never seen my name spread around so lavishly, and I regretted that I hadn’t brought a crowbar and monkey wrench because many of the signs would have made splendid keepsakes. I particularly fancied having the Bryson City Church of Christ sign beside my front gate in England and being able to put up different messages every week like ‘Repent Now, Limeys.’

It didn’t take long to exhaust the possibilities for diversion in downtown Bryson City, and almost before I realized it I found myself on the highway out of town leading towards Cherokee, the next town along the valley. I followed it for a little way but there was nothing to see except a couple of derelict gas stations and barbecue
shacks, and hardly any shoulder to walk on so that cars shot past only inches away and whipped my clothes into a disconcerting little frenzy. All along the road were billboards and large hand-lettered signs in praise of Christ:
GET A GRIP ON YOUR LIFE – PRAISE JESUS, GOD LOVES YOU, AMERICA
, and the rather more enigmatic
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU DIED TOMORROW?
(Well, I thought, there would be no more payments on the freezer for a start.) I turned around and went back into town. It was 5.30 in the afternoon, Bryson City was a crypt with sidewalks, and I was at a complete loss. Down a small hill, beside the rushing river, I spied an A & P supermarket, which appeared to be open, and I went down there for want of something better to do. I often used to hang out in supermarkets. Robert Swanson and I, when we were about twelve and so obnoxious that it would have been a positive mercy to inject us with something lethal, would often go to the Hinky-Dinky supermarket on Ingersoll Avenue in Des Moines during the summer because it was airconditioned, and pass the time by doing things I am now ashamed to relate – loosening the bottom of a bag of flour and then watching it pour on to the floor when some unsuspecting woman picked it up, or putting strange items like goldfish food and emetics in people’s shopping carts when their backs were turned. I didn’t intend to do anything like that in the A & P now – unless of course I got
really
bored – but I thought it would be comforting, in this strange place, to look at foodstuffs from my youth. And it was. It was almost like visiting old friends – Skippy Peanut Butter, Pop Tarts, Welch’s Grape Juice, Sara Lee cakes. I wandered the aisles, murmuring tiny cries of joy at each sighting of an old familiar nutrient. It cheered me up no end.

Then suddenly I remembered something. Months before, in England, I had noticed an ad for panty shields in the
New York Times Magazines
. These panty shields had dimples on them and the dimples had a name that was trade-marked. This struck me as remarkable. Can you imagine being given the job of thinking up a catchy name for dimples on a panty shield? But I couldn’t remember what it was. So now, for no reason other than that I had nothing better to do, I went over and had a look at the A & P’s panty shield section. There was a surprising diversity of them. I would never have guessed that the market was so buoyant or indeed that there were so many panties in Bryson City that needed shielding. I had never paid much attention to this sort of thing before and it was really kind of interesting. I don’t know how long I spent poking about among the various brands and reading the instructions for use, or whether I might even have started talking to myself a little, as I sometimes do when I am happily occupied. But I suppose it must have been quite some time. In any case, at the very moment that I picked up a packet of New Freedom Thins, with Funnel-Dot Protection™, and cried triumphantly, ‘Aha! There you are, you little buggers!’, I turned my head a fraction and noticed that at the far end of the aisle the manager and two female assistants were watching me. I blushed and clumsily wedged the packet back on the shelves. ‘Just browsing!’ I called in an unconvincing voice, hoping I didn’t look too dangerous or insane, and made for the exit. I remembered reading some weeks before in
The Independent
that it is still against the law in twenty US states, most of them in the Deep South, for heterosexuals to engage in oral or anal intercourse. I had nothing like that in mind just now, you understand,
but I think it indicates that some of these places can be doggedly unenlightened in matters pertaining to sex and could well have ordinances with respect to the unlawful handling of panty shields. It would be just my luck to pull a five to ten stretch for some unintended perversion in a place like North Carolina. At all events, I felt fortunate to make it back to my motel without being intercepted by the authorities, and spent the rest of my short stay in Bryson City behaving with the utmost circumspection.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers 500,000 acres in North Carolina and Tennessee. I didn’t realize it before I went there, but it is the most popular national park in America, attracting nine million visitors a year, three times as many as any other national park, and even early on a Sunday morning in October it was crowded. The road between Bryson City and Cherokee, at the park’s edge, was a straggly collection of motels, junky-looking auto repair shops, trailer courts and barbecue shacks perched on the edge of a glittering stream in a cleft in the mountains. It must have been beautiful once, with dark mountains squeezing in from both sides, but now it was just squalid. Cherokee itself was even worse. It is the biggest Indian reservation in the eastern United States and it was packed from one end to the other with souvenir stores selling tawdry Indian trinkets, all of them with big signs on their roofs and sides saying
MOCCASINS! INDIAN JEWELRY! TOMAHAWKS! POLISHED GEMSTONES! CRAPPY ITEMS OF EVERY DESCRIPTION!
Some of the places had a caged brown bear out front – the Cherokee mascot, I gathered – and around each of these was a knot of small boys trying to provoke the animal into a show of ferocity, encouraged
from a safe distance by their fathers. At other stores you could have your photograph taken with a genuine, hung-over, flabby-titted Cherokee Indian in war dress for $5, but not many people seemed interested in this and the model Indians sat slumped in chairs looking as listless as the bears. I don’t think I had ever been to a place quite so ugly, and it was jammed with tourists, almost all of them ugly also – fat people in noisy clothes with cameras dangling on their bellies. Why is it, I wondered idly as I nosed the car through the throngs, that tourists are always fat and dress like morons?

Then, abruptly, before I could give the question the consideration it deserved, I was out of Cherokee and in the national park and all the garishness ceased. People don’t live in national parks in America as they do in Britain. They are areas of wilderness – often enforced wilderness. The Smoky Mountains were once full of hillbillies who lived in cabins up in the remote hollows, up among the clouds, but they were moved out and now the park is sterile as far as human activities go. Instead of trying to preserve an ancient way of life, the park authorities eradicated it. So the dispossessed hillbillies moved down to valley towns at the park’s edge and turned them into junkvilles selling crappy little souvenirs. It seems a very strange approach to me. Now a few of the cabins are preserved as museum pieces. There was one at a visitors’ centre just inside the park, which I dutifully stopped to have a look at. It was exactly like the cabins at the Lincoln village at New Salem in Illinois. I had not realized that it is actually possible to overdose on log cabins, but as I drew near the cabin I began to feel a sudden onset of brainstem death and I retreated to the car after only the briefest of looks.

The Smoky Mountains themselves were a joy. It was a perfect October morning. The road led steeply up through broad-leaved forests of dappled sunshine, full of paths and streams, and then, higher up, opened out to airy vistas. All along the road through the park there were look-out points where you could pull the car over and go ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Wow!’ at the views. They were all named after mountain passes that sounded like condominium developments for yuppies – Pigeon Gap, Cherry Cove, Wolf Mountain, Bear Trap Gap. The air was clear and thin and the views were vast. The mountains rolled away to a distant horizon, gently shading from rich green to charcoal blue to hazy smoke. It was a sea of trees – like looking out over a landscape from Colombia or Brazil, so virginal was it all. In all the rolling vastness there was not a single sign of humanity, no towns, no water-towers, no plume of smoke from a solitary farmstead. It was just endless silence beneath a bright sky, empty and clear apart from one distant bluish puff of cumulus, which cast a drifting shadow over a far-off hill.

The Oconaluftee Highway across the park is only thirty miles long, but it is so steep and winding that it took me all morning to cross it. By 10 A.M. there was a steady stream of cars in both directions, and free spaces at the look-out points were hard to find. This was my first serious brush with real tourists – retired people with trailer homes heading for Florida, young families taking off-season vacations, honeymooners. There were cars and trailers, campers and motor homes from thousands of miles away – California, Wyoming, British Columbia – and at every look-out point people were clustered around their vehicles with the doors and trunks opened, feeding from ice
coolers and portable fridges. Every few yards there was a Winnebago or Komfort Motor Home – massive, self-contained dwellings on wheels that took up three parking spaces and jutted out so far that cars coming in could only barely scrape past.

All morning I had been troubled by a vague sense of something being missing, and then it occurred to me what it was. There were no hikers such as you would see in England – no people in stout boots and short pants, with knee-high tasselled stockings. No little rucksacks full of Marmite sandwiches and flasks of tea. And no platoons of cyclists in skin-tight uniforms and bakers’ caps labouring breathlessly up the mountainsides, slowing up traffic. What slowed the traffic here were the massive motor homes lumbering up and down the mountain passes. Some of them, amazingly, had cars tethered to their rear bumpers, like dinghies. I got stuck behind one on the long, sinuous descent down the mountain into Tennessee. It was so wide that it could barely stay within its lane and kept threatening to nudge oncoming cars off into the picturesque void to our left. That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience – indeed, not to breathe fresh air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you, you pile into your thirteen-ton tin palace and drive 400 miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you don’t have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave facilities. These things, these ‘recreational vehicles’, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts
go to the moon with less backup. RV people are another breed – and a largely demented one at that. They become obsessed with trying to equip their vehicles with gadgets to deal with every possible contingency. Their lives become ruled by the dread thought that one day they may find themselves in a situation in which they are not entirely self-sufficient. I once went camping for two days at Lake Darling in Iowa with a friend whose father – an RV enthusiast – kept trying to press labour-saving devices on us. ‘I got a great little solar-powered can opener here,’ he would say. ‘You wanna take that?’