The Lost Continent (23 page)

I walked past the Peacham Inn – white clapboard, green shutters, no sign of life – and wandered up a hill, past a white Congregational church and pleasant, dozing houses. At the crest of the hill stood a broad green, with an obelisk and flagpole, and beside it an old cemetery. A zephyr wind teased the flag. Down the hill, across a broad valley, a series of pale green and brown hills rolled away to the horizon, like the swells of a sea. Below me the church bell tolled the hour, but otherwise there was not a sound. This was as perfect a spot as I had ever seen. I had a look at the obelisk.
COMMEMORATING PEACHAM SOLDIERS
1869, it said, and had names carved in it, good New England names like Elijah W. Sargent, Lowell Sterns, Horace Rowe. There were forty-five names in all, too many surely for a mere hamlet in the hills. But then the cemetery beside the green also looked far too large for the size of the town. It covered the
hillside and the grandeur of many of the monuments suggested that this had once been a place of wealth.

I went through the gate and had a look around. My eye was caught by one particularly handsome stone, an octagonal marble column surmounted by a granite sphere. The column logged the copious deaths of Hurds and their near relatives from Capt. Nathan Hurd in 1818 to Frances H. Bement in 1889. A small panel on the back said:

Nathan H. died July 24 1852 AE. 4 Y’s 1 M’o.

Joshua F. died July 31 1852 AE. 1 YR 11 M’s.

Children of J. & C. Pitkin.

What could it have been, I wondered, that carried off these two little brothers just a week apart? A fever? It seemed unlikely in July. An accident in which one died and the other lingered? Two unrelated events? I pictured the parents crouched at Joshua F.’s beside, watching his life ebb, praying to God not to take him as well, and having their hopes crushed. Isn’t life shitty? Everywhere I looked there was disappointment and heartbreak recorded in the stones: ‘Joseph, son of Ephraim and Sarah Carter, died March 18 1846, aged 18 yrs’, ‘Alma Foster, daut. of Zadock and Hannah Richardson, d. May 22, 1847, AE. 17 yrs’. So many were so young. I became infected with an inexpressible melancholy as I wandered alone among these hundreds of stilled souls, the emptied lives, the row upon row of ended dreams. Such a sad place! I stood there in the mild October sunshine, feeling so sorry for all these luckless people and their lost lives, reflecting bleakly on mortality and on my own dear, cherished family so far away in England, and I thought, ‘Well, fuck this,’ and walked back down the hill to the car.

I drove west across Vermont, into the Green Mountains. The mountains were dark and round and the valleys looked rich. Here the light seemed softer, sleepier, more autumnal. There was colour everywhere – trees the colour of mustard and rust, meadows of gold and green, colossal white barns, blue lakes. Here and there along the roadside, produce stands brimmed with pumpkins and squash and other autumn fruits. It was like a day trip to heaven. I wandered around on back roads. There was a surprising lot of small houses, some little better than shacks. I supposed there couldn’t be much work in a place like Vermont. The state has hardly any towns or industry. The biggest city, Burlington, has a population of just 37,000. Outside Groton I stopped at a roadside café for coffee and listened along with the other three customers to a fat young woman with a pair of ill-kempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter. ‘I still only get four dollars an hour,’ she was saying. ‘Harvey, he’s been at Fibberts for three years and he’s only just got his first raise. You know what he gets now? Four dollars and sixty-five cents an hour. Isn’t that pathetic? I told him, I said, “Harvey, they’re just walkin’ all over you.” But he won’t do nothin’ about it.’ She broke off here to rearrange the features on one of her children’s faces with the back of her hand. ‘HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU NOT TO INNARUP ME WHEN I’M
TALKING
?’ she enquired rhetorically of the little fellow, and then in a calmer voice turned back to the café lady and launched into a candid list of Harvey’s other shortcomings, which were manifold.

Only the day before in Maine I had been in a McDonald’s offering a starting wage of $5 an hour. Harvey must
have been immensely moronic and unskilled – doubtless both – not to be able to keep pace with a sixteen-year-old burger jockey at McDonald’s. Poor guy! And on top of that here he was married to a woman who was slovenly, indiscreet, and had a butt like a barn door. I hoped old Harvey had sense enough to appreciate all the incredible natural beauty with which God had blessed his native state because it didn’t sound as if He had blessed Harvey very much. Even his kids were ugly as sin. I was half tempted to give one of them a clout myself as I went out of the door. There was just something about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him.

I drove on, thinking what an ironic thing it was that the really beautiful places in America – the Smoky Mountains, Appalachia, and now Vermont – were always inhabited by the poorest, most under-educated people. And then I hit Stowe and realized that when it comes to making shrewd generalizations, I am a cretin. Stowe was anything but poor. It was a rich little town, full of chichi boutiques and expensive ski lodges. In fact, for most of the rest of the day, as I wandered around and through the Green Mountain ski resorts, I saw almost nothing but wealth and beauty – rich people, rich houses, rich cars, rich resorts, beautiful scenery. I drove around quite struck by it all, wandered over to Lake Champlain – also immensely beautiful – and idled down the western side of the state, just over the border from New York State.

Below Lake Champlain the landscape became more open, more rolling, as if the hills had been flattened out from the edges, like someone pulling a crease out of a bedspread. Some of the towns and villages were staggeringly pretty. Dorset, for instance, was an exquisite
little place, standing around an oval green, full of beautiful white clapboard houses, with a summer play-house and an old church and an enormous inn. And yet. And yet there was something about these places. They were too perfect, too rich, too yuppified. At Dorset there was a picture shop called the Dorset Framery. At Bennington, just down the road, I passed a place called the Publyk House Restaurant. Every inn and lodge had a quaint and picturesque name – the Black Locust Inn, the Hob Knob, the Blueberry Inn, the Old Cutter Inn – and a hanging wooden sign out front. There was always this air of twee artifice pushing in on everything. After a while I began to find it oddly oppressive. I longed to see a bit of neon and a restaurant with a good old family name – Ernie’s Chop House, Zweiker’s New York Grille – with a couple of blinking beer signs in the front window. A bowling alley or drive-in movie theatre would have been most welcome. It would have made it all seem real. But this looked as if it had been designed in Manhattan and brought in by truck.

One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. I couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a $200 sweater but not a can of baked beans. Actually, I could think of a lot of worse things – cancer of the brain, watching every episode of a TV mini-series starring Joan Collins, having to eat at a Burger Chef more than twice in one year, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finding that you’ve just taken a drink from your grandmother’s denture cup, and so on. But I think you get my point.

I SPENT THE
night in Cobleskill, New York, on the northern fringes of the Catskills, and in the morning drove to Cooperstown, a small resort on Lake Otsego. Cooperstown was the home of James Fenimore Cooper, from whose family the town takes its name. It was a handsome town, as handsome as any I had seen in New England, and more replete with autumn colour, with a main street of square-topped brick buildings, old banks, a movie theatre, family stores. The Cooperstown Diner, where I went for breakfast, was busy, friendly and cheap – all that a diner should be. Afterwards I went for a stroll around the residential streets, shuffling hands-in-pockets through the dry leaves, and down to the lakeside. Every house in town was old and pretty; many of the larger ones had been converted into inns and expensive B & Bs. The morning sunlight filtered through the trees and threw shadows across the lawns and sidewalks. This was as nice a little town as I had seen on the trip; it was almost Amalgam.

The only shortcoming with Cooperstown is that it is full of tourists, drawn to the town by its most famous institution, the Baseball Hall of Fame, which stands by a shady park at the far end of Main Street. I went there now, paid $8.50 admission and walked into its cathedral-like calm. For those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics, the
Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get. I walked serenely through its quiet and softly-lit halls, looking at the sacred vestments and venerated relics from America’s national pastime. Here, beautifully preserved in a glass case, was ‘the shirt worn by Warren Spahn when registering win No. 305, which tied him with Eddie Plank for most by a left-hander.’ Across the aisle was ‘the glove used by Sal Maglie on September 25, 1958, no-hitter vs Phillies.’ At each case people gazed reverently or spoke in whispers.

One room contained a gallery of paintings commemorating great moments in baseball history, including one depicting the first professional night game under artificial lighting played in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 2, 1930. This was exciting news to me. I had no idea that Des Moines had played a pivotal role in the history of both baseball and luminescence. I looked closely to see if the artist had depicted my father in the press-box, but then I realized that my father was only fifteen years old in 1930 and still in Winfield. This seemed kind of a pity.

In an upstairs room I suppressed a whoop of joy at the discovery of whole cases full of the baseball cards that my brother and I had so scrupulously collected and catalogued, and which my parents, in an early flirtation with senility, had taken to the dump during an attic spring-cleaning in 1981. We had the complete set for 1959 in mint condition; it is now worth something like $1,500. We had Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra as rookies, Ted Williams from the last year he hit .400, the complete New York Yankees teams for every year between 1956 and 1962. The whole collection must have been worth something like $8,000 – enough, at any rate, to have sent
Mom and Dad for a short course of treatment at a dementia clinic. But never mind! We all make mistakes. It’s only because everyone throws these things out that they grow so valuable for the lucky few whose parents don’t spend their retirements getting rid of all the stuff they spent their working lives accumulating. Anyway it was a pleasure to see all the old cards again. It was like visiting a friend in hospital.

The Hall of Fame is surprisingly large, much larger than it looks from the road, and extremely well presented. I wandered through it in a state of complete contentment, reading every label, lingering at every display, reliving my youth, cocooned in a happy nostalgia, and when I stepped back out on to Main Street and glanced at my watch I was astonished to discover that three hours had elapsed.

Next door to the Hall of Fame was a shop selling the most wonderful baseball souvenirs. In my day all we could get were pennants and baseball cards and crummy little pens in the shape of baseball bats that stopped working about the second time you tried to sign your name with them. But now little boys could get everything with their team’s logo on it – lamps, towels, clocks, throw rugs, mugs, bedspreads and even Christmas tree ornaments, plus of course pennants, baseball cards and pens that stop working about the second time you use them. I don’t think I have ever felt such a pang of longing to be a child again. Apart from anything else, it would mean I’d get my baseball cards back and I could put them somewhere safe where my parents couldn’t get at them; then when I got to my age I could buy a Porsche.

I was so taken with all the souvenirs that I began to fill my arms with stuff, but then I noticed that the store was
full of Do Not Touch signs and on the counter by the cash register had been taped a notice that said ‘Do Not Lean on Glass – If You Break, Cost to You Is $50.’ What a jerky thing to say on a sign. How could you expect kids to come into a place full of wonderful things like this and not touch them? This so elevated my hackles that I deposited my intended purchases on the counter and told the girl I didn’t want them after all. This was perhaps just as well because I’m not altogether sure that my wife would have wanted St Louis Cardinals pillowcases.

My ticket to the Hall of Fame included admission to a place on the edge of town called the Farmers Museum, where a couple of dozen old buildings – a schoolhouse, a tavern, a church and the like – have been preserved on a big site. It was about as exciting as it sounds, but having bought the ticket I felt obliged to go and have a look at it. If nothing else, the walk through the afternoon sunshine was pleasant. But I was relieved to get back in the car and hit the road again. It was after four by the time I left town. I drove on across New York State for several hours, through the Susquehanna Valley, which was very fetching, especially at this time of day and year in the soft light of an autumn afternoon: watermelon-shaped hills, golden trees, slumbering towns. To make up for my long day in Cooperstown, I drove later than usual, and it was after nine by the time I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Elmira.

I went straight out for dinner, but almost every place I approached was closed, and I ended up eating in a restaurant attached to a bowling alley – in clear violation of Bryson’s third rule of dining in a strange town. Generally, I don’t believe in doing things on principle – it’s
kind of a principle of mine – but I do have six rules of public dining to which I try to adhere. They are:

1. Never eat in a restaurant that displays photographs of the food it serves. (But if you do, never believe the photographs.)
   
2. Never eat in a restaurant with flock wallpaper.
   
3. Never eat in a restaurant attached to a bowling alley.
   
4. Never eat in a restaurant where you can hear what they are saying in the kitchen.
   
5. Never eat in a restaurant that has live entertainers with any of the following words in their titles: Hank, Rhythm, Swinger, Trio, Combo, Hawaiian, Polka.
   
6. Never eat in a restaurant that has blood-stains on the walls.