The Lost Continent (24 page)

In the event, the bowling-alley restaurant proved quite acceptable. Through the wall I could hear the muffled rumblings of falling bowling-pins and the sounds of Elmira’s hairdressers and grease monkeys having a happy night out. I was the only customer in the restaurant. In fact, I was quite clearly the only thing standing between the waitresses and their going home. As I waited for my food, they cleared away the other tables, removed the ashtrays, sugar-bowls and table-cloths, so that after a while I found myself dining alone in a large room, with a white tablecloth and flickering candle in a little red bowl, amid a sea of barren formica table-tops.

The waitresses stood against the wall and watched me chew my food. After a while they started whispering and tittering, still watching me as they did so, which frankly I found a trifle unsettling. I may only have imagined it, but I
also had the distinct impression that someone was little by little turning a dimmer switch so that the light in the room was gradually disappearing. By the end of my meal I was finding my food more or less by touch and occasionally by lowering my head to the plate and sniffing. Before I was quite finished, when I just paused for a moment to grope for my glass of iced water somewhere in the gloom beyond the flickering candle, my waitress whipped the plate away and put down my bill.

‘You want anything else?’ she said in a tone that suggested I had better not. ‘No thank you,’ I answered politely. I wiped my mouth with the table-cloth, having lost my napkin in the gloom, and added a seventh rule to my list: never go into a restaurant ten minutes before closing time. Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

In the morning I woke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.

I sighed and got up. I shuffled around the room in my old man posture, gathered up my things, washed, dressed and without enthusiasm hit the highway. I drove west through the Alleghenies and then into a small, odd corner of Pennsylvania. For 200 miles the border between New York and Pennsylvania is a straight line, but at its north-western corner, where I was now, it abruptly juts north, as if the draughtsman’s arm had been jogged. The reason for this small cartographical irregularity was to let Pennsylvania
have its own outlet on to Lake Erie so that it wouldn’t have to cross New York State, and it remains today a 200-year-old reminder of how the early states weren’t at all confident that the union was going to work. That it did was far more of an achievement than is often appreciated nowadays.

Just inside the Pennsylvania state line, the highway merged with Interstate 90. This is the main northern route across America, stretching 3,016 miles from Boston to Seattle, and there were lots of long-distance travellers on it. You can always tell long-distance travellers because they look as if they haven’t been out of the car for weeks. You only glimpse them when they pass, but you can see that they have already started to set up home inside – there are pieces of washing hanging in the back, remnants of takeaway meals on the window-sill, and books, magazines and pillows scattered around. There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back. You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past. You glance at each other’s licence plates and feel envy or sympathy in proportion to your comparative distances from home. One car I saw had Alaska plates on it. This was unbelievable. I had never seen Alaska licence plates before. The man must have driven over 4,500 miles, the equivalent of going from London to Zambia. He was the most forlorn looking character I had ever seen. There was no sign of a wife and children. I expect by now he had killed them and put their bodies in the trunk.

A drizzly rain hung in the air. I drove along in that state of semi-mindlessness that settles over you on interstate
highways. After a while Lake Erie appeared on the right. Like all the Great Lakes, it is enormous, more an inland sea than a lake, stretching 200 miles from west to east and about forty miles across. Twenty-five years ago Lake Erie was declared dead. Driving along its southern shore, gazing out at its flat grey immensity, this appeared to be a remarkable achievement. It hardly seemed possible that something as small as man could kill something as large as a Great Lake. But just in the space of a century or so we managed it. Thanks to lax factory laws and the triumph of greed over nature in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Sandusky and other bustling centres of soot and grit, Lake Erie was transformed in just three generations from a bowl of blue water into a large toilet. Cleveland was the worst offender. Cleveland was so vile that its river, a slow-moving sludge of chemicals and half-digested solids called the Cuyahoga, once actually caught fire and burned out of control for four days. This also was a remarkable achievement, I feel. Things are said to be better now. According to a story in the
Cleveland Free Press
, which I read during a stop for coffee near Ashtabula, an official panel with the ponderous title of the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board had just released a survey of chemical substances in the lake, and it had found only 362 types of chemical compared with more than a thousand the last time they had counted. That still seemed an awful lot to me and I was surprised to see a pair of fishermen standing on the shore, hunched down in the drizzle, hurling lines out on to the greenish murk with long poles. Maybe they were fishing for chemicals.

Through dull rain I drove through the outer suburbs of Cleveland, past signs for places that were all called Something
Heights: Richmond Heights, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Warrensville Heights, Parma Heights. Curiously the one outstanding characteristic of the surrounding landscape was its singular lack of eminences. Clearly what Cleveland was prepared to consider the heights was what others would regard as distinctly middling. Somehow this did not altogether surprise me. After a time Interstate 90 became the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, and followed the sweep of the bay. The windscreen wipers of the Chevette flicked hypnotically and other cars threw up spray as they swished past. Outside my window the lake sprawled dark and vast until it was consumed by a distant mist. Ahead of me the tall buildings of downtown Cleveland appeared and slid towards me, like shopping on a supermarket conveyor belt.

Cleveland has always had a reputation for being a dirty, ugly, boring city, though now they say it is much better. By ‘they’ I mean reporters from serious publications like the
Wall Street Journal, Fortune
and the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
, who visit the city at five-yearly intervals and produce long stories with titles like ‘Cleveland Bounces Back’ and ‘Renaissance in Cleveland’. No-one ever reads these articles, least of all me, so I couldn’t say whether the improbable and highly relative assertion that Cleveland is better now than it used to be is wrong or right. What I can say is that the view up the Cuyahoga as I crossed it on the freeway was of a stew of smoking factories that didn’t look any too clean or handsome. And I can’t say that the rest of the town looked such a knock-out either. It may be improved, but all this talk of renaissance is clearly exaggerated. I somehow doubt that if the Duc d’Urbino were
brought back to life and deposited in downtown Cleveland he would say, ‘Goodness, I am put in mind of fifteenth-century Florence and the many treasures therein.’

And then, quite suddenly, I was out of Cleveland and on the James W. Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike in the rolling rural emptiness between Cleveland and Toledo, and highway mindlessness once more seeped in. To relieve the tedium I switched on the radio. In fact, I had been switching it on and off all day, listening for a while but then giving up in despair. Unless you have lived through it, you cannot conceive of the sense of hopelessness that comes with hearing
Hotel California
by the Eagles for the fourteenth time in three hours. You can feel your brain cells disappearing with little popping sounds. But it’s the disc jockeys that make it intolerable. Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys? In South America there is a tribe of Indians called the Janamanos, who are so backward they cannot even count to three. Their counting system goes: ‘One, two . . . oh, gosh, a whole bunch.’ Obviously disc jockeys have a better dress sense and possess a little more in the way of social skills, but I think we are looking at a similar level of mental acuity.

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 half-way 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 semi-demented 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 sports-caster, 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 hut standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer’s field somewhere south-east of Des Moines – and 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 hut 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, Bobbie 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 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 had happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sports-caster in Des Moines. Reagan responded by having the batter do a highly improbable thing – hit foul balls one after the other for over half an hour – while pretending that there was nothing implausible about it, which when you think about it is kind of how he ran the country as President.

Late in the afternoon, I happened on to 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, Bonnie, Johnny and Tammy-Wynette, were killed in a fire after a light airplane crashed into their house and burst into flames. Fire Chief Walter Embers 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 Crudbucket: clear skies with a two per cent chance of precipitation. You’re listening to radio station K-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 Poontang 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 ninety-eight per cent 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 and 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 programme 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, travelling 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 service network in America – possibly the most 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 hut in a field somewhere, reading scribbled notes off a sheet of paper.