Blue Highways (59 page)

A
N
Englishman once had a good laugh when I asked how far it was to Chichester, a name I hadn’t come close to pronouncing properly. I tried three other ways and still didn’t get it right. He was in stitches. “Oh, you Yanks just slay me.”

“Okay, pal,” I said. “Tell me the body of water Seattle is on. That ought to be easy—it’s only five letters.” I started to spell it.

“I can spell it, mate. P-u-g-e-t. And I’ll pronounce it for you too. PUG-it.” I laughed and he tried, “Poo-GET.” More laughter made him desperate, so he tried a little French, the last resort of the English: “Pooh-ZHAY.”

“Nope. It’s PEW-jit. You Limeys just kill me.”

“Look,” he said, “all you have to do to pronounce Chichester is soften the vowels and swallow more than you say.”

The English must do well in Rhode Island, what with all the softening and swallowing necessary to pronounce the descriptive Algonquian place names: Chepiwanoxet, Annaquatucket, Usquepaugh, Woonasquatucket, Nannaquaket, Quonochontaug, Quanatumpic (if you like the letter
q,
you’ll love Little Rhody of the big names). Someone once said that if Niagara Falls were in Rhode Island, the English settlers would have pronounced it “Niffuls.”

There are other names here, thank heavens, just as distinctive but still pronounceable. Take, for example, the meandering county roads that most states would identify by numbers or letters: Willie Woodhead Road, Widow Sweets Road, Hog House Hill Road, Molasses Hazard Road, Biscuit City Road, Boom Bridge Road, Yawgoog Road, Poppasquash Road. Or little Elder Ballon Meetinghouse Road, a lane you can drive faster than spell.

The night before, the sea and sky had been the same color—black—with only liquid spangles of reflected light distinguishing one from the other. When I woke, they were again the same color, but now like melted sapphire. Just off the jetty, a lobster boat rolled and bubbled as the skipper lowered his traps single-handedly.

I started down the coast. If “down” means southward, and you think of the Atlantic seaboard striking a longitudinal line, you’ll be disoriented in Rhode Island and Connecticut as you follow the ocean. The coastline runs almost due east and west. Hence the name Westerly, Rhode Island, a town just off the Atlantic and west of everything in the state.

It was here, so I read, during the Dorr Rebellion in 1842, that General John B. Stedman was charged with maintaining martial law in the town. At one point, when he thought an attack imminent, he told his troops, “Boys, when you see the enemy, fire and then run. And as I am a little lame, I’ll run now.”

When I crossed the Pawcatuck River into Pawcatuck, Connecticut, just up the old Post Road from Wequetequock, I realized I was heading straight into New York City. I had two choices: drive far inland to bypass it or take the New London–Orient Point ferry to Long Island and cut through the bottom edge of the Apple. I headed toward New London, through Mystic, where they used to build the clipper ships.

Indians called New London “Nameaug.” White settlers called it by a tribal name, “Pequot,” and their descendants renamed it “New London,” believing as they did that the little village on the deep-water harbor would become one day the greatest city of the East coast. They even changed the Monhegin River to the “Thames.” And so went the native American names.

In New London, the only thing that smacked of old London was the old-world street system—nowhere a true square or rectangular block between Shaw’s Cove and Winthrop’s Cove. Even Benedict Arnold’s 1781 torching of the town didn’t help straighten the lanes. A policeman on foot motioned me to the curb for driving the wrong direction on a one-way street. I was only four blocks from the ferry slip, but it took a complex of turns to get through the labyrinth.

The ferry, an old oily tub holding a few cars, bucketed down the deep river that had seen Indian canoes, Revolutionary War privateers, whaling ships, Coast Guard rum-chasers, and three generations of submarines. At the railing, I tried to watch both sides of the river: the west bank with grassy homes and an old lighthouse and on the east bank the Groton shipyards.

An engineer for Singer Company (once only makers of sewing machines, but now also manufacturers of undersea warfare “systems”) stood next to me. His face was a whorl of lines like a fingerprint. I asked where they built the submarines, and he pointed to a dagger of a shadow. “That black thing is the
Ohio
. She’s the first Trident. The orange bull on blocks is the
Michigan
.”

“How can anything that big move under water?”

“They’re longer than the Washington Monument. The
Ohio
will carry twenty-four missiles, each one with a dozen warheads: two hundred eighty-eight atomic explosions. One hell of a bitch with twelve sisters coming along behind at a billion dollars each.” He offered a Chiclet. “They used to name battleships after states because they were the dreadnaughts of the sea, but there’s your dreadnaughts of the next war.”

“What next war?”

“You think war is finished? Whatever peace we’ll know will come because of things like those devils. Let me tell you about my uncle who collected handguns and worked up at Colt in Hartford. He had an eighteen-seventy Colt revolver called ‘The Peacemaker’ because it was so deadly. Those Tridents are the new Peacemakers, but they call them ‘deterrents’ now.”

“By that logic the greatest peacemaker would be a doomsday machine.”

“Remember one thing—
Kremlin
is the Russian word for ‘fortress.’ If those uncivilized maniacs in the Fortress ever come to their senses, then maybe we can make some changes. It’s not real fashionable now to believe in military power, but it will be again, and when that happens, people will love those exploding cigars. I’ve seen both sides—I was in the hooligan Navy.”

“What’s the hooligan Navy?”

“Where hooligans did the dirty work. I was on Red Beach in ’forty-four. I can still hear the blue whispers coming at us. A little streak of blue smoke and a hiss and you were gone. I was so scared I wished I was dead.”

All the time we had been talking, a father on the other side of me entertained his baby with the blink of his LED watch; the baby, in a knitted cap that said
PAULIE
, burbled at the red numbers and reached a clumsy half-fist toward it. Paulie didn’t know, but across the way, the General Dynamics Electric Boat Company was putting his world together for him.

I said to the engineer, “Isn’t this ferry some kind of old Navy craft?”

“An LSM they brought out of the Pacific after the war and put a new superstructure on. She’s been making this crossing since nineteen forty-eight, but she’s in her last month. They got a new, specially designed boat just about ready.”

When John Steinbeck began his 1960 tour of the United States that he describes in
Travels with Charley,
he crossed Long Island Sound on this very boat and worried about the nuclear submarines of an earlier day. Yet a couple of decades later, that great flash of light still had not shown mankind the way out. Watching the shipyards disappear from view, the engineer said, “Maybe it’s a crazy way to be sane, but men are most reasonable when they’re scared.”

“Ever seen a cornered animal?”

“We’re not animals.”

We crossed the east end of the sound over a strip of water known as “The Race” and passed close by a small, brushy island topped with a smokestack.

“Talk of animals,” he said, “there’s what worries me—Plum Island. The Dangerous Animal Disease Laboratory.”

“What do they consider a dangerous animal?”

“It’s diseases that’re dangerous, not animals. But I couldn’t say for sure what they study there. Glanders, tularemia, plague—I’m not certain. I don’t even know if the Pentagon has a role in the research. But give me an atomic warhead any day to disease warfare. The time’s coming, though, when we’ll fight with germs. Economics will force it because it’s more efficient to kill with bugs than steel. Compared to a drum of cholera, a Trident’s a thing of beauty.”

“Myself, I’ve always preferred an earache to a toothache.”

I
F
you want to hear distortions and misconceptions laced with plenty of dogmatic opinion, you have a choice of three places—excluding domed governmental edifices and buildings with steeples—bars, sport arenas, and gas stations (barbershops have lost position because of electronics: you can’t hear over the hair dryers). As filling stations cease to be garages and community centers, as they become nothing but expensive nozzles, they too are losing ground. But, in the past, an American traveler depended on the local grease pit boys to tell him (a) the best route to wherever; (b) the best place to eat, although librarians give better recommendations; and (c) what the townsfolk thought about whatsoever. Now, it already may be too late for a doctoral candidate to study the ways that Americans’ views of each other have been shaped while waiting for the tank to fill.

Orient Point, Long Island, was a few houses and a collapsed four-story inn built in 1810, so I went to Greenport for gas. At an old-style station, the owner himself came out and pumped the no-lead and actually wiped the windshield. I happened to refer to him as a New Yorker.

“Don’t call me a New Yorker. This is Long Island.”

“I meant the state, not the city.”

“Manhattan’s a hundred miles from here. We’re closer to Boston than the city. Long Island hangs under Connecticut. Look at the houses here, the old ones. They’re New England–style because the people that built them came from Connecticut. Towns out here look like Connecticut. I don’t give a damn if the city’s turned half the island into a suburb—we should rightfully be Connecticut Yankees. Or we should be the seventh New England state. This island’s bigger than Rhode Island any way you measure it. The whole business gets my dander up. We used to berth part of the New England whaling fleet here, and that was a pure Yankee business. They called this part of the island ‘the flukes’ because Long Island even looks like a whale. But you go down to the wharf now and you’ll see city boats and a big windjammer that sells rides to people from Mamaroneck and Scarsdale.”

He got himself so exercised he overfilled the tank, but he didn’t pipe down. “If the East River had’ve been ten miles wide, we’da been all right.” He jerked the nozzle out and clanked it into the pump. “We needed a bay and we got a bastard river no wider than a stream of piss.”

Thus chastised, I went down a pleasant little road numbered 25, down the north fluke, through neat vegetable truck farms with their typical story-and-a-half houses, past estuaries and swans, to Riverhead. I followed a pickup with four bloodied sharks laid out in the bed; it looked like a tin of evil sardines packed in ketchup.

The side road ended, and I got pulled onto an expressway as if I were part of a train. I buckled the seatbelt, popped in a piece of bubblegum, put on my twelve-o’clock-high sunglasses, and got ready for
the
city. You’d have thought I was going to run the Gaza Strip. But it was Islip, Babylon, Amityville, Merrick, Oceanside. The Belt Roadway showed the backsides of suburbs and miles of carpet sample, unclaimed freight, factory outlet, and furniture warehouse stores—half of them gone under, the others with windows blocked by giant prices. Things raced past like the jumpy images of a nickelodeon: abandoned and stripped cars on the shoulders, two hitchhiking females that nobody could stop to pick up, a billboard
EAT SAUSAGE AND BE HAPPY
, low-flying jumbos into Kennedy International, the racetrack at Ozone Park, bulldozed piles of dirt to fill the marsh at Jamaica Bay, long and straight Flatbush Avenue, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, the World Trade Center like stumps in the yellow velvet sky. Then a windingly protracted ascent up the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the Silver Gate of the East coast) with its world’s longest center span, and below the bay where the
Great Eastern,
the
Monitor,
the
Bonhomme Richard,
and the
Half Moon
sailed.

The low sun turned the Upper Bay orange. Freighters rode at anchor or headed to the Atlantic, and to the north, in the distance, a little glint of coppery green that was the Statue of Liberty. I slowed to gawk and got a horn; the driver passed in a gaseous cloud and held aloft a middle digit opinion.

The lanes descended and shot me across Staten Island; just before it was too late, I pulled out of the oppression of traffic and drove down Richmond Avenue to find the bridge across the Arthur Kill into Perth Amboy, the city (if you follow your nose) that gets to you before you get to it. I don’t know how I lost my way on a thoroughfare as big as Richmond, but I did. I could smell Perth Amboy, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found Great Kills, Eltingville, Huguenot Park, Princess Bay, and Tottenville. I asked directions from a nervous teenager who was either tuning his engine or stealing someone’s distributor.

Just as darkness was complete, I reached New Jersey and decided to take U.S. 9 to get through the congestion and into the Pine Barrens, the last great natural interruption in the Boston-to-Washington megalopolis. John McPhee’s book on the Pines had convinced me that anyone wanting to see it should do so immediately, what with subdividing realtors, industrial parks, reservoirs, and supersonic jet ports.

Forty minutes later I was already in Lakewood, midway down the state. I stopped for the night, still surprised I’d begun the day in Rhode Island. I had forgotten to think in the compressed distances of the Northeast.

I
T
isn’t widely known in America that the descendants of Jolly Roger pirates put an end to dirigible flight. So I heard at breakfast in a diner. Actually, it was a full restaurant, but it had started as a diner. It was done up in red drapes and coachman lanterns, and at the door a concrete Cupid stood in a dry fountain surrounded by a polymer privet hedge. The eggs had been fried in Vitalis, and the potatoes carried a crisp woody flavor. I felt fine anyway.

The waitress, with a grudge of a face and a golden chain cutting into a puffy ankle, complained her way around. Everyone seemed to like her although she had no good tidings for anybody.