The Lost Continent (15 page)

High up the hill I began to encounter shacks set back in clearings in the woods, and peered at them in the hope of glimpsing a Melungeon or two. But the few people I saw were white. They stared at me with a strange look of surprise as I lumbered past, the way you might stare at a man riding an ostrich, and generally made no response to my cheerful wave, though one or two did reply with an automatic and economic wave of their own, a raised hand and a twitch of fingers.

This was real hillbilly country. Many of the shacks looked like something out of
Li’l Abner
, with sagging porches and tilting chimneys. Some were abandoned.
Many appeared to have been handmade, with rambling extensions that had clearly been fashioned from scraps of plundered wood. People in these hills still made moonshine, or stump liquor as they call it. But the big business these days is marijuana, believe it or not. I read somewhere that whole mountain villages band together and can make $100,000 a month from a couple of acres planted in some remote and lofty hollow. More than the Melungeons, that is an excellent reason not to be a stranger asking questions in the area.

Although I was clearly climbing high up into the mountains, the woods all around were so dense that I had no views. But at the summit the trees parted like curtains to provide a spectacular outlook over the valley on the other side. It was like coming over the top of the earth, like the view from an aeroplane. Steep green wooded hills with alpine meadows clinging to their sides stretched away for as far as the eye could see until at last they were consumed by a distant and colourful sunset. Before me a sinuous road led steeply down to a valley of rolling farms spread out along a lazy river. It was as perfect a setting as I had ever seen. I drove through the soft light of dusk, absorbed by the beauty. And the thing was, every house along the roadside was a shack. This was the heart of Appalachia, the most notoriously impoverished region of America, and it was just inexpressibly beautiful. It was strange that the urban professionals from the cities of the eastern seaboard, only a couple of hours’ drive to the east, hadn’t colonized an area of such arresting beauty, filling the dales with rusticky weekend cottages, country clubs, and fancy restaurants.

It was strange, too, to see white people living in poverty. In America, to be white and impoverished really takes
some doing. Of course, this was American poverty, this was white people’s poverty, which isn’t like poverty elsewhere. It isn’t even like the poverty in Tuskegee. It has been suggested with more than a touch of cynicism that when Lyndon Johnson launched his great War on Poverty in 1964, the focus was placed on Appalachia not because it was so destitute but because it was so white. A little-publicized survey at the time showed that forty per cent of the poorest people in the region owned a car and a third of those had been bought new. In 1964, my future father-in-law in England was, like most people there, years away from owning his first car and even now he has never owned a new one, yet no-one ever called him destitute or sent him a free sack of flour and some knitting wool at Christmas. Still, I can’t deny that by American standards the scattered shacks around me were decidedly modest. They had no satellite dishes in the yard, no Weber barbecues, no station wagons standing in the drive. And I daresay they had no microwaves in the kitchen, poor devils, and by American standards that is pretty damn deprived.

I DROVE THROUGH
a landscape of gumdrop hills, rolling roads, neat farms. The sky was full of those big fluffy clouds you always see in nautical paintings, and the towns had curious and interesting names: Snowflake, Fancy Gap, Horse Pasture, Meadows of Dan, Charity. Virginia went on and on. It never seemed to end. The state is nearly 400 miles across, but the twisting road must have added at least a hundred miles to that. In any case, every time I looked at the map I seemed to have moved a remarkably tiny distance. From time to time I would pass a sign that said
HISTORICAL MARKER AHEAD
, but I didn’t stop. There are thousands of historical markers all over America and they are always dull. I know this for a fact because my father stopped at every one of them. He would pull the car up to them and read them aloud to us, even when we asked him not to. They would say something like: [
SINGING TREES SACRED BURIAL SITE
]

For centuries this land, known as the Valley of the Singing Trees, was a sacred burial site for the Blackbutt Indians. In recognition of this the US Government gave the land to the tribe in perpetuity in 1880. However, in 1882 oil was discovered beneath the singing trees and, after a series of skirmishes in which 27,413 Blackbutts perished, the tribe was relocated to a reservation at Cyanide Springs, New Mexico
.

What am I saying? They were never as good as that. Usually they would commemorate something palpably
obscure and uninteresting – the site of the first Bible college in western Tennessee, the birthplace of the inventor of the moist towelette, the home of the author of the Kansas state song. You knew before you got there that they were going to be boring because if they had been even remotely interesting somebody would have set up a hamburger stand and sold souvenirs. But Dad thrived on them and would never fail to be impressed. After reading them to us he would say in an admiring tone, ‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ and then without fail would pull back onto the highway into the path of an oncoming truck, which would honk furiously and shed part of its load as it swerved past. ‘Yes, that was really very interesting,’ he would add reflectively, unaware that he had just about killed us all.

I was heading for the Booker T. Washington National Monument, a restored plantation near Roanoke where Booker T. Washington grew up. He was a remarkable man. A freed slave, he taught himself to read and write, secured an education and eventually founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the first college in America for blacks. Then, as if that were not achievement enough, he finished his career as a soul musician, churning out a series of hits in the 1960s on the Stax record label with the backup group the MGs. As I say, a remarkable man. My plan was to visit his monument and then zip over to Monticello for a leisurely look around Thomas Jefferson’s home. But it was not to be. Just beyond Patrick Springs, I spied a side road leading to a place called Critz, which I calculated with a glance at the map could cut thirty miles off my driving distance. Impulsively I hauled the car around the corner, making the noise of squealing tyres as I went. I had to make the noise myself because the
Chevette couldn’t manage it, though it did shoot out some blue smoke.

I should have known better. My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz clearly was an incurable disease involving flaking skin. The upshot is that I got hopelessly lost. The road, once I lost sight of the highway, broke up into a network of unsignposted lanes hemmed in by tall grass. I drove for ages, with that kind of glowering, insane resolve that you get when you are lost and become convinced that if you just keep moving you will eventually end up where you want to be. I kept coming to towns that weren’t on my map – Sanville, Pleasantville, Preston. These weren’t two-shack places. They were proper towns, with schools, gas stations, lots of houses. I felt as if I should call the newspaper in Roanoke and inform the editor that I had found a lost county.

Eventually, as I passed through Sanville for the third time, I decided I would have to ask directions. I stopped an old guy taking his dog out to splash urine around the neighbourhood and asked him the way to Critz. Without batting an eyelid he launched into a set of instructions of the most breathtaking complexity. He must have talked for five minutes. It sounded like a description of Lewis and Clark’s journey through the wilderness. I couldn’t follow it at all, but when he paused and said, ‘You with me so far?’ I lied and said I was.

‘Okay, well that takes you to Preston,’ he went on. ‘From there you follow the old drover’s road due east out of town till you come to the McGregor place. You can tell it’s the McGregor place because there’s a sign out front saying: The McGregor Place. About a hundred yards
further on there’s a road going off to the left with a sign for Critz. But whatever you do don’t go down there because the bridge is out and you’ll plunge straight into Dead Man’s Creek.’ And on he went like that for many minutes. When at last he finished I thanked him and drove off without conviction in the general direction of his last gesture. Within 200 yards I had come to a T-junction and didn’t have a clue which way to go. I went right. Ten minutes later, to the surprise of both of us, I was driving past the old guy and his ever-urinating dog again. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him gesturing excitedly, shouting at me that I had gone the wrong way, but as this was already abundantly evident to me, I ignored his hopping around and went left at the junction. This didn’t get me any nearer Critz, but it did provide me with a new set of dead ends and roads to nowhere. At three o’clock in the afternoon, two hours after I set off for Critz, I blundered back onto Highway 58. I was 150 feet further down the road than I had been when I left it. Sourly I pulled back on to the highway and drove for many long hours in silence. It was too late to go to the Booker T. Washington National Monument or to Monticello, even assuming I could summon the intelligence to find them. The day had been a complete washout. I had had no lunch, no life-giving infusions of coffee. It had been a day without pleasure or reward. I got a room in a motel in Fredricksburg, ate at a pancake-house of ineffable crappiness and retired to my room in a dim frame of mind.

In the morning I drove to Colonial Williamsburg, a restored historic village near the coast. It is one of the
most popular tourist attractions in the east and even though it was early on a Tuesday morning in October when I arrived, the car-parks were already filling up. I parked and joined a stream of people following the signs to the visitors’ centre. Inside it was cool and dark. Near the door was a scale model of the village in a glass case. Oddly, there was no you-are-here arrow to help you get oriented. Indeed, the visitors’ centre wasn’t even shown. There was no way of telling where the village was in relation to where you were now. That seemed strange to me and I became suspicious; I stood back and watched the crowds. Gradually it became clear to me that the whole thing was a masterpiece of crowd management. Everything was contrived to leave you with the impression that the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket, pass through a door ominously marked ‘Processing’ and then climb aboard a shuttle bus which would whisk you off to the historic site, presumably some distance away. Unless, like me, you pulled out of the river of people, you found yourself standing at the ticket counter making an instant decision on which of three kinds of ticket to buy – a Patriot’s Pass for $24.50, a Royal Governor’s Pass for $20 or a Basic Admission Ticket for $15.50, each allowing entrance to a different number of restored buildings. Most visitors found themselves parted from a lot of money and standing in the line to the processing doorway before they knew what had hit them.

I hate the way these places let you get all the way there before disclosing just how steep and confiscatory the admission price is. They should be required to put up roadside signs saying
THREE MILES TO COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG. GET YOUR CHEQUE-BOOKS READY
! or
ONE MILE TO COLONIAL
WILLIAMSBURG. IT’S PRETTY GOOD, BUT REAL EXPENSIVE
. I felt that irritation, bordering on wild hate, that I generally experience when money is being tugged out of me through my nostrils. I mean honestly, $24.50 just to walk around a restored village for a couple of hours. I gave silent thanks that I had ditched the wife and kids at Manchester Airport. A day out here with the family could cost almost $75 – and that’s before paying for ice-creams and soft drinks and sweat-shirts saying ‘Boy, Were We Screwed at Colonial Williamsburg’.

There was something wrong with the whole set-up, something deeply fishy about the way it worked. I had lived in America long enough to know that if the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket there would be an enormous sign on the wall saying
YOU
MUST
have a ticket. don’t even
think
about trying to get in without one. But there wasn’t any such sign. I went outside, back out into the bright sunshine, and watched where the shuttle buses were going. They went down the driveway, joined a dual carriageway and disappeared around a bend. I crossed the dual carriageway, dodging the traffic, and followed a path through some woods. In a few seconds I was in the village. It was as simple as that. I didn’t have to pay a penny. Nearby the shuttle buses were unloading ticket-holders. They had had a ride of roughly 200 yards and were about to discover that what their tickets entitled them to do was join long, ill-humoured lines of other ticket-holders standing outside each restored historic building, sweating in silence and shuffling forward at a rate of one step every three minutes. I don’t think I had ever seen quite so many people failing to enjoy themselves. The glacial lines put me
in mind of Disney World, which was not altogether inappropriate since Williamsburg is really a sort of Disney World of American history. All the ticket takers and street sweepers and information givers were dressed in period costumes, the women in big aprons and muffin hats, the men in tri-cornered hats and breeches. The whole idea was to give history a happy gloss and make you think that spinning your own wool and dipping your own candles must have been bags of fun. I half expected to see Goofy and Donald Duck come waddling along dressed as soldiers in the Colonial Army.

The first house I came to had a sign saying
DR MCKENZIE’S APOTHECARY
. The door was open, so I went inside, expecting to see eighteenth-century apothecary items. But it was just a gift shop selling twee reproductions at outrageous prices – brass candle snifters at $28, reproduction apothecary jars at $35, that sort of thing. I fled back outside, wanting to stick my head in Ye Olde Village Puking Trough. But then, slowly and strangely, the place began to grow on me. As I strolled up Duke of Gloucester Street I underwent a surprising transformation. Slowly, I found that I was becoming captivated by it all. Williamsburg is big – 173 acres – and the size of it alone is impressive. There are literally dozens of restored houses and shops. More than that, it really is quite lovely, particularly on a sunny morning in October with a mild wind wandering through the ash and beech trees. I ambled along the leafy lanes and broad greens. Every house was exquisite, every cobbled lane inviting, every tavern and vine-clad shoppe remorselessly a-drip with picturesque charm. It is impossible, even for a flinty-hearted
jerk-off such as your narrator, not to be won over. However dubious Williamsburg may be as a historical document – and it is plenty dubious – it is at least a model town. It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, ‘Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let’s go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings.’ But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.