The Lost Continent (25 page)

At Toledo, I joined Interstate 75, and drove north into Michigan, heading for Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, where I intended spending the night. Almost immediately I found myself in a wilderness of warehouses and railroad
tracks and enormous parking lots leading to distant car factories. The parking lots were so vast and full of cars that I half wondered if the factories were there just to produce sufficient cars to keep the parking lots full, thus eliminating any need for consumers. Interlacing all this were towering electricity pylons. If you have ever wondered what becomes of all those pylons you see marching off to the horizon in every country in the world, like an army of invading aliens, the answer is that they all join up in a field just north of Toledo, where they discharge their loads into a vast estate of electrical transformers, diodes and other contraptions that look for all the world like the inside of a television set, only on a rather grander scale, of course. The ground fairly thrummed as I drove past and I fancied I felt a crackle of blue static sweep through the car, briefly enlivening the hair on the back of my neck and leaving a strangely satisfying sensation in my armpits. I was half inclined to turn around at the next intersection and go back for another dose. But it was late and I pressed on. For some minutes I thought I smelled smouldering flesh and kept touching my head tentatively. But this may only have been a consequence of having spent too many lonely hours in a car.

At Monroe, a town halfway between Toledo and Detroit, a big sign beside the highway said
WELCOME TO MONROE – HOME OF GENERAL CUSTER
. A mile or so later there was another sign, even larger, saying
MONROE, MICHIGAN – HOME OF LA-Z-BOY FURNITURE
. Goodness, I thought, will the excitement never stop? But it did, and the rest of the journey was completed without drama.

I SPENT THE
night in Dearborn for two reasons. First, it would mean not having to spend the night in Detroit, the city with the highest murder rate in the country. In 1987, there were 635 homicides in Detroit, a rate of 58.2 per 100,000 people, or eight times the national average. Just among children, there were 365 shootings in which both the victims and gunmen were under sixteen. We are talking about a tough city – and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn’t bear thinking about. People will have to start carrying bazookas for protection.

My second and more compelling reason for going to Dearborn was to see the Henry Ford Museum, a place my father had taken us when I was small and which I remembered fondly. After breakfast in the morning, I went straight there. Henry Ford spent his later years buying up important Americana by the truckload and crating it to his museum, beside the big Ford Motor Company Rouge Assembly Plant. The car-park outside the museum was enormous – on a scale to rival the factory car-parks I had passed the day before – but at this time of year there were few cars in it. Most of them were Japanese.

I went inside and discovered without surprise that the entrance charge was steep: $15 for adults and $7.50 for children. Americans are clearly prepared to fork out large
sums for their pleasures. Grudgingly I paid the admission charge and went in. But almost from the moment I passed through the portals I was enthralled. For one thing, the scale of it is almost breathtaking. You find yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff – machinery, railway trains, refrigerators, Abraham Lincoln’s rocking-chair, the limousine in which John F. Kennedy was killed (nope, no bits of brain on the floor), George Washington’s campaign chest, General Tom Thumb’s ornate miniature billiard-table, a bottle containing Thomas Edison’s last breath. I found this last item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison’s last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the death-bed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, ‘Is that it?’

This was the way the Smithsonian once was and still should be – a cross between an attic and a junk shop. It was as if some scavenging genius had sifted through all the nation’s collective memories and brought to this one place everything from American life that was splendid and fine and deserving fondness. It was possible here to find every single item from my youth – old comic books, lunch pails, bubble gum cards,
Dick and Jane
reading books, a Hot-point stove just like the one my mom used to have, a soda pop dispenser like the one that used to stand in front of the pool hall in Winfield.

There were even a collection of milk bottles exactly like those that Mr Morrisey, the deaf milkman, used to bring to our house every morning. Mr Morrisey was the noisiest milkman in America. He was about sixty years old and
wore a large hearing-aid. He always travelled with his faithful dog Skipper. They would arrive like clockwork just before dawn. Milk had to be delivered early, you see, because in the Midwest it spoiled quickly once the sun came up. You always knew when it was 5.30 because Mr Morrisey would arrive, whistling for all he was worth, waking all the dogs for blocks around, which would get Skipper very excited and set him to barking. Being deaf, Mr Morrisey tended not to notice his own voice and you could hear him clinking around on your back porch with his rack of milk bottles and saying to Skipper, ‘WELL, I WONDER WHAT THE BRYSONS WANT TODAY! LET’S SEE . . . FOUR QUARTS OF SKIMMED AND SOME COTTAGE CHEESE. WELL, SKIPPER, WOULD YOU FUCKING BELIEVE IT, I LEFT THE COTTAGE CHEESE ON THE GOD DAMN TRUCK!’ And then you would look out the window to see Skipper urinating on your bicycle and lights coming on in houses all over the neighbourhood. Nobody wanted to get Mr Morrisey fired, on account of his unfortunate disability, but when Flynn Dairies discontinued home deliveries in about 1960 on economic grounds ours was one of the few neighbourhoods in the city from which there was no outcry.

I walked through the museum in a state of sudden, deep admiration for Henry Ford and his acquisitive instincts. He may have been a bully and an anti-Semite, but he sure could build a nifty museum. I could happily have spent hours picking around among the memorabilia. But the hangar is only a fractional part of it. Outside there is a whole village – a little town – containing eighty homes of famous Americans. These are the actual homes, not replicas. Ford criss-crossed the country acquiring the
residences and workshops of the people he most admired – Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Luther Burbank, the Wright brothers and of course himself. All these he crated up and shipped back to Dearborn where he used them to build this 250-acre fantasy land – the quintessential American small town, a picturesque and timeless community where every structure houses a man of genius (almost invariably a white, Christian man of genius from the Middle West). Here in this perfect place, with its broad greens and pleasing shops and churches, the lucky resident could call on Orville and Wilbur Wright for a bicycle inner tube, go to the Firestone farm for milk and eggs (but not for rubber yet – Harvey’s still working on it!), borrow a book from Noah Webster and call on Abraham Lincoln for legal advice, always assuming he’s not too busy with patent applications for Charles Steinmetz or emancipating George Washington Carver, who lives in a tiny cabin just across the street.

It is really quite entrancing. For a start, places like Edison’s workshop and the boarding-house where his employees lodged have been scrupulously preserved. You can really see how these people worked and lived. And there is a certain undeniable convenience in having the houses all brought together. Who in a million years would go to Columbiana, Ohio, to see the Harvey Firestone birthplace, or to Dayton to see where the Wright brothers lived? Not me, brother. Above all, bringing these places together makes you realize just how incredibly inventive America has been in its time, what a genius it has had for practical commercial innovation, often leading to unspeakable wealth, and how many of the comforts and pleasures of modern life have their roots in the small
towns of the American Middle West. It made me feel proud.

I drove north and west across Michigan lost in a warm after-glow of pleasure from the museum. I was past Lansing and Grand Rapids and entering the Manistee National Forest, 100 miles away, almost before I knew it. Michigan is shaped like an oven mitt and is often about as exciting. The Manistee forest was dense and dull – endless groves of uniform pine trees – and the highway through it was straight and flat. Occasionally I would see a cabin or little lake in the woods, both just glimpsable through the trees, but mostly there was nothing of note. Towns were rare and mostly squalid – scattered dwellings and ugly prefab buildings where they made and sold ugly prefab cabins, so that people could buy their own little bit of ugliness and take it out into the woods.

After Baldwin, the road became wider and emptier and the commercialism grew sparser. At Manistee, the highway ran down to Lake Michigan, and then followed the shoreline off and on for miles, going through rather more pleasant little communities of mostly boarded-up summer homes – Pierport, Arcadia, Elberta (‘A Peach of A Place’), Frankfort. At Empire I stopped to look at the lake. The weather was surprisingly cold. A blustery wind blew in from Wisconsin, seventy miles away across the steely grey water, raising white caps and wavelets. I tried to go for a stroll, but I was only out for about five minutes before the wind blew me back to the car.

I went on to Traverse City, where the weather was milder, perhaps because it was more sheltered. Traverse City looked to be a wonderful old town that seemed not to
have changed since about 1948. It still had a Woolworth’s, a J.C. Penney, an old-fashioned movie theatre called The State and a wonderful old restaurant, the Sydney, with black booths and a long soda-fountain. You just don’t see places like that any more. I had coffee and felt very pleased to be there. Afterwards I drove on north on a road running up one side of Grand Traverse Bay and down the other, so that you could always see where you were going or where you had been, sometimes veering inland past farms and cherry orchards for a couple of miles and then sweeping back down to the water’s edge. As the afternoon progressed, the wind settled and the sun came out, tentatively at first, like a shy guest, and then stayed on, giving the lake bright patches of silver and blue. Far out over the water, perhaps twenty miles away, dark clouds dumped rain on the lake. It fell in a pale grey curtain. And high above a faint rainbow reached across the sky. It was inexpressibly beautiful. I drove transfixed.

In the early evening I reached Mackinaw City, on the tip of the oven mitt, the point where the shorelines of southern and northern Michigan pinch together to form the Straits of Mackinac, which separate Lake Michigan from Lake Huron. A suspension bridge, five miles long, spans the gap. Mackinaw City – they are fairly casual about how they spell the word up this way – was a scattered and unsightly little town, full of gift shops, motels, ice-cream parlours, pizzerias, carparks, and firms operating ferries to Mackinac Island. Almost every place of business, including the motels, was boarded up for the winter. The Holiday Motel, on the shore of Lake Huron, seemed to be open so I went inside and rang the desk bell. The young guy who came
out looked surprised to have a customer. ‘We were just about to close up for the season,’ he said. ‘In fact, everybody’s gone out to dinner to celebrate. But we’ve got rooms if you want one.’

‘How much?’ I asked.

He seemed to snatch a figure from the air. ‘Twenty dollars?’ he said.

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said and signed in. The room was small but nice and it had heating, which was a good thing. I went out and had a walk around, to look for something to eat. It was only a little after seven, but it was dark already and the chill air felt more like December than October. I could see my breath. It was odd to be in a place so full of buildings and yet so dead. Even the McDonald’s was closed, with a sign in the window telling me to have a good winter.

I walked down to the Shepler’s Ferry terminal – really just a big parking lot with a shed – to see what time the ferry to Mackinac Island would depart in the morning. That was my reason for being here. There was one at eleven. I stood beside the pier, facing into the wind, and gazed for a long time out across Lake Huron. Mackinac Island was berthed a couple of miles out in the lake like a glittering cruiseship. Nearby, even larger but with no lights, was Bois Blanc Island, dark and round. Off to the left, Mackinac Bridge, lit up like a Christmas decoration, spanned the strait. Everywhere the lights shimmered on the water. It was odd that such a nothing little town could have such a wonderful view.

I ate dinner in a practically empty restaurant and then had some beers in a practically empty bar. Both places had turned on the heating. It felt good, cosy. Outside the wind
beat against the plate glass windows, making a woppa-woppa sound. I liked the quiet bar. Most bars in America are dark and full of moody characters – people drinking alone and staring ahead. There’s none of that agreeable coffee-house atmosphere that you find in bars in Europe. American bars are, by and large, just dark places to get drunk in. I don’t like them much, but this one was OK. It was snug and quiet and well lit, so I could sit and read. Before too long I was fairly well lit myself. This was also OK.

In the morning I woke early and gave the steamy window a wipe with my hand to see what kind of day it was. The answer was: not a good one. The world was full of sleety snow, dancing about in the wind like a plague of white insects. I switched on the TV and crept back into the warm bed. The local PBS station came on. PBS is the Public Broadcasting System, what we used to call educational TV. It is supposed to show quality stuff, though because it is always strapped for funds this consists mostly of BBC melodramas starring Susan Hampshire and domestically-produced programmes that cost about $12 to make – cookery programmes, religious discussions, local high school wrestling matches. It’s pretty well unwatchable most of the time, and it’s getting worse. In fact, the station I was watching was holding a telethon to raise funds for itself. Two middle-aged men in casual clothes were sitting in swivel chairs, with a pair of phones on a table between them, asking for money. They were trying to look perky and cheerful, but there was a kind of desperation in their eyes.