The Lost Continent (6 page)

I strolled around the business district. The whole area was a dispiriting combination of auto parts stores, empty buildings and vacant lots. I had always thought that all river towns, even the poor ones, had something about them – a kind of faded elegance, a raffish air – that made them more interesting than other towns, that the river served as a conduit to the larger world and washed up a more interesting and sophisticated brand of detritus. But not Hannibal. It had obviously had better days, but even they couldn’t have been all that great. The Hotel Mark Twain was boarded up. That’s a sad sight – a tall building with every window plugged with plywood. Every business in town appeared to trade on Twain and his books – the Mark Twain Roofing Company, the Mark Twain Savings and Loan, the Tom ’n’ Huck Motel, the Injun Joe Campground and Go-Kart Track, the Huck Finn Shopping Center. You could even go and be insane at the Mark Twain Mental Health Center – a possibility that would, I imagine, grow increasingly likely with every day spent in Hannibal. The whole place was sad and awful. I had been planning to stay for lunch, but the thought of having to face a Tom Sawyer
Burger or Injun Joe Cola left me without any appetite for either food or Hannibal.

I walked back to the car. Every parked car along the street had a licence plate that said ‘Missouri – the Show Me State’. I wondered idly if this could be short for ‘Show Me the Way to Any Other State’. In any case, I crossed the Mississippi – still muddy, still strangely unimpressive – on a long, high bridge and turned my back on Missouri without regret. On the other side a sign said
BUCKLE UP. ITS THE LAW IN ILLINOIS
. Just beyond it another said
AND WE STILL CAN’T PUNCTUATE
.

I plunged east into Illinois. I was heading for Springfield, the state capital, and New Salem, a restored village where Abraham Lincoln lived as a young man. My dad had taken us there when I was about five and I thought it was wonderful. I wondered if it still was. I also wanted to see if Springfield was in any way an ideal town. One of the things I was looking for on this trip was the perfect town. I’ve always felt certain that somewhere out there in America it must exist. When I was small,
WHO TV
in Des Moines used to show old movies every afternoon after school, and when other children were out playing kick the can or catching bullfrogs or encouraging little Bobby Birnbaum to eat worms (something he did with surprising amenability), I was alone in a curtained room in front of the TV, lost in a private world, with a plate of Oreo cookies on my lap and Hollywood magic flickering on my glasses. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the films
WHO
showed were mostly classic –
The Best Years of Our Lives
,
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
,
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, It Happened One Night
. The one constant in these pictures was the
background. It was always the same place, a trim and sunny little city with a tree-lined Main Street full of friendly merchants (‘Good morning, Mrs Smith!’) and a courthouse square, and wooded neighbourhoods where fine houses slumbered beneath graceful elms. There was always a paper-boy on a bike slinging papers onto front porches, and a genial old fart in a white apron sweeping the sidewalk in front of his drugstore and two men striding briskly past. These two background men always wore suits, and they always strode smartly, never strolled or ambled, but strode in perfect harmony. They were really good at it. No matter what was going on in the foreground – Humphrey Bogart blowing away a bad guy with a .45, Jimmy Stewart earnestly explaining his ambitions to Donna Read, W.C. Fields lighting a cigar with the cellophane still on it – the background was always this timeless, tranquil place. Even in the midst of the most dreadful crises, when monster ants were at large in the streets or buildings were collapsing from some careless scientific experiment out at State University, you could still generally spot the paper-boy slinging newspapers somewhere in the background and those two guys in suits striding along like Siamese twins. They were absolutely imperturbable.

And it wasn’t just in the movies. Everybody on TV – Ozzie and Harriet, Wally and Beaver Cleaver, George Burns and Gracie Allen – lived in this middle-class Elysium. So did the people in the advertisements in magazines and on the commercials on television and in the Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of the
Saturday Evening Post
. In books it was the same. I used to read Hardy Boys mysteries one after the other, not for the plots, which even at the age of eight I could see were ridiculously improbable (‘Say,
Frank, do you suppose those fellows with the funny accents that we saw at Moose Lake yesterday weren’t really fishermen, but German spies, and that the girl in the bottom of their canoe with the bandage around her mouth wasn’t really suffering from pyorrhoea but was actually Dr Rorschack’s daughter? I’ve got a funny feeling those fellows might even be able to tell us a thing or two about the missing rocket fuel!’). No, I read them for Franklin W. Dixon’s evocative, albeit incidental, descriptions of Bayport, the Hardy Boys’ home town, a place inexpressibly picturesque, where houses with porch swings and picket fences peeked out on a blue sweep of bay full of sail-boats and skimming launches. It was a place of constant adventures and summers without end.

It began to bother me that I had never seen this town. Every year on vacation we would drive hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country, in an insane pursuit of holiday happiness, toiling over blue hills and brown prairies, through towns and cities without number, but without ever going through anywhere even remotely like that dreamy town in the movies. The places we passed through were hot and dusty and full of scrawny dogs, closed-down movie theatres, grubby diners and gas stations that looked as if they would be grateful to get two customers a week. But I felt sure that it must exist somewhere. It was inconceivable that a nation so firmly attached to small-town ideals, so dedicated in its fantasies to small-town notions, could not have somewhere built one perfect place – a place of harmony and industry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories and drive-in churches, without Kwik-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the
other. In this timeless place Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred Macmurray the high school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on a bike and those two smartly striding men. The place I was looking for would be an amalgam of all those towns I had encountered in fiction. Indeed, that might well be its name – Amalgam, Ohio, or Amalgam, North Dakota. It could exist almost anywhere, but it had to exist. And on this trip, I intended to find it.

I drove and drove, through flat farming country and little towns devoid of life: Hull, Pittsfield, Barry, Oxville. On my map, Springfield was about two inches to the right of Hannibal, but it seemed to take hours to get there. In fact it does take hours to get there. I was only slowly adjusting to the continental scale of America, where states are the size of countries. Illinois is nearly twice as big as Austria, four times the size of Switzerland. There is so much emptiness, so much space between towns. You go through a little place and the dinette looks crowded, so you think, ‘Oh, I’ll wait till I get to Fuddville before I stop for coffee,’ because it’s only just down the road, and then you get out on the highway and a sign says
FUDDVILLE
102
MILES
. And you realize that you are dealing with another scale of geography altogether. There is a corresponding lack of detail on the maps. On British maps every church and public house is dutifully recorded. Rivers of laughable minuteness – rivers you can step across – are landmarks of importance,
known for miles around. In America whole towns go missing – places with schools, businesses, hundreds of quiet little lives, just vanish, as effectively as if they had been vaporized.

And the system of roads is only cruelly hinted at. You look at the map and think you spy a short cut between, say, Weinerville and Bewilderment, a straight grey line of county road that promises to shave thirty minutes from your driving time. But when you leave the main highway, you find yourself in a network of unrecorded back roads, radiating out across the countryside like cracks in a pane of broken glass.

The whole business of finding your way around becomes laden with frustration, especially away from the main roads. Near Jacksonville I missed a left turn for Springfield and had to go miles out of my way to get back to where I wanted to be. This happens a lot in America. The highway authorities are curiously reluctant to impart much in the way of useful information, like where you are or what road you are on. This is all the more strange when you consider that they are only too happy to provide all kinds of peripheral facts –
NOW ENTERING BUBB COUNTY SOIL CONSERVATION DISTRICT, NATIONAL SPRAT HATCHERY
5
MILES, NO PARKING WED
3
A.M. TO
6
A.M., DANGER: LOW-FLYING GEESE, NOW LEAVING BUBB COUNTY SOIL CONSERVATION DISTRICT
. Often on country roads you will come to a crossroads without signposts and then have to drive twenty miles or more without having any confidence in where you are. And then abruptly, without warning, you round a bend and find yourself at an eight-lane intersection with fourteen traffic lights and the most bewildering assortment of signs, all with arrows pointing in different directions. Lake
Maggot State Park this way. Curtis Dribble Memorial Expressway over there. US Highway 41 South. US Highway 53 North. Interstate 11/78. Business District this way. Dextrose County Teachers’ College that way. Junction 17 West. Junction 17 Not West. No U-Turn. Left Lane Must Turn Left. Buckle Your Seat Belt. Sit Up Straight. Did You Brush Your Teeth This Morning?

Just as you realize that you should be three lanes to the left, the lights change and you are swept off with the traffic, like a cork on a fast river. This sort of thing used to happen to my father all the time. I don’t think Dad ever went through a really big and important intersection without getting siphoned off to somewhere he didn’t want to be – a black hole of one-way streets, an expressway into the desert, a long and expensive toll bridge to some offshore island, necessitating an embarrassing and costly return trip. (‘Hey, mister, didn’t you come through here a minute ago from the other direction?’) My father’s particular speciality was the ability to get hopelessly lost without ever actually losing sight of the target. He never arrived at an amusement park or tourist attraction without first approaching it from several directions, like a pilot making passes over an unfamiliar airport. My sister and brother and I, bouncing on the back seat, could always see it on the other side of the freeway and cry, ‘There it is! There it is!’ Then after a minute we would spy it from another angle on the far side of a cement works. And then across a broad river. And then on the other side of the freeway again. Sometimes all that would separate us from our goal would be a high chain-link fence. On the other side you could see happy, carefree families parking their cars and getting ready for a wonderful day. ‘How did they get in there?’
my dad would cry, the veins of his forehead lively. ‘Why can’t the city put up some signs, for Christ’s sake? It’s no wonder you can’t find your way into the place,’ he would add, conveniently overlooking the fact that 18,000 other people, some of them of decidedly limited mental acuity, had managed to get on to the right side of the barbed wire without too much difficulty.

Springfield was a disappointment. I wasn’t really surprised. If it were a nice place, someone would have said to me, ‘Say, you should go to Springfield. It’s a nice place.’ I had high hopes for it only because I had always thought it sounded promising. In a part of the world where so many places have harsh, foreign-sounding names full of hard consonants – De Kalb, Du Quoin, Keokuk, Kankakee – Springfield is a little piece of poetry, a name suggesting grassy meadows and cool waters. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. Like all small American cities, it had a downtown of parking lots and tallish buildings surrounded by a sprawl of shopping centres, gas stations and fast food joints. It was neither offensive nor charming. I drove around a little bit, but finding nothing worth stopping for, I drove on to New Salem, twelve miles to the north.

New Salem had a short and not very successful life. The original settlers intended to cash in on the river trade that passed by, but in fact the river trade did just that – passed by – and the town never prospered. In 1837 it was abandoned and would no doubt have been lost to history altogether except that one of its residents from 1831 to 1837 was a young Abraham Lincoln. So now, on a 620-acre site, New Salem has been rebuilt just as it was when Lincoln lived there, and you can go and see why everybody
was pretty pleased to clear off. Actually it was very nice. There were about thirty or forty log cabins distributed around a series of leafy clearings. It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon, with a warm breeze and soft sunlight adrift in the trees. It all looked impossibly quaint and appealing. You are not allowed to go in the houses. Instead you walk up to each one and peer through the windows or front door and you get an idea of what life was like for the people who lived there. Mostly it must have been pretty uncomfortable. Every house had a sign telling you about its residents. The historical research was impressively diligent. The only problem was that it all became a little repetitive after a while. Once you have looked through the windows of fourteen log cabins, you find yourself approaching number fifteen with a certain diminution of enthusiasm, and by the time you reach number twenty it is really only politeness that impels you onward. Since they’ve taken the trouble to build all these cabins and scour the country digging out old rocking-chairs and chamber-pots, you feel that the least you can do is walk around and feign interest at each one. But in your heart you are really thinking that if you never saw a log cabin again you’d be pretty damn pleased. I’m sure that was what Lincoln was thinking when he packed his cases and decided not to be a backwoods merchant any more, but to take up a more rewarding career emancipating Negroes and being President.