by Bill Bryson
So I can’t pretend to speak with authority here. All I can tell you is that if Kennebunk Beach in Maine is anything to go by, then American beaches are entirely unlike British ones. To begin with, there was no pier, promenade, or arcades; no shops where everything is miraculously priced at £1; no places to buy saucy postcards or jaunty hats; no tearooms and fish and chip shops; no fortune tellers; no disembodied voice from a bingo parlor breathing out those strange, coded calls: “Number 37—the vicar’s in the shrubs again,” or whatever it is they say.
Indeed, there was nothing commercial at all—just a street lined with big summer homes, a vast, sunny beach, and an infinite and hostile sea beyond.
That isn’t to say the people on the beach—of whom there were many hundreds—were going to go without, for they had brought everything they would ever need again in the way of food, beverages, beach umbrellas, windbreaks, folding chairs, and sleek inflatables. Amundsen went to the South Pole with fewer provisions than most of these people had.
We were a pretty pathetic sight in contrast. Apart from being whiter than an old man’s flanks, we had in the way of equipment just three beach towels and a raffia bag filled, in the English style, with a bottle of sunscreen, an inexhaustible supply of Wet Wipes, spare underpants for everyone (in case of vehicular accidents involving visits to an emergency room), and a modest packet of sandwiches.
Our youngest—whom I’ve taken to calling Jimmy in case he should one day become a libel lawyer—surveyed the scene and said: “OK, Dad, here’s the situation. I need an ice cream cone, an inflatable lounger, a deluxe bucket and spade set, a hot dog, scuba equipment, some cotton candy, a zodiac with an outboard, my own water slide, a cheese pizza with extra cheese, and a bathroom.”
“They don’t have those things here, Jimmy,” I chuckled.
“I really need the bathroom.”
I reported this to my wife. “Then you’ll have to take him to Kennebunkport,” she said serenely from beneath a preposterous sun hat.
Kennebunkport is an old town, at a crossroads, laid out long before anyone thought of the automobile, and some miles from the beach. It was jammed with traffic from all directions. We parked an appallingly vast distance from the center and searched all over for rest rooms. By the time we found a rest room (actually it was the back wall of the Rite-Aid Pharmacy—but please don’t tell my wife), little Jimmy didn’t need to go any longer.
So we returned to the beach. By the time we got there, some hours later, I discovered that everyone had gone off for a swim and there was only one half-eaten sandwich left. I sat on a towel and nibbled at the sandwich.
“Oh, look, Mummy,” said number two daughter gaily when they emerged from the surf a few minutes later, “Daddy’s eating the sandwich the dog had.”
“Tell me this isn’t happening,” I whispered.
“Don’t worry, dear,” my wife said soothingly. “It was an Irish setter. They’re very clean.”
I don’t remember much after that. I had a little nap and woke to find that Jimmy was burying me up to my chest in sand, which was fine except that he had started at my head, and I managed to get so sunburned that a dermatologist invited me to a convention in Cleveland the following week as an exhibit.
We lost the car keys for two hours, the Irish setter came back and stole one of the beach towels, then nipped me on the hand for eating his sandwich, and number two daughter got tar in her hair. It was a typical day at the seaside, in other words. We got home about midnight after an inadvertent detour to the Canadian border—though this at least gave us something to talk about on the long drive across Pennsylvania.
“Lovely,” said my wife. “We must do that again soon.”
And the heartbreaking thing is she really meant it.
This may get a little sentimental, and I’m sorry, but yesterday evening I was working at my desk when my youngest child came up to me, a baseball bat perched on his shoulder and a cap on his head, and asked me if I felt like playing a little ball with him. I was trying to get some important work done before going away on a long trip, and I very nearly declined with regrets, but then it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month, and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
So we went out onto the front lawn and here is where it gets sentimental. There was a kind of beauty about the experience so elemental and wonderful I cannot tell you—the way the evening sun fell across the lawn, the earnest eagerness of his young stance, the fact that we were doing this most quintessentially dad-and-son thing, the supreme contentment of just being together—and I couldn’t believe that it would ever have occurred to me that finishing an article or writing a book or doing anything at all could be more important and rewarding than this.
Now what has brought on all this sudden sensitivity is that a week or so ago we took our eldest son off to a small university in Ohio. He was the first of our four to fly the coop, and now he is gone—grown up, independent, far away—and I am suddenly realizing how quickly they go.
“Once they leave for college they never really come back,” a neighbor who has lost two of her own in this way told us wistfully the other day.
This isn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that they come back a lot, only this time they hang up their clothes, admire you for your intelligence and wit, and no longer have a hankering to sink diamond studs into various odd holes in their heads. But the neighbor was right. He is gone. There is an emptiness in the house that proves it.
I hadn’t expected it to be like this because for the past couple of years even when he was here he wasn’t really here, if you see what I mean. Like most teenagers, he didn’t live in our house in any meaningful sense—more just dropped by a couple of times a day to see what was in the refrigerator or to wander between rooms, a towel round his waist, calling out “Mom, where’s my...?” as in “Mom, where’s my yellow shirt?” and “Mom, where’s my deodorant?” Occasionally I would see the top of his head in an easy chair in front of a television on which Asian people were kicking each other in the heads, but mostly he resided in a place called “Out.”
My role in getting him off to college was simply to write checks—lots and lots of them—and to look suitably pale and aghast as the sums mounted. I was staggered at the cost of sending a child to college these days. Perhaps it is because we live in a community where these matters are treated earnestly, but nearly every college-bound youth in our town goes off and looks at half a dozen or more prospective universities at enormous cost. Then there are fees for college entrance examinations and a separate fee for each university applied to.
But all this pales beside the cost of college itself. My son’s tuition is $19,000 a year, which I am told is actually quite reasonable these days. Some schools charge as much as $28,000 for tuition. Then there is a fee of $3,000 a year for his room, $2,400 for food, $700 or so for books, $650 for health center fees and insurance, and $710 for “activities.” Don’t ask me what that is. I just sign the checks.
Still to come are the costs of flying him to and from Ohio at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, plus all the other incidental expenses like spending money and long-distance phone bills. Already my wife is calling him every other day to ask if he has enough money, when in fact, as I point out, it should be the other way around. And here’s one more thing. Next year, I have a daughter who goes off to college, so I get to do this twice.
So you will excuse me, I hope, when I tell you that the emotional side of this event was rather overshadowed by the ongoing financial shock. It wasn’t until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.
Now that we are home it is even worse. There is no kickboxing on the TV, no astounding clutter of sneakers in the back hallway, no calls of “Mom, where’s my... ?
” from the top of the stairs, no one my size to call me a “doofus” or to say, “Nice shirt, Dad. Did you mug a boat person?” In fact, I see now, I had it exactly wrong. Even when he wasn’t here, he was here, if you see what I mean. And now he is not here at all.
It takes only the simplest things—a wadded-up sweatshirt found behind the backseat of the car, some used chewing gum left in a patently inappropriate place—to make me want to blubber helplessly. Mrs. Bryson, meanwhile, doesn’t need any kind of prod. She just blubbers helplessly.
For the past week I have found myself spending a lot of time wandering aimlessly through the house looking at the oddest things—a basketball, his running trophies, an old holiday snapshot—and thinking about all the carelessly discarded yesterdays they represent. The hard and unexpected part is the realization not just that my son is not here but that the boy he was is gone forever. I would give anything to have them both back. But of course that cannot be. Life moves on. Kids grow up and move away, and if you don’t know this already, believe me, it happens faster than you can imagine.
Which is why, if you will excuse me, I am going to finish here and go off and play a little baseball on the front lawn while the chance is still there.
My father, who like all dads sometimes seemed to be practicing for a World’s Most Boring Man competition, used to have the habit, when I was a boy, of identifying and commenting on the state of origin of all the other cars on any highway we happened to be traveling along.
“Hey, there’s another one from Oregon,” he would say. “That’s three this morning.” Or: “Hey, Mississippi. Now what do you suppose he’s doing way up here?” Then he would look around hopefully to see if anyone wanted to elaborate or offer speculation, but no one ever did. He could go on like that all day, and sometimes did.
I once wrote a book called The Lost Continent in which my father featured for his many interesting and unusual talents when behind the wheel—the unerring ability to get lost in any community larger than, say, a small golf course; to pay repeated inadvertent visits to a set of tollbooths on a bridge to some distant offshore archipelago; to drive the wrong way down a one-way street so many times that eventually merchants would come and watch from their doorways. One of my teenaged children recently read that book for the first time and came with it into the kitchen where my wife was cooking and said in a tone of amazed discovery, “But this is Dad,” meaning, of course, me.
I have to admit it. I have become my father. I even read license plates, though my particular interest is the slogans— “Land of Lincoln” for Illinois, “Vacationland” for Maine, the zippily inane “Shore Thing” for New Jersey. I enjoy making quips and comments on these, so when, for instance, we see “You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania,” I like to turn to the other passengers and say in a wounded tone, “Then why doesn’t he call?” However, I am the only one who finds this an amusing way to pass a long journey.
It’s interesting—well, perhaps not interesting exactly, but certainly a fact—that many states append slogans that are pretty well meaningless. I have never understood what Ohio was thinking when it called itself the “Buckeye State” or Indiana the “Hoosier State,” and I haven’t the remotest idea what New York means by dubbing itself the “Empire State.” As far as I am aware, New York’s many undoubted glories do not include overseas possessions.
Still, I can’t criticize because I live in the state with the most demented of all license plate slogans, the strange and pugnacious “Live Free or Die.” Perhaps I take these things too literally, but I really don’t like driving around with an explicit written vow to expire if things don’t go right. Frankly, I would prefer something a little more equivocal and less terminal—“Live Free or Pout” perhaps, or maybe “Live Free or Bitch Mightily to Anyone Who’ll Listen.”
All this is a somewhat circuitous way of introducing our important topic—namely, how boring it is to make a long car journey these days. If you have been following this space closely (and if not, why not?) you will recall that last week I discussed how we recently drove from New Hampshire to Ohio in order to deliver my eldest son to a university that had offered to house and educate him for the next four years in return for a sum of money not unadjacent to the cost of a moon launch.
What I didn’t tell you then, because I didn’t want to upset you on my first week back from vacation, is what a nightmare experience it was. Now please understand, I am as fond of my wife and children as the next man, no matter how much they cost me per annum in footwear and Nintendo games (which is, frankly, a lot), but that isn’t to say that I wish to pass a week with them ever again in a sealed metal chamber on an American highway.
The trouble is not my family, I hasten to add, but the American highway. Boy, are highways dull. Part of the problem is that they are so very long—it is 850 miles from New Hampshire to central Ohio and, I can now personally attest, just as far back—but mostly it is because there is so little to get excited about along the way.
It didn’t used to be like this. When I was a boy, the highways of America were scattered with diversions. They weren’t always very good diversions, but that didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that they were there.
At some point on every day, you could count on seeing a billboard that would say something like: “Visit World-Famous Atomic Rock—It Really Glows!” A few miles farther on there would be another billboard saying: “See the Rock That Has Baffled Science! Only 65 Miles!” This one would have a picture of a grave-looking scientist with a cartoon bubble beside his head confiding: “It Is Truly a Marvel of Nature!” or “I Am Quite Baffled!”
A few miles beyond that would be: “Experience the Atomic Rock Force Field—If You Dare! Just 44 Miles!” This one would show a man, interestingly not unlike one’s own father, being violently flung back by some strange radiant force. In smaller letters would be the warning: “Caution: May Not Be Suitable for Small Children.”
Well, that would be it. My big brother and sister, squeezed in to the backseat with me and having exhausted all the possibilities for diversion that came with holding me down and drawing vivid geometric patterns on my face, arms, and stomach with a felt marking pen, would set up a clamor to see this world-famous attraction, and I would weakly chime in.
The people who put up these billboards were brilliant, among the greatest marketing geniuses of our age. They knew precisely—to the mile, I would guess—how long it would take a carful of children to wear down a father’s profound and inevitable opposition to visiting something that was going to waste time and cost money. The upshot, in any case, is that we always went.
The world-famous Atomic Rock would of course be nothing like the advertised attraction. It would be almost comically smaller than illustrated and wouldn’t glow at all. It would be fenced off, ostensibly for the safety of onlookers, and the fence would be covered with warnings saying: “Caution: Dangerous Force Field! Approach No Farther!” But there would always be some kid who would crawl under the fence and go up and touch it, indeed clamber all over it, without being flung aside or suffering any other evident consequences. As a rule, my extravagant felt-pen tattoos would draw more interest from the crowd.
So in exasperation my father would pile us all back into the car vowing never to be duped like this again, and we would drive on until, some hours later, we would pass a billboard that said: “Visit World-Famous Singing Sands! Only 97 Miles!” and the cycle would start again.
Out west, in really boring states like Nebraska and Kansas, people could put up signs saying pretty much anything—“See the Dead Cow! Hours of Fun for the Whole Family!” or “Plank of Wood! Just 132 Miles!” Over the years, I recall, we visited a dinosaur footprint, a painted desert, a petrified frog, a hole in the ground that claimed to be the world’s deepest well, and a house made entirely of beer bottles. In fact, from some of our vacations that is all I can remember.
These things were always disappointing, but that wasn’t the point. You weren’t paying seven
ty-five cents for the experience. You were paying seventy-five cents as a kind of tribute, a thanks to the imaginative person who had helped you to pass 127 miles of uneventful highway in a state of genuine excitement, and, in my case, without being drawn on. My father never understood this. Now, I regret to say, my children don’t understand it either. On this trip as we drove across Pennsylvania, a state so ludicrously vast that it takes a whole day to traverse, we passed a sign that said: “Visit World-Famous Roadside America! Just 79 Miles!”
I had no idea what Roadside America was, and it wasn’t even on our route, but I insisted that we make a detour to go there. These things simply don’t exist any longer. Nowadays the most exciting thing you can hope to get along the highway is a McDonald’s Happy Meal. So something like Roadside America, whatever it might be, is to be devoutly cherished. The great irony is that I was the only one in the car, and by a considerable margin, who wanted to see it.
Roadside America turned out to be a large model railway, with little towns and tunnels, farms with miniature cows and sheep, and lots of trains going around in endless circles. It was a little dusty and ill-lit but charming in a not-touched-since-1957 sort of way. We were the only customers that day, possibly the only customers for many days. I loved it.
“Isn’t this great?” I said to my youngest daughter.
“Dad, you are, like, so pathetic,” she said sadly and went out.
I turned hopefully to her little brother, but he just shook his head and followed.
I was disappointed, naturally, that they weren’t moved by the experience. But I think I know what to do next time. I’ll hold them down for two hours beforehand and draw all over them with a felt marking pen. Then, believe me, they’ll appreciate any kind of highway diversion.
Ah, autumn!
Every year about this time, for a tantalizingly short while—a week or two at most—an amazing thing happens here. The whole of New England explodes in color. All those trees that for months have formed a somber green backdrop suddenly burst into a million glowing tints and the country-side, as Frances Trollope put it, “goes to glory.”
