by Bill Bryson
But what really sets the Opryland apart is that it is a Total Indoor Environment. At its heart are three stupendously commodious glass-roofed atriums, five or six stories high and extending to nine acres overall, which offer all the benefits of the out-of-doors without any of the inconveniences. These “interiorscapes,” as the hotel fondly calls them, are replete with tropical foliage, full-sized trees, waterfalls, streams, “open-air” restaurants and cafes, and multilevel walkways. The effect is strikingly reminiscent of those illustrations you used to get in Popular Science magazine in the 1950s showing what life would be like in a space colony on Venus (or at least what it would be like if all the space colonists were overweight middle-aged people in Nike sneakers and baseball caps who spent their lives walking around eating handheld food). It is, in short, a flawless, aseptic, self-contained world, with a perfect unvarying climate and an absence of messy birds, annoying insects, irksome and unpredictable weather, or indeed any kind of reality.
On my first evening, anxious to escape the hordes of shuffling grazers and curious to see what the weather was like back on Planet Earth, I stepped outside with a view to having a stroll through the grounds. And guess what? There were no grounds—just acres and acres of parking lot, stretching away to an unseen horizon like a great inland sea. A couple of hundred yards away was the perimeter fence of the Opryland Amusement Park, but there was no foot access to the park from the hotel. The only way of getting there, I discovered by inquiring, was to purchase a $3 ticket and board an air-conditioned bus for a forty-five-second ride to the front gate.
Unless you wanted to walk around among thousands and thousands of parked cars, there was no place to take the air or stretch your legs. At Opryland, the outdoors is indoors, and that, I realized with a shiver, is precisely the way many millions of people would have the whole world if it were possible.
As I stood there, a bird dropped onto the toe of my left shoe the sort of thing you don’t normally appreciate a bird’s dropping (to coin a phrase). I looked from the sky to my shoe and back to the sky again.
“Thank you,” I said, and I believe I nearly meant it.
The last time it occurred to me, in a serious way, that Death is out there—you know, really out there, just hovering—and that my name is in his book, was on a short flight from Boston to Lebanon, New Hampshire, when we got in a little trouble.
The flight is only fifty minutes, over the old industrial towns of northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, and on toward the Connecticut River, where the plump hills of the Green and White Mountains lazily merge. It was a late October afternoon, just after the clocks had changed for winter, and I had rather hoped I might enjoy the last russety blush of autumn color on the hills before the daylight went, but within five minutes of takeoff our little sixteen-seater plane was enveloped in bouncy clouds, and it was obvious that there would be no spectacular panoramas this day.
So I read a book and tried not to notice the turbulence or to let my thoughts preoccupy themselves with unhappy fantasies involving splintering wings and a long, shrill, vertical plunge to earth.
I hate little planes. I don’t like most planes much, but little planes I dread because they are cold and bouncy and make odd noises, and they carry too few passengers to attract more than passing attention when they crash, as they seem to do quite regularly. Almost every day in any newspaper you will see an article like this:
Dribbleville, Indiana—All nine passengers and crew died today when a 16-seat commuter plane operated by Bounce Airlines crashed in a ball of flames shortly after takeoff from Dribbleville Regional Airport. Witnesses said the plane did four figure eights in the sky, then fell for, oh gosh, a really long time before slamming into the ground at 1,892 miles an hour. It was the eleventh little-noted crash by a commuter airline since Sunday.
These things really do go down all the time. In 1997, a commuter plane crashed on a flight from Cincinnati to Detroit. One of the passengers who died was on her way to a memorial service for her brother, who had been killed in a crash in West Virginia two weeks before.
So I tried to read my book, but I kept glancing out the window into the impenetrable murk. something over an hour into the flight—later than usual—we descended through the bumpy clouds and popped out into clear air. We were only a few hundred feet over a dusky landscape. There were one or two farmhouses visible in the last traces of daylight, but no towns. Mountains, severe and muscular, loomed up around us on all sides.
We rose back up into the clouds, flew around for a few minutes, and dropped down again. There was still no sign of Lebanon or any other community, which was perplexing because the Connecticut River Valley is full of little towns. Here there was nothing but darkening forest stretching to every horizon.
We rose again, and repeated the exercise twice more. After a few minutes, the pilot came on and in that calm, unflappable voice of airline pilots said: “I don’t know if you folks have noticed, but we’re, ah, having a little trouble eyeballing the airport on account of the, ah, inclement weather. There’s no radar at Lebanon, so we have to do all of this visually, which makes it a little, ah, tricky. The whole of the eastern seaboard is socked in with fog, so there’s no point in trying another air-port. Anyway, we’re gonna keep trying because if there is one thing for certain it’s that sooner or later this baby is going to have to come down somewhere!”
Actually, I just made that last line up, but that was the gist of it. We were blundering around in clouds and dying light looking for an airport tucked among mountains. We had been in the air for almost ninety minutes by now. I didn’t know how long these things could fly, but at some point clearly we would run out of fuel. Meanwhile, at any moment we could, in the course of our blundering drops through the clouds, slam into the side of a mountain.
This didn’t seem fair. I was on my way home from a long trip. Scrubbed little children, smelling of soap and fresh towels, would be waiting. There was steak for dinner, possibly with onion rings. Extra wine had been laid in. I had gifts to disburse. This was not a convenient time to be flying into mountains. So I shut my eyes and said in a very sincere inner voice: “Please oh please oh please oh please get this thing down safely, and I will be exceptionally good forever, and I really mean it. Thank you.”
And miraculously it worked. On about the sixth occasion that we popped from the clouds, there below us were the flat roofs, illuminated signs, and gorgeously tubby customers of the Kmart Shopping Plaza, and just across the road from it was the perimeter fence of the airport. We were aimed slightly the wrong way, but the pilot banked sharply and brought the plane in on a glidepath that would, in any other circumstance, have had me shrieking.
We landed with a lovely smooth squeal. I have never been so happy. My wife was waiting for me in the car outside the airport entrance, and on the way home I told her all about my gripping adventure in the sky. The trouble with believing that you are about to die in a crash, as opposed to actually dying in a crash, is that it doesn’t make nearly as good a story.
“You poor sweetie,” my wife said soothingly, but just a little distractedly, and patted my leg. “Well, you’ll be home in a minute and there’s a lovely cauliflower supreme in the oven for you.”
I looked at her. “Cauliflower supreme? What the—” I cleared my throat and put on a new voice. “And what is cauliflower supreme exactly, dear? I understood we were having steak.”
“We were, but this is much healthier for you. Maggie Higgins gave me the recipe.”
I sighed. Maggie Higgins was a health-conscious busybody whose assertive views on diet were forever being translated into dishes like cauliflower supreme for me. She was fast becoming the bane of my life, or at least of my stomach.
Life’s a funny thing, isn’t it? One minute you’re praying to be allowed to live, vowing to face any hardship without complaint, and the next you are mentally banging your head on the dashboard and thinking: “I wanted steak, I wanted steak, I wanted steak.”
“Did I tell you, by the way,” my wife went on, “that Maggie fell asleep with hair coloring on the other day and her hair turned bright green?”
“Really?” I said, perking up a little. This was good news indeed. “Bright green, you say?”
“Well, everyone told her it was lemony, but really, you know, it looked like Astroturf.”
“Amazing,” I said—and it was. I mean to say, two prayers answered in one day.
A couple of years ago, when I was sent ahead of the rest of the family to scout out a place for us to live, I included the town of Adams, Massachusetts, as a possibility because it had a wonderful old-fashioned diner on Main Street.
Unfortunately, I was compelled to remove Adams from the short list when I was unable to recall a single other virtue in the town, possibly because it didn’t have any. Still, I believe I would have been happy there. Diners tend to take you like that.
Diners were once immensely popular, but like so much else they have become increasingly rare. Their heyday was the years between the wars, when Prohibition shut the taverns and people needed some place else to go for lunch. From a business point of view, diners were an appealing proposition. They were cheap to buy and maintain and, because they were factory built, they came virtually complete. Having acquired one, all you had to do was set it on a level piece of ground, hook up water and electricity, and you were in business. If trade didn’t materialize, you simply loaded it onto a flatbed truck and tried your luck elsewhere. By the late 1920s, about a score of companies were mass-producing diners, nearly all in a streamlined art deco style known as moderne, with gleaming stainless-steel exteriors, and insides of polished dark wood and more shiny metal.
Diner enthusiasts are a somewhat obsessive breed. They can tell you whether a particular diner is a 1947 Kullman Blue Comet or a 1932 Worcester Semi-Streamliner. They appreciate the design details that mark out a Ralph Musi from a Starlite or an O’Mahoney, and will drive long distances to visit a rare and well-preserved Sterling, of which only seventy-three were made between 1935 and 1941.
The one thing they don’t talk about much is food. This is because diner food is generally much the same wherever you go—which is to say, not very good. My wife and children refuse to accompany me to diners for this very reason. What they fail to appreciate is that going to diners is not about eating; it’s about saving a crucial part of America’s heritage.
We didn’t have diners in Iowa when I was growing up. They were mostly an East Coast phenomenon, just as restaurants built in the shape of things (pigs, doughnuts, derby hats) were a West Coast phenomenon. The closest thing we had to a diner was a place down by the Raccoon River called Ernie’s Grill. Everything about it was squalid and greasy, including Ernie, and the food was appalling, but it did have many of the features of a diner, notably a long counter with twirly stools, a wall of booths, patrons who looked as if they had just come in from killing big animals in the woods, possibly with their teeth, and a fondness for diner-style lingo. When you ordered, the waitress would call out to the kitchen in some indecipherable code, “Two spots on a dot—easy on the Brylcreem. Dribble on the griddle and cough twice in a bucket,” or something similarly alarming and mystifying.
But Ernie’s was in a square, squat, anonymous brick building, which patently lacked the streamlined glamour of a classic diner. So when, decades later, I was sent to look for a livable community in New England, a diner was one of the things high on my shopping list. Alas, they are getting harder and harder to find.
Hanover, where we eventually settled, does have a venerable eating establishment called Lou’s, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year. It has the decor and superficial ambience of a diner—booths and a long counter and an air of busyness—but it is really a restaurant. The menu features items like quiches and quesadillas, and it prides itself on the freshness of its lettuce. The customers are generally wellheeled and yuppie-ish. You can’t imagine any of them climbing into a car with a deer lashed to the hood.
So you may conceive of my joy when, about six months after we moved to Hanover, I was driving one day through the nearby community of White River Junction and passed an establishment called the Four Aces. Impulsively, I went in and found an early postwar Worcester in nearly mint condition. It was wonderful. Even the food was pretty good, which was disappointing, but I have learned to live with it.
No one knows how many diners like this remain. Partly it is a problem of definition. A diner is essentially any place that serves food and calls itself a diner. Under the broadest definition, there are about twenty-five hundred diners in the United States. But no more than a thousand of these, at the outside, are what could be called “classic” diners, and the number of those diminishes yearly. Recently Phil’s, the oldest diner in California, closed. It had been in business in north Los Angeles since 1926, making it, by California standards, about as venerable as Stonehenge, but its passing was hardly noted.
Most diners can’t compete with the big fast-food chains. A traditional diner is small, with perhaps eight booths and a dozen or so counter spaces, and because they provide waitress service and individually cooked meals their operating costs are higher. Most diners are also old, and we live in an age in which it is almost always much cheaper to replace than to preserve. An enthusiast who bought an old diner in Jersey City, New Jersey, discovered to his horror that it would cost $900,000—perhaps twenty years’ worth of potential profits— to bring it back to its original condition. Much cheaper to tear it down and turn the site over to a Taco Bell or a McDonald’s.
What you get a lot of instead these days are ersatz diners. The last time I was in Chicago I was taken to a place called Ed Debevic’s, where the waitresses wore badges giving their names as Bubbles and Blondie and where the walls were lined with Ed’s bowling trophies. But, there never was an Ed Debevic. He was just the creative figment of a marketing man. No matter. Ed’s was humming. A dining public that had disdained genuine diners when they stood on every corner was now standing in line to get into a make-believe one. If there is one thing that mystifies me about modern life it is this impulse to celebrate things we couldn’t wait to get rid of.
You find it at Disneyland, where people flock to stroll up and down a Main Street just like the ones they abandoned wholesale in the 1950s. It happens at restored colonial villages like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Mystic, Connecticut, where visitors drive long distances and pay good money to savor the sort of compact and tranquil atmosphere that they long ago fled for the accommodating sprawl of suburbs. I can’t begin to account for it, but it appears that in this country these days we really only want something when it isn’t really real.
But that is another subject. Meanwhile, I am off to the Four Aces while the chance is still there. There aren’t any waitresses called Bubbles, but the bowling trophies are real.
I went into a Toys “” Us the other day with my youngest so that he could spend some loot he had come into. (He had gone short on Anaconda Copper against his broker’s advice, the little scamp.) And entirely by the way, isn’t Toys “” Us the most mystifying name of a commercial concern you have ever heard of? What does it mean? I have never understood it. Are they saying they believe themselves to be toys? Do their executives carry business cards saying “Dick “” Me”? And why is the R backward in the title? Surely not in the hope or expectation that it will enhance our admiration? Why, above all, is it that even though there are thirty-seven checkout lanes at every Toys “” Us in the world, only one of them is ever open?
These are important questions, but sadly this is not our theme today, at least not specifically. No, our theme today is shopping. To say that shopping is an important part of American life is like saying that fish appreciate water.
Apart from working, sleeping, watching TV, and accumulating fatty tissue, we devote more time in this country to shopping than to any other pastime. Indeed, according to the Travel Industry Association of America, shopping is now the number one holiday ac
tivity of Americans. People actually plan their vacations around shopping trips. Hundreds of thousands of people a year travel to Niagara Falls, it transpires, not to see the falls but to wander through its two megamalls. Soon, if developers in Arizona get their way, vacationers will be able to travel to the Grand Canyon and not see it either, for there are plans, if you can believe it, to build a 450,000-square-foot shopping complex by its main entrance.
Shopping these days is not so much a business as a science. There is even now an academic discipline called retail anthropology whose proponents can tell you exactly where, how, and why people shop the way they do. They know which proportion of customers will turn right upon entering a store (87 percent) and how long on average those people will browse before wandering out again (two minutes and thirty-six seconds). They know the best ways to lure shoppers into the magic, high-margin depths of the shop (an area known in the trade as “Zone 4”) and the layouts, color schemes, and background music that will most effectively hypnotize the unassuming browser into becoming a helpless purchaser. They know everything.
So here is my question. Why then is it that I cannot go shopping these days without wanting either to burst into tears or kill someone? For all its science, you see, shopping in this country is no longer a fun experience, if it ever was.
A big part of the problem is the stores. They come in three types, all disagreeable.
First, there are the stores where you can never find anyone to help you. Then there are the stores where you don’t want any help, but you are pestered to the brink of madness by a persistent sales assistant, probably working on commission. Finally, there are the stores where, when you ask where anything is, the answer is always, “Aisle seven.” I don’t know why, but that is what they always tell you.
