Bill Bryson

by The Continent

  It took me a while to figure out what was missing. It was billboards. When I was small, billboards thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high stood in fields along every roadside. In places like Iowa and Kansas they were about the only stimulation you got. In the 1960s Lady Bird Johnson, in one of those misguided campaigns in which presidents' wives are always engaging themselves, had most of the roadside billboards removed as part of a highway beautification program. In the middle of the Rocky Mountains this was doubtless a good thing, but out here in the lonesome heartland billboards were practically a public service.

  Seeing one standing a mile off you would become interested to see what it said, and would watch with mild absorption as it advanced towards you and passed. As roadside excitements went, it was about on a par with the little windmills in Pella, but it was better than nothing.

  The superior billboards would have a three-dimensional element to them-the head of a cow jutting out if it was for a dairy, or a cutout of a bowling ball scattering pins if it was for a bowling alley.

  Sometimes the billboard would be for some coming attraction. There might be a figure of a ghost and the words, VISIT SPOOK CAVERNS! OKLAHOMA'S GREAT FAMILY ATTRACTION!

  JUST 69 MILES! A couple of miles later there would be another sign saying, PLENTY OF FREE

  PARKING AT SPOOK CAVERNS. JUST 67 MILES! And so it would go with sign after sign promising the most thrilling and instructive afternoon any family could ever hope to have, at least in Oklahoma. These promises would be supported by illustrations showing eerily lit underground chambers, the size of cathedrals, in which the stalactites and stalagmites had magically fused into the shapes of witches' houses, bubbling caldrons, flying bats and Casper the Friendly Ghost. It all looked extremely promising. So we children in the back would begin suggesting that we stop and have a look, taking it in turns to say, in a sincere and moving way, "Oh, please, Dad, oh, pleeeeease."

  Over the next sixty miles my father's position on the matter would proceed through a series of well-worn phases, beginning with a flat refusal on the grounds that it was bound to be expen sive and anyway our behavior since breakfast had been so disgraceful that it didn't warrant any special treats, to studiously ignoring our pleas (this phase would last for up to eleven minutes), to asking my mother privately in a low voice what she thought about the idea and receiving an equivocal answer, to ignoring us again in the evident hope that we would forget about it and stop nagging (one minute, twelve seconds), to saying that we might go if we started to behave and kept on behaving more or less forever, to saying that we definitely would not go because, just look at us, we were already squabbling again and we hadn't even gotten there, to finally announcing-sometimes in an exasperated bellow, sometimes in a deathbed whisper-that all right we would go. You could always tell when Dad was on the brink of acceptance because his neck would turn red. It was always the same. He always said yes in the end. I never understood why he didn't just accede to our demands at the outset and save himself thirty minutes of anguish. Then he would always quickly add, "But we're only going for half an hour-and you're not going to buy anything. Is that clear?" This seemed to restore to him a sense that he was in charge of things.

  By the last two or three miles, the signs for Spook Caverns would be every couple of hundred yards, bringing us to a fever pitch of excitement. Finally there would be a billboard the size of a battleship with a huge arrow telling us to turn right here and drive eighteen miles. "Eighteen miles!" Dad would cry shrilly, his forehead veins stirring to life in preparation for the inevitable discovery that after eighteen miles of bouncing down a dirt road with knee-deep ruts there would be no sign of Spook Caverns, that indeed after nineteen miles the road would end in a desolate junction without any clue of which way to turn, and that Dad would turn the wrong way. When eventually found, Spook Caverns would prove to be rather less than advertised-in fact, would give every appearance of being in the last stages of solvency. The caverns, damp and ill lit and smelling like a long-dead horse, would be about the size of a garage and the stalactites and stalagmites wouldn't look the least bit like witches' houses and Casper the Ghost. They would look like-well, like stalactites and stalagmites. It would all be a huge letdown. The only possible way of assuaging our disappointment, we would discover, would be if Dad bought us each a rubber Bowie knife and bag of toy dinosaurs in the adjoining gift shop. My sister and I would drop to the ground and emit mournful noises to remind him what a fearful thing unassuaged grief can be in a child.

  So, as the sun sank over the brown flatness of Oklahoma and Dad, hours behind schedule, embarked on the difficult business of not being able to find a room for the night (ably assisted by my mother, who would misread the maps and mistakenly identify almost every passing building as a possible motel), we children would pass the time in back by having noisy and vicious knife fights, breaking off at intervals to weep, report wounds and complain of hunger, boredom and the need for toilet facilities. It was a kind of living hell. And now there appeared to be almost no billboards along the highways. What a sad loss.

  I was headed for Cairo, which is pronounced "Kay-ro." I don't know why. They do this a lot in the South and Midwest. In Kentucky, Athens is pronounced "AY-thens" and Versailles is pronounced

  "Vur-SAYLES." Bolivar, Missouri, is "BAW-liv-er." Madrid, Iowa, is "MAD-rid." I don't know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward, undereducated shitkickers who don't know any better or whether they know better but don't care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated shitkickers. It's not really the sort of question you can ask them, is it? At Cairo I stopped for gas and in fact I did ask the old guy who doddered out to fill my tank why they pronounced Cairo as they did.

  "Because that's its name, " he explained as if I were kind of stupid.

  "But the one in Egypt is pronounced 'Ki-ro."' "So I've heard," agreed the man.

  "And most people, when they see the name, think 'Ki-ro,' don't they?"

  "Not in Kay-ro they don't," he said, a little hotly.

  There didn't seem to be much to be gained by pursuing the point, so I let it rest there, and I still don't know why the people call it "Kay-ro." Nor do I know why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump, however you pronounce it. Cairo is at the point where the Ohio River, itself a great artery, joins the Mississippi, doubling its grandeur. You would think that at the confluence of two such mighty rivers there would be a great city, but in fact Cairo is a poor little town of 6,000 people. The road in was lined with battered houses and unpainted tenements. Aged black men sat on the porches and stoops on old sofas and rocking chairs, waiting for death or dinner, whichever came first. This surprised me. You don't expect to see tenements and porches full of black people in the Midwest-at least not outside big cities like Chicago and Detroit. But then I realized that I was no longer really in the Midwest. The speech patterns of southern Illinois are more Southern than Midwestern. I was nearly as far south as Nashville. Mississippi was only 160 miles away. And Kentucky was just across the river. I crossed it now, on a long, high bridge. From here on down to Louisiana the Mississippi is immensely broad. It looks safe and lazy, but in fact it is full of danger. Scores of people die in it every year. Farmers out fishing stare at the water and think, "I wonder what would happen if I just stuck my toe in there a little bit," and the next thing you know their bodies bob up in the Gulf of Mexico, bloated but looking strangely serene. The river is deceptively fierce. In 1927, when the Mississippi overflowed, it flooded an area the size of Scotland. That is a serious river.

  On the Kentucky side of the river I was greeted by huge signs everywhere saying, FIREWORKS! In Illinois fireworks are illegal; in Kentucky they are not. So if you live in Illinois and want to blow your hand off, you drive across the river to Kentucky. You used to see a lot more of this sort of thing. If one state had a lower sales tax on cigarettes than a neighboring state, all the state-line gas stations and cafes would put big signs on
their roofs saying, TAX-FREE CIGARETTES! 40

  CENTS A PACK! No TAX! and all the people from the next state would come and load their cars up with cut-price cigarettes. Wisconsin used to ban margarine to protect its dairy farmers, so everybody in Wisconsin, including all the dairy farmers, would drive to Iowa where there were big signs everywhere saying, MARGARINE FOR SALE! All the Iowans, in the meantime, were driving off to Illinois, where there was no sales tax on anything, or Missouri, where the sales tax on gasoline was 50 percent lower. The other thing you used to get a lot of was states going their own way in terms of daylight saving time, so in the summer Illinois might be two hours adrift from Iowa and one hour behind Indiana. It was all kind of crazy, but it made you realize to what an extent the United States is really fifty independent countries (forty eight countries in those days). Most of that seems to have gone now, yet another sad loss.

  I drove through Kentucky thinking of sad losses and was abruptly struck by the saddest loss of all-the Burma Shave sign. Burma Shave was a shaving cream that came in a tube. I don't know if it's still produced. In fact, I never knew anyone who ever used it. But the Burma Shave company used to put clever signs along the highway. They came in clusters of five, expertly spaced so that you read them as a little poem as you passed: IF HARMONY / IS WHAT YOU CRAVE / THEN GET /

  A TUBA BURMA SHAVE. Or: BEN MET ANNA / MADE A HIT / NEGLECTED BEARD I BEN-ANNA SPLIT / BURMA SHAVE. Great, eh? Even in the 1950s the Burma Shave signs were pretty much a thing of the past. I can remember seeing only half a dozen in all the thousands of miles of highway we covered. But as roadside diversions went they were outstanding, ten times better than billboards and Pella's little twirling windmills. The only things that surpassed them for diversion value were multiple-car pileups with bodies strewn about the highway.

  Kentucky was much like southern Illinois-hilly, sunny, attractive-but the scattered houses were less tidy and prosperouslooking than in the North. There were lots of wooded valleys and iron bridges over twisting creeks, and an abundance of dead animals pasted to the road. In every valley stood a little white Baptist church and all along the road were signs to remind me that I was now in the Bible Belt: JESUS SAVES. PRAISE THE LORD. CHRIST IS KING.

  I was out of Kentucky almost before I knew it. The state tapers to a point at its western edge, and I was cutting across a chunk of it only 40 miles wide. In a veritable eyeblink in terms of American traveling time I was in Tennessee. It isn't often you can dispense with a state in less than an hour, and Tennessee would not detain me much longer. It is an odd-looking state, shaped like a Dutch brick, stretching more than 500 miles from east to west, but only i00 miles from top to bottom. Its landscape was much the same as that of Kentucky and Illinois-indeterminate farming country laced with rivers, hills and religious zealots-but I was surprised, when I stopped for lunch at a Burger King in Jackson, at how warm it was. It was 83 degrees, according to a sign on the drive-in bank across the street, a good z0 degrees higher than it had been in Carbondale that morning. I was still obviously deep in the Bible Belt. A sign in the yard of a church next door said, CHRIST IS THE

  ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?) I went into the Burger King. A girl at the counter said, "Kin I hep yew?" I had entered another country.

  CHAPTER 6

  JUST SOUTH OF Grand Junction, Tennessee, I passed over the state line into Mississippi. A sign beside the highway said, WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. WE SHOOT TO KILL. It didn't really. I just made that up. This was only the second time I had ever been to the Deep South and I entered it with a sense of foreboding. It is surely no coincidence that all those films you have ever seen about the South-Easy Rider, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, Deliverance-depict Southerners as murderous, incestuous, shitty-shoed rednecks. It really is another country. Years ago, in the days of Vietnam, two friends and I drove to Florida during college spring break. We all had long hair. En route we took a shortcut across the back roads of Georgia and stopped late one afternoon for a burger at a dinette in some dreary little crudville, and when we took our seats at the counter the place fell silent. Fourteen people just stopped eating, their food resting in their mouths, and stared at us. It was so quiet in there you could have heard a fly fart. A whole roomful of good ole boys with cherry-colored cheeks and bib overalls watched us in silence and wondered whether their shotguns were loaded. It was disconcerting. To them, out here in the middle of nowhere, we were a curiosity-some of them had clearly never seen no long-haired, nigger-loving, Northern, college- edjicated, commie hippies in the flesh before-and yet unspeakably loathsome. It was an odd sensation to feel so deeply hated by people who hadn't really had a proper chance to acquaint themselves with one's shortcomings. I remember thinking that our parents didn't have the first idea where we were, other than that we were somewhere in the continental vastness between Des Moines and the Florida Keys, and that if we disappeared we would never be found. I had visions of my family sitting around the living room in years to come and my mother saying, "Well, I wonder whatever happened to Billy and his friends. You'd think we'd have had a postcard by now. Can I get anybody a sandwich?"

  That sort of thing did really happen down there, you know. This was only five years after three freedom riders were murdered in Mississippi. They were a twenty-one-year-old black from Mississippi named James Chaney and two white guys from New York, Andrew Goodman, twenty, and Michael Schwerner, twenty. I give their names because they deserve to be remembered. They were arrested for speeding, taken to the Neshoba County Jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and never seen again-at least not until weeks later when their bodies were hauled out of a swamp. These were kids, remember. The police had released them to a waiting mob, which had taken them away and done things to them that a child wouldn't do to an insect. The sheriff in the case, a smirking, tobacco-chewing fat boy named Lawrence Rainey, was acquitted of negligent behavior. No one was ever charged with murder. To me this was and always would be the South.

  I followed Highway 7 south towards Oxford. It took me along the western edge of the Holly Springs National Forest, which seemed to be mostly swamp and scrubland. I was disap pointed. I had half expected that as soon as I crossed into Mississippi there would be Spanish mosses hanging from the trees and women in billowy dresses twirling parasols and white-haired colonels with handlebar mustaches drinking mint juleps on the lawn while armies of slaves gathered the cotton and sang sweet hymns. But this landscape was just scrubby and hot and nondescript. Occasionally there would be a shack set up on bricks, with an old black man in a rocking chair on the porch, but precious little sign of life or movement elsewhere.

  At the town of Holly Springs stood a sign for Senatobia, and I got briefly excited. Senatobia! What a great name for a Mississippi town! All that the old South stood for seemed to be encap sulated in those five golden syllables. Maybe things were picking up. Maybe now I would see chain gangs toiling in the sun and a prisoner in heavy irons legging it across fields and sloshing through creeks while pursued by bloodhounds, and lynch mobs roaming the streets and crosses .burning on lawns.

  The prospect enlivened me, but I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking me over with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car. He was sweaty and overweight and sat low in his seat. I assume he was descended from the apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope. I stared straight ahead with a look that I hoped conveyed seriousness of purpose mingled with a warm heart and innocent demeanor. I could feel him looking at me. Ac the very least I expected him to gob a wad of tobacco juice down the side of my head. Instead, he said, "How yew doin'?"

  This so surprised me that I answered, in a cracking voice, "Pardon?"

  "I said, how yew doin'?"

  "I'm fine," I said. And then added, having lived some years in England, "Thank you."r />
  "Y'on vacation?" "

  Yup."

  "Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?" "Pardon?"

  "I say, Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?"

  I was quietly distressed. The man was armed and Southern and I couldn't understand a word he was saying to me. "I'm sorry," I said, "I'm kind of slow, and I don't understand what you're saying."

  "I say"-and he repeated it more carefully-"how doo yew lack Mississippi?"

  It dawned on me. "Oh! I like it fine! I like it heaps! I think it's wonderful. The people are so friendly and helpful." I wanted to add that I had been there for an hour and hadn't been shot at once, but the light changed and he was gone, and I sighed and thought, "Thank you, Jesus."

  I drove on to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss as it's known. The people named the town after Oxford in England in the hope that this would persuade the state to build the university there, and the state did. This tells you most of what you need to know about the workings of the Southern mind. Oxford appeared to be an agreeable town. It was built around a square, in the middle of which stood the Lafayette County Courthouse, with a tall clock tower and Doric columns, basking grandly in the Indian-summer sunshine. Around the perimeter of the square were attractive stores and a tourist information office. I went into the tourist information office to get directions to Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home. Faulkner lived in Oxford for the whole of his life, and his home is now a museum, preserved as it was on the day he died in 1962. It must be unnerving to be so famous that you know they are going to come in the moment you croak and hang velvet cords across all the doorways and treat everything with reverence. Think of the embarrassment if you left a copy of Reader's Digest Condensed Books on the bedside table.