by Bill Bryson
I had never been to Swedesburg. There was no reason to go—it was just a small collection of houses—but at night in winter with its distant lights it was like a ship far out at sea. I found it peaceful and somehow comforting to see their lights, to think that all the citizens of Snooseville were snug in their homes and perhaps looking over at us in Winfield and deriving comfort in turn. My father told me that when he was a boy the people of Snooseville still spoke Swedish at home. Some of them could barely speak English at all. I loved that, too—the idea that it was a little outpost of Sweden over there, that they were all sitting around eating herring and black bread and saying, “Oh, ja!” and just being happily Swedish in the middle of the American continent. When my dad was young if you drove across Iowa you would regularly come upon towns or villages where all the inhabitants spoke German or Dutch or Czech or Danish or almost any other tongue from northern and central Europe.
But those days had long since passed. In 1916, as the shadow of the Great War made English-speaking people suspicious of loyalties, a governor of Iowa named William L. Harding decreed that henceforth it would be a crime to speak any foreign language in schools, at church, or even over the telephone in the great state of Iowa. There were howls that people would have to give up church services in their own languages, but Harding was not to be moved. “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English,” he responded. “God is listening only to the English tongue.”
One by one the little linguistic outposts faded away. By the 1950s they were pretty much gone altogether. No one would have guessed it at the time, but the small towns and family farms were soon to become likewise imperiled.
In 1950, America had nearly six million farms. In half a century almost two-thirds of them vanished. More than half the American landscape was farmed when I was a boy; today, thanks to the spread of concrete, only 40 percent is—a severe decline in a single lifetime.
I was born into a state that had two hundred thousand farms. Today the number is much less than half that and falling. Of the 750,000 people who lived on farms in the state in my boyhood, half a million—two in every three—have gone. The process has been relentless. Iowa’s farm population fell by 25 percent in the 1970s and by 35 percent more in the 1980s. Another hundred thousand people were skimmed away in the 1990s. And the people left behind are old. In 1988, Iowa had more people who were seventy-five or older than five or younger. Thirty-seven counties out of ninety-nine—getting on for half—recorded more deaths than births.
It’s an inevitable consequence of greater efficiency and continuous amalgamation. Increasingly the old farms clump together into superfarms of three thousand acres or more. By the middle of the present century, it is thought, the number of farms in Iowa could drop to as low as ten thousand.
Without a critical mass of farmers, most small towns in Iowa have pretty well died. Drive anywhere in the state these days and what you see are empty towns, empty roads, collapsing barns, boarded farmhouses. Everywhere you go it looks as if you have just missed a terrible contagion, which in a sense I suppose you have. It’s the same story in Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri, and even worse in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Wherever there were once small towns, there are now empty main streets.
Winfield is barely alive. All the businesses on Main Street—the dime store, the pool hall, the newspaper office, the banks, the grocery stores—long ago disappeared. There is nowhere to buy Nehi pop. You can’t purchase a single item of food within the town limits. My grandparents’ house is still there—at least it was the last time I passed—but its barn is gone as is its porch swing and the shade tree out back and the orchard and everything else that made it what it was.
The best I can say is that I saw the last of something really special. It’s something I seem to say a lot these days.
Chapter 11
WHAT, ME WORRY?
LIES IN MORGUE
17 HOURS—ALIVE
ATLANTA, GA. (UP)—An elderly woman taken to a funeral home for embalming opened her eyes 17 hours after arriving and announced: “I’m not dead.”
W. L. Murdaugh of Murdaugh Brothers funeral home here said two of his employees were made almost speechless.
The woman, listed as Julia Stallings, 70, seemed dazed after her long coma ended Sunday night, but otherwise appeared in good condition, Murdaugh said.
—Des Moines Tribune, May 11, 1953
THE ONLY TIME I have ever broken a bone was also the first time I noticed that adults are not entirely to be counted on. I was four years old and playing on Arthur Bergen’s jungle gym when I fell off and broke my leg.
Arthur lived up the street, but was at the dentist or something when I called, so I decided to have a twirl on his new jungle gym before heading back home.
I don’t remember anything at all about the fall, but I do remember very clearly lying on damp earth, the jungle gym now above and around me and seeming awfully large and menacing all of a sudden, and not being able to move my right leg. I remember also lifting my head and looking down my body to my leg which was bent at an unusual—indeed, an entirely novel—angle. I began to call steadily for help, in a variety of tones, but no one heard. Eventually I gave up and dozed a little.
At some point I opened my eyes and a man with a uniform and a peaked cap was looking down at me. The sun was directly behind him so I couldn’t see his face; it was just a hatted darkness inside a halo of intense light.
“You all right, kid?” he said.
“I’ve hurt my leg.”
He considered this for a minute. “You wanna get your mom to put some ice on it. Do you know some people named…”—he consulted a clipboard—“…Maholovich?”
“No.”
He glanced at the clipboard again. “A. J. Maholovich, 3725 Elmwood Drive.”
“No.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell at all?”
“No.”
“This is Elmwood Drive?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, kid, thanks.”
“It really hurts,” I said. But he was gone.
I slept a little more. After a while Mrs. Bergen pulled into their driveway and came up the back steps with bags of groceries.
“You’ll catch a chill down there,” she said brightly as she skipped past.
“I’ve hurt my leg.”
She stopped and considered for a moment. “Better get up and walk around on it. That’s the best thing. Oh, there’s the phone.” She hurried into the house.
I waited for her to come back but she didn’t. “Hello,” I croaked weakly now. “Help.”
Bergen’s little sister, who was small and therefore stupid and unreliable, came and had a critical look at me.
“Go and get your mom,” I said. “I’m hurt.”
She looked at my leg with comprehension if not compassion. “Owie,” she said.
“Yes, owie. It really hurts.”
She wandered off, saying, “Owie, owie,” but evidently took my case no further.
Mrs. Bergen came out after some time with a load of washing to hang.
“You must really like it down there,” she chuckled.
“Mrs. Bergen, I think I’ve really hurt my leg.”
“On that little jungle gym?” she said, with good-natured skepticism, but came closer to look at me. “I don’t think so, honey.” And then abruptly: “Christamighty! Your leg! It’s backward!”
“It hurts.”
“I bet it does, I bet it does. You wait right there.”
She went off.
Eventually, after quite some time, Mr. Bergen and my parents pulled up in their respective cars at more or less the same moment. Mr. Bergen was a lawyer. I could hear him talking to my parents about liability as they came up the steps. Mr. Bergen was the first to reach me.
“Now you do understand, Billy, that technically you were trespassing…”
They took me to a young Cuban doctor on Woodland Avenue and he was in a panic. He started m
aking exactly the kind of noises Desi Arnaz made in I Love Lucy when Lucy did something really boneheaded—only he was doing this over my leg. “I don’ thin’ I can do this,” he said, and looked at them beseechingly. “It’s a really bad break. I mean look at it. Wow.”
I expect he was afraid he would be sent back to Cuba. Eventually he was prevailed upon to set the break. For the next six weeks my leg remained more or less backward. The moment they cut off the cast, the leg spun back into position and everyone was pleasantly surprised. The doctor beamed. “Tha’s a bit of luck!” he said happily.
Then I stood up and fell over.
“Oh,” the doctor said and looked troubled again. “Tha’s not good, is it?”
He thought for a minute and told my parents to take me home and to keep me off the leg for the rest of the day and overnight and see how it was in the morning.
“Do you think it will be all right then?” asked my father.
“I’ve no idea,” said the doctor.
The next morning I got up and stepped gingerly onto my wounded leg. It felt okay. It felt good. I walked around. It was fine. I walked a little more. Yes, it was definitely fine.
I went downstairs to report this good news and found my mother in the laundry room bent over sorting through clothes.
“Hey, Mom, my leg’s fine,” I announced. “I can walk.”
“Oh, that’s good, honey,” she said, head in the dryer. “Now where’s that other sock?”
IT WASN’T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children’s physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right. No one ever got lastingly hurt in our family. No one died. Nothing ever went seriously wrong—and not much went wrong in our town or state either, come to that. Danger was something that happened far away in places like Matsu and Quemoy and the Belgian Congo, places so distant that nobody was really quite sure where they were.
It’s hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther—beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say—quickly became almost foreign. It wasn’t just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere.
America was especially blessed in this regard. We had big buffering oceans to left and right and no neighbors to worry us above or below, so there wasn’t any need to be fearful about anything ever. Even world wars barely affected our home lives. During World War II, when the film mogul Jack Warner realized that from the air his Hollywood studio was indistinguishable from a nearby aircraft factory, he had a giant arrow painted on the roof above the legend “Lock-heed That-Away!” to steer Japanese bombers safely away from some of the valuable stars who didn’t go to war (and that included, just for the record, Gary Cooper, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, Frank Sinatra, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, Alan Ladd, Danny Kaye, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne, among many other valiant heroes who helped America to act its way to victory) and toward the correct target.
No one ever knew whether Warner was in earnest with his sign or not, but it didn’t really matter because no one seriously expected (at least not after the first jittery days of the war) that the Japanese would attack the U.S. mainland. At the same time, on the other side of the country, when a congressman grew concerned for the welfare of rooftop sentries at the Capitol Building who didn’t ever seem to stir from their positions or enjoy a moment’s relief, he was quietly informed that they were in fact dummies and that their antiaircraft guns were wooden models. There was no point in wasting men and munitions on a target that was never going to be hit, even if it was the headquarters of the United States government.
FOR THE RECORD there was one manned attack on the American mainland. In 1942, a pilot named Nobuo Fujita took to the air from coastal waters off Oregon in a specially modified seaplane that was brought there aboard a submarine. Fujita’s devious goal was to drop incendiary bombs on Oregon’s forests, starting large-scale fires that would, if all went to plan, rage out of control and engulf much of the West Coast, killing hundreds and leaving Americans weeping and demoralized at the thought of all that damage caused by one little squinty-eyed man in a plane. In the event, the bombs either puttered out or caused only localized fires of no consequence.
The Japanese also, over a period of months, launched into the prevailing winds across the Pacific some nine thousand large paper balloons, each bearing a thirty-pound bomb timed to go off forty hours after launch—the length of time calculated that it would take to cross the Pacific to America. These managed to blow up a small number of curious souls whose last earthly utterance was something along the lines of “Now what the heck do you suppose this is?” but otherwise did almost no damage, though one made it as far as Maryland.
IN THE COLD WAR YEARS all this comfortable security abruptly vanished as the Soviet Union developed long-range ballistic missiles to match our own. Suddenly we were in a world where something horribly destructive could drop on us at any moment without warning wherever we were. This was a startling and unsettling notion, and we responded in a quintessentially 1950s way. We got excited about it.
For a number of years you could hardly open a magazine without learning of some new destructive marvel that could wipe us all out in a twinkle. An artist named Chesley Bonestell specialized in producing sumptuously lifelike illustrations of man-made carnage, showing warhead-laden rockets streaking gorgeously (excitingly!) across American skies or taking off from giant space stations on a beautifully lit, wondrously imagined Moon en route to an explosive attack on planet Earth.
The thing about Bonestell’s paintings was that they seemed so real, so informed, so photographically exact. It was like looking at something as it happened, rather than imagining it as it one day might be. I can remember studying with boundless fascination, and more than a touch of misplaced longing, a Bonestell illustration in Life magazine showing New York City at the moment of nuclear detonation, a giant mushroom cloud rising from the familiar landscape of central Manhattan, a second cloud spreading itself across the outlying sprawl of Queens. These illustrations were meant to frighten, but really they excited. *13
I’m not suggesting that we actually wanted New York to be blown up—at least not exactly. I’m just saying that if it did ever happen you could see a plus side to it. We would all die, sure, but our last utterance would be a sincere and appreciative “Wow.”
Then in the late 1950s the Soviets briefly developed a clear lead in the space race and the excitement took on a real edge. The fear became that they would install giant space platforms in geostationary orbit directly above us, far beyond the reach of our gnatlike planes and weakly puffing guns, and that from this comfortable perch they would drop bombs on us whenever we peeved them.
In fact, that was never going to happen. Because of Earth’s spin, you can’t just drop bombs from space like water balloons. For one thing, they wouldn’t drop; they would go into orbit. So you would have to fire them in some fashion, which required a level of delivery control the 1950s simply didn’t command. And anyway because the Earth is spinning at a thousand kilometers an hour (give or take), you would have to master extremely precise trajectories to hit a given target. Any bomb fired from space was in fact far more likely to fall in a Kansas wheat field, or almost anywhere else on Earth, than through the roof of the White House. If bombarding each other from space had ever been a realistic option, we would have space stations up there in the hundreds now, believe me.
However, the only people who knew this in the 1950s were sp
ace scientists, and they weren’t going to tell anybody because then we wouldn’t give them money to develop their ambitious programs. So magazines and Sunday supplements ran these breathless accounts of peril from above, because their reporters didn’t know any better, or didn’t wish to know any better, and because they had all these fantastic drawings by Chesley Bonestell that were such a pleasure to look at and just had to be seen.
So earthly devastation became both a constant threat and a happy preoccupation of that curiously bifurcated decade. Public service films showed us how private fallout shelters could not only be protective but fun, with Mom and Dad and Chip and Skip bunking down together underground, possibly for years on end. And why not? They had lots of dehydrated food and a whole stack of board games. “And Mom and Dad need never worry about the lights running low with this handy pedal generator and two strong young volunteers to provide plenty of muscle power!” And no school! This was a lifestyle worth thinking about.
For those who didn’t care to retreat underground, the Portland Cement Association offered a range of heavy-duty “Houses for the Atomic Age!”—special “all-concrete blast-resistant houses” designed to let the owners survive “blast pressures expected at distances as close as 3,600 feet from ground zero of a bomb with an explosive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.” So the Russians could drop a bomb right in your own neighborhood and you could sit in comfort at home reading the evening newspaper and hardly know there was a war on. Can you imagine erecting such a house and not wanting to see how well it withstood a nuclear challenge? Of course not. Let those suckers drop! We’re ready!
