The Lost Continent (21 page)

I went back to my room, pleased not to have been mugged, more pleased not to have been murdered. On top of my television was a card saying that for $6.50 I could have an in-room movie. There was, as I recall, a choice of four—
Friday the Thirteenth, Part 19,
in which a man with a personality disorder uses knives, hatchets, Cuisinarts and a snowblower to kill a succession of young women just as they are about to step into the shower;
Death Wish 11,
in which Charles Bronson tracks down and kills Michael Winner;
Bimbo,
in which Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has a sex-change operation and then blows up a lot of Oriental people; and, on the adult channel,
My Panties Are Dripping,
a sensitive study of interpersonal relationships and social conflict in postmodern Denmark, with a lot of vigorous bonking thrown in for good measure. I toyed for a moment with the idea of watching a bit of the last one—just to help me relax, as they say in evangelical circles—but I was too cheap to spend $6.50, and, anyway, I’ve always suspected that if I did punch the requisite button (which was worn to a nubbin, I can tell you), the next day a bellboy would confront me with a computer printout and tell me that if I didn’t give him fifty dollars he would send a copy of the room receipt to my mother with “Miscellaneous charges: Deviant Porno Movie, $6.50” circled in red. So instead I lay on the bed and watched a rerun on normal television of “Mr. Ed,” a 1960s comedy series about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr. Ed wrote his own material. But at least there was nothing in it that would get me blackmailed.

And thus ended my day in New York, the most exciting and stimulating city in the world. I couldn’t help but reflect that I had no reason to feel superior to my fellow lonely hearts in the striptease club twenty floors below. I was just as lonesome as they were. Indeed, all over this big, heartless city there were no doubt tens of thousands of people just as solitary and friendless as me. What a melancholy thought.

“But I wonder how many of them can do this?” I remarked to myself and with my hands and feet reached out and touched all four walls at once.

15

I
t was the Columbus Day weekend and the roads were busy. Columbus has always seemed to me an odd choice of hero for a country that celebrates success as America does because he was such a dismal failure. Consider the facts: he made four long voyages to the Americas, but never once realized that he wasn’t in Asia and never found anything worthwhile. Every other explorer was coming back with exciting new products like potatoes and tobacco and nylon stockings, and all Columbus found to bring home were some puzzled-looking Indians—and he thought they were Japanese. (“Come on, you guys, let’s see a little sumo.”)

But perhaps Columbus’s most remarkable shortcoming was that he never actually saw the land that was to become the United States. This surprises a lot of people. They imagine him trampling over Florida, saying, “You know, this would make a nice resort.” But in fact his voyages were all spent in the Caribbean and bouncing around the swampy, bug-infested coasts of Central America. If you ask me, the Vikings would make far more worthy heroes for America. For one thing, they did actually discover it. On top of that, the Vikings were manly and drank out of skulls and didn’t take any crap from anybody. Now
that’s
the American way.

When I lived in America Columbus Day was one of those semibogus holidays that existed only for the benefit of public workers with strong unions. There was no mail on Columbus Day and if you innocently drove all the way over to the east side of town to the Iowa State Vehicle Licensing Center to renew your driver’s license you would find the door locked and a notice hanging in the window saying, C
LOSED
FOR
C
OLUMBUS
D
AY
H
OLIDAY
. S
O
T
OUGH
S
HIT
TO
Y
OU
. But otherwise life was no different than on any other day. Now, however, it appeared that the Columbus Day holiday had spread. There were lots of cars and recreational vehicles on the highway and the radio announcers kept talking about things like the number of fatalities that were expected “this Columbus Day weekend.” (How do they know these things anyway? Is there some kind of secret quota?) I had been looking forward to reaching New England because I wanted to see the autumn color. In addition, the states would be small and varied and there wouldn’t be that awful rolling tedium that comes with all the other American states, even the attractive ones. But I was wrong. Of course, New England states are indubitably tiny—Connecticut is only eighty miles across; Rhode Island is smaller than London—but they are crowded with cars, people and cities. Connecticut appeared to be just one suburb. I drove up US 202 towards Litchfield, which was marked on my map as a scenic route, and it was, to be sure, more scenic than a suburb, but it wasn’t exactly spectacular.

Perhaps I was expecting too much. In the movies in the 1940s people were always going to Connecticut for the weekend, and it always looked wonderfully green and rustic. It was always full of empty roads and stone cottages in leafy glades. But this was just semisuburban: ranch houses with three-car garages and lawns with twirling sprinklers and shopping centers every six blocks. Litchfield itself was very handsome, the quintessential New England town, with an old courthouse and a long sloping green with a cannon and a memorial to the war dead. On one side of the green stood pleasant shops and on the other was a tall, white, steepled church, dazzling in the October sunshine. And there was color—the trees around the green were a rich gold and lemon. This was more like it.

I parked in front of MacDonald Drug and crossed the green through a scuffle of fallen leaves. I strolled along residential streets where big houses squatted on wide lawns. Each was a variation on the same theme: rambling clapboard with black shutters. Many had wooden plaques on them pertaining to their history—O
LIVER
B
OARDMAN
1785; 1830 C
OL
. W
EBB
. I spent over an hour just poking around. It was a pleasant town for poking.

Afterwards I drove east, sticking to back highways. Soon I was in the suburbs of Hartford, and then in Hartford itself, and then in the suburbs on the other side of Hartford. And then I was in Rhode Island. I stopped beside a sign saying W
ELCOME
TO
R
HODE
I
SLAND
and stared at the map. Was that really all there was to Connecticut? I considered turning back and having another sweep across the state—there had to be more to it than that—but it was getting late, so I pressed on, venturing into a deep and rather more promising pine forest. Considering Rhode Island’s microscopic size it seemed to take me ages to find my way out of the forest. By the time I hit Narragansett Bay, a heavily islanded inlet which consumes almost a quarter of the state’s modest square mileage, it was almost dark, and there were lights winking from the villages scattered along the shoreline.

At Plum Point a long bridge crossed the sound to Conanicut Island, which rode low and dark on the water, like a corpse. I crossed the bridge and drove around the island a little, but by now it was too dark to see much. At one place where the shore came in near the road, I parked and walked to the beach. It was a moonless night and I could hear the sea before I could see it, coming in with a slow, rhythmic
whoosh-whoosh.
I went and stood at the water’s edge. The waves fell onto the beach like exhausted swimmers. The wind played at my jacket. I stared for a long time out across the moody sea, the black vastness of the Atlantic, the fearsome, primordial, storm-tossed depths from which all of life has crawled and will no doubt one day return, and I thought, “I could murder a hamburger.”

In the morning I drove into Newport, America’s premier yachting community, home of the America’s Cup races. The old part of town had been fixed up in recent years, by the look of it. Shops with hanging wooden signs out front lined the streets. They all had jauntily nautical names like the Flying Ship and Shore Thing. The harbor was almost too picturesque, with its crowds of white yachts and bare masts undulating beneath a sky in which gulls danced and reeled. But all around the fringe of the downtown there were unsightly parking lots, and a busy four-lane road, more freeway than city street, divided the waterfront from the town. Spindly trees stood along it like scrawny afterthoughts. The city had also built a little park, Perrott Park, but it was unkempt and full of graffiti. I had not encountered this kind of neglect before. Most American towns are spotless, and this really surprised me, especially considering the importance of tourism to Newport. I walked up Thames Street, where some fine old sea captains’ homes were fighting a losing battle with litter and dog shit and the encroachment of gas stations and car transmission places. It was all very sad. This was a place where the people didn’t seem to care, or perhaps just didn’t notice, how shabby they had let things grow. It reminded me of London.

I drove out to Fort Adams State Park across the bay. From there Newport looked another town altogether—a charming cutout of needle-shaped church spires and Victorian rooftops protruding from a parkland of trees. The bay glittered in the sunshine and its scores of sailboats bobbed on the gentle waves. It was captivating. I drove on along the shore road, past Brenton Point, and then down Bellevue Avenue, where the most fabulous summer homes ever built line the road on both sides and spill over onto many of the streets beyond.

Between about 1890 and 1905, America’s richest families—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Belmonts, dozens of others—tried to outdo each other by building magnificent homes, which they insisted on calling cottages, all along this half-mile strip of imposing cliffs. Most were loosely modeled on French chateaux and filled with furniture, marble and tapestries shipped at huge expense from Europe. Hostesses routinely spent $300,000 or more on entertainment for a season that listed only six or eight weeks. For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.

Most of the houses are now run as museums. They charge an arm and a leg to get in and in any case the lines outside most of them were enormous (this was the Columbus Day weekend, remember). You can’t see much from the street—the owners didn’t want common people staring at them as they sat on the lawn counting their money, so they put up dense hedges and high walls—but I discovered quite by chance that the city had built an asphalt footpath all along the cliff edge, from which I could see the backs of the grander mansions, as well as enjoy giddying views of the ocean breaking onto the rocks far below. I had the path almost to myself and walked along it in a state of quiet amazement, with my mouth open. I had never seen such a succession of vast houses, such an excess of architecture. Every house looked like a cross between a wedding cake and a state capitol building. I knew that the grandest of all the houses was The Breakers, built by the Vanderbilts, and I kept thinking, “Well,
this
must be it” and “Now surely
this
must be it,” but then the next house along would be even more awesome. When at last I reached The Breakers, it was absolutely enormous, a mountain with windows. You can’t look at it without thinking that nobody, with the possible exception of oneself, deserves to be that rich.

On the other side of the fence, the lawns and terraces were full of pudgy tourists in Bermuda shorts and silly hats, wandering in and out of the house, taking pictures of each other and trampling the begonias, and I wondered what Cornelius Vanderbilt would make of that, the dog-faced old prick.

I drove on to Cape Cod, another place I had never been and for which I had high expectations. It was very picturesque, with its old salt-box homes, its antique shops and wooden inns, its pretty villages with quaint names: Sagamore, Sandwich, Barnstable, Rock Harbor. But it was jam-packed with tourists in overloaded cars and rumbling motor homes. Boy, do I hate motor homes! Especially on crowded peninsulas like Cape Cod where they clog the streets and block the views—and all so that some guy and his dumpy wife can eat lunch and empty their bladders without stopping.

The traffic was so dense and slow moving that I almost ran out of gas and just managed to limp into a two-pump station outside West Barnstable. It was run by a man who was at least ninety-seven years old. He was tall and rangy and very spry. I’ve never seen anybody pump gas with such abandon. First he slopped a quantity of it down the side of the car and then he got so engaged in talking about where I came from—“Ioway, eh? We don’t get many from Ioway. I think you’re the first this year. What’s the weather like in Ioway this time of year?”—that he let the pump run over and I had to point out to him that gasoline was cascading down the side of the car and gathering in a pool at our feet. He withdrew the nozzle, sloshing another half-gallon over the car and down his trousers and shoes, and kind of threw it back at the pump, where it dribbled carelessly.

He had a cigarette butt plugged into the side of his mouth and I was terrified he would try to light it. And he did. He pulled out a crumpled book of matches and started to fidget one of them to life. I was too stunned to move. All I could think of was a television newscaster saying, “And in West Barnstable today a tourist from Iowa suffered third-degree burns over 98 percent of his body in an explosion at a gas station. Fire officials said he looked like a marshmallow that had fallen on the campfire. The owner of the gas station has still not been found.” But we didn’t explode. The little stub of cigarette sprouted smoke, which the man puffed up into a good-sized billow, and then he pinched out the match with his fingers. I suppose after all these decades of pumping gas he had become more or less incombustible, like those snake handlers who grow immune to snake venom. But I wasn’t inclined to test this theory too closely. I paid him hastily and pulled straight back onto the highway, much to the annoyance of a man in a forty-foot motor home who dripped mustard on his lap in braking to avoid me. “That’ll teach you to take a building on vacation,” I muttered uncharitably and hoped that something heavy had fallen on his wife in back.