"The monument looked smaller than I had expected."I am enthusiastic. Already I am thinking which book of Bryson to read next. Definitely A Short History of Nearly Everything and his newest, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. The latter because the Last Continent keeps returning to Bryson's crazy vacation travels with his parents when he was a child, to locations that he revisits now. His parents were a crazy bunch. No wonder Bill Bryson was keen on escaping them by moving to England. Also because he thinks lowly of his country people on which he keeps shedding insults. I think you can only insult your own country people like Bill Bryson does, but never a foreigner without seeming tasteless.
Unfortunately I only started at page 75 to compile the insults:
Page 75: an encounter in the streets of Holly Springs, Mississippi: "I had to calm 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."
Page 77: a meeting in the tourist office of Oxford, Mississippi, getting driving directions from a local of how to get to William Faulkner's home: "She gave me the rest of the instructions and I pretended to understand, though they meant almost nothing to me. All I kept thinking was what funny sounds they were to be emerging from such an elegantly-looking woman. As I went out the door she called out, 'Hit doan really matter anyhow cuz hit be's closed now...You kin back arond the grounz if you woan, but you caint go insod.'"
Page 91: about the students of Auburn, Mississippi: "In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available, but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students' principle concerns seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice."
Page 95: while visiting Little White House, the weekend home of Theodore Roosevelt who also died there, in Warm Springs, Georgia: "The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead."
Page 98: "There is a fashion in many parts of America, particularly the South, to name things made of concrete after some local worth - the Sylvester C. Grubb Memorial Bridge, the Chester Ovary Levee, theat sort of thing. It seems a very odd practice to me. Imagine working all your life, clawing your way to the top, putting in long hours, neglecting your family, stabbing people in the back and generally being thought a shit by everyone you came in contact with, just to have a highway bridge over the Tallapoosa River named after you."
Etc.
He does not even shy away from making fun of Ike Eisenhower when he observes during a visit to his home outside Gettysburg: "In Ike's room his baathrobe and slippers were laid out and the book he had been reaing on the day he died was left open on the chair beside his bed. The book was - and I ask you to remember for a moment that this was one of the most important men of his country, a man who held the world's destiny in his hands throughout much of World War II and the Cold War, a man chosen by Columbia University to be its president, a man venerated by Republicans for two generations, a man who throughout the whole of my childhood had his finger on The Button - the book was West of the Pecos by Zane Grey." I wonder if I would have preferred Eisenhower's reading taste and his life experience to my way of living. At least people remember him.
Bill Bryson focuses on people during the first part of his trip, on his Eastern loop. The dense population of the East has ruined nature, the highways are lined with fast-food restaurants and gas stations. (He prefers highways because on the minor roads he keeps getting lost hopelessly.)
However, once he has passed Iowa and moves up to the Northern part of Michigan, crossing the Great Lakes on the Straits of Mackinac, the mood changes and he stops making fun of America. Already earlier he has praised the beauty of Savannah or the weekend mansion of Roosevelt in Warm Springs and has described his American heaven in Charleston: "Charleston had the climate and ambience of a Naples, but the wealth and style of a big American city."
He describes what he sees and there are hardly any people in the West. He is fed up with the cities: "As I was close to Los Angeles, I toyed with the idea of driving on it, but I was put off by the smog and the traffic... I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannof for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there." This is quite in contrast to what he writes about nature, e.g. about Colorado: "It was like driving into the opening credits of a Paramount movie."
The most ecstatic moment of the journey comes when he approaches the edge of Grand Canyon: "I came across a snow-spattered sign announcing a look-out point half a mile away along a trail through the woods, and impulsively I went down it, mostly just to get some air. The path was slippery and took a long time to traverse, but on the way the snow stopped falling and the air felt clean and refreshing. Eventually I came to a platform of rocks, marking the edge of the canyon. There was no fence to keep you back from the edge, so I shuffled cautiously over and looked down, but could see nothing but grey soup. A middle-aged couple came along and as we stood chatting about what a dispiriting experience this was, a miraculous thing happened. The fog parted. It just silently drew back, like a set of theatre curtains being opened, and suddenly we saw that we were on the edge of a sheer, giddying drop of at least a thousand feet. 'Jesus!' we said and jumped back, and all along the canyon edge you could hear people saying 'Jesus!', like a message being passed down a long line. And then for many moments all was silence, except for the tiny fretful shiftings of the snow, because out there in front of us was the most awesome, most silencing sight that exists on earth."
But mostly the West is empty: "I drove and drove. That is what you do in the West. You drive and you drive and you drive, advancing from one scattered town to the next, creeping across a landscape like Neptune. For long, empty hours your one goal in life is to get to Dry Gulch or Cactus City or wherever. You sit there watching the highway endlessly unfurl and the odometer advancing with the speed of centuries and all you think about is getting to Dry Gulch and hoping by some miracle it will have a McDonald's or at least a coffee shop. And when at last you get there, all there is is a two-pump gas station and a stall with an old Indian woman selling Navajo trinkets."
After such toil, would you believe that the last word of the book is "serene"?
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