The Lost Continent

Key Takeaways

Kyle, in 2018 in Books: This book fits into my bucket of thinking about small towns and what sets them apart. Bill Bryson also just happens to be so dang funny. I was frequently taking pictures of jokes and sending it to my wife or my brother. There really is no end result, no summary. He sees good, and he sees bad as he travels around the whole country.

Thanks to Camden for getting me this birthday present, and for Bell’s Books in Palo Alto for my copy.

Talking about college kids (remember, this book was written in the 80s)— “These kids wear button-down-collar shirts and penny loafers. They look like they’re on their way to an Osmonds concert. And they don’t know anything! You talk to them in a bar and they don’t know who’s running for president. They’ve never heard of Nicaragua. It’s scary. They’re getting an education, can you believe that? They want to be insurance salesmen and computer programmers. That’s their dream in life. They want to make a lot of money so they can go out and buy more penny loafers and Madonna albums. It terrifies me sometimes.” In a casino — “On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money.”

Bill Bryson driving small-town America in the 1980s looking for a perfect town that doesn’t exist. Kyle reads it as City Building material disguised as a travel comedy:

• The vanished main street. Winfield’s Main Street once had “two grocery stores, a variety store, a tavern, a pool hall” — the inventory of a functioning downtown, recited as an absence.
• The perfect town as a thing he can’t find. “One of the things I was looking for on this trip was the perfect town. It began to bother me that I had never seen this town” — and the disillusionment when a place he’d built up in memory turns out to be “nothing there.”
• Preservation as the missing instinct. “It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation” — with Savannah’s 1,000 historic buildings as the counterexample that works, and the generalisation that “Americans revere the past only as long as” it’s convenient.
• Compartmentalised commerce. The “strange compartmentalization that goes on in America — a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed” near the good parts, which is a zoning argument in disguise.
• Envy of unassuming places. Bloomsburg, PA: “I was seized with a huge envy for these people and their unassuming lives. It must be wonderful to live in a safe and timeless place.”
• Comfort as the enemy of travel. “The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience.”
• Relative poverty. “Where I come from you are poor if you can’t afford a refrigerator that makes its own ice cubes.”

Connections

Books: Our Towns — the direct modern counterpart, same question, different decade. The Death and Life of Great American Cities on preservation and street life.

Concepts: City Building · Small-Town Revitalization — this is a field report on what was lost. The Luna Landing — Kyle’s own small-town project shares the question.

People: Bill Bryson.

• Our Towns — Kyle’s notes on Our Towns explicitly tag The Lost Continent as part of the same “road trip discovers America” tradition (Lewis & Clark → Tocqueville → Steinbeck → Least Heat-Moon); Bryson’s highway drive and Fallows’s single-engine plane survey occupy the same genre.
• A Walk in the Woods — both by Bill Bryson; paired reads in the Bryson travel-essay tradition (one on-foot, one by car).

Highlights

• “And as for American closets, they seem to always be full of yesterday’s enthusiasms: golf clubs, scuba diving equipment, tennis rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, dark room equipment, objects that once excited their owner and then were replaced by other objects even more shiny and exciting. That is the great, seductive thing about America — the people always get what they want, right now, whether it is good for them or not. There is something deeply worrying, and awesomely irresponsible, about this endless Self-gratification, this constant appeal to the baser instincts.” #materialism
• “I drove on into town. When I was growing up Main Street in Winfield had two grocery stores, a variety store, a tavern, a pool hall, a newspaper, a bank, a barbershop, a post office, two gas stations — all the things you would expect of any thriving little town. Everyone shopped locally; everyone knew everyone else. Now all that was left was a tavern and a place selling farm equipment. There were half a dozen vacant lots, full of patchy grass, where buildings had been torn down and never replaced. Most of the remaining buildings were dark and boarded up. It was like an abandoned film set which had long since been left to decay.”
• “One of the things I was looking for on this trip was the perfect town. It began to bother me that I had never seen this town. But I felt sure that it must exist somewhere. It was inconceivable that a nation so firmly attached to small-town ideals, so dedicated in its fantasies to small-town notions, could not have somewhere built one perfect place — a place of harmony and industry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories, and drive-in churches, without Kwik-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the other. In this timeless place Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on a bike and those two smartly striding men. The place I was looking for would be an amalgam of all those towns I had encountered in fiction. Indeed, that might well be its name — Amalgam, Ohio, or Amalgam, North Dakota. It could exist almost anywhere, but it had to exist. And on this trip, I intended to find it.”
• “But there really was nothing there. I was perplexed and disillusioned. Before I had left on this trip I had lain awake at night in my bed in England and pictured myself stopping each evening at a motel in a little city, strolling into town along wide sidewalks, dining on the blue-late special at Betty’s Family Restaurant on the town square, then plugging a scented toothpick in my mouth and going for a stroll around town, very probably stopping off at Vern’s Midnite Tavern for a couple draws and a game of eight-ball with the boys or taking in a movie at the Regal or looking in at the Val-Hi Bowling Alley to kibitz the Mid-Week Hairdressers’ League matches before rounding off the night with a couple games of pinball and a grilled cheese sandwich. But here there was no square to stroll to, no Betty’s, no blue-plate specials, no Vern’s Midnite Tavern, no movie theater, no bowling alley. There was no town, just six-lane highways and shopping malls. There wasn’t even any sidewalks. Going for a walk, as I discovered, was a ridiculous and impossible undertaking.”
• “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.”
• “With so much poverty everywhere, Columbus, Mississippi came as a welcome surprise. It was a splendid little city, hometown of Tennessee Williams, with a population of 30,000. During the Civil War it was briefly the state capital, and it still had some large antebellum homes lining the well-shaded road in from the highway. But the real jewel was its downtown, which seemed hardly to have changed since about 1955. Crenshaw’s Barber Shop had a rotating pole out front and across the street was a genuine five-and-dime called McCrory’s and on the corner was the Bank of Mississippi in an imposing building with a big clock hanging over the sidewalk. The county courthouse, city hall and post office were all handsome and imposing edifices but built to a small-town scale. The people looked prosperous. The first person I saw was an obviously well-educated black man in a three-piece suit carrying a Wall Street Journal. It was all deeply pleasing and encouraging. This was a first-rate town. Combine it with Pella’s handsome square and you would almost have my long-sought Amalgam. I was beginning to realize that I was never going to find it in one place. I would have to collect it piecemeal — a courthouse here, a fire station there — and here I had found several pieces.”
• “Where I come from you are poor if you can’t afford a refrigerator that makes its own ice cubes and your car doesn’t have automatic windows. Not having running water in the house is something beyond the realms of the imaginable to most Americans.”
• “In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting, and learning. Learning was something you did only when the the first three weren’t available, but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students’ principal concerns seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice. I don’t think learning comes into it very much. At the time of my trip, there was an outcry in America over the contagion of ignorance that appeared to be sweeping through the nation’s young people.”
• “Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown. What a difference it makes, how much more vibrant and alive it all seems, to see children playing ball in the street or skipping rope on the front stoops.”
• “This isn’t supposed to happen in America. Wealthy children don’t play on the street; there isn’t any need. They lounge beside the pool or sneak reefers in the $3,000 treehouse that Daddy had built for them on their ninth birthday. And their mothers, when they wish to gossip with a neighbor, do it on the telephone or climb into their air-conditioned station wagons and drive a hundred yards. It made me realize how much cars and suburbs — and indiscriminate wealth — have spoiled American life.”
• “That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience — indeed, not to breathe fresh air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you, you pile into your thirteen-ton tin palace and drive 400 miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you don’t have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave facilities.”
• “I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America — a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.”
• “It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, “Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let’s go home to Smellville and plant a lot trees and preserve all the fine old buildings.” But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.”
• “Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, as it turned out, was actually very nice. It’s a college town, with a decidedly sleepy air. You feel at first as if you should be wearing slippers and a bathrobe. Main Street was prosperous and tidy and the surrounding streets were mostly filled with large old houses sitting on ample lawns. Here and there church spires poked out from among the many trees. It was pretty well an ideal town — one of those rare American places where you wouldn’t need a car. From almost any house in town it would be a short and pleasant stroll to the library and post office and stores. My brother and his wife told me that a developer was about to build a big shopping mall outside town and most of the bigger merchants were going to move out there. People, it appeared, didn’t want to stroll to do their shopping. They actually wanted to get in their cars and drive to the edge of town, where they could then park and walk a similar distance across a flat, treeless parking lot. That is how America goes shopping and they wanted to be a part of it. So now downtown Bloomsburg is likely to become semiderelict and another nice little town will be lost. So the world progresses.”
• “I was seized with a huge envy for these people and their unassuming lives. It must be wonderful to live in a safe and timeless place, where you know everyone and everyone knows you, and you can count on each other. I envied them their sense of community, their football games, their bring-and-bake sales, their church socials. I felt guilty for mocking them. They were good people.”

Kyle: Talking about college kids (remember, this book was written in the 80s)— “These kids wear button-down-collar shirts and penny loafers. They look like they’re on their way to an Osmonds concert. And they don’t know anything! You talk to them in a bar and they don’t know who’s running for president. They’ve never heard of Nicaragua. It’s scary. They’re getting an education, can you believe that? They want to be insurance salesmen and computer programmers. That’s their dream in life. They want to make a lot of money so they can go out and buy more penny loafers and Madonna albums. It terrifies me sometimes.”

• “Generally speaking — which is of course, always dangerous thing to do, generally speaking — Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences. Preserving the past for its own sake doesn’t come into it much. There is little room for sentiment. When somebody comes along and offers a group of nuns good money for their staircase, they don’t say, ‘Certainly not, it is a hallowed shrine,’ they say, ‘How much?’ And if the offer is good enough they will sell it to build a new convent on a bigger site, with air-conditioning, lots of parking space, and a games room. I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that nuns are worse than other Americans in this regard. They are simply behaving in the customary American way. I find that very sad. It is no wonder that so few things last for more than a generation in America.”

Kyle: In a casino — “On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money.”

• “I don’t know why it should be, but the National Park Service has a long history of incompetence. In the 1960s, if you can believe it, the park service invited the Walt Disney Corporation to build a development in Sequoia National Park. Mercifully, that plan was quashed. But others have succeeded, most notably in 1923 when, after a long fight between conservationists and businessmen, the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the northern part of Yosemite — which was said to be even more spectacularly beautiful than Yosemite Valley itself — was flooded to create a reservoir to provide drinking water for San Francisco, 150 miles to the west. So for the last sixty years one of the half-dozen or so most breathtaking stretches of landscape on the planet has lain under water for commercial reasons. God help us if they ever find oil there.”