Read Online The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bill Bryson
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clambered over to a nearby K Mart and had a look around. K Marts are a chain of discount stores and they are really depressing places. You could take Mother Teresa to a K Mart and she would get depressed. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the K Marts themselves, it’s the customers. K Marts are always full of the sort of people who give their children names that rhyme: Lonnie, Donnie, Ronnie, Connie, Bonnie. The sort of people who would stay in to watch “The Munsters.” Every woman there has at least four children and they all look as if they have been fathered by a different man. The woman always weighs 250 pounds. She is always walloping a child and bawling, “If you don’t behave, Ronnie, I’m not gonna bring you back here no more!” As if Ronnie could care less about never going to a K Mart again. It’s the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn’t care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake. If you go shopping at K Mart you know that you’ve touched bottom. My dad liked K Marts.
I went in and looked around. I picked up some disposable razors and a pocket notebook, and then, just to make an occasion of it, a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which were attractively priced at $1.29. I paid for these and went outside. It was 7:30 in the evening. The stars were rising above the parking lot. I was alone with a small bag of pathetic treats in the most boring town in America and frankly I felt sorry for myself. I clambered over a wall and dodged across the highway to a Kwik-Krap mini-supermarket, purchased a cold six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and returned with it to my room where I watched cable TV, drank beer, messily ate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (wiping my hands on the sheets) and drew meager comfort from the thought that in Carbondale, Illinois, that was about as good a time as you were ever likely to get.
5
I n the morning I rejoined Highway 127 south. This was marked on my map as a scenic route and for once this proved to be so. It really was attractive countryside, better than anything I knew Illinois possessed, with rolling hills of wine-bottle green, prosperous-looking farms and deep woods of oak and beech. Surprisingly, considering I was heading south, the foliage here was more autumnal than elsewhere—the hillsides were a mixture of mustard, dull orange and pale green, quite fetching—and the clear, sunny air had an agreeable crispness to it. I could live here, in these hills, I thought.
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, V ISIT S POOK C AVERNS ! O KLAHOMA ’ S G REAT F AMILY A TTRACTION ! J UST 69 M ILES ! A couple of miles later there would be another sign saying, P LENTY OF F REE P ARKING AT S POOK C AVERNS . J UST
I went in and looked around. I picked up some disposable razors and a pocket notebook, and then, just to make an occasion of it, a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which were attractively priced at $1.29. I paid for these and went outside. It was 7:30 in the evening. The stars were rising above the parking lot. I was alone with a small bag of pathetic treats in the most boring town in America and frankly I felt sorry for myself. I clambered over a wall and dodged across the highway to a Kwik-Krap mini-supermarket, purchased a cold six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and returned with it to my room where I watched cable TV, drank beer, messily ate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (wiping my hands on the sheets) and drew meager comfort from the thought that in Carbondale, Illinois, that was about as good a time as you were ever likely to get.
5
I n the morning I rejoined Highway 127 south. This was marked on my map as a scenic route and for once this proved to be so. It really was attractive countryside, better than anything I knew Illinois possessed, with rolling hills of wine-bottle green, prosperous-looking farms and deep woods of oak and beech. Surprisingly, considering I was heading south, the foliage here was more autumnal than elsewhere—the hillsides were a mixture of mustard, dull orange and pale green, quite fetching—and the clear, sunny air had an agreeable crispness to it. I could live here, in these hills, I thought.
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, V ISIT S POOK C AVERNS ! O KLAHOMA ’ S G REAT F AMILY A TTRACTION ! J UST 69 M ILES ! A couple of miles later there would be another sign saying, P LENTY OF F REE P ARKING AT S POOK C AVERNS . J UST
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