Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [42]
I still know very little about the Amish way of life, but it seems very humane to me. I don’t know of any other religion that has that. The fact that most of them choose to come back and live that way after the rumspringa says a lot. And there’s a wonderful social side to it. For instance, I really liked the way that Mervin and many of the other Amish guys grew beards but not moustaches, just because they all wanted to look the same as each other. Like, for instance, when I asked Mervin, ‘Why no moustache, why just the beard?’
‘Nobody else has moustaches,’ he said, ‘and we like to all be the same.’ That’s a lovely sharing concept which really appeals to me, and it’s not phony.
Being Amish is not for me, because I’m too long in the tooth and set in my ways, but if I could have my time again, I’d be proud to be Amish. I think I would have made a pretty cool Amish guy, with my hat and bib and brace overalls, making beautiful furniture. I would have settled for that.
My day in Arthur left me with a similar feeling to when I’d visited Quinn Chapel. It’s nice to see people happy in the knowledge of who and what they are.
The weather was still crap – there were even reports of more tornadoes in St Louis – but I was content now. It was what it was, and as much a part of the journey as the road and the people I’d meet along it. Everything doesn’t always have to be in primary colours. But I must admit, I could have done without the permanently wet crotch.
Go through St Louis; Joplin, Missouri
I arrived in St Louis to find I was staying in the Moonrise Hotel’s Buddy Ebsen Suite, which was strangely appropriate, as Buddy was the reason why I was on the journey. A movie star in 1930s Hollywood, Buddy later played the dad in The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. I used to watch it at home in Glasgow in the 1960s and delight in its bluegrass banjo theme song. It made me rush out and buy a banjo, thereby kick-starting the whole long story that took me out of the shipyards, into playing in folk bands and from there to comedy, movies and ultimately a television series about riding a trike along good old Route 66.
If it hadn’t been for Buddy Ebsen and the other guys in The Beverly Hillbillies – and Earl Scruggs, who played that theme song – I would never have written this book. So it was kind of nice to be in Buddy’s suite. It put a big smile on my face when I went into the room and saw pictures of him all over the place.
The journey to St Louis had been longer and harder than I’d anticipated when I left Mervin’s place in Arthur. The rain battered down, drenching me until I was freezing wet and shivering. Then, mercifully, Mike, the director, offered to take over on the bike. He rode twice the distance that I did and was nearly drowned by the spray of passing trucks. It was terrifying. Driving along on a three-wheeler with your arse eighteen inches off the floor as forty-ton trucks come whooshing past is not fun. It’s not a game for children at all. But Mike did it, and we all arrived in St Louis to tell the tale, so I was a happy boy. It felt like a good day’s hard work.
We had arrived in St Louis by crossing the Mississippi on Poplar Street Bridge, the route since 1966. In the 1920s Route 66 took the McKinley Bridge, a three-arch structure, across the river, but in the 1930s, Route 66 was diverted on to the Chain of Rocks Bridge, allowing travellers to bypass St Louis. It soon became a well-known landmark on the road west, so I decided to take a look at it. But good intentions can result in tricky outcomes, and when I arrived at the bridge with the film crew my first thought was: What am I going to say about this? It was just a wee bridge over a wee river. How would I entertain the great British public with that? Some of them would have bigger bridges in their back gardens.
Then the crew