The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [122]
Those were the days all right. Now children sit and watch people having their vitals sprayed around the room with a chain-saw and think nothing of it. I know that makes me sound very old and crotchety to all you youngsters out there, but I think it’s a pity that we can’t have some good wholesome entertainment like we had when I was a boy, when the heroes wore masks and capes, and carried whips, and liked other men a whole bunch. Seriously, have you ever stopped to think what strange role models we were given when we were children? Like Super-man. Here’s a guy who changes his clothes in public. Or Davy Crockett, a man who conquered the frontier, fought valiantly at the Alamo and yet never noticed that he had a dead squirrel on his head. It’s no wonder people my age grew up confused and got heavily involved with drugs. My favourite hero of all was Zorro, who whenever he was peeved with someone would whip out his sword and with three deft strokes carve a Z in the offending party’s shirt. Wouldn’t you just love to be able to do that?
‘Waiter, I specifically asked for this steak rare.’
Slash, slash, slash!
‘Excuse me, but I believe I was here before you.’
Slash, slash, slash!
‘What do you mean, you don’t have it in my size?’
Slash, slash, slash!
For weeks, my friend Robert Swanson and I tried to master this useful trick by practising with his mother’s kitchen knives, but all we had to show for it were some torn shirts and ragged wounds across our chests, and after a time we gave it up as both painful and impossible, a decision that even now I rue from time to time.
As I was close to Los Angeles, I toyed with the idea of driving on in, but I was put off by the smog and the traffic and above all by the thought that in Los Angeles someone might come up to me and carve a Z in my chest for real. I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there. Besides, Los Angeles is passé. It has no surprises. My plan was to drive up through the hidden heart of California, through the fertile San Joaquin Valley. Nobody ever goes there. There is a simple reason for this, as I was about to discover. It is really boring.
Chapter twenty-five
I WOKE UP quietly excited. It was a bright clear morning and in an hour or two I was going to go to Sequoia National Park and drive through a tree. This excited me, in a calm, unshowy sort of way. When I was five, my Uncle Frank and Aunt Fern from Winfield went to California on vacation – this was, of course, before it turned out that Frank was a homo, the old devil, and ran off to Key West with his barber, which rather shocked and upset a lot of people in Winfield, especially when they realized that from now on they would have to drive all the way to Mount Pleasant to get their hair cut – and they sent us a postcard showing a redwood tree of such enormous girth that a road had been cut right through the base of it. The postcard pictured a handsome young couple in a green Studebaker convertible driving through the tree and looking as if they were having something approximating a wholesome orgasm. It made an immediate impression on me. I went to my dad and asked him if we could go to California on our next vacation and drive through a tree and he looked at the card and said, ‘Well . . . maybe one day,’ and I knew then that I had about as much chance of seeing the road through a tree as I had of sprouting pubic hair.
Every year my father would call a family powwow (can you believe this?) to discuss where we were going on vacation and every year I would push for going to California and the tree with a road through it, and my brother and sister would sneer cruelly and say that that was a really mega-dumb idea. My brother always wanted to go to the Rocky Mountains, my sister to Florida and my mother said she didn’t care where we went as long as we were all together. And then my dad would