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By Root 1421 0

hot and dusty and full of scrawny dogs, closed-down movie theatres, grubby diners and gas stations that looked as if they would be grateful to get two customers a week. 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.

I drove and drove, through flat farming country and little towns devoid of life: Hull, Pittsfield, Barry, Oxville. On my map, Springfield was about two inches to the right of Hannibal, but it seemed to take hours to get there. In fact it does take hours to get there. I was only slowly adjusting to the continental scale of America, where states are the size of countries. Illinois is nearly twice as big as Austria, four times the size of Switzerland. There is so much emptiness, so much space between towns. You go through a little place and the dinette looks crowded, so you think, ‘Oh, I’ll wait till I get to Fuddville before I stop for coffee,’ because it’s only just down the road, and then you get out on the highway and a sign says FUDDVILLE 102 MILES. And you realize that you are dealing with another scale of geography altogether. There is a corresponding lack of detail on the maps. On British maps every church and public house is dutifully recorded. Rivers of laughable minuteness – rivers you can step across – are landmarks of importance, known for miles around. In America whole towns go missing – places with schools, businesses, hundreds of quiet little lives, just vanish, as effectively as if they had been vaporized.

And the system of roads is only cruelly hinted at. You look at the map and think you spy a short cut between, say, Weinerville and Bewilderment, a straight grey line of county road that promises to shave thirty minutes from your driving time. But when you leave the main highway, you find yourself in a network of unrecorded back roads, radiating out across the countryside like cracks in a pane of broken glass.

The whole business of finding your way around becomes laden with frustration, especially away from the main roads. Near Jacksonville I missed a left turn for Springfield and had to go miles out of my way to get back to where I wanted to be. This happens a lot in America. The highway authorities are curiously reluctant to impart much in the way of useful information, like where you are or what road you are on. This is all the more strange when you consider that they are only too happy to provide all kinds of peripheral facts – NOW ENTERING BUBB COUNTY SOIL CONSERVATION DISTRICT, NATIONAL SPRAT HATCHERY 5 MILES, NO PARKING WED 3 A.M. TO 6 A.M., DANGER: LOW-FLYING GEESE, NOW LEAVING BUBB COUNTY SOIL CONSERVATION DISTRICT. Often on country roads you will come to a crossroads without signposts and then have to drive twenty miles or more without having any confidence in where you are. And then abruptly, without warning, you round a bend and find yourself at an eight-lane intersection with fourteen traffic lights and the most bewildering assortment of signs, all with arrows pointing in different directions. Lake Maggot State Park this way. Curtis Dribble