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By Root 1305 0

The historical research was impressively diligent. The only problem was that it all became a little repetitive after a while. Once you have looked through the windows of fourteen log cabins, you find yourself approaching number fifteen with a certain diminution of enthusiasm, and by the time you reach number twenty it is really only politeness that impels you onward. Since they’ve taken the trouble to build all these cabins and scour the country digging out old rocking-chairs and chamber-pots, you feel that the least you can do is walk around and feign interest at each one. But in your heart you are really thinking that if you never saw a log cabin again you’d be pretty damn pleased. I’m sure that was what Lincoln was thinking when he packed his cases and decided not to be a backwoods merchant any more, but to take up a more rewarding career emancipating Negroes and being President.

Down at the far end of the site, I met an older couple plodding towards me, looking tired. The man gave me a sympathetic look as he passed and said, ‘Only two more to go.’ Down the path from where they had come I could see one of the two remaining cabins, looking distant and small. I waited until the older couple were safely out of sight around a bend, and then sat down beneath a tree, a handsome oak into whose leaves a first trace of autumn gold was delicately bleeding. I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders and wondered why it was that I had been so enchanted by this place when I was five years old. Were childhoods so boring back then? I knew my own little boy, if driven to this place, would drop to the ground and start hyperventilating at the discovery that he had spent a day and a half sealed in a car only to come and see a bunch of boring log cabins. And looking at it now, I couldn’t have blamed him. I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

But then it occured to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone’s time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.

After New Salem, I took Interstate 55 south, and drove for an hour and a half towards St Louis. It was boring, too. On a road as straight and as wide as an American interstate, fifty-five miles an hour is just too slow. It feels like walking speed. Cars and trucks coming towards you on the opposite carriageway seem to be travelling on one of those pedestrian conveyor belts you find in airports. You can see the people inside, get a long, lingering glimpse into their lives, as they slide past. And there’s no sense of driving. You need to put a hand to the wheel occasionally just to confirm your course, but you can take time out to do the most intricate things – count your money, brush your hair, tidy up the car, use the rear-view mirror to search-and-destroy blackheads, read maps and guidebooks, put on or discard articles of clothing. If your car possessed cruise control you could just about climb in the back and take a nap. It is certainly quite easy to forget that you are in charge of two tons of speeding metal, and it is only when you start to scatter emergency cones at roadworks sites or a truck honks at you as you drift into its path that you are jolted back to reality and you realize that henceforth you probably shouldn’t leave your seat to search for snack food.

The one thing that can be said is that it leaves you time to think, and to consider questions like why is it that the trees along highways never grow? Some of them must have been there for forty years by now, and yet they are still no more than six feet tall and with only fourteen leaves on them. Is it a particular low-maintenance strain, do you suppose? And here’s another one. Why can’t they make cereal boxes with pouring spouts? Is some guy at General Foods splitting his sides at the thought that every time people pour out a bowl of cornflakes they spill some of it on the floor? And why is that when you clean a sink, no matter