The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [24]
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 $1.20. 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 meagre comfort from the thought that in Carbondale, Illinois, that was about as good a time as you were ever likely to get.
Chapter five
IN 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 winebottle 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 programme. 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 on about 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 cut-out 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: VISIT SPOOK CAVERNS! OKLAHOMA’S GREAT FAMILY ATTRACTION! JUST 69 MILES! A couple of miles later there would be another sign saying PLENTY OF FREE PARKING AT SPOOK CAVERNS, JUST 67 MILES! And so it would go, with sign after sign promising the most thrilling and instructive afternoon any family could ever hope to have, at least in Oklahoma. These promises would be supported by illustrations showing eerily-lit underground chambers, the size of cathedrals, in which the stalactites and stalagmites had magically fused into the shapes of witches’ houses, bubbling cauldrons, flying bats and Casper the Friendly Ghost. It all looked extremely promising. So we children in the back would begin suggesting that we stop and have a look, taking it in turns to say, in a sincere and moving way, ‘Oh, please Dad, oh, pleeeeease.’
Over the next sixty miles my father’s position on the matter would proceed through a series of well-worn phases, beginning with a flat refusal on the grounds that it was bound to be expensive and anyway our behaviour since breakfast had been so disgraceful that it didn