The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [26]
‘And most people, when they see the name, think Ki-ro, don’t they?’
‘Not in Kay-ro they don’t,’ he said, a little hotly.
There didn’t seem to be much to be gained by pursuing the point, so I let it rest there, and I still don’t know why the people call it Kay-ro. Nor do I know why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump, however you pronounce it. Cairo is at the point where the Ohio River, itself a great artery, joins the Mississippi, doubling its grandeur. You would think that at the confluence of two such mighty rivers there would be a great city, but in fact Cairo is a poor little town of 6,000 people. The road in was lined with battered houses and unpainted tenements. Aged black men sat on the porches and stoops on old sofas and rocking-chairs, waiting for death or dinner, whichever came first. This surprised me. You don’t expect to see tenements and porches full of black people in the Midwest – at least not outside big cities like Chicago and Detroit. But then I realized that I was no longer really in the Midwest. The speech patterns of southern Illinois are more Southern than Midwestern. I was nearly as far south as Nashville. Mississippi was only 160 miles away. And Kentucky was just across the river. I crossed it now, on a long, high bridge. From here on down to Louisiana the Mississippi is immensely broad. It looks safe and lazy, but in fact it is full of danger. Scores of people die in it every year. Farmers out fishing stare at the water and think, ‘I wonder what would happen if I just stuck my toe in there a little bit,’ and the next thing you know their bodies bob in the Gulf of Mexico, bloated but looking strangely serene. The river is deceptively fierce. In 1927, when the Mississippi overflowed, it flooded an area the size of Scotland. That is a serious river.
On the Kentucky side of the river I was greeted by huge signs everywhere saying FIREWORKS! In Illinois fireworks are illegal; in Kentucky they are not. So if you live in Illinois and want to blow your hand off, you drive across the river to Kentucky. You used to see a lot more of this sort of thing. If one state had a lower sales tax on cigarettes than a neighbouring state, all the state-line gas stations and cafés would put big signs on their roofs saying TAX-FREE CIGARETTES! 40 CENTS A PACK! NO TAX! and all the people from the next state would come and load their cars up with cut-price cigarettes. Wisconsin used to ban margarine to protect its dairy farmers, so everybody in Wisconsin, including all the dairy farmers, would drive to Iowa where there were big signs everywhere saying MARGARINE FOR SALE! All the Iowans, in the meantime, were driving off to Illinois, where there was no sales tax on anything, or Missouri where the sales tax on gasoline was fifty per cent lower. The other thing you used to get a lot of was states going their own way in terms of daylight saving time, so in the summer Illinois might be two hours adrift from Iowa and one hour behind Indiana. It was all kind of crazy, but it made you realize to what an extent the United States is really fifty independent countries (forty-eight countries in those days). Most of that seems to have gone now, yet another sad loss.
I drove through Kentucky thinking of sad losses and was abruptly struck by the saddest loss of all – the Burma Shave sign. Burma Shave was a shaving cream that came in a tube. I don’t know if it’s still produced. In fact, I never knew anyone who ever used it. But the Burma Shave company used to put clever signs along the highway. They came in clusters of five, expertly spaced so that you read them as a little poem as you passed: IF HARMONY/IS WHAT YOU CRAVE/THEN GET/A TUBA/BURMA SHAVE. Or: BEN MET/ANNA/MADE A HIT/NEGLECTED BEARD/BEN-ANNA SPLIT. Great, eh? Even in the 1950s the Burma Shave signs were pretty much a thing of the past. I can only remember seeing half a dozen in all the thousands of miles of highway we covered. But as roadside diversions went they were outstanding, ten times better than billboards and Pella’s little twirling