The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [50]
‘Don’t know,’ he said abruptly without looking at me. Then he looked at me. ‘Don’t know nothin’ about that. You want your oil checked?’
I hesitated, surprised by the question. ‘No thank you.’
‘That’s eleven dollars.’ He took my money without thanks and went back inside. I was fairly dumb-founded. I don’t know quite why. Through the window I could see him pick up his telephone and make a call. He looked at me as he did it. Suddenly I felt alarmed. What if he was calling the police to tell them to come out and shoot me? I laid a small patch of rubber on his driveway as I departed – something you don’t often see achieved with a Chevette – and made the pistons sing as I floored the accelerator and hurtled out of town at a breakneck twenty-seven miles an hour. But a mile or so later I slowed down. Partly this was because I was going up an almost vertical hill and the car wouldn’t go any faster – for one breathless moment I thought it might actually start rolling backwards – and partly because I told myself not to be so jumpy. The guy was probably just calling his wife to remind her to buy more wart lotion. Even if he was calling the police to report an outsider asking impertinent questions, what could they do to me? It was a free country. I hadn’t broken any laws. I had asked an innocent question, and asked it politely. How could anyone take offence at that? Clearly I was being silly to feel any sense of menace. Even so, I found myself glancing frequently into the rear-view mirror and half expecting to see the hill behind me crawling with flashing squad cars and posses of volunteer vigilantes in pickup trucks coming after me. Judiciously, I stepped up my speed from eleven to thirteen miles a hour.
High up the hill I began to encounter shacks set back in clearings in the woods, and peered at them in the hope of glimpsing a Melungeon or two. But the few people I saw were white. They stared at me with a strange look of surprise as I lumbered past, the way you might stare at a man riding an ostrich, and generally made no response to my cheerful wave, though one or two did reply with an automatic and economic wave of their own, a raised hand and a twitch of fingers.
This was real hillbilly country. Many of the shacks looked like something out of Li’l Abner, with sagging porches and tilting chimneys. Some were abandoned. Many appeared to have been handmade, with rambling extensions that had clearly been fashioned from scraps of plundered wood. People in these hills still made moonshine, or stump liquor as they call it. But the big business these days is marijuana, believe it or not. I read somewhere that whole mountain villages band together and can make $100,000 a month from a couple of acres planted in some remote and lofty hollow. More than the Melungeons, that is an excellent reason not to be a stranger asking questions in the area.
Although I was clearly climbing high up into the mountains, the woods all around were so dense that I had no views. But at the summit the trees parted like curtains to provide a spectacular outlook over the valley on the other side. It was like coming over the top of the earth, like the view from an aeroplane. Steep green wooded hills with alpine meadows clinging to their sides stretched away for as far as the eye could see until at last they were consumed by a distant and colourful sunset. Before me a sinuous road led steeply down to a valley of rolling farms spread out along a lazy river. It was as perfect a setting as I had ever seen. I drove through the soft light of dusk, absorbed by the beauty. And the thing was, every house along the roadside was a shack. This was the heart of Appalachia, the most notoriously impoverished region of America, and it was just inexpressibly beautiful. It was strange that the urban professionals from the cities of the eastern seaboard, only a couple of hours’ drive to the east, hadn’t colonized an area of such arresting beauty, filling the dales with rusticky weekend cottages, country clubs, and fancy restaurants.
It was strange, too, to see white