The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [52]
I should have known better. My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz clearly was an incurable disease involving flaking skin. The upshot is that I got hopelessly lost. The road, once I lost sight of the highway, broke up into a network of unsignposted lanes hemmed in by tall grass. I drove for ages, with that kind of glowering, insane resolve that you get when you are lost and become convinced that if you just keep moving you will eventually end up where you want to be. I kept coming to towns that weren’t on my map – Sanville, Pleasantville, Preston. These weren’t two-shack places. They were proper towns, with schools, gas stations, lots of houses. I felt as if I should call the newspaper in Roanoke and inform the editor that I had found a lost county.
Eventually, as I passed through Sanville for the third time, I decided I would have to ask directions. I stopped an old guy taking his dog out to splash urine around the neighbourhood and asked him the way to Critz. Without batting an eyelid he launched into a set of instructions of the most breathtaking complexity. He must have talked for five minutes. It sounded like a description of Lewis and Clark’s journey through the wilderness. I couldn’t follow it at all, but when he paused and said, ‘You with me so far?’ I lied and said I was.
‘Okay, well that takes you to Preston,’ he went on. ‘From there you follow the old drover’s road due east out of town till you come to the McGregor place. You can tell it’s the McGregor place because there’s a sign out front saying: The McGregor Place. About a hundred yards further on there’s a road going off to the left with a sign for Critz. But whatever you do don’t go down there because the bridge is out and you’ll plunge straight into Dead Man’s Creek.’ And on he went like that for many minutes. When at last he finished I thanked him and drove off without conviction in the general direction of his last gesture. Within 200 yards I had come to a T-junction and didn’t have a clue which way to go. I went right. Ten minutes later, to the surprise of both of us, I was driving past the old guy and his ever-urinating dog again. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him gesturing excitedly, shouting at me that I had gone the wrong way, but as this was already abundantly evident to me, I ignored his hopping around and went left at the junction. This didn’t get me any nearer Critz, but it did provide me with a new set of dead ends and roads to nowhere. At three o’clock in the afternoon, two hours after I set off for Critz, I blundered back onto Highway 58. I was 150 feet further down the road than I had been when I left it. Sourly I pulled back on to the highway and drove for many long hours in silence. It was too late to go to the Booker T. Washington National Monument or to Monticello, even assuming I could summon the intelligence to find them. The day had been a complete washout. I had had no lunch, no life-giving infusions of coffee. It had been a day without pleasure or reward. I got a room in a motel in Fredricksburg, ate at a pancake-house of ineffable crappiness and retired to my room in a dim frame of mind.
In the morning I drove to Colonial Williamsburg, a restored historic village near the coast. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the east and even though it was early on a Tuesday morning in October when I arrived, the car-parks were already filling up. I parked and joined a stream of people following the signs to the visitors’ centre. Inside it was cool and dark. Near the door was a scale model of the village in a glass case. Oddly,