The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [62]
Q: What is the difference between Bud Dwyer and Bud Lite?
A: Bud Lite has a head on it.
Yet for all its incompetence and criminality, Philadelphia is a likeable place. For one thing, unlike Washington, it feels like a big city. It had skyscrapers and there was steam rising through vents in the sidewalk and on every corner stood a stainless steel hot dog stand, with a chilly-looking guy in a stocking cap bobbing around behind it. I wandered over to Independence Square – actually it’s now called Independence National Historical Park – and looked respectfully at all the historic buildings. The main building is Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and the Constitution ratified. When I was first there in 1960, there was a long line stretching out of the building. There still was – in fact, it seemed not to have moved in twenty-seven years. Deep though my respect is for both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, I was disinclined to spend my afternoon in such a long and immobile queue. I went instead to the visitors’ centre. National park visitors’ centres are always the same. They have some displays in glass cases that manage to be both boring and uninformative, a locked auditorium with a board out front saying that the next showing of the free twelve-minute introductory film will be at 4 p.m. (just before 4 p.m. somebody comes and changes it to 10 a.m.), some racks of books and brochures with titles like Pewter in History and Vegetables of Old Philadelphia, which are too dull even to browse through, much less buy, and a drinking fountain and rest-rooms, which everyone makes use of because there’s not much else to do. Every visitor to every national park goes into the visitors’ centre, stands around kind of stupidly for a while, then has a pee and a drink of water and wanders back outside. That is what I did now.
From the visitors’ centre I ambled along Independence Mall to Franklin Square, which was full of winos, many of whom had the comical idea that I might be prepared to give them twenty-five cents of my own money without their providing any product or service in return. According to my guidebook, Franklin Square had ‘lots of interesting things’ to see – a museum, a working book bindery, an archaeological exhibit and ‘the only post office in the United States which does not fly the American flag’ (don’t ask me why) – but my heart wasn’t in it, especially with piteous and unwashed winos tugging at my sleeves all the while, and I fled back to the real world of downtown Philadelphia.
Late in the afternoon, I found my way to the offices of the Philadelphia Inquirer, where an old friend from Des Moines, Lucia Herndon, was life-style editor. The Inquirer offices were like newspaper offices everywhere – grubby, full of junk, littered with coffee-cups in which cigarette butts floated like dead fish in a polluted lake – and Lucia’s desk, I was impressed to note, was one of the messiest in the room. This may have accounted in part for her impressive rise at the Inquirer. I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will; but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.
We drove in my car out to the district of Mt Airy, where, conveniently for me – and for her too, come to that – Lucia lived with another old friend of mine from Des Moines, her husband, Hal. All day long I had been wondering, vaguely and intermittently, why Hal and Lucia liked Philadelphia so much – they had moved there about a year before – but now I understood. The road to Mt Airy led through the most beautiful city park I had ever been in. Called Fairmount Park and covering almost 9,000 rolling acres, it is the largest municipal park in America and it is full of trees and fragrant shrubs and bosky glades of infinite charm. It stretches for miles along the banks