The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [73]
At Plum Point a long bridge crossed the sound to Conanicut Island, which rode low and dark on the water, like a corpse. I crossed the bridge and drove around the island a little, but by now it was too dark to see much. At one place where the shore came in near the road, I parked and walked to the beach. It was a moonless night and I could hear the sea before I could see it, coming in with a slow, rhythmic whoosh-whoosh. I went and stood at the water’s edge. The waves fell on to the beach like exhausted swimmers. The wind played at my jacket. I stared for a long time out across the moody sea, the black vastness of the Atlantic, the fearsome, primordial, storm-tossed depths from which all of life has crawled and will no doubt one day return, and I thought, ‘I could murder a hamburger.’
In the morning I drove into Newport, America’s premier yachting community, home of the America’s Cup races. The old part of town had been fixed up in recent years, by the look of it. Shops with hanging wooden signs out front lined the streets. They all had jauntily nautical names like ‘The Flying Ship’ and ‘Shore Thing’. The harbour was almost too picturesque, with its crowds of white yachts and bare masts undulating beneath a sky in which gulls danced and reeled. But all around the fringe of the downtown there were unsightly parking lots, and a busy four-lane road, more freeway than city street, divided the waterfront from the town. Spindly trees stood along it like scrawny afterthoughts. The city had also built a little park, Perrott Park, but it was unkempt and full of graffiti. I had not encountered this kind of neglect before. Most American towns are spotless and this really surprised me, especially considering the importance of tourism to Newport. I walked up Thames Street, where some fine old sea captains’ homes were fighting a losing battle with litter and dog shit and the encroachment of gas stations and car transmission places. It was all very sad. This was a place where the people didn’t seem to care, or perhaps just didn’t notice, how shabby they had let things grow. It reminded me of London.
I drove out to Fort Adams State Park across the bay. From there Newport looked another town altogether – a charming cut-out of needle-shaped church spires and Victorian roof-tops protruding from a parkland of trees. The bay glittered in the sunshine and its scores of sailboats bobbed on the gentle waves. It was captivating. I drove on along the shore road, past Brenton Point, and then down Bellevue Avenue, where the most fabulous summer homes ever built line the road on both sides and spill over on to many of the streets beyond.
Between about 1890 and 1905, America’s richest families – the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Belmonts, dozens of others – tried to outdo each other by building magnificent homes, which they insisted on calling cottages, all along this half-mile strip of imposing cliffs. Most were loosely modelled on French châteaux and filled with furniture, marble and tapestries shipped at huge expense from Europe. Hostesses routinely spent $300,000 or more on entertainment for a season that lasted only six or eight weeks. For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.
Most of the houses are now run as museums. They charge an arm and a leg to get in and in any case the queues outside most of them were enormous