The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [81]
Only the day before in Maine I had been in a McDonald’s offering a starting wage of $5 an hour. Harvey must have been immensely moronic and unskilled – doubtless both – not to be able to keep pace with a sixteen-year-old burger jockey at McDonald’s. Poor guy! And on top of that here he was married to a woman who was slovenly, indiscreet, and had a butt like a barn door. I hoped old Harvey had sense enough to appreciate all the incredible natural beauty with which God had blessed his native state because it didn’t sound as if He had blessed Harvey very much. Even his kids were ugly as sin. I was half tempted to give one of them a clout myself as I went out of the door. There was just something about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him.
I drove on, thinking what an ironic thing it was that the really beautiful places in America – the Smoky Mountains, Appalachia, and now Vermont – were always inhabited by the poorest, most under-educated people. And then I hit Stowe and realized that when it comes to making shrewd generalizations, I am a cretin. Stowe was anything but poor. It was a rich little town, full of chichi boutiques and expensive ski lodges. In fact, for most of the rest of the day, as I wandered around and through the Green Mountain ski resorts, I saw almost nothing but wealth and beauty – rich people, rich houses, rich cars, rich resorts, beautiful scenery. I drove around quite struck by it all, wandered over to Lake Champlain – also immensely beautiful – and idled down the western side of the state, just over the border from New York State.
Below Lake Champlain the landscape became more open, more rolling, as if the hills had been flattened out from the edges, like someone pulling a crease out of a bedspread. Some of the towns and villages were staggeringly pretty. Dorset, for instance, was an exquisite little place, standing around an oval green, full of beautiful white clapboard houses, with a summer play-house and an old church and an enormous inn. And yet. And yet there was something about these places. They were too perfect, too rich, too yuppified. At Dorset there was a picture shop called the Dorset Framery. At Bennington, just down the road, I passed a place called the Publyk House Restaurant. Every inn and lodge had a quaint and picturesque name – the Black Locust Inn, the Hob Knob, the Blueberry Inn, the Old Cutter Inn – and a hanging wooden sign out front. There was always this air of twee artifice pushing in on everything. After a while I began to find it oddly oppressive. I longed to see a bit of neon and a restaurant with a good old family name – Ernie’s Chop House, Zweiker’s New York Grille – with a couple of blinking beer signs in the front window. A bowling alley or drive-in movie theatre would have been most welcome. It would have made it all seem real. But this looked as if it had been designed in Manhattan and brought in by truck.
One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. I couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a $200 sweater but not a can of baked beans. Actually, I could think of a lot of worse things – cancer of the brain, watching every episode of a TV mini-series starring Joan Collins, having to eat at a Burger Chef more than twice in one year, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finding that you’ve just taken a drink from your grandmother’s denture cup, and so on. But I think you get my point.
Chapter seventeen
I SPENT THE night in Cobleskill,