The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [84]
‘You want anything else?’ she said in a tone that suggested I had better not. ‘No thank you,’ I answered politely. I wiped my mouth with the table-cloth, having lost my napkin in the gloom, and added a seventh rule to my list: never go into a restaurant ten minutes before closing time. Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
In the morning I woke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
I sighed and got up. I shuffled around the room in my old man posture, gathered up my things, washed, dressed and without enthusiasm hit the highway. I drove west through the Alleghenies and then into a small, odd corner of Pennsylvania. For 200 miles the border between New York and Pennsylvania is a straight line, but at its north-western corner, where I was now, it abruptly juts north, as if the draughtsman’s arm had been jogged. The reason for this small cartographical irregularity was to let Pennsylvania have its own outlet on to Lake Erie so that it wouldn’t have to cross New York State, and it remains today a 200-year-old reminder of how the early states weren’t at all confident that the union was going to work. That it did was far more of an achievement than is often appreciated nowadays.
Just inside the Pennsylvania state line, the highway merged with Interstate 90. This is the main northern route across America, stretching 3,016 miles from Boston to Seattle, and there were lots of long-distance travellers on it. You can always tell long-distance travellers because they look as if they haven’t been out of the car for weeks. You only glimpse them when they pass, but you can see that they have already started to set up home inside – there are pieces of washing hanging in the back, remnants of takeaway meals on the window-sill, and books, magazines and pillows scattered around. There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back. You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past. You glance at each other’s licence plates and feel envy or sympathy in proportion to your comparative distances from home. One car I saw had Alaska plates on it. This was unbelievable. I had never seen Alaska licence plates before. The man must have driven over 4,500 miles, the equivalent of going from London to Zambia. He was the most forlorn looking character I had ever seen. There was no sign of a wife and children. I expect by now he had killed them and put their bodies in the trunk.
A drizzly rain hung in the air. I drove along in that state of semi-mindlessness that settles over you on interstate highways. After a while Lake Erie appeared on the right. Like all the Great Lakes, it is enormous, more an inland sea than a lake, stretching 200 miles from west to east and about forty miles across. Twenty-five years ago Lake Erie was declared dead. Driving along its southern shore, gazing out at its flat grey immensity, this appeared to be a remarkable achievement. It hardly seemed possible that something as small as man could kill something as large as a Great Lake. But just in the space of a century or so we managed it. Thanks to lax factory laws and the triumph of greed over nature in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Sandusky and other bustling centres of soot and grit, Lake Erie was transformed in just three generations