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By Root 1312 0

from a bowl of blue water into a large toilet. Cleveland was the worst offender. Cleveland was so vile that its river, a slow-moving sludge of chemicals and half-digested solids called the Cuyahoga, once actually caught fire and burned out of control for four days. This also was a remarkable achievement, I feel. Things are said to be better now. According to a story in the Cleveland Free Press, which I read during a stop for coffee near Ashtabula, an official panel with the ponderous title of the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board had just released a survey of chemical substances in the lake, and it had found only 362 types of chemical compared with more than a thousand the last time they had counted. That still seemed an awful lot to me and I was surprised to see a pair of fishermen standing on the shore, hunched down in the drizzle, hurling lines out on to the greenish murk with long poles. Maybe they were fishing for chemicals.

Through dull rain I drove through the outer suburbs of Cleveland, past signs for places that were all called Something Heights: Richmond Heights, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Warrensville Heights, Parma Heights. Curiously the one outstanding characteristic of the surrounding landscape was its singular lack of eminences. Clearly what Cleveland was prepared to consider the heights was what others would regard as distinctly middling. Somehow this did not altogether surprise me. After a time Interstate 90 became the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, and followed the sweep of the bay. The windscreen wipers of the Chevette flicked hypnotically and other cars threw up spray as they swished past. Outside my window the lake sprawled dark and vast until it was consumed by a distant mist. Ahead of me the tall buildings of downtown Cleveland appeared and slid towards me, like shopping on a supermarket conveyor belt.

Cleveland has always had a reputation for being a dirty, ugly, boring city, though now they say it is much better. By ‘they’ I mean reporters from serious publications like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, who visit the city at five-yearly intervals and produce long stories with titles like ‘Cleveland Bounces Back’ and ‘Renaissance in Cleveland’. No-one ever reads these articles, least of all me, so I couldn’t say whether the improbable and highly relative assertion that Cleveland is better now than it used to be is wrong or right. What I can say is that the view up the Cuyahoga as I crossed it on the freeway was of a stew of smoking factories that didn’t look any too clean or handsome. And I can’t say that the rest of the town looked such a knock-out either. It may be improved, but all this talk of renaissance is clearly exaggerated. I somehow doubt that if the Duc d’Urbino were brought back to life and deposited in downtown Cleveland he would say, ‘Goodness, I am put in mind of fifteenth-century Florence and the many treasures therein.’

And then, quite suddenly, I was out of Cleveland and on the James W. Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike in the rolling rural emptiness between Cleveland and Toledo, and highway mindlessness once more seeped in. To relieve the tedium I switched on the radio. In fact, I had been switching it on and off all day, listening for a while but then giving up in despair. Unless you have lived through it, you cannot conceive of the sense of hopelessness that comes with hearing Hotel California by the Eagles for the fourteenth time in three hours. You can feel your brain cells disappearing with little popping sounds. But it’s the disc jockeys that make it intolerable. Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys? In South America there is a tribe of Indians called the Janamanos, who are so backward they cannot even count to three. Their counting system goes: ‘One, two . . . oh, gosh, a whole bunch.’ Obviously disc jockeys have a better dress sense and possess a little more in the way of social skills, but I think we are looking at a