The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [87]
The American economy was coming apart in shreds and all I could get were songs by the Eagles. I twirled and twirled the dial, thinking that surely somebody somewhere must be giving the dawn of a new Great Depression more than a passing mention – and someone was, thank goodness. It was CBC, the Canadian network, with an excellent and thoughtful programme called As It Happens, which was entirely devoted that evening to the crash of Wall Street. I will leave you, reader, to consider the irony in an American citizen, travelling across his own country, having to tune in to a foreign radio network to find out the details of one of the biggest domestic news stories of the year. To be scrupulously fair, I was later told that the public service network in America – possibly the most underfunded broadcast organization in the developed world – also devoted a long report to the crash. I expect it was given by a man sitting in a tin hut in a field somewhere, reading scribbled notes off a sheet of paper.
At Toledo, I joined Interstate 75, and drove north into Michigan, heading for Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, where I intended spending the night. Almost immediately I found myself in a wilderness of warehouses and railroad tracks and enormous parking lots leading to distant car factories. The parking lots were so vast and full of cars that I half wondered if the factories were there just to produce sufficient cars to keep the parking lots full, thus eliminating any need for consumers. Interlacing all this were towering electricity pylons. If you have ever wondered what becomes of all those pylons you see marching off to the horizon in every country in the world, like an army of invading aliens, the answer is that they all join up in a field just north of Toledo, where they discharge their loads into a vast estate of electrical transformers, diodes and other contraptions that look for all the world like the inside of a television set, only on a rather grander scale, of course. The ground fairly thrummed as I drove past and I fancied I felt a crackle of blue static sweep through the car, briefly enlivening the hair on the back of my neck and leaving a strangely satisfying sensation in my armpits. I was half inclined to turn around at the next intersection and go back for another dose. But it was late and I pressed on. For some minutes I thought I smelled smouldering flesh and kept touching my head tentatively. But this may only have been a consequence of having spent too many lonely hours in a car.
At Monroe, a town halfway between Toledo and Detroit, a big sign beside the highway said WELCOME TO MONROE – HOME OF GENERAL CUSTER. A mile or so later there was another sign, even larger, saying MONROE, MICHIGAN – HOME OF LA-Z-BOY FURNITURE. Goodness, I thought, will the excitement never stop? But it did, and the rest of the journey was completed without drama.
Chapter eighteen
I SPENT THE night in Dearborn for two reasons. First, it would mean not having to spend the night in Detroit, the city with the highest murder rate in the country. In 1987, there were 635 homicides in Detroit, a rate of 58.2 per 100,000 people, or eight times the national average. Just among children, there were 365 shootings in which both the victims and gunmen were under sixteen. We are talking about a tough city – and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn’t bear thinking about. People will have to start carrying bazookas for protection.
My second and more compelling reason for going to Dearborn was to see the Henry Ford Museum, a place my father had taken us