The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [89]
It is really quite entrancing. For a start, places like Edison’s workshop and the boarding-house where his employees lodged have been scrupulously preserved. You can really see how these people worked and lived. And there is a certain undeniable convenience in having the houses all brought together. Who in a million years would go to Columbiana, Ohio, to see the Harvey Firestone birthplace, or to Dayton to see where the Wright brothers lived? Not me, brother. Above all, bringing these places together makes you realize just how incredibly inventive America has been in its time, what a genius it has had for practical commercial innovation, often leading to unspeakable wealth, and how many of the comforts and pleasures of modern life have their roots in the small towns of the American Middle West. It made me feel proud.
I drove north and west across Michigan lost in a warm after-glow of pleasure from the museum. I was past Lansing and Grand Rapids and entering the Manistee National Forest, 100 miles away, almost before I knew it. Michigan is shaped like an oven mitt and is often about as exciting. The Manistee forest was dense and dull – endless groves of uniform pine trees – and the highway through it was straight and flat. Occasionally I would see a cabin or little lake in the woods, both just glimpsable through the trees, but mostly there was nothing of note. Towns were rare and mostly squalid – scattered dwellings and ugly prefab buildings where they made and sold ugly prefab cabins, so that people could buy their own little bit of ugliness and take it out into the woods.
After Baldwin, the road became wider and emptier and the commercialism grew sparser. At Manistee, the highway ran down to Lake Michigan, and then followed the shoreline off and on for miles, going through rather more pleasant little communities of mostly boarded-up summer homes – Pierport, Arcadia, Elberta (‘A Peach of A Place’), Frankfort. At Empire I stopped to look at the lake. The weather was surprisingly cold. A blustery wind blew in from Wisconsin, seventy miles away across the steely grey water, raising white caps and wavelets. I tried to go for a stroll, but I was only out for about five minutes before the wind blew me back to the car.
I went on to Traverse City, where the weather was milder, perhaps because it was more sheltered. Traverse City looked to be a wonderful old town that seemed not to have changed since about 1948. It still had a Woolworth’s, a J.C. Penney, an old-fashioned movie theatre called The State and a wonderful old restaurant, the Sydney, with black booths and a long soda-fountain. You just don’t see places like that any more. I had coffee and felt very pleased to be there. Afterwards I drove on north on a road running up one side of Grand Traverse Bay and down the other, so that you could always see where you were going or where you had been, sometimes veering inland past farms and cherry orchards for a couple of miles and then sweeping back down to the water’s edge. As the afternoon progressed, the wind settled and the sun came out, tentatively at first, like a