The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [95]
Despite the manifest insanities of private health care in America, there is no denying that the quality of treatment is the best in the world. My friend received superb and unstinting care (and, not incidentally, they cured both her cancer and her pneumonia). She had a private room, with a private bath, a remote control television and video recorder, her own telephone. The whole hospital was carpeted and full of exotic palms and cheerful paintings. In government hospitals in Britain, the only piece of carpet or colour TV you find is in the nursing officers’ lounge. I worked in an NHS hospital years ago and once late at night I sneaked into the nursing officers’ lounge just to see what it was like. Well, it was like the Queen’s sitting-room. It was all velvety furniture and half-eaten boxes of Milk Tray chocolates.
The patients, in the meantime, slept beneath bare light bulbs in cold and echoing barrack halls, and spent their days working on jigsaw puzzles that had at least a fifth of the pieces missing, awaiting a fortnightly twenty-second visit by a swift-moving retinue of doctors and students. Those were, of course, the good old days of the NHS. Things aren’t nearly so splendid now.
Forgive me. I seem to have gone off on a little tangent there. I was supposed to be guiding you across Wisconsin, telling you interesting facts about America’s premier dairy state, and instead I go off and make unconstructive remarks about British and American health care. This was unwarranted.
Anyway, Wisconsin is America’s premier dairy state, producing seventeen per cent of the nation’s cheese and milk products, by golly, though as I drove across its rolling pleasantness I wasn’t particularly struck by an abundance of dairy cows. I drove for long hours, south past Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh and then west towards Iowa. This was quintessential Mid-western farming country, a study in browns, a landscape of low wooded hills, bare trees, faded pastures, tumbledown corn. It all had a kind of muted beauty. The farms were large, scattered and prosperous-looking. Every half mile or so I would pass a snug-looking farmhouse, with a porch swing and a yard full of trees. Standing nearby would be a red barn with a rounded roof and a tall grain silo. Everywhere corn cribs were packed to bursting. Migrating birds filled the pale sky. The corn in the fields looked dead and brittle, but often I passed large harvesters chewing up rows and spitting out bright yellow ears.
I drove through the thin light of afternoon along back highways. It seemed to take forever to cross the state, but I didn’t mind because it was so fetching and restful. There was something uncommonly alluring about the day, about the season, the sense that winter was drawing in. By four o’clock the daylight was going. By five the sun had dropped out of the clouds and was slotting into the distant hills, like a coin going into a piggy bank. At a place called Ferryville, I came suddenly up against the Mississippi River. It fairly took my breath away, it was so broad and beautiful and graceful lying there all flat and calm. In the setting sun it looked like liquid stainless steel.
On the far bank, about a mile away, was Iowa. Home. I felt a strange squeeze of excitement that made me hunch up closer to the wheel. I drove for twenty miles down the eastern side of the river, gazing across to the high dark bluffs on the Iowa side. At Prairie du Chien I crossed the river on an iron bridge full of struts and crossbars. And then I was in Iowa. I actually felt my heart quicken. I was home. This was my state. My licence plate matched everyone else’s. No-one would look at me as if to say, ‘What are you doing here?’ I belonged.
In the fading light, I drove almost randomly around north-east Iowa. Every couple of miles I would pass a farmer on a tractor juddering along the