The Lost Continent (17 page)

Washington feels like a small city. Its metropolitan population is three million, which makes it the seventh largest in America. And if you add Baltimore, right next door, it rises to over five million. But the city itself is quite small, with a population of just 637,000, less than Indianapolis or San Antonio. You feel as if you are in some agreeable provincial city, but then you turn a corner and come up against the headquarters of the FBI or the World Bank or the IMF and you realize what an immensely important place it is. The most startling of all these surprises is the White House. There you are, shuffling along downtown, looking in department store windows, browsing at cravats and negligees, and you turn a corner and there it is—the White House—right in the middle of the downtown. So handy for shopping, I thought. It’s smaller than you expect. Everybody says that.

Across the street there is a permanent settlement of disaffected people and crazies, living in cardboard boxes, protesting at the Central Intelligence Agency controlling their thoughts from outer space. (Well, wouldn’t you?) There was also a guy panhandling for quarters. Can you believe that? Right there in our nation’s capital, right where Nancy Reagan could have seen him from her bedroom window. I refused to give him a penny. “Why don’t you go and mug somebody?” I told him. “It has more dignity.”

Washington’s most fetching feature is the Mall, a broad, grassy strip of parkland which stretches for a mile or so from the Capitol building at the eastern end to the Lincoln Memorial at the western side, overlooking the Potomac. The dominant landmark is the Washington Monument. Slender and white, shaped like a pencil, it rises 555 feet above the park. It is one of the simplest and yet handsomest structures I know, and all the more impressive when you consider that its massive stones had to be brought from the Nile delta on wooden rollers by Sumerian slaves. I’m sorry, I’m thinking of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Anyway, it is a real feat of engineering and very pleasing to look at. I had hoped to go up it, but there was a long line of people, mostly restive schoolchildren, snaked around the base and some distance into the park, all waiting to squeeze into an elevator about the size of a telephone booth, so I headed east in the direction of Capitol Hill, which isn’t really much of a hill at all.

Scattered around the Mall’s eastern end are the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution—the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum and so on. The Smithsonian—which, incidentally, was donated to America by an Englishman who had never been there—used to be all in one building, but they keep splitting off sections of it and putting them in new buildings all over town. Now there are fourteen Smithsonian museums. The biggest ones are arrayed around the Mall, the others are mostly scattered around the city. Partly they had to do this because they get so much stuff every year—about a million items. In 1986, just to give you some idea, the Smithsonian’s acquisitions included ten thousand moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a MiG-25 jet fighter. All of this used to be kept in a wonderful old Gothic brick building on the Mall called the Castle, but now the Castle is just used for administration and to show an introductory film.

I strolled down towards the Castle now. The park was full of joggers. I found this a little worrying. I kept thinking, shouldn’t they be running the country, or at least destabilizing some Central American government? I mean to say, don’t you usually have something more important to do at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning than pull on a pair of Reeboks and go sprinting around for forty-five minutes?

At the Castle I found the entrance area blocked with wooden trestles and lengths of rope. American and Japanese security men in dark suits were standing around. They all looked as if they spent a lot of time jogging. Some of them had headphones on and were talking into radios. Others had dogs on long leashes or mirrors on poles and were checking out cars parked along Jefferson Drive in front of the building. I went up to one of the American security men and asked him who was coming, but he said he wasn’t allowed to tell me. I thought this was bizarre. Here I was in a country where, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I could find out how many suppositories Ronald Reagan’s doctor had prescribed for him in 1986,
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but I couldn’t be told which foreign dignitary would shortly be making a public appearance on the steps of a national institution. The lady next to me said, “It’s Nakasone. President of Japan.”

“Oh, really,” I replied, always ready to see a celebrity. I asked the security man when he would be arriving. “I’m not allowed to tell you that either, sir,” he said and passed on.

I stood with the crowd for a while and waited for Mr. Nakasone to come along. And then I thought, “Why am I standing here?” I tried to think of anyone I knew who would be impressed to hear that I had seen with my own eyes the prime minister of Japan. I imagined myself saying to my children, “Hey, kids, guess who I saw in Washington—Yasuhiro Nakasone!” and being met with silence. So I walked on to the National Air and Space Museum, which was more interesting.

But not nearly as interesting as it ought to be, if you ask me. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the Smithsonian
was
the Castle. Everything was crammed into this one wonderfully dark and musty old building. It was like the nation’s attic and, like an attic, it was gloriously random. Over here was the shirt Lincoln was wearing when he was shot, with a dried brown bloodstain above the heart. Over there was a diorama showing a Navajo family fixing dinner. Up above you, hanging from the gloomy rafters, were the
Spirit of St. Louis
and the Wright brothers’ first plane. You didn’t know where to look next or what you would find around each corner. Now it is as if everything has been sorted out by a fussy spinster, folded neatly and put in its proper place. You go to the Air and Space Museum and you see the
Spirit of St. Louis
and the Wright brothers’ plane and lots of other famous planes and rocket ships and it’s all highly impressive, but it is also clinical and uninspired. There is no sense of discovery. If your brother came running up to you and said, “Hey, you’ll never guess what I found in this room over here!” you would in fact guess, more or less, because it would have to be either an airplane or a rocket ship. At the old Smithsonian it could have been absolutely anything—a petrified dog, Custer’s scalp, human heads adrift in bottles. There’s no element of surprise anymore. So I spent the day trudging around the various museums dutifully and respectfully, with interest but not excitement. Still, there was so much to see that a whole day passed and I had seen only a part of it.

In the evening I came back to the Mall, and walked across it to the Jefferson Memorial. I had hoped to see it at dusk, but I arrived late and the darkness fell like a blanket. Before I was very far into the park it was pitch dark. I expected to be mugged—indeed, I took it as my due wandering into a city park like this on a dark night—but evidently the muggers couldn’t see me. The only physical risk I ran was being bowled over by one of the many joggers who sprinted invisibly along the dark paths. The Jefferson Memorial was beautiful. There’s not much to it, just a large marble rotunda in the shape of Monticello, with a gigantic statue of Jefferson inside and his favorite sayings engraved on the walls (“Have a nice day,” “Keep your shirt on,” “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” etc.), but when it is lit up at night it is entrancing, with the lights of the memorial smeared across the pool of water called the Tidal Basin. I must have sat for an hour or more just listening to the rhythmic swish of the distant traffic, the sirens and car horns, the distant sounds of people shouting, people singing, people being shot.

I lingered so long that it was too late to go to the Lincoln Memorial and I had to come back in the morning. The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits there in his big high chair looking grand and yet kindly. There was a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head. I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him. Afterwards, as I strolled across the Mall, I spied yet more trestles and draped ropes, with security men hanging about. They had closed off a road across the park and had brought in two helicopters with the presidential seal on their sides and seven cannons and the Marine Corps Band. It was quite early in the morning and there were no crowds, so I went and stood beside the roped enclosure, the only spectator, and none of the security men bothered me or even seemed to notice me.

After a couple of minutes, a wailing of sirens filled the air and a cavalcade of limousines and police motorcycles drew up. Out stepped Nakasone and some other Japanese men, all in dark suits, escorted by some junior-looking Aryans from the State Department. They all stood politely while the Marine Corps Band blared a lively tune, which I didn’t recognize. Then there was a twenty-one-gun salute, but the cannons didn’t go “BOOM!” as you would expect. They went “
PUFF
.” They were filled with some kind of noiseless powder, presumably so as not to waken the president in the White House across the way, so when the battery commander shouted, “Ready, steady, go!” or whatever it was he shouted, there followed seven quick
puff
sounds and then a dense cloud of smoke drifted over us and went on a long slow waft across the park. This was done three times because there were only seven cannons. Then Nakasone gave a friendly wave to the crowd—which is to say, to me—and sprinted with his party to the presidential helicopters, whose blades were already whirring to life. After a moment they rose up, tilted past the Washington Monument and were gone, and everyone back on the ground relaxed and had a smoke.

Weeks afterwards, back in London, I told people about my private encounter with Nakasone and the Marine Corps Band and the noiseless cannons and how the prime minister of Japan had waved to me alone. Most of them would listen politely, then allow a small pause and say, “Did I tell you that Mavis has to go back into hospital next week to have her feet done?” or something like that. The English can be so crushing sometimes.

From Washington I took US 301 out past Annapolis and the US Naval Academy and over a long, low bridge across the Chesapeake Bay into eastern Maryland. Before 1952, when the bridge was built, the eastern side of the bay had enjoyed centuries of isolation. Ever since then, people have been saying that outsiders will flood in and ruin the peninsula, but it still looked pretty unspoiled to me, and my guess is that it’s the outsiders who have kept it that way. It’s always the outsiders who are the most fiercely opposed to shopping malls and bowling alleys, which the locals in their simple, trusting way tend to think might be kind of handy.

Chestertown, the first town of any size I came to, confirmed this. The first thing I saw was a woman in a bright pink track suit zipping past on a bicycle with a wicker basket on the front. Only an urban émigré would have a bicycle with a wicker basket. A local person would have a Subaru pickup truck. There seemed to be a lot of these bike ladies about and between them they had clearly made Chestertown into a model community. The whole place was as neat as a pin. The sidewalks were paved with brick and lined with trees, and there was a well-tended park in the middle of the business district. The library was busy. The movie theater was still in business and not showing a
Death Wish
movie. Everything about the place was tranquil and appealing. This was as nice a town as I had seen. This was almost Amalgam.

I drove on through the low, marshy flatlands, much taken with the simple beauty of the Chesapeake peninsula, with its high skies and scattered farms and forgotten little towns. Late in the morning I crossed into Delaware, en route to Philadelphia. Delaware may well be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her. I said, “So you come from Delaware? Gosh. Wow.” And she moved quickly on to someone more verbally dextrous, and also better-looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they’d say, “You know, I don’t think I ever have,” and then they’d look kind of troubled too.

I determined that I would read up on Delaware so that the next time I met a girl from there I could say something droll and apposite and she might go to bed with me. But I could find almost nothing written about Delaware anywhere. Even the entry in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence, as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children’s drawing slates on which you erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted up behind me as I drove, expunging the experience as it unfolded. Looking back now, I can just vaguely recall some semi-industrial landscape and some signs for Wilmington.

And then I was in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the city that gave the world Sylvester Stallone and Legionnaires’ disease, among other things, and was too preoccupied with the disturbing thoughts that this called up to give Delaware any further consideration.

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1,472.

13

W
hen I was a child, Philadelphia was the third biggest city in America. What I remembered of it was driving through endless miles of ghettos, one battered block after another, on a hot July Sunday, with black children playing in the spray of fire hydrants and older people lounging around on the street corners or sitting on the front stoops. It was the poorest place I had ever seen. Trash lay in the gutters and doorways, and whole buildings were derelict. It was like a foreign country, like Haiti or Panama. My dad whistled tunelessly through his teeth the whole time, as he always did when he was scared, and told us to keep the windows rolled up even though it was boiling in the car. At stoplights people would stare stonily at us and Dad would whistle in double time and drum the steering wheel with his fingers and smile apologetically at anyone who looked at him, as if to say, “Sorry, we’re from out of state.”