The Lost Continent (41 page)

Authors: Bill Bryson

I drove to Storm Lake. Somebody once told me that Storm Lake was a nice little town, so I decided to drive in and have a look. And by golly, it was wonderful. Built around the blue lake from which it takes its name, it is a college town of 8,000 people. Maybe it was the time of year, the mild spring air, the fresh breeze, I don’t know, but it seemed just perfect. The little downtown was solid and unpretentious, full of old brick buildings and family-owned stores. Beyond it a whole series of broad, leafy streets, all of them lined with fine Victorian homes, ran down to the lakefront where a park stood along the water’s edge. I stopped and parked and walked around. There were lots of churches. The whole town was spotless. Across the street, a boy on a bike slung newspapers onto front porches and I would almost swear that in the distance I saw two guys in 1940s suits cross the street without breaking stride. And somewhere at an open window, Deanna Durbin sang.

Suddenly I didn’t want the trip to be over. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would go to the car now and in an hour or two I would crest my last hill, drive around my last bend, and be finished with looking at America, possibly forever. I pulled my wallet out and peered into it. I still had almost seventy-five dollars. It occurred to me to drive up to Minneapolis and take in a Minnesota Twins baseball game. Suddenly this seemed an excellent idea. If I drove just a little bit maniacally, I could be there in three hours—easily in time for a night game. I bought a copy of
USA Today
from a street-corner machine and went with it into a coffee shop. I slid into a booth and eagerly opened it to the sports pages to see if the Twins were at home. They were not. They were in Baltimore, a thousand miles away. I was desolate. I couldn’t believe I had been in America all this time and it hadn’t occurred to me before now, the last day of the trip, to go to a ball game. What an incredibly stupid oversight.

My father always took us to ball games. Every summer he and my brother and I would get in the car and drive to Chicago or Milwaukee or St. Louis for three or four days and go to movies in the afternoon and to ball games in the evening. It was heaven. We would always go to the ballpark hours before the game started. Because Dad was a sportswriter of some standing—no, to hell with the modesty, my dad was one of the finest sportswriters in the country and widely recognized as such—he could go into the press box and onto the field before the game and to his eternal credit he always took us with him. We got to stand beside him at the batting cage while he interviewed people like Willie Mays and Stan Musial. We got to sit in the dugouts (they always smelled of tobacco juice and urine; I don’t know what those guys got up to down there) and we got to go in the dressing rooms and watch the players dress for the games. I’ve seen Ernie Banks naked. Not a lot of people can say that, even in Chicago.

The best feeling was to walk around the field knowing that kids in the stands were watching us enviously. Wearing my Little League baseball cap with its meticulously creased brim and a pair of very sharp plastic sunglasses, I thought I was Mr. Cool. And I was. I remember once at Comiskey Park in Chicago some kids calling to me from behind the first base dugout, a few yards away. They were big-city kids. They looked like they came from the Dead End Gang. I don’t know where my brother was this trip, but he wasn’t there. The kids said to me, “Hey, buddy, how come you get to be down there?” and “Hey, buddy, do me a favor, get me Nellie Fox’s autograph, will ya?” But I paid no attention to them because I was . . . Too Cool.

So I was, as I say, desolate to discover that the Twins were a thousand miles away on the East Coast and that I couldn’t go to a game. My gaze drifted idly over the box scores from the previous day’s games and I realized with a kind of dull shock that I didn’t recognize a single name. It occurred to me that all these players had been in junior high school when I left America. How could I go to a baseball game not knowing any of the players? The essence of baseball is knowing what’s going on, knowing who’s likely to do what in any given situation. Who did I think I was fooling? I was a foreigner now.

The waitress came over and put a paper mat and cutlery in front of me. “Hi!” she said in a voice that was more shout than salutation. “And how are you doin’ today?” She sounded as if she really cared. I expect she did. Boy, are Midwestern people wonderful. She wore butterfly glasses and had a beehive hairdo.

“I’m very well, thank you,” I said. “How are you?”

The waitress gave me a sideways look that was suspicious and yet friendly. “Say, you don’t come from around here, do ya?” she said.

I didn’t know how to answer that. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” I replied, just a trifle wistfully. “But, you know, it’s so nice I sometimes kind of wish I did.”

Well, that was my trip, more or less. I visited all but ten of the lower forty-eight states and drove 13,978 miles. I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see and a good deal that I didn’t. I had much to be grateful for. I didn’t get shot or mugged. The car didn’t break down. I wasn’t once approached by a Jehovah’s Witness. I still had sixty-eight dollars and a clean pair of underpants. Trips don’t come much better than that.

I drove on into Des Moines and it looked very large and handsome in the afternoon sunshine. The golden dome of the state capitol building gleamed. Every yard was dark with trees. People were out cutting the grass or riding bikes. I could see why strangers came in off the interstate looking for hamburgers and gasoline and stayed forever. There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought, and turned the car for home. It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I almost felt serene.

Index

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

Addams, Charles, 22

Adirondacks, 102

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