The Lost Continent (19 page)

When the Eisenhowers bought the place in 1950, a 200-year-old farmhouse stood on the site, but it was draughty and creaked on stormy nights, so they had it torn down and replaced with the present building, which
looks
like a 200-year-old farmhouse. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that just so Republican? I was enchanted. Every room contained things I hadn’t seen for years – 1960s kitchen appliances, old copies of
Life Magazine
, boxy black and white portable TVs, metal alarm clocks. Upstairs the bedrooms were just as Ike and Mamie had left them. Mamie’s personal effects were on her bedside table – her diary, reading glasses, sleeping-pills – and I dare say that if you knelt down and looked under the bed you would find all her old gin bottles.

In Ike’s room his bathrobe and slippers were laid out and the book he had been reading on the day he died was left open on the chair beside the bed. The book was – and I ask you to remember for a moment that this was one of the
most important men of this century, a man who held the world’s destiny in his hands throughout much of World War II and the Cold War, a man chosen by Columbia University to be its president, a man venerated by Republicans for two generations, a man who throughout the whole of my childhood had his finger on The Button – the book was
West of the Pecos
by Zane Grey.

From Gettysburg, I headed north up US 15 towards Bloomsburg, where my brother and his family had recently moved. For years they had lived in Hawaii, in a house with a swimming-pool, near balmy beaches, beneath tropical skies and whispering palms, and now, just when I had landed a trip to America and could go anywhere I wanted, they had moved to the Rust Belt. Bloomsburg, as it turned out, was actually very nice – a bit short on balmy beaches and hula girls with swaying hips, but still nice for all that.

It’s a college town, with a decidedly sleepy air. You feel at first as if you should be wearing slippers and a bathrobe. Main Street was prosperous and tidy and the surrounding streets were mostly filled with large old houses sitting on ample lawns. Here and there church spires poked out from among the many trees. It was pretty well an ideal town – one of those rare American places where you wouldn’t need a car. From almost any house in town it would be a short and pleasant stroll to the library and post office and stores. My brother and his wife told me that a developer was about to build a big shopping mall outside town and most of the bigger merchants were going to move out there. People, it appeared, didn’t want to stroll to do their shopping. They actually wanted to get in their cars and
drive to the edge of town, where they could then park and walk a similar distance across a flat, treeless parking lot. That is how America goes shopping and they wanted to be part of it. So now downtown Bloomsburg is likely to become semiderelict and another nice little town will be lost. So the world progresses.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to see my brother and his family, as you can imagine. I did all the things you do when you visit relatives – ate their food, used their bathtub, washing-machine and telephone, stood around uselessly while they searched for spare blankets and grappled with a truculent sofa bed, and of course late at night when everyone was asleep I crept out of my room and had a good look in their closets.

As it was the weekend and as they had some spare time, my brother and his wife decided to take me down to Lancaster County to show me the Amish country. It was a two-hour drive.
En route
, my brother pointed out the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor at Harrisburg, where a few years before some careless employees had very nearly irradiated the whole of the eastern seaboard, and then forty-five miles further on we passed the Peach Bottom nuclear power station, where seventeen employees had recently been dismissed after it had been revealed that they spent their working hours sleeping, taking drugs, having rubber band fights and playing video games. At some times every person in the plant was dozing, according to investigators. Allowing state utilities in Pennsylvania to run nuclear power stations is a bit like letting Prince Philip fly through London airspace. In any case, I made a mental note to bring an anti-radiation suit with me next time I came to Pennsylvania.

Lancaster County is the home of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish and Mennonites. The Mennonites are named after a well-known brand of speed-stick deodorant. They aren’t really. I just made that up. They are named after Menno Simons, one of their early leaders. In Europe they were called Anabaptists. They came to Lancaster County 250 years ago. Today there are 12,500 Amish people in the county, almost all of them descended from thirty original couples. The Amish split from the Mennonites in 1693, and there have been countless subdivisions since then, but the thing that they all have in common is that they wear simple clothes and shun modern contrivances. The problem is that since about 1860 they’ve been squabbling endlessly over just how rigorous they should be in their shunning. Every time anybody invents something they argue about whether it is ungodly or not, and the ones who don’t like it go off and form a new sect. First, they argued over whether they should have steel rims or rubber rims on their buggies, then whether they should have tractors, then electricity and television. Now presumably they argue over whether they should have a frost-free refrigerator and whether their instant coffee should be powdered or freeze-dried.

The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height
of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postal mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.

Many people are so fascinated by the Amish way of life, by the idea of people living 200 years in the past, that they come quite literally by the millions to gawk. There were hundreds and hundreds of tourists thronging Intercourse when we arrived, and cars and buses choking the roads into town. Everyone hoped to see and photograph some genuine Amish. Up to five million people a year visit the county and non-Amish businessmen have erected vast souvenir palaces, replica farms, wax museums, cafeterias and gift shops to soak up the $350 million that the visitors are happy to spend each year. Now there is almost nothing left in these towns for the Amish themselves to buy, so they don’t come in and the tourists have nothing to do but take pictures of each other.

Travel articles and movies like
Witness
generally gloss over this side of things, but the fact is that Lancaster County is now one of the most awful places in America, especially at weekends when traffic jams sometimes stretch for miles. Many of the Amish themselves have given up and moved to places like Iowa and upper Michigan where they are left alone. Out in the countryside, particularly on the back roads, you can still sometimes see the people in their dark clothes working in the fields or driving their distinctive black buggies down the highway, with a long line of tourist cars creeping along behind, pissed off because they can’t get by and they really want to be in Bird in Hand so they can get some more funnel cakes and Sno-cones and perhaps buy a wrought-iron wine rack or combination mailbox/weather-vane to take back home to
Fartville with them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a decade from now there isn’t a real Amish person left in the county. It is an unspeakable shame. They should be left in peace.

In the evening, we went to one of the many barn-like family-style Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants that are scattered across the county. The parking lot was packed with buses and cars and there were people waiting everywhere, inside the building and out. We went in and were given a ticket with the number 621 on it and went with it to a tiny patch of floor-space just vacated by another party. Every few minutes a man would step to the door and call out a series of numbers ridiculously lower than ours – 220, 221, 222 – and a dozen or so people would follow him into the dining-room. We debated leaving, but a party of fat people beside us told us not to give up because it was worth the wait, even if we had to stay there until eleven o’clock. The food was that good, they said, and where food was concerned these people clearly had some experience. Well, they were right. Eventually our number was called and we were ushered into the dining-room with nine strangers and all seated together at one big trestle-table.

There must have been fifty other such tables in the room, all with a dozen or so people at them. The din and bustle were intense. Waitresses hurried back and forth with outsized trays and everywhere you looked people were shovelling food into their mouths, elbows flapping, as if they hadn’t eaten for a week. Our waitress made us introduce ourselves to each other, which everybody thought was kind of dopey, and then she started bringing food, great platters and bowls of it – thick slabs of ham, mountains of fried chicken, buckets of mashed potatoes and all kinds of vegetables, rolls, soups and salads. It was
incredible. You helped yourself and with two hands heaved the platter on to the next person. You could have as much of anything as you wanted – and when a bowl was empty the waitress brought back another and practically ordered you to clear it.

I’ve never seen so much food. I couldn’t see over the top of my plate. It was all delicious and pretty soon everybody knew everybody else and was having a great time. I ate so much my armpits bulged. But still the food kept coming. Just when I thought I would have to summon a wheelchair to get me to the car, the waitress took away all the platters and bowls, and started bringing desserts – apple pies, chocolate cakes, bowls of homemade ice-cream, pastries, flans and God knows what else.

I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt. My trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shovelling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate the gross national product of Lesotho that night. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons from our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombie-like into the night.

We got in the car, too full to speak, and headed towards the distant greenish glow of Three Mile Island. I lay on the back seat, my feet in the air, and moaned softly. I vowed that never again in my life would I eat a single morsel of food, and I meant it. But two hours later, when we arrived back at my brother’s house, the agony had abated and my brother and I were able to begin a new cycle of gross overconsumption, beginning with a twelve-pack of beer and bucket of pretzels from his kitchen and concluding, in
the early hours of the morning, with a plate of onion rings and two-foot-long submarine sandwiches, full of goo and spices, at an all-night eaterie out on Highway II.

What a great country.

IT WAS TEN
minutes to seven in the morning and it was cold. Standing outside the Bloomsburg bus station, I could see my breath. The few cars out this early trailed clouds of vapour. I was hung-over and in a few minutes I was going to climb on to a bus for a five-hour ride into New York. I would sooner have eaten cat food.

My brother had suggested that I take the bus because it would save having to find a place to park in Manhattan. I could leave the car with him and come back for it in a day or two. At two in the morning, after many beers, this had seemed a good plan. But now, standing in the early morning chill, I realized I was making a serious mistake. You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or – and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America – you cannot afford a car. Being unable to afford a car in America is the last step before living out of a plastic sack. As a result, most of the people on long-distance buses are one of the following: actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, just released from prison, or nuns. Occasionally you will also see a pair of Norwegian students. You can tell they are Norwegian students because they are so pink-faced and healthy-looking and they wear little blue ankle socks with their sandals. But by and large a ride on a long-distance bus in America combines most of the
shortcomings of prison life with those of an ocean crossing in a troop-ship.

So when the bus pulled up before me, heaving a pneumatic sigh, and its door flapped open, I boarded it with some misgivings. The driver himself didn’t appear any too stable. He had the sort of hair that made him look as if he’d been playing with live wires. There were about half a dozen other passengers, though only two of them looked seriously insane and just one was talking to himself. I took a seat near the back and settled down to get some sleep. I had drunk far too many beers with my brother the night before, and the hot spices from the submarine sandwich were now expanding ominously inside my abdomen and drifting around like the stuff they put in lava lamps. Soon, from one end or the other, it would begin to seep out.

I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind. Through the gap in the seat I could see it was an Indian man – by that I mean a man from India, not an American Indian. ‘Can I smoke on this bus?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t smoke any more, so I don’t pay much attention to these things.’

‘But do you
think
I can smoke on this bus?’

‘I really don’t know.’

He was quiet for a few minutes, then his hand was on my shoulder again, not tapping it but resting there. ‘I can’t find an ashtray,’ he said.

‘No fooling,’ I responded wittily, without opening my eyes.

‘Do you think that means we’re not allowed to smoke?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’

‘But do you
think
it means we’re not allowed to smoke?’