The Lost Continent (21 page)

Perhaps I was expecting too much. In the movies in the 1940s people were always going to Connecticut for the weekend, and it always looked wonderfully green and rustic. It was always full of empty roads and stone cottages in leafy glades. But this was just semi-suburban: ranch-houses with three-car garages and lawns with twirling
sprinklers and shopping centres every six blocks. Litchfield itself was very handsome, the quintessential New England town, with an old courthouse and a long sloping green with a cannon and a memorial to the war dead. On one side of the green stood pleasant shops and on the other was a tall, white steepled church, dazzling in the October sunshine. And there was colour – the trees around the green were a rich gold and lemon. This was more like it.

I parked in front of MacDonald Drug and crossed the green through a scuffle of fallen leaves. I strolled along residential streets where big houses squatted on wide lawns. Each was a variation on the same theme: rambling clapboard with black shutters. Many had wooden plaques on them pertaining to their history – ‘Oliver Boardman 1785’; ‘1830 Col. Webb’. I spent over an hour just poking around. It was a pleasant town for poking.

Afterwards I drove east, sticking to back highways. Soon I was in the suburbs of Hartford, and then in Hartford itself, and then in the suburbs on the other side of Hartford. And then I was in Rhode Island. I stopped beside a sign saying
WELCOME TO RHODE ISLAND
and stared at the map. Was that really all there was to Connecticut? I considered turning back and having another sweep across the state – there had to be more to it than that – but it was getting late, so I pressed on, venturing into a deep and rather more promising pine forest. Considering Rhode Island’s microscopic size it seemed to take me ages to find my way out of the forest. By the time I hit Narragansett Bay, a heavily-islanded inlet which consumes almost a quarter of the state’s modest square mileage, it was almost dark, and there were lights winking from the villages scattered along the shoreline.

At Plum Point a long bridge crossed the sound to Conanicut Island, which rode low and dark on the water, like a corpse. I crossed the bridge and drove around the island a little, but by now it was too dark to see much. At one place where the shore came in near the road, I parked and walked to the beach. It was a moonless night and I could hear the sea before I could see it, coming in with a slow, rhythmic whoosh-whoosh. I went and stood at the water’s edge. The waves fell on to the beach like exhausted swimmers. The wind played at my jacket. I stared for a long time out across the moody sea, the black vastness of the Atlantic, the fearsome, primordial, storm-tossed depths from which all of life has crawled and will no doubt one day return, and I thought, ‘I could murder a hamburger.’

In the morning I drove into Newport, America’s premier yachting community, home of the America’s Cup races. The old part of town had been fixed up in recent years, by the look of it. Shops with hanging wooden signs out front lined the streets. They all had jauntily nautical names like ‘The Flying Ship’ and ‘Shore Thing’. The harbour was almost too picturesque, with its crowds of white yachts and bare masts undulating beneath a sky in which gulls danced and reeled. But all around the fringe of the downtown there were unsightly parking lots, and a busy four-lane road, more freeway than city street, divided the waterfront from the town. Spindly trees stood along it like scrawny afterthoughts. The city had also built a little park, Perrott Park, but it was unkempt and full of graffiti. I had not encountered this kind of neglect before. Most American towns are spotless and this really surprised me,
especially considering the importance of tourism to Newport. I walked up Thames Street, where some fine old sea captains’ homes were fighting a losing battle with litter and dog shit and the encroachment of gas stations and car transmission places. It was all very sad. This was a place where the people didn’t seem to care, or perhaps just didn’t notice, how shabby they had let things grow. It reminded me of London.

I drove out to Fort Adams State Park across the bay. From there Newport looked another town altogether – a charming cut-out of needle-shaped church spires and Victorian roof-tops protruding from a parkland of trees. The bay glittered in the sunshine and its scores of sailboats bobbed on the gentle waves. It was captivating. I drove on along the shore road, past Brenton Point, and then down Bellevue Avenue, where the most fabulous summer homes ever built line the road on both sides and spill over on to many of the streets beyond.

Between about 1890 and 1905, America’s richest families – the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Belmonts, dozens of others – tried to outdo each other by building magnificent homes, which they insisted on calling cottages, all along this half-mile strip of imposing cliffs. Most were loosely modelled on French châteaux and filled with furniture, marble and tapestries shipped at huge expense from Europe. Hostesses routinely spent $300,000 or more on entertainment for a season that lasted only six or eight weeks. For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.

Most of the houses are now run as museums. They charge an arm and a leg to get in and in any case the queues outside most of them were enormous (this was the
Columbus Day weekend, remember). You can’t see much from the street – the owners didn’t want common people staring at them as they sat on the lawn counting their money, so they put up dense hedges and high walls – but I discovered quite by chance that the city had built an asphalt footpath all along the cliff edge, from which I could see the backs of the grander mansions, as well as enjoy giddying views of the ocean breaking onto the rocks far below. I had the path almost to myself and walked along it in a state of quiet amazement, with my mouth open. I had never seen such a succession of vast houses, such an excess of architecture. Every house looked like a cross between a wedding-cake and a state capitol building. I knew that the grandest of all the houses was The Breakers, built by the Vanderbilts, and I kept thinking, ‘Well,
this
must be it’ and ‘Now surely
this
must be it,’ but then the next house along would be even more awesome. When at last I reached The Breakers, it was absolutely enormous, a mountain with windows. You can’t look at it without thinking that nobody, with the possible exception of oneself, deserves to be that rich.

On the other side of the fence, the lawns and terraces were full of pudgy tourists in Bermuda shorts and silly hats, wandering in and out of the house, taking pictures of each other and trampling the begonias, and I wondered what Cornelius Vanderbilt would make of that, the dog-faced old prick.

I drove on to Cape Cod, another place I had never been and for which I had high expectations. It was very picturesque, with its old saltbox homes, its antique shops and wooden inns, its pretty villages with quaint names:
Sagamore, Sandwich, Barnstable, Rock Harbor. But it was jam-packed with tourists in overloaded cars and rumbling motor homes. Boy, do I hate motor homes! Especially on crowded peninsulas like Cape Cod where they clog the streets and block the views – and all so that some guy and his dumpy wife can eat lunch and empty their bladders without stopping.

The traffic was so dense and slow-moving that I almost ran out of gas, and just managed to limp into a two-pump station outside West Barnstable. It was run by a man who was at least ninety-seven years old. He was tall and rangy and very spry. I’ve never seen anybody pump gas with such abandon. First he slopped a quantity of it down the side of the car and then he got so engaged in talking about where I came from – ‘Ioway, eh? We don’t get many from Ioway. I think you’re the first this year. What’s the weather like in Ioway this time of year?’ – that he let the pump run over and I had to point out to him that gasoline was cascading down the side of the car and gathering in a pool at our feet. He withdrew the nozzle, sloshing another half-gallon over the car and down his trousers and shoes, and kind of threw it back at the pump, where it dribbled carelessly.

He had a cigarette butt plugged into the side of his mouth and I was terrified he would try to light it. And he did. He pulled out a crumpled book of matches and started to fidget one of them to life. I was too stunned to move. All I could think of was a television news-reader saying, ‘And in West Barnstable today a tourist from Iowa suffered third degree burns over ninety-eight per cent of his body in an explosion at a gas station. Fire officials said he looked like a piece of toast that had been left under the grill too long. The owner of the gas station has still not
been found.’ But we didn’t explode. The little stub of cigarette sprouted smoke, which the man puffed up into a good-sized billow, and then he pinched out the match with his fingers. I suppose after all these decades of pumping gas he had become more or less incombustible, like those snake handlers who grow immune to snake venom. But I wasn’t inclined to test this theory too closely. I paid him hastily and pulled straight back onto the highway, much to the annoyance of a man in a forty-foot motor home who dripped mustard on his lap in braking to avoid me. ‘That’ll teach you to take a building on vacation,’ I muttered uncharitably, and hoped that something heavy had fallen on his wife in the back.

Cape Cod is a long, thin peninsula that sprouts out of the base of Massachusetts, runs out to sea for twenty miles or so and then curls back in on itself. It looks like an arm flexed to make a muscle – in fact, it looks remarkably like my arm because there’s almost no muscle in it. There are three roads along the lower part of the peninsula – one along the north shore, one along the south shore and one up the middle – but at the peninsula’s elbow at Rock Harbor, where it narrows and abruptly turns north, the three roads come together and there is just one long slow highway up the forearm to Provincetown at the fingertips. Provincetown was swarming with tourists. The town has just one route in and one route out. Only a few hundred people live there, but they get as many as 50,000 visitors a day during the summer and at holiday weekends such as this one. Parking was not allowed in the town itself – there were mean-spirited tow-away warnings everywhere – so I paid a couple of bucks to leave my car with several
hundred others out in the middle of nowhere and trudged a long way into town.

Provincetown is built on sand. All around it stand rolling dunes broken only by occasional clumps of straw-coloured grass. The names of the businesses – Windy Ridge Motel, Gale Force Gift Shop – suggested that wind might be something of a local feature, and indeed there was sand drifted across the roads and piled in the doorways, and with every whipping breeze it flew in your eyes and face and dusted whatever food you happened to be eating. It must be an awful place to live. I might have disliked it less if Provincetown had tried just a little harder to be charming. I had seldom seen a place so singularly devoted to sucking money out of tourists. It was filled with ice-cream parlours and gift shops and places selling T-shirts, kites and beach paraphernalia.

I walked around for a while and had a hot dog with mustard and sand and a cup of coffee with cream and sand and had a look in a window of a real estate agency, where I noticed that a basic two-bedroom house by the beach was on offer at $190,000, though it did include a fireplace and all the sand you could eat. The beaches looked nice enough, but apart from that I couldn’t see a single real attraction in the place.

Provincetown is where the pilgrim fathers first touched American soil in 1620. There’s a big campanile-type tower in the middle of the town to commemorate the event. The pilgrims, curiously enough, didn’t mean to land on Cape Cod at all. They were aiming for Jamestown in Virginia, but missed their target by a mere 600 miles. I think that is a considerable achievement. Here’s another curious thing: they didn’t bring with them a single plough or horse or
cow or even a fishing line. Does that strike you as just a little bit foolish? I mean to say, if you were going to start a new life in a land far, far away, don’t you think you would give some thought to how you were going to fend for yourself once you got there? Still, for all their shortcomings as planners, the pilgrim fathers were sufficiently on the ball not to linger in the Provincetown area and at the first opportunity they pushed on to mainland Massachusetts. So did I.

I had hoped to go to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys had their summer home, but the traffic was so slow, especially around Woods Hole, where the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard departs, that I dared not. Every motel I passed – and there were hundreds – said No Vacancy. I got on Interstate 93, thinking I would follow it for a few miles just to get away from Cape Cod, and start looking for a room, but before I knew it I was in Boston, caught in the evening rush-hour. Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains. Every few hundred yards I would find my lane vanishing beneath me and other lanes merging with it from the right or left, or sometimes both. This wasn’t a road system, it was mobile hysteria. Everybody looked worried. I had never seen people working so hard to keep from crashing into each other. And this was a Saturday – God knows what it must be like on a week-day.

Boston is a big city and its outer suburbs dribble on and on all the way up to New Hampshire. So, late in the evening, without having any clear idea of how I got there, I found myself in one of those placeless places that sprout up along the junctions of interstate highways – purplishly-lit islands of motels, gas stations, shopping centres and fast
food places – so brightly lit they must be visible from outer space. This one was somewhere in the region of Haverhill. I got a room in a Motel 6 and dined on greasy fried chicken and limp French fries at a Denny’s Restaurant across the way. It had been a bad day, but I refused to get depressed. Just a couple of miles down the road was New Hampshire and the start of the real New England. Things could only get better.

I HAD ALWAYS
thought that New England was nothing but maple trees and white churches and old guys in checked shirts sitting around iron stoves in country general stores swapping tall tales and spitting in the cracker barrel. But if lower New Hampshire was anything to go by, clearly I had been misinformed. There was just modern commercial squalor – shopping centres, gas stations, motels. Every once in a while there would be a white church or clapboard inn standing incongruously in the midst of Burger Kings and Texacos. But far from mollifying the ugliness, it only intensified it, reminding you what had been thrown away for the sake of drive-thru burgers and cheap gasoline.