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 newscaster saying, 'And in West Barnstable today a tourist from Iowa suffered third-degree burns over 98 percent of his body in an explosion at a gas station. Fire officials said he looked like a marshmallow that had fallen on the campfire. 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 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 on holiday weekends such as this one. Parking was not allowed in the town itself-there were mean-spirited towaway 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- colored 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 parlors 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 $l90,000, 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 b00 miles. I think that is a considerable achievement. Here's another curious thing: they didn't bring with them a single plow 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 hundredssaid N0 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 was 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 weekday.
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 centers 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.
CHAPTER 16
I HAD ALWAYS thought that New England was nothing but maple trees and white churches and old guys in checkered 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 squalorshopping centers, 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-through burgers and cheap gasoline.
At Salisbury, I joined old Route 1, intending to follow it up the coast through Maine. Route 1, as the name suggests, is the patriarch of American roads, the first federal highway. It stretches for 2,500 miles from the Canadian border to the Florida Keys. For forty years it was the main highway along the eastern seaboard, connecting all the big cities of the North-Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington-with the beaches and citrus groves of the South. It must have been wonderful in the i930s and 1940s to drive from Maine to Florida on vacation, going through all those big marvelous cities and then passing on to the hills of Virginia and the green mountains of the Carolinas, getting warmer with the passing miles. But by the 1960s Route I had become too congested to be practical-a third of all Americans live within twenty miles of it-and Interstate 9s was built to zip traffic up and down the coast with only the most fleeting sense of a changing landscape.
Today Route i is still there, but you would need weeks to drive its entire length. Now it is just a local road, an endless city street, an epic stretch of shopping malls.
I had hoped that here in rural New England it would retain something of its former charm, but it seemed not to. I drove through a chill morning drizzle and wondered if ever I would find the real New England. At Portsmouth, an instantly forgettable little town, I crossed over into Maine on an iron bridge over the gray Piscataqua River. Seen through the rhythmic swish of windshield wipers, Maine too looked ominously unpromising, a further sprawl of shopping centers and muddy new housing developments.
Beyond Kennebunkport the suburbs at last gave way to forest. Here and there massive brown boulders emerged eerily from the earth, like subterranean creatures coming up for air, and occasionally I caught glimpses of
