I sighed and arose. I shuffled around the room in my old-man posture, gathered up my things, washed, dressed and without enthusiasm hit the highway. I drove west through the Alleghenies and then into a small, odd corner of Pennsylvania. For z00 miles the border between New York and Pennsylvania is a straight line, but at Pennsylvania's northwestern corner, where I was now, it abruptly juts north, as if the draftsman's arm had been jogged. The reason for this small cartographical irregularity was to let Pennsylvania have its own outlet onto Lake Erie so that its residents wouldn't have to cross New York State, and it remains today a 200-Year-old reminder of how the early states Weren't at all confident that the Union was going to work. That it did was far more of an achievement than is often appreciated nowadays.
Just inside the Pennsylvania state line, the highway merged with interstate 90. This is the main northern route across America, stretching 3,016 miles from Boston to Seattle, and there were lots of long-distance travelers on it. You can always tell long distance travelers because they look as if they haven't been out of the car for weeks. You only glimpse them when they pass, but you can see that they have already started to set up home inside there are pieces of washing hanging in the back, remnants of takeout meals on the windowsill and books, magazines and pillows scattered around.
There's always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back. You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past. You glance at each other's license plates and feel envy or sympathy in proportion to your comparative distances from home. One car I saw had Alaska plates on it. This was unbelievable. I had never seen Alaska license plates before. The man must have driven over 4,500 miles, the equivalent of going from London to Zambia. He was the most forlorn-looking character I had ever seen. There was no sign of a wife and children. I expect by now he had killed them and put their bodies in the trunk.
A drizzly rain hung in the air. I drove along in that state of semimindlessness that settles over you on interstate .highways. After a while Lake Erie appeared on the right. Like all the Great Lakes, it is enormous, more an inland sea than a lake, stretching 200 miles from west to east and about 40 miles across. Twenty-five years ago Lake Erie was declared dead. Driving along its southern shore, gazing out at its flat gray immensity, I thought this appeared to be a remarkable achievement. It hardly seemed possible that something as small as man could kill something as large as a Great Lake. But just in the space of a century or so we managed it. Thanks to lax factory laws and the triumph of greed over nature in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Sandusky and other bustling centers of soot and grit, Lake Erie was transformed in just three generations from a bowl of blue water into a large toilet. Cleveland was the worst offender. Cleveland was so vile that its river, a slow-moving sludge of chemicals and half-digested solids called the Cuyahoga, once actually caught fire and burned out of control for four days. This also was a remarkable achievement, I feel. Things are said to be better now. According to a story in the Cleveland Free Press, which I read during a stop for coffee near Ashtabula, an official panel with the ponderous title of the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Water Quality Board had just released a survey of chemical substances in the lake, and it had found only 362 types of chemicals in the lake compared with more than a thousand the last time they had counted. That still seemed an awful lot to me and I was surprised to see a pair of fishermen standing on the shore, hunched down in the drizzle, hurling lines out onto the greenish murk with long poles. Maybe they were fishing for chemicals.
Through dull rain I drove through the outer suburbs of Cleveland, past signs for places that were all called Something Heights: Richmond Heights, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Warrensville Heights, Parma Heights. Curiously, the one outstanding characteristic of the surrounding landscape was its singular lack of eminences. Clearly what Cleveland was prepared to consider the heights was what others would regard as distinctly middling. Somehow this did not altogether surprise me. After a time Interstate 90 became the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, and followed the sweep of the bay. The windshield wipers of the Chevette flicked hypnotically and other cars threw up spray as they swished past. Outside my window the lake sprawled dark and vast until it was consumed by a distant mist. Ahead of me the tall buildings of downtown Cleveland appeared and slid towards me, like shopping on a supermarket conveyor belt.
Cleveland has always had a reputation for being a dirty, ugly, boring city, though now they say it is much better. By
'they' I mean reporters from serious publications like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the New York Times Sunday magazine, who visit the city at five-year intervals and produce long stories with titles like 'Cleveland Bounces Back' and 'Renaissance in Cleveland.' No one ever reads these articles, least of all me, so I couldn't say whether the improbable and highly relative assertion that Cleveland is better now than it used to be is wrong or right What I can say is that the view up the Cuyahoga as I crossed it on the freeway was of a stew of smoking factories that didn't look any too clean or handsome. And I cant say that the rest of the town looked such a knockout either. It may be improved, but all this talk of a renaissance is clearly exaggerated. I somehow doubt that if the Duc d'Urbino were brought back to life and deposited in downtown Cleveland he would say, 'Goodness, I am put in mind of fifteenth-century Florence and the many treasures therein.'
And then, quite suddenly, I was out of Cleveland and on the James W. Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike in the rolling rural emptiness between Cleveland and Toledo, and highway mindlessness once more seeped in. To relieve the tedium I switched on the radio. In fact, I had been switching it on and off all day, listening for a while but then giving up in despair. Unless you have lived through it, you cannot conceive of the sense of hopelessness that comes with hearing 'Hotel California' by the Eagles for the fourteenth time in three hours. You can feel your brain cells disappearing with little popping sounds. But it's the disc jockeys that make it intolerable. Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys? In South America there is a tribe of Indians called the Janamanos, who are so backward they cannot even count to three. Their counting system goes, 'One, two ... oh, gosh, a whole bunch.' Obviously disc jockeys have a better dress sense and possess a little more in the way of social skills, but I think we are looking at a similar level of mental acuity.
Over and over I searched the airwaves for something to listen to, but I could find nothing. It wasn't as if I was asking for all that much. All I wanted was a station that didn't play endless songs by bouncy prepubescent girls, didn't employ disc jockeys Who said 'H-e-y-y-y-y' more than once every six seconds and didn't keep telling me how much Jesus loved me. But no such station existed. Even when I did find something halfway decent, the sound would begin to fade after ten or twelve miles, and the old Beatles song that I was listening to with quiet pleasure would gradually be replaced by a semidemented man talking about the word of God and telling me that I had a friend in the Lord.
Many American radio stations, particularly out in the hinterland, are ridiculously small and cheap. I know this for a fact because when I was a teenager I used to help out at KCBC in Des Moines.
KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball games' but it was too cheap to send its sportscaster, a nice young guy named Steve Shannon' on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio-really just a tin but standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer's field somewhere southeast of Des Moinesand he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha. It was bizarre. Every couple of innings someone at the ballpark would call me on the phone and give me a bare summary of the game, which I would scribble into a scorebook and pass to Shannon, and on the basis of this he would give a two-hour broadcast.
It was a remarkable experience to sit there in a windowless but on a steaming August night listening to the crickets outside and watching a man talking into a microphone and saying things like, 'Well, it's a cool evening here in Omaha, with a light breeze blowing in off the Missouri River. There's a special guest in the crowd tonight' Governor Warren T. Legless, who I can see sitting with his pretty young wife, Bobbi Rae, in a box seat just below us
