here in the press box.' Shannon was a genius at this sort of thing. I remember one time the phone call from the ballpark didn't come through-the guy at the other end had gotten locked in a toilet or something-and Shannon didn't have anything to tell the listeners. So he delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said that it was a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged somebody there to let him know what was going on. Funnily enough, I later read that the exact same thing happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sportscaster in Des Moines. In Reagan's case he had the batter hit foul balls one after the other for over half an hour while pretending there was nothing implausible in this, which when you think about it is more less how he ran the country as president.
Late in the afternoon, I happened onto a news broadcast by some station in Crudbucket, Ohio, or some such place. American radio news broadcasts usually last about thirty seconds. It went like this:
'A young Crudbucket couple, Dwayne and Wanda Dreary and their seven children, Ronnie, Lonnie, Connie, Donnie, Johnny and Tammy-Wynette, were killed when a light airplane crashed into their house and burst into flames. Fire Chief Walter Water said he could not at this stage rule out arson.
On Wall Street, shares had their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points. And the weather outlook for greater Crudville: clear skies with a 2 percent chance of precipitation. You're listening to radio station L-R-U-D where you get more rock and less talk.' There then followed 'Hotel California' by the Eagles.
I stared at the radio, wondering whether I had heard that second item right. The biggest one-day fall in shares in history? The collapse of the American economy? I twirled the dial and found another news broadcast: '...but Senator Pootang denied that the use of the four Cadillacs and the trips to Hawaii were in any way connected with the $120 million contract to build the new airport. On Wall Street, shares suffered their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points in just under three hours. And the weather outlook here in Crudbucket is for cloudy skies and a 98 percent chance of precipitation. We'll have more music from the Eagles after this word.'
The American economy was coming apart in shreds and all I could get were songs by the Eagles. I twirled the twirled the dial, thinking that surely somebody somewhere must be giving the dawn of a new Great Depression more than a passing mention --and someone was, thank goodness. It was CBC, the Canadian network, with an excellent and thoughtful program called 'As It Happens,'
which was entirely devoted that evening to the crash of Wall Street. I will leave you, reader, to consider the irony in an American citizen, traveling across his own country, having to tune in to a foreign radio network to find out the details of one of the biggest domestic news stories of the year.
To be scrupulously fair, I was later told that the public-radio network in America-possibly the most grossly underfunded broadcast organization in the developed world-also devoted a long report to the crash. I expect it was given by a man sitting in a tin but in a field somewhere, reading scribbled notes off a sheet of paper.
At Toledo, I joined Interstate 75, and drove north into Michigan, heading for Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, where I intended spending the night. Almost immediately I found myself in a wilderness of warehouses and railroad tracks and enormous parking lots leading to distant car factories. The parking lots were so vast and full of cars that I half wondered if the factories were there just to produce sufficient cars to keep the parking lots full, thus eliminating any need for consumers.
Interlacing all this were towering electricity pylons. If you have ever wondered what becomes of all those pylons you see marching off to the horizon in every country in the world, like an army of invading aliens, the answer is that they all join up in a field just north of Toledo, where they discharge their loads into a vast estate of electrical transformers, diodes and other contraptions that looks for all the world like the inside of a television set, only on a rather grander scale, of course.
The ground fairly thrummed as I drove past and I fancied I felt a crackle of blue static sweep through the car, briefly enlivening the hair on the back of my neck and leaving a strangely satisfying sensation in my armpits. I was half inclined to turn around at the next intersection and go back for another dose. But it was late and I pressed on. For some minutes I thought I smelled smoldering flesh and kept touching my head tentatively. But this may only have been a consequence of having spent too many lonely hours in a car.
At Monroe, a town halfway between Toledo and Detroit, a big sign beside the highway said, WELCOME TO MONROE-HOME OF GENERAL CUSTER. A mile or so later there was another sign, even
larger, saying, MONROE, MICHIGAN-HOME OF LA-Z-BOY FURNITURE. Goodness, I thought, will the excitement never stop? But it did, and the rest of the journey was completed without drama.
CHAPTER 18
I SPENT THE NIGHT in Dearborn for two reasons. First, it would mean not having to spend the night in Detroit, the city with the highest murder rate in the country. In 1987, there were 635
homicides in Detroit, a rate of 58.2 per ioo,ooo people, or eight times the national average. Just among children, there were 365 shootings in which both the victim and gunman were under sixteen (of whom 40 died). We are talking about a tough city-and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn't bear thinking about.
People will have to start carrying bazookas for protection.
My second and more compelling reason for going to Dearborn was to see the Henry Ford Museum, a place my father had taken us when I was small and which I remembered fondly. After breakfast in the morning, I went straight there. Henry Ford spent his later years buying up important Americana by the truckload and crating it to his museum, beside the big Ford Motor Company Rouge Assembly Plant. The parking lot outside the museum was enormous-on a scale to rival the factory parking lots I had passed the day before-but at this time of year there were few cars in it. Most of them were Japanese.
I went inside and discovered without surprise that the entrance charge was steep: $15 for adults and $7.50 for children. Americans are clearly prepared to fork out large sums for their pleasures.
Grudgingly I paid the admission charge and went in. But almost from the moment I passed through the portals I was enthralled. For one thing, the scale of it is almost breathtaking. You find yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff-machinery, railway trains, refrigerators, Abraham Lincoln's rocking chair, the limousine in which John F. Kennedy was killed (nope, no bits of brains on the floor), George Washington's campaign chest, General Tom Thumb's ornate miniature billiard table, a bottle containing Thomas Edison's last breath. I found this last item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison's last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the deathbed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, 'Is that it?'
This was the way the Smithsonian once was and still should be-a cross between an attic and a junk shop. It was as if some scavenging genius had sifted through all the nation's collective memories and brought to this one place everything from American life that was splendid and fine and deserving fondness. It was possible here to find
