The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson
Language: es
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-06-28T03:00:00+00:00

* * *

SIXTEEN

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 squalor shopping 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 1 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 the sea—a gray plane, cold and bleak. I drove and drove, thinking that any moment now I would encounter the fabled Maine of lobster pots and surf-battered shores and lonely lighthouses standing on rocks of granite, but the towns I passed through were just messy and drear, and the countryside was wooded and unmemorable. Once, outside Falmouth, the road ran for a mile or so

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.