Nothing is Boring in America

Chocolate gravy, Civil War, Piggly Wiggly. My newfound love of the Mid-South.

I want to see America. I want to see all of America. Every small-town interstate, every roadside diner, every eccentric museum, every monumental lake, mountain range, river, every charming creek, every rock formation that sticks out like a snake’s head, even every boring conurbation that has abandoned all aesthetic hope. I want to hear the accents of the Mid-South and the Midwest, the twangs and the drawls and the gurgles. I want to see the monuments, the statues, the suburbs, and the dizzyingly long highways. I want to stop in for coffee and see a local political meeting. I want to go to the places where people still have sunken toothless mouths and where there are wooden buildings collapsing across the road from vast soulless new-builds. I want to know how they live miles from anywhere and right there in the heart of things.

That is why I drove a thousand miles from home, wiggling from Arlington to Richmond to Damascus to Chattanooga to Franklin to Shiloh. Now we are winding back, through Nashville to Louisville to Dayton and to Ohiopyle. We have been in the mountains and over the mountains, in the heart of old Confederate country, in the fields where the course of the Civil War changed, in the diners where locals are surprised to see anyone from out of town.

A lot of what you see on a big road trip is what you went to see. One wishes, naturally, for Americans in their big trucks to be aggressive on the road, no matter how irritating it might be at the time. One wishes to see podgy middle-aged men lined up on stools eating eggs and biscuits. (Indeed, one fits right in.) What else is a road trip for if not to see up close and for real all the hundreds of details of this great civilization of the USA that we take for granted out of books and movies and television programs?

But a lot is what you never knew was out there. In five days I have fallen in love with Tennessee. There is history everywhere. Not just in the battlefields and Civil War sites, and the superb state museum, but in the collapsing buildings, the old-school diners, the well-preserved towns, the eccentric and wonderful little museums. And the natural beauty is just awesome. There is an elephant sanctuary in this state—three thousand acres dedicated to rehabilitating elephants. It is closed to the public but it has a visitor center in a town of only four thousand people. There is a mighty river, mist that drifts and piles in great clumps, the Chattanooga Choo Choo, long flat landscapes, deep valleys, National Parks of extraordinary beauty and poignancy. Yes, in Nashville the dogs wear bandanas and the art museum is full of modern rubbish (though it is housed in a very splendid art deco building, the old Post Office). But on every road off the interstate you will see history in real time, one place in decline while another is thriving, the old ways of life still clinging on. The Catfish Hotel in Shiloh, the little towns that are not on the road atlas but which do have large graveyards next to their church. It is a world unto itself.

For one night, we crossed into Mississippi, and saw Corinth, a small place, with no redeeming architectural features, but where the Sheriffs let our children sit in the car and use the siren. They handed out stickers too. One of them had just married the waitress in the restaurant we stopped at. In the morning we went to Abe’s Grill, which looks like a shack on the outside and only has space to sit on counter stools, or a small table outside. It is family run, fifty-three years old, and opens at 3 a.m. every day for the nurses and factory workers hereabouts. The walls are covered in fading photographs, many including the old owner who died a month ago. His wife and son and daughter-in-law still run the place, never missing a beat, flipping eggs while they chat to customers. “What meat for you? Sir? British! Bacon or country ham?” They are fast and friendly and as soon as you are gone they are well-acquainted with the next customer. The biscuits are advertised as the Mid-South’s favourite and I am surprised they have not gone national. I would drive miles to have them again, dipped in their chocolate gravy. (All the son would tell me about the recipe is that it takes a lot of love. These are family recipes.) The roof beams are covered in licence plates, one from every state, which people bring in and donate. The menu is so old it advertises eggs ’n’ biscuit for less than $3. Dickens would have produced a timeless page of description about this place where a coffee pot is always filling, the bills are held in the owner’s head without notes, and someone is always arriving, hoping breakfast has not yet run out. If you want a cheeseburger at 3 a.m.—and a cheeseburger that is famous in local parts—Abe’s is the place to go. We have met a lot of lovely and big-hearted people down here, but Abe’s packed more of them into a few square feet than anywhere else.

That was only one hour of our journey. We saw the third largest collection in the USA of mounted animals (shot in Africa) in a small town—the very same town that houses the elephant sanctuary. We saw a tractor graveyard, endless lorries carrying logs, the remarkable and almost unbearable spectacle of Buc-ee’s—a service station that is larger than some malls, they could screen movies there—, several remarkable National Parks (truly, a wonderful wonderful service), birds of prey on telephone wires, a drive-in movie theatre, an Amish horse-drawn buggy, lorries that truly look like Transformers, and mist sitting on lakes and hanging upon trees that could make you believe a dinosaur might any moment walk right out of it and heave along the road.

And who knows what else is coming? Drive the suburbs and see the great variety of houses, the bizarre Halloween decorations, the endless businesses; drive the highways and see the blaring and sublime advertisements that line all the roads—NOW HIRING, WE BUY GOLD, CHEAPEST CIGARETTES FOR MILES, SHE WANTS THE DECK, WORLD’S LARGEST FIREWORK SUPERMARKET, WE SELL FLAMETHROWERS—go to the supermarkets and see the great variety of life, go to the Piggly Wiggly, which was the first self-service market, and is now a living museum, with the old beige shelves, brands from the 1960s, and the typography your grandmother would have known. Nothing is boring in America.

Go—go—and see it all.