Free The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson Page A

complain of hunger, boredom and the need for toilet facilities. It was a kind of living hell. And now there appeared to be almost no billboards along the highways. What a sad loss.
    I was headed for Cairo, which is pronounced “Kay-ro.” I don’t know why. They do this a lot in the South and Midwest. In Kentucky, Athens is pronounced “AY-thens” and Versailles is pronounced “Vur-SAYLES.” Bolivar, Missouri, is “BAW-liv-er.” Madrid, Iowa, is “MAD-rid.” I don’t know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward, undereducated shitkickers who don’t know any better or whether they know better but don’t care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated shitkickers. It’s not really the sort of question you can ask them, is it? At Cairo I stopped for gas and in fact I did ask the old guy who doddered out to fill my tank why they pronounced Cairo as they did.
    “Because that’s its name, ” he explained as if I were kind of stupid.
    “But the one in Egypt is pronounced ‘Ki-ro.’ ”
    “So I’ve heard,” agreed the man.
    “And most people, when they see the name, think ‘Ki-ro,’ don’t they?”
    “Not in Kay-ro they don’t,” he said, a little hotly.
    There didn’t seem to be much to be gained by pursuing the point, so I let it rest there, and I still don’t know why the people call it “Kay-ro.” Nor do I know why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump, however you pronounce it. Cairo is at the point where the Ohio River, itself a great artery, joins the Mississippi, doubling its grandeur. You would think that at the confluence of two such mighty rivers there would be a great city, but in fact Cairo is a poor little town of 6,000 people. The road in was lined with battered houses and unpainted tenements. Aged black men sat on the porches and stoops on old sofas and rocking chairs, waiting for death or dinner, whichever came first. This surpised me. You don’t expect to see tenements and porches full of black people in the Midwest—at least not outside big cities like Chicago and Detroit. But then I realized that I was no longer really in the Midwest. The speech patterns of southern Illinois are more Southern than Midwestern. I was nearly as far south as Nashville. Mississippi was only 160 miles away. And Kentucky was just across the river. I crossed it now, on a long, high bridge. From here on down to Louisiana the Mississippi is immensely broad. It looks safe and lazy, but in fact it is full of danger. Scores of people die in it every year. Farmers out fishing stare at the water and think, “I wonder what would happen if I just stuck my toe in there a little bit,” and the next thing you know their bodies bob up in the Gulf of Mexico, bloated but looking strangely serene. The river is deceptively fierce. In 1927, when the Mississippi overflowed, it flooded an area the size of Scotland. That is a serious river.
    On the Kentucky side of the river I was greeted by huge signs everywhere saying, F IREWORKS ! In Illinois fireworks are illegal; in Kentucky they are not. So if you live in Illinois and want to blow your hand off, you drive across the river to Kentucky. You used to see a lot more of this sort of thing. If one state had a lower sales tax on cigarettes than a neighboring state, all the state-line gas stations and cafes would put big signs on their roofs saying, T AX -F REE C IGARETTES ! 40 C ENTS A P ACK ! N O T AX ! and all the people from the next state would come and load their cars up with cut-price cigarettes. Wisconsin used to ban margarine to protect its dairy farmers, so everybody in Wisconsin, including all the dairy farmers, would drive to Iowa where there were big signs everywhere saying, M ARGARINE FOR S ALE ! All the Iowans, in the meantime, were driving off to Illinois, where there was no sales tax on anything, or Missouri, where the sales tax on gasoline was 50 percent lower. The other thing