Free The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson Page B

you used to get a lot of was states going their own way in terms of daylight saving time, so in the summer Illinois might be two hours adrift from Iowa and one hour behind Indiana. It was all kind of crazy, but it made you realize to what an extent the United States is really fifty independent countries (forty-eight countries in those days). Most of that seems to have gone now, yet another sad loss.
    I drove through Kentucky thinking of sad losses and was abruptly struck by the saddest loss of all—the Burma Shave sign. Burma Shave was a shaving cream that came in a tube. I don’t know if it’s still produced. In fact, I never knew anyone who ever used it. But the Burma Shave company used to put clever signs along the highway. They came in clusters of five, expertly spaced so that you read them as a little poem as you passed: I F HARMONY / IS WHAT YOU CRAVE / THEN GET / A TUBA / B URMA S HAVE . Or: B EN MET A NNA / MADE A HIT / NEGLECTED BEARD / B EN -A NNA SPLIT / B URMA S HAVE . Great, eh? Even in the 1950s the Burma Shave signs were pretty much a thing of the past. I can remember seeing only half a dozen in all the thousands of miles of highway we covered. But as roadside diversions went they were outstanding, ten times better than billboards and Pella’s little twirling windmills. The only things that surpassed them for diversion value were multiple-car pileups with bodies strewn about the highway.
    Kentucky was much like southern Illinois—hilly, sunny, attractive—but the scattered houses were less tidy and prosperous-looking than in the North. There were lots of wooded valleys and iron bridges over twisting creeks, and an abundance of dead animals pasted to the road. In every valley stood a little white Baptist church and all along the road were signs to remind me that I was now in the Bible Belt: J ESUS S AVES . P RAISE THE L ORD . C HRIST I S K ING .
    I was out of Kentucky almost before I knew it. The state tapers to a point at its western edge, and I was cutting across a chunk of it only 40 miles wide. In a veritable eyeblink in terms of American traveling time I was in Tennessee. It isn’t often you can dispense with a state in less than an hour, and Tennessee would not detain me much longer. It is an odd-looking state, shaped like a Dutch brick, stretching more than 500 miles from east to west, but only 100 miles from top to bottom. Its landscape was much the same as that of Kentucky and Illinois—indeterminate farming country laced with rivers, hills and religious zealots—but I was surprised, when I stopped for lunch at a Burger King in Jackson, at how warm it was. It was 83 degrees, according to a sign on the drive-in bank across the street, a good 20 degrees higher than it had been in Carbondale that morning. I was still obviously deep in the Bible Belt. A sign in the yard of a church next door said, C HRIST I S THE A NSWER . (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?) I went into the Burger King. A girl at the counter said, “Kin I hep yew?” I had entered another country.

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    J ust South of Grand Junction, Tennessee, I passed over the state line into Mississippi. A sign beside the highway said, W ELCOME TO M ISSISSIPPI . W E S HOOT TO K ILL . It didn’t really. I just made that up. This was only the second time I had ever been to the Deep South and I entered it with a sense of foreboding. It is surely no coincidence that all those films you have ever seen about the South— Easy Rider, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, Deliverance —depict southerners as murderous, incestuous, shitty-shoed rednecks. It really is another country. Years ago, in the days of Vietnam, two friends and I drove to Florida during college spring break. We all had long hair. En route we took a shortcut across the back roads of Georgia and stopped late one afternoon for a burger at a dinette in some dreary little crudville, and when we took our seats at the