Free Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking by Jessica Mitford

editors who had rejected “St. Peter” were after me to write follow-up articles on the very subject they had found so distasteful (see comment on three funeral pieces, page 103). Is there a moral here for the aspirant writer? The old bromide “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” would seem to apply nicely.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION
    LIFE / June, 1961
    There are various reasons why visitors to America do it. Some yearn to see enormous things like the Grand Canyon and Yellow-stone National Park, and are in general devotees of scenic routes more easily attained by car than by jet or train. Others long to linger at the site of Abe Lincoln’s log cabin, the battlefields of the Civil War, the final resting place of the late President Millard Fillmore.
    “Did you have fun on your trip?” I asked an eight-year-old, just returned from a long journey with his history-minded parents. “No!” he said disgustedly. “We had to stop at all the darn old hysterical monuments.”
    I sympathize with him. There are many other disadvantages to the long and grueling transcontinental auto trip, or the drive from California to New Orleans. It is, however, far and away the cheapest and most practically adventurous way to go.
    Nothing in your previous experience will have prepared you for the turnpikes, freeways, thruways, skyways you will encounter in America—particularly if you are, as I was, a Londoner. The actual sensation of highway driving in America is that of traffic whizzing slowly. This contradiction is achieved by getting up to the legal speed limit (50, 70, or 80, depending on the state) and staying there—which is precisely what every other car is doing. For hours and hours you drive at this speed, with no necessity for slowing, accelerating, or changing gear—you are alone on your track, like Yuri Gagarin in his space capsule.
    There are sinister portents, however. From time to time your nervous eye will rest momentarily on recurrent signs along the way, proclaiming starkly, “NO STOPPING OR TURNING,” and, more unnerving still, “CRIPPLED CARS TO THE RIGHT.” If you are a person ridden by imagination, the question will inevitably occur to you, what then?
    You visualize the scene: a dreadful and threatening sound develops in your motor, or that funny feeling in the steering wheel that means a flat tire. Your car is crippled. Obediently you draw up and stop at the right. Years later your skeleton is discovered. The image persists even though turnpike authorities assure you that a policeman will pick you up within a half-hour if you simply tie a handkerchief to your radio aerial.
    Other American highway signs tend to be tautological (“SLIPPERY WHEN WET” is a great favorite), suggestive (“SOFT SHOULDERS”), or baffling because they are impossible to comply with (“BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS” or “DEER CROSSING”).
    Here and there one encounters “POINT OF INTEREST AHEAD.” These signs are strategically placed a quarter of a mile or so before the point of interest to enable the driver to slow or stop as the extent of his interest may dictate. If there are children in the car, they will start jumping up and down, shouting, “Point of Interest! Point of Interest!” at the top of their lungs. Once, acceding to those screams in the back seat, I actually did stop. It was somewhere in the Middle West, and we saw a tree growing out of a rock, which really was rather extraordinary. Small thanks I got, however. To this day, the children complain in heavy tones of censure, “... And the only thing we saw on the entire trip was a crummy old tree growing out of a rock.”
    One must rest, naturally, between such lively points of interest. Places to stay along the way in America range from luxury run wild, at corresponding prices, to the most heavenly camping in the world.
    The really expensive motels ($16 to $25 a night), found on the West and East coasts but not much in between, reach heights of fantasy hard to