Free The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson Page B

cigarettes than a neighbouring state, all the state-line gas stations and cafés would put big signs on their roofs saying TAX-FREE CIGARETTES ! 40 CENTS A PACK ! NO TAX ! 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 MARGARINE FOR SALE ! 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 fifty per cent lower. The other thing 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: IF HARMONY/IS WHAT YOU CRAVE/THEN GET/A TUBA/BURMA SHAVE . Or: BEN MET/ANNA/MADE A HIT/NEGLECTED BEARD/BEN-ANNA SPLIT . Great, eh? Even in the 1950s the Burma Shave signs were pretty much a thing of the past. I can only remember seeing 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 pile-ups 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: JESUS SAVES. PRAISE THE LORD. CHRIST IS KING .
    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 forty miles wide. In a veritable eyeblink in terms of American travelling 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 memuch 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 eighty-three degrees, according to a sign on the drive-in bank across the street, a good twenty 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 CHRIST IS THE ANSWER . (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.

Chapter six
    JUST SOUTH OF Grand Junction, Tennessee, I passed over the state line into Mississippi. A sign beside the highway said WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. WE SHOOT TO KILL . It didn’t really. I just made that up. This was only the second time I