Hello. My name is Cheryl Berzanskis and I’m from Amarillo.
As listeners to High Plains Public Radio slog through winter and spring is only a promise on the calendar, some lighthearted reading might get us through the darkness. Our Radio Readers Book Club theme “Humor Me!” urges one to chuckle, get the joke and find the funny in everyday life.
As one who lives with a suitcase half packed and is pretty sure “the road DOES go on forever” the combination of humor and hitting the road to see America seemed like a winner. Our BookByte selection, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by author Bill Bryson was published in 1989 by Perennial an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
At 299 pages, our spring selection is not a travel guide to America. That is “the continent” to which Bryson refers, because there’s nary a map nor how-to-visit page in the book. Rather the book is about the about. Not the seeing of something or someone but the reflecting on how it fits into the whole of a land. Sometimes humorously — think about the ubiquity of beehive hairdos and butterfly glasses — but occasionally hitting the flat note of a people trying to work with they have but not having much and Bryson doesn’t help them out. After all every place can’t be New York City or the Grand Canyon or Santa Fe, over which Bryson swooned.
He asks one very good question about the quest to see our very own lost continent. Really, it’s a reflection on people and how they live in the world.
“I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.”
I think he qualifies as one who is enchanted by his world, but as I read, I thought what this book would be like were Bryson writing it on a tour of the Texas and Oklahoma portions of the HPPR listening area. He covers Kansas pretty well. Colorado, too, and nips through New Mexico, but neither panhandle. Would he be bored or would he be enchanted? Would he handle our listeners with a light touch?
Would he have tooled through Lipscomb in his aging Chevette to see the turkeys parade around the town square twice a day? Would he be delighted by the Spanish skirts of Palo Duro Canyon? St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Umbarger with its beautifully painted sanctuary? The internationally famous Cadillac Ranch and its parody site Slug Bug Ranch on the opposite side of Amarillo? Black Mesa, Oklahoma’s claim to dark sky fame and its highest peak?
While Lost Continent is amusing with Bryson’s silly renaming of small towns and calling out of tourist traps, this is not a laugh out loud paean to the joys of small towns and unexpected finds. Bryson is occasionally tender and always self-deprecating. Once in a while cringeworthy and sometimes so hard on people that it’s no wonder they don’t like outsiders.
What I think Bryson brings to his mostly lighthearted perspective is how the nation has changed compared to his childhood vacations with the family. He seems to be looking for some Beaver Cleaver perfection that doesn’t exist in the 38 states he visited along with their Pizza Huts, shiny car dealerships and vanishing mom-and-popness.
It was only at the end of his almost 14,000-mile journey that Bryson longed for his quest for America to continue.
“Suddenly I didn’t want the trip to be over. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would go to the car now and in an hour or two I would crest my last hill, drive around my last bend, and be finished with looking at America, possibly forever.”
For the Radio Readers Book Club on High Plains Public Radio, this has been Cheryl Berzanskis.