After a long crawl round the town’s side-streets, I finally found Mr Earthworm’s place on Jefferson. It wasn’t what I was expecting.
I was expecting a sort of shack surrounded by workshops, a front drive littered with disembowelled cars and old domestic appliances, a hand-painted sign offering BAIT – or whatever else earthworms were good for. What I found was a neat production-line bungalow with net curtains over the front windows and a row of flowers lining the path. I hit the bell-push, and waited. Hit it again and waited some more.
I was about to give up when the door opened a crack and half a face appeared. It was stubbly, and it was motionless. The mouth was a thin horizontal line.

“Hi,” I started, brightly, “I’m looking for Joe. Joe Kozinsky?”

A bare foot curled around the bottom of the door and opened it wider, revealing a young man in a pair of boxer shorts. He was covered in muscles from head to toe, and the muscles were covered in tattoos. “Joe who?” he said. I flipped open my notebook. I was hoping against hope that I’d made a mistake, that the address was Adams, not Jefferson, and maybe the town he lived in was Anson, not Merkel. “Why doncha step inside a moment,” the man suggested. He had one of those quiet voices that start out sounding mildly threatening and get worse – much worse – as they lower the volume.

From this vantage-point – that is, safely back at my desk – I could claim that when I went inside I was just being what I’d set out to be, an intrepid travel writer. Investigative, fearless – that kind of thing.
I have an uncomfortable recollection, however, of being rigid with fear, wanting to run, but irresistibly drawn forward.

In the front room of the house a young woman of about twenty lay full-length on a sofa. Blonde, curvy, with as sleek a pair of legs as you could dream of, and eating a chocolate bar. She had on a skimpy Simpsons T-shirt and nothing else. She probably had about five more years of looking drop-dead gorgeous before she went to fat. Or, of course, she might decide she needed to get away from all this and take up with some other guy – a sensitive, intellectual type, perhaps, an artist, maybe even a writer – whereupon Mr Muscle would re-arrange her face before dismembering the new man in her life.

But Mr Muscle didn’t seem too interested in me right now. He’d gone to the corner of the room where there was a crib, and had picked up a tiny baby, which he now fed from a bottle as he stood watching the TV. It was one of those sub-Jerry Springer daytime confessionals. My boyfriend wants me to dress like a hooker.

“Kernawski,” I said. “His name’s Joe Kernawski.” I checked my notes again. “This is 412 Jefferson, isn’t it?” There was still hope.

“Yeah, this is 412.” The girl on the couch sat up and smoothed her T-shirt over her body, stretching it an inch or two over the top of her thighs. “What’s he done?”
“Nothing. I’m hoping to interview him.”
She scowled. “I knew it – you’re from the Government.”
“No, I – ”
“You’re a Revenue Inspector.”
“Listen,” I said, “I was just passing through town, and – ”
“Nobody passes through Merkel….” It was Mr Muscle, speaking without moving his lips. I waited. I wasn’t entirely sure that he’d completed the sentence. I had an awful fear that it went on: “Nobody passes through Merkel – alive!”

“I got lost,” I said. “I got a map from the mailman. Look.” I shoved a hand into my shirt-pocket and pulled out the folded napkin. “I’m trying to avoid Abilene, see – ”

Mr Muscle was cooing at the baby, who was now asleep in his arms. He stopped in mid-coo and looked me up and down. “Say,” he said, “I know that accent. Where you from?”

“England,” I said. “I’m from England.”

“That a fact?” He thought for a moment. “Say, you guys drive on the left, doncha?” I didn’t like the way he said that. I couldn’t tell whether it was it an innocent conversational gambit, or a veiled accusation. “Left” has all kinds of associations in Texas, few of them helpful if you’re trapped in a house with Bonnie and Clyde. Without straining my memory too hard I can come up with “Commie”, “pinko”, and you might as well throw in “faggot” for good measure.

“Sure, but over here we drive on the right. Always.” I can still hear myself say it, and I still shake my head in disbelief. I think I expected it to re-assure him.

He grinned. “Ya hear that, Denver?”

Denver was suddenly engrossed in the television. A huge women in a tiny sequinned dress and eight-inch stilettos was attacking a thin, weaselly man in black leather, and the heavies were wading in. Denver had her fists clenched and was mouthing silent encouragement. As far as I could make out her lips were spelling out “Rip his fucking head off.”

“Denver!”
“Uh-huh, honey.” She re-emerged from her trance, took a bite of chocolate and smiled sweetly at her beloved.
“He’s from England.”
“Oh, right.”
She turned to me. “So what brings you to” – she swallowed her chocolate and laughed – “I mean, Merkel, for chrissake!”
“I’m looking for this guy Kernawski.”
“Oh, old Joe?”
“You know him?”
“Sure. He used to live here.”
“Oh, so he doesn’t live here any more.”
“Nah. Moved out a couple months back.”
“Oh.”
“I can tell you where he is, though.”
I brightened. “Where’s that?”
“You sure you ain’t with the Government?”

Her old man butted in. “Honey, he’s English. Drives on the left.” I was warming to Mr Muscle. ;

“You could try Safeway.”
“Why, does he spend a lot of time there?”

She laughed again and crossed her legs. Jesus, she was lovely. “No, stupid. He works there. Runs the produce section.”

Produce. Well, I thought, it’s perfectly reasonable that a guy who tries to make a living raising earth-worms should get a day-job. Nevertheless, I was kind of disappointed. In fact, more than that: I felt cheated. Here I was, all psyched up to interview a latter-day pioneer – and he’d sold out to a supermarket. I thanked Mr Muscle for his help, politely looked the other way as the lady of the house peeled off her T-shirt and headed for the shower-room, and went on my way. Of course, Mr Muscle had to come to the door to see me to the car. And as I backed out of the drive he gave me a cheery wave and shouted after me “Keep to the right, ya hear!” I don’t think there was a political sub-text there, but if there was I was prepared to do exactly as he said.

However. Try finding a place to pull off the road and relieve yourself where there isn’t a State Park, State Game Reserve or any of the multitude of facilities listed above. No, let me save you the trouble. Don’t try it. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s not as easy as you’d like it to be. Worse than that, it can soon land you in trouble. I have from time to time driven thirty or forty miles with a bursting bladder and still, finally, had to relieve myself in the scant shade of an open car door, scanning the horizon for approaching vehicles.

Take my word for it, out in the Great American Desert, as the early explorers called these lands between the Missouri and the Rockies, you may drive five, ten, fifteen miles without seeing another soul. But if you’re (a) male, and (b) feeling lonesome, here’s what to do. Get out of the car and unzip your trousers. Then watch that skyline. You just know what’s going to come thundering over the next rise. No, not the cavalry. If only.

The minute you start to feel that blessed relief flood through your groin you can guarantee you’re going to have visitors. Generally it’ll be a family with a bunch of rowdy kids, all charged up on sugar and grease, the boys affecting disgust, the girls horror, the parents disbelief. Or it might be a gang of rowdy youths heading to town after a hard week herding cows; they’re inclined to shout encouragement or derision – it all depends on how good a look they get of your private parts. But worse, far worse than all of these, are traffic cops.

Traffic cops have nothing to do, at least not in the daytime. I once sat in a café in Wyoming and had lunch with a traffic cop who told me that both his partners were off work sick and that he therefore had 10,000 square miles of territory to patrol. Ten thousand. It may be 99% cattle range, but it’s a hell of a lot of cattle range. “But hey,” he said, “nothing much happens till the weekend. Then it’s mostly teenaged kids. DWIs. That kinda thing.”

So, traffic cops are bored. If they pull over to the side of the road the least they want is to stretch their tired limbs and exercise their jaw muscles for a few minutes. And they hope – in a forlorn kind of way – that they’ll rack up some points on that giant chart they keep back at Headquarters.

You all know about the chart I take it? Okay, Clint – let’s see now. That’s six DWIs at ten points apiece, two bank robbers at twenty-five, and the runaway cow – hey, you had yourself quite a week out there in Custer County. I reckon that’s sixty… plus fifty… call it ten for the cow… You sure it weren’t a bull, now? ‘Cos that’d be another twenty-five… then – hey, nearly forgot the homicidal maniac; that’s another fifteen at least…. Boy, that puts you at number three and rising. And what’s this you’re claiming – a British travel writer? Well, look at that – you done shot clear off the chart.

While you stand there with your knees pressed together Clint, having got out of the car and left the lights flashing lazily – strictly for the amusement of any passing families or gangs of youths – ambles across and asks whether you’re all right. No, actually I’m breaking my neck here – and I just pissed on my sandals. But he doesn’t hear, because, having seen your out-of-state plates, he wants to see your driver’s licence.

A British driver’s licence is a thing of wonder to Americans, because (a) it’s designed to last till you hit seventy, so the expiry date is generally decades away – although the older you get the less remote that seems, I have to say – and (b) there’s no picture on it, unless you’ve got the new-fangled one. “So,” he says, “you’re British. Welcome to Wyoming.” At which point he holds out his hand, quite unaware that you just used your right hand to shove your dribbling member back inside your trousers. Then he wants to know if you’re quite sure you haven’t broken down `cos helping you would be the neighbourly thing to do. Finally, he starts to reminisce – as your thighs turn to jelly – about when he was in the U.K. Back in the eighties with the USAAF. Green-ham Common. You heard o’ that?

In the end, of course, you learn. You want a pee, you take the dirt roads. Swing off the highway, ride over the next ridge, and you’ll have all the solitude you need. On the other hand, if you experience total mechanical failure in the middle of nowhere – well, you know just how to summon up some assistance. Don’t you?

I look at the table oppposite where some kind of feed salesman in a suit is toying with his breakfast as he talks discounts to a rancher in jeans, suspenders and boots.

The waitress has hit the nail right on the head. When it comes to eating a square meal, Americans simply can’t hack it. From deep in my memory comes an echo of a voice, a young high-school boy with wide eyes and a clear reluctance to believe what he’d just seen.

“Say, are you that Limey they’re talking about who sent back seven empty plates?”
It was a get-together of Western Lit. scholars in Hastings, Nebraska. The locals had put on a Victorian banquet I mean the whole enchilada, so to speak. Soup, followed by fish, followed by Beef Wellington… and on through the card. Decent portions, with plenty of time to let each one settle. I made myself comfortable and dug in. It took a while – but not that long – before the first murmurs of complaint reached my ear.

Before I go any further, I want to issue a disclaimer. I am not a fattist. I do not hate fat people. And certainly not fat women. It seems to me that a woman with no sub-cutaneous layer of fat has been wagiung war on Nature. I suppose I should add here that I’m talking about warm fat. Cold fat belongs on a joint of cold ham, where it is much to be desired. Warm fat – that is, plump flesh that has spent the night in a well-insulated bed and, having totted up a few hours of beauty sleep, is now glowing, curved, sleek and palpitating – oh man, let me at it. But again, I’m talking about moderate amounts of fat. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to draw the line at the excesses that some Americans are prone to. I mean the people you see in airports or Greyhound bus stations, the ones you go to speak to and find that while their faces are still right in front of you their bodies have shifted forward several feet.

Where was I? Yes, the first murmurs of complaint. “Oh – my – goodness! Oh, no! Oh, well, just a little taste, then.” It was the heavyweights, screwing up their faces and pushing their plates away. “No, really! Oh, I couldn’t!”

You see – one square meal, and it was all too much for them. They were the same people who shuffled along the counter at breakfast each morning, took a cup of de-caff or a glass of orange juice, guiltily slipped a single lo-cal bagel onto their tray, and then grinned conspiratorially as they told everyone within earshot – for Americans, read the entire bloody room – how wicked they were being. “But hey, I’m giving my paper this morning – I deserve to pig out!”

Pig out? On a ring of featherweight dough and a cup of emasculated Columbia? Give me a break. The day I delivered my paper I needed a plate of oatmeal, five strips of bacon, three eggs (over easy), a double serving of hash browns and an extra order of wholewheat toast. And even then the old stomach was rumbling all afternoon.

Which was just as well, because that evening it was the banquet. Meat and drink to me. Yes sir, seven separate courses, seven empty plates. I know. I was that Limey.

“Of course,” I told the high-school waiter who collected my discarded platters one by one, “we eat like that all the time back home. It’s what being European” – what being sophisticated, son – “is all about.” He stood there in his white shirt and bow-tie, the sweat trickling over his downy upper lip. He’d probably done Irony in school, but, not having travelled out of state, he wouldn’t have encountered it face to face. “So… how come you stay so… slim?”

Ah, the things you wish you’d said at the time. For example, “And how come so many of you people put on so much weight without eating?” It’s a fantastic feat. A modern-day miracle. Americans achieve colossal weight gain without ever eating a proper meal. A muffin here, a burger there. Here a Coke, there a Sprite, everywhere an ice-tea…. And just about everything they consume claims to be devoid of absolutely anything that makes food worth eating. I mean caffeine… sugar… fat… calories… bulk. Everything is reduced, everything is Lite. Everything is Bite-size.

So, if they’re taking in zero calories, tell me – what is all this flesh made of? That cattleman at the table opposite, I bet he’d pay a king’s ransom to know the answer. If he could get his livestock on the same eating plan as the rest of the population, he’d clean up.

The salesman has already found his breakfast too much for him. He’s shoved it to one side and buried it in screwed-up paper napkins. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He’s half out of his seat, leaning across the table to his client. “Take a look at this,” he says, snapping open his briefcase and pressing a button to bring up a computerised model on his lap-top. He starts to explain a mathematical calculation as to the effectiveness of whatever feed supplement he’s pushing. The cattleman takes a drink of coffee and tells the salesman about the claims made by a rival product. “Well,” the salesman says, “if they say they’re getting a hundred pounds of growth for a hundred pounds of feed – now hell, I can’t sit here and tell ya I can get you a hundred and one, now can I? It wouldn’t add up.

Oh, but wouldn’t it? I’m tempted – sorely tempted – to interrupt them and tell them about the Amazing Midwestern Bulk Enhancement Plan I’ve just come up with.

This is how it goes. Stick a huge pile of greasy food out in the feedlots, and make the cattle form an orderly line. One look at it and they’ll roll their eyes, clutch their waistlines and moan “Oh no, I absolutely couldn’t!” Then they’ll slip away across the meadow and fatten up before your very eyes.

But as the rancher winks at the salesman I can see they’d never believe me.

Lola’s might best be described as a shack, certainly as seen from the road: a tiny place with one square window and a little door, wedged between a rickety-looking tin-roofed building and a squat timber house with a hitching-rail outside the front door.

A single pick-up truck was parked outside Lola’s, its front bumper kissing a bleached tree-stump that marked the edge of a narrow, dusty sidewalk. There was no indication that Lola’s was a café: it just looked as though it ought to be.

The sign in the window said CLOSED, but the door was slightly ajar. I shoved it open and looked inside. One oldtimer in faded dungarees and one mailman in a short-sleeved shirt were sitting at a little wooden table under a low ceiling drinking coffee from styrofoam cups. Above them on the wall were the House Rules:

•  We do not specialise in service – wait on yourself.

•  You eat what we tell you to eat – unless you’re a regular.

•  This is not a Country Club, and you do not pay Country Club dues – so don’t boss us around with that Country Club attitude.

•  Do not even think about leaning back in our chairs.

“Is it open, or not?” I asked.

“No, she’s closed Mondays. Leaves us the key so we can fix ourselves a drink.”

The oldtimer shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t have anyplace to go otherwise,” he explained. “Here, grab yourself some coffee” – he pointed to a machine by the deserted counter – “and stick a coupla quarters in the jar there.”

Yes, the mailman agreed as I jotted down the Rules in my notebook, she’s quite a gal. Then he asked me where I was heading.

“Haven’t any particular route in mind, except to avoid Abilene.”

“That’s a smart move. Abilene ain’t a nice place at all. Here” – he took a fresh paper napkin and borrowed my pen – “Lemme draw ya a little map. I drive all those county roads. I can show a real neat detour.”

Not only did he know all the minor roads of the district, but by golly he was going to cram them all in on my paper napkin if he could. He’d already covered half of it with a confused network of farm tracks, railways, and even a set of roadworks, when he got distracted by the M word. It was my own stupid fault for mentioning my interest in history.

When I made my first trip across the Plains, back in `91, I drove 5017 miles, and I made very slow progress. Well, I was young, I was eager, and I had a PhD to write up. There are an awful lot of Historical Markers out there, and I dutifully pulled over at every one of them. Out there Historical Markers rank number three in their list of products – some way behind grass, but only a little way behind abandoned gas stations, and gaining fast.

I also called at just about every museum, National, State Historical or private, from Holbrook, Arizona, to Baldwin, Kansas, on up to Laramie, Wyoming, and back through Colorado to Gallup, New Mexico, out on Route 66. I took notes on ploughs, ox-yokes, Indian pots, arrow-heads, six-guns, Winchesters, traps, coonskin caps, buffalo-robes and all the appurtenances, domestic, commercial and military, Native and imported, that furnished the needs of westerners, Red, white, black and yellow. I saw re-constructed log cabins, sod houses, tipis, authentic frontier jails, school-houses, pot-belly stoves, barns, garages, dentists’ surgeries, livery stables, cavalry forts, lock-ups, churches, Conestoga wagons, Model T Fords, railroad engines, stage-coaches, scalps, petroglyphs, and the very wagon-tracks left in the prairie earth by those early emigrants.

So when the mailman broke off from his map-making and said, “You know, so long as you’re in town you really ought to call in at the museum”, I had to restrain myself from lecturing him on the devalued currency of ubiquitous western relics. Being polite, being British, I meekly agreed that it would be un-neighbourly to miss it. I drank up my coffee and headed for Elm Street.

It’s no great curiosity to find a graveyard out west whose population outnumbers the town it serves. And because past so frequently overshadows present in this land of speculative ventures, because people so frequently abandon their homes and move on with nothing more than what they can pile in the back of the car, it’s not unusual to find a museum whose collection spills over into outbuildings, basements and adjacent lots, and soon dwarfs the town itself.

People started abandoning their treasures on the Great Plains way back in the overland trail days, lightening the load as the mountains loomed and the draught animals weakened on the thin grazing. Leaving aside the bones of exhausted oxen, the pitiful little gravesites of babies – or the mothers who died bearing them – the most likely candidates for abandonment seemed to be the tokens of a more refined life: the bureaux, the pianos, the books. More than one nineteenth-century emigrant has written of finding excellent reading material along the side of the road, and more than one has marvelled at how little these heirlooms counted for once their owners were sufficiently reduced by hunger and thirst. Later generations, destroyed by drought, or locusts, or plummeting prices for farm products, were equally unmoved by the value their grand-parents had placed on furniture from the old country. So there’s an awful lot of junk to be sifted through, and most of it is in back-rooms in smalltown museums. But I have to say that until I arrived in Buffalo Gap I’d never seen a museum that so nearly overshadowed a town in its size, its comprehensive representation of what that town might have looked like in its prime.

The Buffalo Gap Historic Village contains, not necessarily in this order, a courthouse, a jail, a log cabin, a doctor’s surgery, a post office, a barber shop, a railroad depot, an art gallery, a carpenter’s shop, a blacksmith’s shop, a wagon barn, a print shop, a chapel, another post office more modern than the first, a Texaco service station, a schoolhouse, a Marshall’s house, a trading-post, and a general store. And then there are the outside exhibits, which are several.

They start you off with an appetiser, a twenty-minute video presentation on the history of Texas in general and Buffalo Gap in particular. And for that alone I am grateful: I learned a few things about Texas which had escaped my attention. For example, having struggled to hold in check my amazement at the abundance and variety of wildflowers that have decorate these Texas byways, I now find that the whole thing is a put-up job. The department responsible for such matters, I learn, dumps 40,000 lbs – that’s around twenty tons – of flower-seed along its verges every year . But because they scatter them along one million, two hundred and fifty thousand miles of road, they scatter them pretty thin.

There’s more: Did you know – the video commentator is now casting around for alternative ways to impress upon you the vastness of his home state – that if you peeled Texas off the map and rotated it along an axis described by the northern Panhandle, Brownsville, currently on the Gulf Coast, would be in Canada. So that means – my mind’s in overdrive – that South Padre Island would be somewhere in northern Minnesota. Hey, give it a try, I say: it’d be an awful lot less attractive to the drunken students who descend on it every Spring Break, and the residents might thank you for that, even as they rush out and buy their snow-chains.

After the commentator has numbed your sensibilities with this barrage of psephological trivia, he sends you on the tour. I’ve sort of pre-empted the tour, with that exhaustive list of the buildings that make up the collection, but the wonderful thing about a museum like Buffalo Gap is that, having the space to grow, they keep cramming things in. Beautifully preserved things like the dentist’s chair – and instruments of torture – and there, around the corner, nailed to the grey, bare, wooden boards of an old farm building, an enamelled sign advertising a long-vanished brand of chicken-feed: LAY or BUST.

If you’ve never done this kind of museum in the West, Buffalo Gap is as good a place to do it as any. But don’t make my mistake: try to hit town when Lola is open for business – officially, that is, with the lady herself in residence. And write and tell me what she’s like. I’m kind of curious.

But just in case, let’s say it’s midday, the sun’s blazing down on Main Street, the mythical `one horse` is grabbing some shut-eye under the hanging-tree and one oldtimer is sitting asleep outside the barber shop. I dare say you now have a very good idea of the sort of scene I want you to conjure up. But just in case, let’s sling in a tumbleweed.

Right, that’s the setting. Now for the stranger. You know he’s going to ride into town real slow. There is no other way, is there? You know too he’s going to be dusty and hot from the trail. And thirsty? Hell, his throat’ll be – what’s the word? Yep, you got it: parched. And just in case there’s anyone there apart from the oldtimer to hear him riding up to the hitching-rail, we’ll give him a little sound-effect of some sort. Who knows, it might turn out to be his signature tune. You’re probably thinking of a little jingling of spurs; or maybe you want him to be playing a jew’s harp.
Well, they’re good answers, but I need to step in here and say no, what the little old guy outside the barber’s shop hears, as he wakes from his siesta and feels in his jeans for a pack of cigarettes, is a dry, rhythmic squeaking.

Ee-eek… ee-eek… ee-eek… ee-eek And as the stranger slows down, so does the noise. He’s had that squeaking all along the Republican River. Two hundred miles, and it’s been driving him nuts.

Finally he comes to a stop, and the town is silent once more apart from the chirruping of the cicadas. As he lowers himself stiffly onto the road and steps up to the boardwalk he grimaces. And the oldtimer pauses with a cigarette between his cracked lips and a match in his hand, pushes his hat back on his head and squints up to see what kinda darned fool is out in this heat.

“Saddle-sore, huh?”

The stranger nods his head. “Ridden fifty miles since sun-up.” And then, as he shakes the trail dust off his clothes he asks, “Say, is there anybody in town can help me get this fixed? She’s in real bad shape.”

The little old feller rubs his chin, strikes a match on his boot-heel, and holds it to his cigarette. “We-ell,” he says as he sucks on it, “there used to be a feller back of Main Street.” He holds the smoke for a moment, then lets it out in a long slow loving plume. “But he died.”

Then he casts a sceptical eye over the stranger’s trusty steed and asks, “Guess you ain’t from around these parts, huh?”

Okay, we can stop fooling around now. I will tell you precisely what happened next in the little town of Red Cloud, Nebraska (population 1204) sometime in the late summer of 1994. I said to the guy, “I wanted to take a little trip across The Great Plains.” And he said, “Hell, I wouldn’t mind doing that myself – on a Harley Davidson.” And then he looked at my trusty steed once more and sort of snorted, and said, “But on a goddam bicycle? Hell no!”

You may as well call me Slim. The little old feller did, as he bought me a beer in the saloon and introduced me to his friends. “This here’s my buddy, Slim, from England. Riding a bicycle clear across the U.S. of A.” I tried to tell them, no, I’m riding across Nebraska, but they wouldn’t listen. Too busy trying to remember when they last saw a bike in town, and who that feller was who used to fix `em – and what he died of.

As I struggled west next day into a strengthening wind I decided that next time I came out on the Great Plains I’d come by car. And, just for the hell of it, I would indeed cross the entire U.S. of A., except I’d do it south to north rather than coast-to-coast. I’d drive from the Mexican border clear to Canada, all the way up the Great Plains, all along the Hundredth Meridian.

Actually going for a walk, which is what I stubbornly insist on doing over here, just as I would at home, involves variety, uncertainty, an element of chance or discovery. In a new place such as Orlando I do what I would do if I were in some provincial French town, or staying with friends somewhere I didn’t know too well: go exploring. But because I have this huge street map of the greater Orlando area I am able to plot out a convenient route towards the downtown area, which I am keen to investigate. The course I’ve decided on is roughly parallel to the main road which leads directly downtown, but one block west of it. Should be easy enough to follow.

For several hundred yards it’s pleasant enough with trees, gardens and mature houses; birdsong; a squirrel tight-rope walking along a power cable above my head; lizards darting in and out of the shrubbery; sunlight filtering through the skeins of Spanish moss; the occasional couple out for an afternoon stroll, Round The Block. God damn it, they don’t even look as if they’re “taking the air”; you just know they’re bent on some health-restoring activity that their doctor’s told them to engage in. And in between glancing nervously at their wrists to check their m.p.h. – or cholesterol level – they glance nervously at someone such as me, in my jeans and sandals, sauntering by with no apparent urgency or destination and looking up at the trees and sky and roof-shingles. Nervously? I want to say suspiciously. But, hell, may as well say hi – and they say hi back, and we both force a grin.

Then I hit a main road. It’s not really a main road, not a divided highway, just a wide and rather busy road that clearly goes somewhere of note on its east-west axis. And the minute I’ve got the other side everything’s different. There’s a tension in the air. Gone are the florid shrubs, the dark mulch of shredded pine bark, the elegant lamps embellishing brick driveways, the sleek SUVs purring in readiness. Instead there are wire fences, swirls of trash, threadbare grass verges, cars that pop and bark as they rattle past, and rather more people on the streets. Poor people; well, certainly poorish; and every one of them black. Ahead of me are two young women on the sidewalk. They don’t seem to be very sure where they’re going. They’ve emerged from a side-street and are standing at the junction. They feint one way, check, and set off the other way, but hesitantly; then stand and watch me approach, before walking very slowly in the same direction as me so that I have to brush past them.

Mwah mwah mwah, they blow pussy-cat kisses at me, and laugh. They’re not bad looking, as it happens, which makes it kind of sexy and menacing at the same time. Then it’s little knots of kids, playing innocently, but pausing to look up as I approach, moving aside with very slightly exaggerated courtesy to let me pass and muttering I don’t know what. On a porch a young girl, maybe eighteen, is talking to an older woman, while a skinny old man dozes in a beat-up sofa in the sun. “Hi,” she says, and like a fool I reply, and she’s in. “How you doing today man?” and before I know it I’ve tossed off some kind of answer and she’s walking along beside me, breathing alcohol and telling me how the damned bitch took all of her seventy-nine dollars she’d been paid and what the hell’s she gonna do now; and you’re from England, right so what’s it like over there huh? Once more, I’ve said too much; now I keep to monosyllables and concentrate on walking south. Not half a mile away I can see the tall apartment blocks and offices of downtown. I try to lengthen my stride rather than quicken my pace; she keeps right on trotting along beside me and now there are a couple of youths up ahead, one leaning against a car, the other about to climb inside. They look up and gawp at this white man – extremely white, his legs not having been exposed to the sun since the summer before last – this old white guy walking down the street, their street, with this young woman at his side. What if these are her brothers, her boyfriends? “Listen,” I tell her, “I haven’t got any money to give away you know.” And she sort of melts away.

A couple of hundred yards more and it’s dusty lots where savage dogs charge into chain-link fences to protect whatever’s stashed in the warehouses and abandoned cafes, snapping and yowling until they’ve seen me on my way.

Of course, now that I’ve arrived at the great glassy eminence of the bank headquarters and heaved a sigh of relief it’s time to wonder how the hell I’m going to get back home again without a repeat performance. Even here, in the business district, I’m being stared at – this time by people in cars, the sidewalks being completely deserted. I find myself wondering how often, if ever, any of these smartly dressed young women or men, with their lips pursed around their straws, their shades pushed up onto their perfectly groomed heads, their manicured hands steering a gracious curve around me and onto the slip road to the freeway, how often they’ve felt the actual raw fabric – the shattered glass and splintered timber, the warped aluminum trim, the roadside grit of their own native land, have stood as I stand now, at a railroad crossing waiting for a green light, perched on buckled paving slabs, a sere weed chafing against my leg, a truck bulldozing a wall of heat past my face, and at my feet one of those dark drainage holes fat enough to swallow you down without a thought. It ain’t exactly fun. But if you really want to understand this damned country I’d say you need to do it from time to time.

I found a way home, eventually, one which took me along a beautiful lakeside fringed with some sort of tree that seemed to like growing in a foot of water; a cypress perhaps. Sunlight was sparkling off the waves, a father was taking his kids and their dog back across the grass to a shiny new car, and as I turned left up Shady Lane Drive and headed back towards my safe little historic house I passed another couple doing the outdoor treadmill routine, safe within their own neighbourhood, and this time I have to admit it made a little more sense to me.

how indeed, I wonder, how indeed does he wind up in Jack Kerouac’s old apartment, peeing in his toilet, sleeping in his bed, baking bread in his kitchen, sunning himself under the venerable live-oak, all draped with Spanish moss, in the very yard where the supposed King of the Beats slept beneath the southern stars and waited, and waited, and waited for On The Road to be published forty-seven long years ago?

What Road, exactly, did a latter-day drop-out take that led him, at last, after he too had waited, and waited, and waited for some kind of success before slinging his hook and going back to the factory, to this house of literary repute where, having unpacked his two suitcases, he moves from room to room late at night in between eating and writing and flipping through sixty-some tv channels in the vain pursuit of something watchable, all the while averting his eyes from the penetrating gaze of the darkly handsome French Canadian – forever thirty-five, intense and brooding – who stares out at him from two portraits on the walls, from a couple of book covers on the shelf beside the antique Underwood portable, and, from time to time, from within his own over-stimulated imagination?

Does it start on the banks of the Ouse in midwinter? Should I begin with my bike-ride, half-past five on a frosty morning, bending almost double as I lean on the pedals and plough my way through the wind that funnels down the river from the water-meadows north of town? Should I begin by explaining that it was in the brake-van (or caboose if you prefer) of a freight train such as the one now rumbling past me heading north out of York station that I read old Kerouac’s works, hunched over a red-hot cast-iron stove, my book illuminated by a paraffin lamp, as the train rattled its way to Newcastle in the black of mid-December? Should I weave in the homely smell of cocoa, some mornings drifting across from Rowntree’s factory, and the way it always takes me back to the old Extract Block where I whiled away the night-shift trying to write the memoirs of a twenty-seven-year-old – precisely half my lifetime ago? Or should I wait a while before trying to explain why it is that when I look up at the creamy white discharge from the chimneys on Boroughbridge Road billowing across the star-pricked sky, wondering whether it’ll turn a candy pink underbelly – as it did yesterday – to the rising sun, why it is that even faced with an eight-hour shift in the noise and heat and dirt of the sugar-beet processing plant this man who was not so long ago writing for Britain’s number two soap opera, his every episode watched by twelve million viewers, why it is that he finds himself grinning out loud, such is his joy at being back in that reality?

The banks of the river Ouse would indeed be a good place to start.
I can see that. But because I can never hold present circumstance at bay for long, any more than I can keep the past locked away for five minutes, I find myself starting in the here and now. And that means starting with Florida. Worse than that: Orlando. You know: Disney