Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
about four minutes its little beam fluttered and failed altogether, and it has never been used
again. And the thing is that I knew all along that this was how it was going to end, that it
wouldallbeabitterdisappointment.Onsecondthought,ifIeverranoneofthosecompan-
iesIwouldjustsendpeopleanemptyboxwithanoteinitsaying,“Wehavedecidednotto
sendyoutheitemyou'veorderedbecause,asyouwellknow,itwouldneverproperlywork
and you would only be disappointed. So let this be a lesson to you for the future.”
From the Zwingle catalog I moved on to the food and household products advertisements.
There is usually a wad of these bright and glossy inducements to try out exciting new
products things with names like Hunk o' Meat Beef Stew 'n' Gravy (“with rich 'n' meaty
chunks of beef-textured fiber”) and Sniff a-Snax (“An Exciting New Snack Treat You
TakeThroughtheNose!”)andCountrySunshineHoney-ToastedWheatNut'n'SugarBits
Breakfast Cereal (“Now with Vitamin-Enriched ChocolateCovered Raisin Substitute!”). I
am endlessly fascinated by these new products. Clearly some time ago makers and con-
sumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in
theendlessquestfornewtastesensations.Nowtheyarealittlelikethosedesperatejunkies
who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining bathroom bowl
cleanser in an effort to get still higher. All over America you can see countless flabby-but-
tedcouples quietly searching supermarket shelves fornewcombinations offlavors,hoping
to find some untried product that will tingle in their mouths and excite, however briefly,
their leaden taste buds.
The competition for this market is intense. The food inserts not only offered fifty-cent dis-
counts and the like, but also if you sent off two or three labels the manufacturers would
dispatch to you a Hunk o' Meat Beach Towel, or Country Sunshine Matching Apron and
Oven Mitt, or a Sniff a-Snax hot plate for keeping your coffee warm while you slipped in
and out of consciousness from a surfeit of blood sugar. Interestingly, the advertisements
for dog food were much the same, except that they weren't usually chocolate flavored. In
fact,everysingleproduct-fromthelemon-scentedtoiletbowlcleanserstothescent-o'-pine
trash bags-promised to give you a brief buzz. It's no wonder that so many Americans have
a glazed look. They are completely junked out.
I drove on south on Highway 218 to Keokuk. This stretch of the road was marked on my
map as a scenic route, though these things are decidedly relative. Talking about a scenic
route in southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to
make certain allowances. Compared with an afternoon in a darkened room, it wasn't bad.
But compared with, say, the coast road along the Sorrentine peninsula, it was perhaps a
littletame.Certainlyitdidn'tstrikemeasbeinganymoreorlessscenicthananyoftheoth-
er roads I had been on today. Keokuk is a Mississippi River town where Iowa, Illinois and
