"Preface"

THIS ALL STARTED as a kind of private craziness.A small band of newspaper people who spent their time on the road across America, reporting on it for the Washington Post, started getting used to a certain question from me, their desk-bound editor. What, I wanted to know, was it like wherever they found themselves?

Chapter Two - "The Nine Nations"

FORGET the pious wisdom you've been handed about North America.

Forget about the borders dividing the United States, Canada, and Mexico, those pale barriers so thoroughly porous to money, immigrants, and ideas.

Forget the bilge you were taught in sixth-grade geography about East and West, North and South, faint echoes of glorious pasts that never really existed save in sanitized textbooks.

Chapter Three - "New England"

EAST OF THE GREEN MOUNTAINS, under a bridge that carries the main street of the town of Randolph, Vermont, over the Third Branch of the White River, lies a small mill.

With the words SARGENT ROUNDY CORPORATION fading on its smokestack, the place might seem to be abandoned. There are many deserted factories in this beautiful land, much of whose industry has seen hard times for a century.

Chapter Four - "The Foundry"

"Oh-ho say can you see . . ."

Dull green with yellow tips, the hefty cranes up on towers cluster, sporting the markings of Bethlehem Steel. Amid them, incongruously, are nestled the white-tipped black yardarms of a three-masted sailing ship, the U.S.S. Constellation.

Chapter Five - "Aberrations"

ON FORTY-FIFTH STREET In Manhattan, there is a transvestite disco called G. G. Barnum's.

For ten bucks, its patrons get two unwatered drinks, the opportunity to exercise as many kinks as they can conjure up, and - unusual even by the standards of midtown - an air show.

The ceiling above the dance floor is perhaps thirty feet high. Just over the heads of the paying customers, cargo netting has been strung from wall to wall. Above the cargo netting are trapezes. Also, shiny chrome vertical and horizontal bars. And gymnast's rings.

Chapter Six - Dixie

IN HINDS COUNTY, Mississippi, in a dark-paneled reception room by striking orange Scandinavian furniture, on a mahogany pole, stands a Confederate battle flag.

As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, there would be nothing remarkable about the presence of the flag in this, the deepest of the Deep South, just below the state capital of Jackson. In fact, if it were standing alone, it might not attract any attention today. But this particular, full-sized, gold-fringed symbol of a certain time and place stands in a row of four.

Chapter Seven - "The Islands"

ABOUT THREE MILES into the heart of the city, but at a point where the Miami River is still wide enough for a small ocean freighter to just squeeze through, the denizens of the Gunkhole were trying to figure out why the Coast Guard was on their case.

Chapter Eight - "MexAmerica"

RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON always liked Coronado Island, and no wonder. It would take an incomprehensible hardening of the soul not to feel a surge of gratitude toward the Pacific Ocean for creating the beaches, waves, and breezes that give the island what is possibly the finest year-round climate in North America.

But perhaps more important to him, the island, just an hour south of San Clemente, is full of the former president's kind of people.

Chapter Nine - Ecotopia

PARADISE, as it turns out, smells like bee glue.

Near the crest of the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, Paradise is guarded by Three Sisters. North, Middle, and South - 10,085 feet, 10,047 feet, and 10,358 feet, respectively - the Three Sisters are snowcapped behemoths that tower over the Douglas fir near the top of the valley of the McKenzie River.

Chapter Ten - "The Empty Quarter"

DOWN AT the Blyth & Fargo Co. mercantile, where he takes payments on the credit sales of groceries to ranchers and puts the cash into an Antonio y Cleopatra cigar box, Harry Bodine talks about the Wyoming frontier as if it were yesterday. He really does.

"We had two barns in town to house these horses to do our delivering with. We'd go from town to town, sometimes, with these horses. You had to have just as stylish a horse, just as nice and useful as you would an automobile or truck today."

Chapter Eleven - "The Breadbasket"

IN THE HUSH of the high-ceilinged expanse of teak and cork, near the soaring walls of glass, below the enormous chandeliers, oblivious of the hundreds of people who filed, blinking, into the bright, lofty space through a low portal, the three men talked of cathedrals.

"One is pretty similar to the other," said one thoughtful acolyte. "Basically, they're worshiping the same monolithic higher power. You know, the rules are different, just as the ritual is different. But essentially, these things tell us how to live. Very often where to live. How we dress."

Chapter Twelve - "Quèbec"

SIX HUNDRED MILES north of Montreal, the land is so wild and forbidding that even the moose won't put up with it. Around La Grande Riviere, where the snow begins to blow in mid-September, but stops soon after Christmas, when it becomes too cold even for that, the caribou begin their range.

The fishing is terrific in this crumpled, glacier-scoured plain. The land is so tattered with lakes and ponds that, despite the thousands of years the Indians and Eskimos - Cree and Innuit - have lived off it, there are untold numbers of waters where trout and pike have never been disturbed by man.