Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

They will be crushed – and that’s all there is to it.

We stopped for lunch at a roadway restaurant with the sign “Dine and Dance”. We were the only ones in a large, dim room which had a square in the middle for dancing.

Out of small bowls we ate a brownish soup, accompanied by crackers, small salty rusks which justified their name by their incredible crackling when bitten. When we were attacking the large T-bone steaks – beefsteaks of frozen meat with a T-shaped bone in the middle – the owner of the restaurant and entertainment aggregate “Dine and Dance” drove up in an old Ford.

He began to drag out of his machine and into the hall bundles of dried cornstalks to decorate the room with them. That evening the youth of the district was to assemble and dance. It was all very pleasant and peaceful – even patriarchal – yet we had driven only a hundred miles away from New York. Only a hundred miles behind us was the noisiest population in the world, while here was quiet, peace, heart-throbbing bucolic flirtation during dances, cornstalks, even flowers.

At the very doors of the quiet restaurant lay the dun concrete of a first-class highway. Again the wound in Mrs. Adams’s heart opened the moment she took the wheel. Thirty miles an hour – and not another mile!

A foreigner, even one who has no command of English, can drive out on an American road without any apprehension. He will never get lost, no matter how strange the country is to him.

Even a child, even a deaf-and-dumb person can freely make his way along these roads. They are carefully numbered, and the numbers are met so frequently that it is impossible to make a mistake of direction.

Occasionally, two roads become one for a time. Then the roadway post contains two numbers – the number of the federal road above that of the state road. At times, five, seven, even ten roads come together. Then the quantity of numbers grows, and with it the post on which they are inscribed, so that the indicator begins to look like an ancient Indian totem pole.

There is a great variety of different signposts on the road, but-remarkable distinction! – not one among them is superfluous, not one might distract the attention of the driver. The signs are placed sufficiently low above-ground so that the driver may see them on his right without taking his eyes off the road. They are never conditional and never require any decoding.