The truth was, they would not go out. They were afraid to die.
Ringgold, Georgia, population 1,381, is a mile east of Interstate 75, less than ten miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Interstate 24 crosses 75. It is 539 miles north of Orlando, Florida, and Disney World.
Ben Flesh had chosen it for the site of his most important venture with a good deal of exactitude and care. Indeed, almost five years before, even before Disney World had officially opened in October 1971, or Interstate 75 and 24 were completed, Flesh had consulted the Automobile Association. He had wanted to know near which large city a family of four, starting out from the Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Columbus metropolitan areas and hoping to make it to Disney World in two days, might be likely to stop for the night. Chattanooga, Tennessee, seemed, according to all the parameters that could be known at the time, the most probable location. Though it would be a long, difficult drive from Chicago or Cleveland, it was merely a pleasant day’s ride from Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Columbus, and an absolutely leisurely one from Cincinnati. There were, however, either built, or projected, or already under construction, four Travel Inns in Chattanooga. A fifth would have been redundant. Flesh looked at his maps again.
Of course, he’d thought, the state line. Chattanooga sat exactly on Tennessee’s straight, ruled southern border like a house on a blueprint. The state line, America’s and distance’s gravitational pull, and Georgia, beneath it, even northern Georgia, the South, the deep South like a trench in the ocean. The South for those vacationing Midwesterners anyway, their one-night stand and grits for breakfast in Dixie, an edge to the trip, for somehow one knew, even if one had never been there, that Florida was not the South. Florida was the deep East, and Tennessee was not southern either but merely defunct hillbilly, some queer smudge of country and industry. Georgia was the South, Georgia was where they would stay, the father driving, breasting — if not for the romance, then for the accomplishment — one more state line, one more milestone, like a runner busting a tape.
He felt that way himself; traveled as he was, he felt that way himself, a mystique about state lines, a sense one had that there was something not just foreign but perhaps even illicit, perhaps actually illegal, about the devices offered there. They were, for a few miles this side and a few miles that, free ports of a kind, where ordinary ordinance and day-to-day due process could be fudged — law’s and territory’s olly olly okshen free, an odd three-mile limit where fireworks were openly sold, gas discounted, and liquor and cigarettes offered at reduced prices, where kids could drive cars at fifteen, and couples got married without waiting for blood tests, where you could bet on horses or purchase lottery tickets and the pinball machines paid off in cash, where whorehouses thrived and gambling in roadhouses. West Memphis, Arkansas; West Yellowstone, Montana; Covington, Kentucky; Crown Point, Indiana; Calumet City, Illinois — American Ginzas. Wide open, but somehow cutting both ways and watch out for the speed traps. And everything up front, Wisconsin pushing its cheeses at you once you left Illinois, Florida its oranges, Georgia its pecans, Louisiana its pralines.
So it would be on the Georgia side of Chattanooga, yet close enough to pull in the Tennessee television stations. It was astonishing, once one stopped to think about it, that all the motels were not in Ringgold, Georgia. To Flesh, who had worked it out, who, once the Interstates were complete and Disney World had opened, had actually hired drivers, starting out in Indianapolis and Columbus and St. Louis, to tail families driving south — he paid reservation clerks in various motels around the park for names and anticipated arrival times — it seemed inevitable. How delighted he’d been when report after report came back: Chattanooga, they stay in Chattanooga.
But that was before the Yom Kippur war, that was before the oil embargo, that was before the energy crisis, that was before the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit had been imposed nationwide. That was before, finally, the two-day drive from St. Louis or Chicago or Indianapolis or Columbus to Disney World had become a three-day drive. Come on, he thought, come onnn, Cincinnati!
Oh, he thought, farseeing Flesh, prophetic Ben, oh, oh, the Ezekielized connections, the, to him, visible network of causality. Dial the phone in Texas, it rings in Paris. (And yet, and yet, if it turned out I was mistaken, why, I was honestly mistaken, nobly mistaken, for this is the way things are done in the world. He thought of polls, straw votes, telephone samplings, trial balloons, sneak previews with their audience-reaction cards, consumer research, feasibility studies, all enterprise’s three-spoon tests. Of handicapping the world, of infinite possibility like hats in the ring, of flags run up flagpoles to see who salutes, of all ever-diminishing options which reduced themselves at last to a sort of Hobson’s choice, the inevitable if-this-then-that sequences of science and syllogism. Nobly mistaken. For if I paid off room clerks in Orlando, if I had Impalas tailed and station wagons, and studied the progress of the Interstates, or, more, connived — and I did — to discover where they would be, where the exits would be placed, learning the distances between gas stations, between rest areas, toilet facilities, the Gas/Food/Lodging synapses of American physiology, reconnoitering the as yet no-man’s-land and enemy lines and possible beachheads of the tourist buck — the images military because the discipline was — if, that is, the bulk of my accomplishment was mere dog-soldier spadework, why then at least the cause for it was anchored in inspiration. Disney World, I thought, when I first heard it proposed, when the name was itself a trial balloon, my God, it will draw Americans like flies to sweets, entire families — for surely, I recognized, no one, no one would go to such a place alone; this was something collective; there was something exponentially tandem in the very prospect of such a journey, and one could almost forget about single rooms or even tables for two; this would be big, big—and I shall have to get roll-away beds, Porta-cribs, playground equipment, candy machines, comic-book stands, refrigeration units for bottles, formulas. Noble. In a way, heroic, even epic.
Of course noble. Of course heroic. Of course epic. For I was in the big time now. Up there, at least in spirit, with Aeneas, Brigham Young, Penn and Pike and Penrose, with Roger Williams, Theseus, Dido, Brutus, and Peter the Great and Alexander, Czar of all the Alexandrias. With Moses and Paul and Del Webb and Bugsy Siegel. With Disney himself, the Disney of Anaheim no less than the Disney of Florida. Up there, at least in spirit, at least on their wavelengths, with all those Founders, legendary and historic, with a sense of timing and prophecy on them, perfect pitch for the potential incipient in what lesser men might have looked on as hills, desert, swampland, stony ground. There in spirit and brotherhood with whoever it was who first said, “Let there be Chicago, let it be here.” That long line of visionaries who defoliated jungle simply by giving it their attention, who, looking at mountains, saw fortresses; at valleys, the laws of gravity pulling sweet water. Who second and third guessed the shabby givens of place and impediment, Johnny Appleseeds of commerce and government and a dozen God’s countries, swell places to raise kids or nice to visit.
Having, that is, what they had — criteria, standards, the surveyor imagination, the blueprint heart.)
Ringgold, Georgia, with its labor force of busboys, waiters, maids, auditors, desk clerks, and the rest, its honest day’s drive from major cities of the north and midwest, its blunt smack dab existence almost exactly between the points of origin and destination, was, would have been, and would be again, if there was lasting peace in the Middle East, if OPEC came round and detente worked, the perfect place for Flesh to pitch his now million-dollar tent. And how far off was he, anyway? Less than two hundred miles. (Atlanta would be the logical stopping point on the second night of the now three-day drive to Disney World.) What’s two hundred miles? In a universe that was probably infinite, what was two hundred miles? Not a stone’s throw, not a good spit, less than a lousy molecule of space. What’s two hundred miles? Bank-fuckruptcy, that’s all.