Small Towns
Bryson seems to have a bee in his bonnet about small towns, but it is more what he sees as "small town thinking" than the locations themselves that frustrate him. He initially chooses to visit small towns because he yearns for the America he grew up in, where each small town had a church, a general store and a main street. He feels that people had more interraction with each other and the community was stronger. What he finds when he visits is that many small towns feel cities encroaching upon them. Because of this, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell where a city ends and a small town begins.
Idiosyncracies of Different Regions
Bryson is extremely good at pointing out the shared characteristics from people who come from the same place; for example, Midwesterners are obsessed with the details of directions and their stories are long and convoluted because they add so many location details and directional specifics into their conversation. Bryson notices a shared way of doing things and presenting things between people who live in a certain state or town, even if they have not lived their their whole life.
America The Beautiful
America is a nation of extreme beauty and this is one of the themes of the book; Bryson manages to visit many national parks. He is also preoccupied by the fact that many people he encounters do not seem to appreciate that the beauty is something they could translate to their own communities as well. He describes the beauty of different national monuments and fears that they are getting smaller and smaller as big city urbanization takes over.
The Perils of Urban Development
Bryson notices so much overdevelopment on his journey that he fears it will change our way of life in a negative way. He particularly hates the way in which the areas of beauty are fenced off and there is urban development right up to the boundary. From his travels, he is able to see that over-development is ruining the appearance of a very beautiful nation and that eventually the country will be almost entirely made of concrete with little fenced off pockets of green dotted between the theme parks and the multiplexes.
