I was on the road again. It was a little after 7:30 A.M. on a bright but still wintry Monday morning in April. I drove west out of Des Moines on Interstate S0, intending to zip across the western half of Iowa and plunge deep into Nebraska. But I couldn't face Nebraska just yet, not this early in the morning, and abruptly at De Soto, just fifteen miles west of Des Moines, I pulled off the interstate and started wandering around on back roads. Within a couple of minutes I was lost. This didn't altogether surprise me. Getting lost is a family trait.
My father, when behind the wheel, was more or less permanently lost. Most of the time he was just kind of lost, but whenever we got near something we were intent on seeing he would become seriously lost. Generally it would take him about an hour to realize that he had gone from the first stage to the second. All during that time, as he blundered through some unfamiliar city, making sudden and unpredictable turns, getting honked at for going the wrong way down one-way streets or for hesitating in the middle of busy intersections, my mother would mildly suggest that perhaps we should pull over and ask directions. But my father would pretend not to hear her and would press on in that semiobsessional state that tends to overcome fathers when things aren't going well.
Eventually, after driving the wrong way down the same one-way street so many times that merchants were beginning to come and watch from their doorways, Dad would stop the car and gravely announce, "Well, l think we should ask directions" in a tone that made it clear that this had been his desire all along. This was always a welcome development, but seldom more than a partial breakthrough. Either my mom would get out and stop a patently unqualified person-a nun on an exchange visit from Costa Rica usually-and come back with directions that were hopelessly muddled or my father would go off to find somebody and then not come back. The problem with my dad was that he was a great talker. This is always a dangerous thing in a person who gets lost a lot. He would go into a cafe to ask the way to Giant Fungus State Park and the next thing you knew he would be sitting down having a cup of coffee and a chat with the proprietor or the proprietor would be taking him out back to show him his new septic tank or something. In the meantime the rest of us would have to sit in a quietly baking car, with nothing to do but sweat and wait and listlessly watch a pair of flies copulate on the dashboard.
After a very long time my father would reappear, wiping crumbs from around his mouth and looking real perky. "Darnedest thing," he would say, leaning over to talk to my mom through the window. "Guy in there collects false teeth. He's got over seven hundred sets down in his basement.
He was so pleased to have someone to show them to that I just couldn't say no. And then his wife insisted that I have a piece of blueberry pie and see the photographs from their daughters wedding.
They'd never heard of Giant Fungus State Park, I'm afraid, but the guy said his brother at the Conoco station by the traffic lights would know. He collects fan belts, of all things, and apparently has the largest collection of prewar fan belts in the upper Midwest. I'm just going down there now."
And then, before anybody could stop him, he'd be gone again. By the time he finally returned my father would know most of the people in town and the flies on the dashboard would have a litter of infants.
Eventually I found what I was looking for: Winterset, birthplace of John Wayne. I drove around the town until I found his house-Winterset is so small that this only took a minute-and slowed down to look at it from the car. The house was tiny and the paint was peeling off it. Wayne, or Marion Morrison as he then was, only lived there for a year or so before his family moved to California. The house is run as a museum now, but it was shut. This didn't surprise me as pretty much everything in the town was shut, quite a lot of it permanently from the look of things. The Iowa Movie Theater on the square was clearly out of business, its marquee blank, and many of the other stores were gone or just hanging on. It was a depressing sight because Winterset was really quite a nice-looking little town with its county courthouse and square and long streets of big Victorian houses. I bet, like Winfield, it was a different place altogether fifteen or twenty years ago. I drove back out to the highway past the Gold Buffet ("Dancing Nitely") feeling an odd sense of emptiness.
Every town I came to was much the same-peeling paint, closed businesses, a deathly air. Southwest Iowa has always been the poorest part of the state and it showed. I didn't stop because there was nothing worth stopping for. I couldn't even find a place to get a cup of coffee. Eventually, much to my surprise, I blundered onto a bridge over the Missouri River and then I was in Nebraska City, in Nebraska. And it wasn't at all bad. In fact, it was really quite pleasant-better than Iowa by a long shot, I was embarrassed to admit. The towns were more prosperous-looking and better maintained, and the roadsides everywhere were full of bushes from which sprang a profusion of creamy flowers.
It was all quite pretty, though in a rather monotonous way. That is the problem with Nebraska. It just goes on and on, and even the good bits soon grow tedious. I drove for hours along an undemanding highway, past Auburn, Tecumseh, Beatrice (a town of barely 10,000 people but which produced two Hollywood stars, Harold Lloyd and Robert Taylor), Fairbury, Hebron, Deshler, Ruskin.
At Deshler I stopped for coffee and was surprised at how cold it was. Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the house. It brings piles of snow and bonecracking cold. From November to March you walk leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futilely at ice that seems to have been applied to the windows with superglue. And then one day spring comes. The snow melts, you stride about in shirtsleeves, you incline your face to the sun. And then, just like that, spring is over and it's summer. It is as if God has pulled a lever in the great celestial powerhouse. Now the weather rolls in from the opposite direction, from the tropics far to the south, and it hits you like a wall of heat. For six months, the heat pours over you. You sweat oil. Your pores gape. The grass goes brown. Dogs look as if they could die. When you walk downtown you can feel the heat of the pavement rising through the soles of your shoes. Just when you think you might very well go crazy, fall comes and for two or three weeks the air is mild and nature is friendly. And then it's winter and the cycle starts again. And you think, "As soon as I'm big enough, I'm going to move far, far away from here."
At Red Cloud, home of Willa Cather, I joined US 281 and headed south towards Kansas. Just over the border is Smith Center, home of Dr. Brewster M. Higley, who wrote the words to "Home on the Range." Wouldn't you just know that "Home on the Range" would be written by somebody with a name like Brewster M. Higley? You can see the log cabin where he wrote the words. But I was headed for something far more exciting-the geographical center of the United States. You reach it by turning off the highway just outside the little town of Lebanon and following a side road for about a mile through the wheat fields. Then you come to a forlorn little park with picnic tables and a stone monument with a wind-whipped flag atop it and a plaque saying that this is the centermost point in the continental United States, by golly. Beside the park, adding to the sense of forlornness, was a closed-down motel, which had been built in the evident hope that people would want to spend the night in this lonely place and send postcards to their friends saying, "You'll never guess where we are." Clearly the owner had misread the market.
I climbed onto a picnic table and could instantly see for miles across the waving fields. The wind came at me like a freight train. I felt as if I were the first person to come there for years. It was a strange feeling to think that of all the 230 million people in the United States I was the most geographically distinctive. If America were invaded, I would be the last person captured. This was it, the last stand, and as I climbed down off the table and returned to the car I felt an uneasy sense of guilt for leaving the
place undefended.
I drove into the gathering evening gloom. The clouds were low and swift. The landscape was a sea of white grass, fine as a child's hair. It was strangely beautiful. By the time I reached Russell, it was dark and rain was falling. The headlights swept over a sign that said, WELCOME TO BOB DOLE
COUNTRY. Russell is the hometown of Bob Dole, who was at this time running for the Republican nomination for president. I stopped and got a room for the night, figuring that if Dole were elected president, I could tell my children that I had once spent the night in his hometown and perhaps thereby deepen their respect for me. Also, every time Russell was shown on TV over the next four years I could say, "Hey, I was there!" and make everybody in the room stop talking while I pointed out things I had seen. In the event, Dole dropped out of the race two days later, primarily because nobody could stand him, apart from his family and some other people around Russell, and the town, alas, lost its chance at fame.
I awoke to a more promising day. The sun was bright and the air was clear. Bugs exploded colorfully against the windshield, a sure sign of spring in the Midwest. In the sunshine Kansas seemed an altogether more agreeable place, which surprised me a little. I had always thought one of the worst things anyone could say to you was, "We're transferring you to Kansas, son." Kansas calls itself "the Wheat State." That kind of says it all, don't you think? It really makes you want to cancel that Barbados trip, doesn't it? But in fact Kansas was okay. The towns I went through all looked trim and prosperous and quintessentially American. But then Kansas is the most quintessential of American states. It is, after all, where Superman and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz grew up, and all the towns I went through had a cozy, leafy, timeless air to them. They looked like the sort of places where you could still have your groceries delivered by a boy on a bike and people would still say things like "by golly" and "gee whillikers." At Great Bend, I stopped on the square beside the Barton County Courthouse and had a look around. It was like passing through a time warp. The place appeared not to have changed a fraction since 1965. The Crest Movie Theater was still in business. Nearby stood the Great Bend Daily Tribune and the Brass Buckle Clothing Store, with a big sign on it that said, FOR GUYS AND GALS. Gee whillikers. A man and his wife passed me on the sidewalk and said good morning like old friends. The man even tipped his hat. From a passing car came the sound of the Everly Brothers. This was almost too eerie. I half expected Rod Serling to step out from behind a tree and say, "Bill Bryson doesn't know it, but he's just driven into a community that doesn't exist in time or space. He's just embarked on a one-way trip into . . . The Twilight Zone."
I had a look in the window of the Family Pharmacy and Gift Shop, which had an interesting and unusual display that included a wheelchair, a packet of disposable absorbent underpants (it isn't often you find a store catering to the incontinent impulse shopper), teddy bears, coffee mugs bearing wholesome sentiments like "World's Best Grandma," Mother's Day cards and a variety of porcelain animals. In one corner of the window was a poster for a concert by-you are never going to believe this-Paul Revere and the Raiders. Can you beat that? There they were, still dressed up like Continental soldiers, prancing about and grinning, just like when I was in junior high school.
Goodness me, what assholes. They would be performing at the Civic Auditorium in Dodge City in two weeks. Tickets started at $10.75, This was all becoming too much for me. I was glad to get in the car and drive on to Dodge City, which at least is intentionally unreal.
Somewhere during the seventy miles between Great Bend and Dodge City you leave the Midwest and enter the West. The people in the towns along the way stop wearing baseball caps and shuffling along with that amiable dopeyness characteristic of the Midwest and instead start wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, walking with a lope and looking vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute. People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.* (*Many people will tell you that you mustn't call them buffalo, that they are really bison. Buffalo, thesepeople will tell you, actually live in China or some other distant country and are a different breed of animal altogether. These are the some people who tell you that you must call geraniums pelargoniums. Ignore them.). Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.
Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000
Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.
When they weren't shooting things, the people of the West went into towns like Dodge City for a little social and sexual intercourse. At its peak, Dodge City was the biggest cow town and semen sink in the West, full of drifters, drovers, buffalo hunters and the sort of women that only a cowboy could find attractive. But it was never as tough and dangerous as you were led to believe on
"Gunsmoke" and all those movies about Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. For ten years it was the biggest cattle market in the world; that's all.
In all those years, there were only thirty-four people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery and most of those were just drifters found dead in snowdrifts or of natural causes. I know this for a fact because I paid $2.75 to go and see Boot Hill and the neighboring "Historic Front Street," which has been rebuilt to look like it did when Dodge City was a frontier town and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were the sheriffs. Matt Dillon never existed, I was distressed to learn, though Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were both real enough. Bat Masterson ended his life as sports editor of the New York Morning Telegraph. Isn't that interesting? And here's another interesting fact, which I didn't tell you about earlier because I've been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn't that great?
Fifty miles beyond Dodge City is Holcomb, Kansas, which gained a small notoriety as the scene of the murders described with lavish detail in the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood. In 1959, two small-time crooks broke into the house of a wealthy Holcomb rancher named Herb Clutter because they had heard he had a safe full of money. In fact he didn't. So, chagrined, they tied Clutter's wife and two teenaged children to their beds and took Clutter down to the basement and killed them all.
They slit Clutters throat (Capote describes his gurglings with a disturbing relish) and shot the others in the head at point-blank range. Because Clutter had been prominent in state politics, the New York Times ran a small story about the murders. Capote saw the story, became intrigued and spent five years interviewing all the main participants-friends, neighbors, relatives, police investigators and the murderers themselves. The book, when it came out in 1965, was considered an instant classic, largely because Capote told everyone it was. In any case, It was sutticiently seminal, as we used to say in college, to have made a lasting impact and it occurred to me that I could profitably reread it and then go to Holcomb and make a lot of trenchant observations about crime and violence in America.
I was wrong. I quickly realized there was nothing typical about the Clutter murders: they would be as shocking today as they were then. And there was nothing particularly seminal about Capote's book. It was essentially just a grisly and sensational murder story that pandered, in a deviously respectable way, to the readers baser instincts. All that a trip to Holcomb would achieve would be to provide me with the morbid thrill of gawping at a house
in which a family had long before been senselessly slaughtered. Still, that's about all I ask out of life, and it was bound, at the very least, to be more interesting than Historic Front Street in Dodge City.
In Capote's book, Holcomb was a tranquil, dusty hamlet, full of intensely decent people, a place whose citizens didn't smoke, drink, lie, swear or miss church, a place in which sex outside marriage was unforgivable and sex before marriage unthinkable, in which teenagers were home at eleven on a Saturday night, in which Catholics and Methodists didn't mingle if they could possibly help it, in which doors were never locked, and children of eleven or twelve were allowed to drive cars. For some reason I found the idea of children driving cars particularly astonishing. In Capote's book, the nearest town was Garden City, five miles down the highway. Things had clearly changed. Now Holcomb and Garden City had more or less grown together, connected by an umbilicus of gas stations and fast-food places. Holcomb was still dusty, but no longer a hamlet. On the edge of town was a huge high school, obviously new, and all around were cheap little houses, also new, with barefooted Mexican children running around in the front yards. I found the Clutter house without too much trouble. In the book it stood apart from the town, down a shady lane. Now the lane was lined with houses. There was no sign of occupancy at the Clutter house. The curtains were drawn. I hesitated for a long time and then went and knocked at the front door, and frankly was relieved that no one answered. What could I have said? Hello, I'm a stranger passing through town with a morbid interest in sensational murders and I just wondered if you could tell me what it's like living in a house in which several people have had their brains spattered onto the walls? Do you ever think about it at mealtimes, for instance?
Bill Bryson Page 22