Bill Bryson

by The Continent

  I sighed. "I'm a stranger in town. Can you tell me where else I can get something to eat?"

  She grinned, clearly pleased to be able to give me some bad news. "We're the only restaurant in Sundance," she said. Some beaming Shriners at a nearby table watched my unfolding dis comfort with simple-minded merriment. "You might try the gas station down the street," the lady added.

  "The gas station serves food?" I responded in a tone of quiet amazement.

  "No, but they've got potato chips and candy bars." "I don't believe this is happening," I muttered.

  "Or else you can go about a mile out of town on Highway 24 and you'll come to a Tastee-Freez drive-in."

  This was great. This was just too outstanding for words. The woman was telling me that on a Saturday night in Sundance, Wyoming, all I could have for dinner was potato chips and ice cream.

  "What about another town?" I asked.

  "You can try Spearfish. That's thirty-one miles down Route 14 over the state line in South Dakota.

  But you won't find much there either." She grinned again, and clicked her gum, as if proud to be living in such a turdy place.

  "Well, thank you so much for your help," I said with elaborate insincerity and departed.

  And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice. In the Midwest the hostess would have felt bad about my going hungry.

  She would have found me a table at the back of the room or at least fixed me up with a couple of roast beef sandwiches and a slab of apple pie to take back to the motel. And the Shriners, subimbecilic assholes that they may be, would have been happy to make room for me at one of their tables, and probably would even have given me some pats of butter to throw. People in the Midwest are good and they are kind to strangers. But here in Sundance the milk of human kindness was exceeded in tininess only by the size of the Shriners' brains.

  I trudged up the road in the direction of the Tastee-Freez. I walked for some way, out past the last of the houses and onto an empty highway that appeared to stretch off into the distance for miles, but there was no sign of a Tastee-Freez, so I turned around and trudged back into town. I intended to get the car, but then I couldn't be bothered. There was something about the way they can't even spell freeze right that's always put me off these places. How much faith can you place in a company that can't even spell a monosyllable? So instead I went to the gas station and bought about six dollars'

  worth of potato chips and candy bars, which I took back to my room and dumped on the bed. I lay there and pushed candy bars into my face, like logs into a sawmill, watched some plotless piece of violent Hollywood excrescence on HBO, and then slept another fitful night, lying in the dark, full and yet unsatisfied, staring at the ceiling and listening to the Shriners across the street and to the ceaseless bleating of my stomach: "Hey, what is all this crap in here? It's nothing but chocolate. This is disgusting. I want some real food. I want steak and mashed potatoes. Really, this is just too gross for words. I've a good mind to send this all back. I'm serious, you'd better go and stand by the toilet because this is coming straight back up in a minute. Are you listening to me, butt-face?"

  And so it went all night long. God, I hate my stomach.

  I awoke early and peeked, shivering, through a gap in the curtains. It was a drizzly Sunday dawn.

  Not a soul was about. This would be an excellent time to firebomb the restaurant. I made a mental note to pack gelignite the next time I came to Wyoming. And sandwiches. Switching on the TV, I slipped back into bed and pulled the covers up to just below my eyeballs. Jimmy Swaggart was still appealing for forgiveness. Goodness me, but that man can cry. He is a human waterfall. I watched for a while, but then got up and changed the channel. On all the other channels it was just more evangelists, usually with their dumpy wives sitting at their sides. You could see why they all went out for sex. Generally, the program would also feature the evangelist's son-in-law, a graduate of the Pat Boone school of grooming, who would sing a song with a title like "You've Got A Friend in Jesus And Please Send Us Lots of Money." There can be few experiences more dispiriting than to lie alone in a darkened motel room in a place like Wyoming and watch TV early on a Sunday morning.

  I can remember when we didn't even have TV on Sunday mornings; that's how old I am. You would turn on WOI and all you would get was a test pattern and you would sit there and watch that because there was nothing else. Then after a while they would take off the test pattern and show

  "Sky King," which was an interesting and exciting program, at least compared to a test pattern.

  Nowadays they don't show test patterns at all on American TV, which is a shame because given a choice between test patterns and TV evangelists, I would unhesitatingly choose the test patterns.

  They were soothing in an odd way and, of course, they didn't ask you for money or make you listen to their son-in-law sing.

  It was just after eight when I left the motel. I drove through the drizzle to Devils Tower, about twenty-five miles away. Devils Tower was the mountain used by Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the one on which the aliens landed. It is so singular and extraordinary that you cannot imagine what Spielberg would have used as an alternative if it hadn't been available.

  You can see it long before you get to it, but as you draw nearer the scale of it becomes really quite awesome. It is a flat-topped cone of rock 865 feet high, soaring out of an otherwise flat and featureless plain. The scientific explanation is that it was a volcanic fluke-an outsized lump of warm rock that shot out of the earth and then cooled into its present arresting shape. In the moonlight it is said to glow, though even now on a wet Sunday morning with smoky clouds brushing across its summit it looked decidedly supernatural, as if it were placed there eons ago for the eventual use of aliens. I only hope that when they do come they don't expect to eat out.

  I stopped at a lay-by near the tower and got out to look at it, squinting through the drizzle. A wooden sign beside the road said that the tower was considered sacred by the Indians and that in 1g06 it became the first designated national monument in America. I stared at the tower for a long time, hypnotized both by its majesty and by a dull need for coffee, and then realized that I was getting very wet, so I returned to the car and drove on.

  Having gone without dinner the night before, I intended to indulge myself in that greatest of all American gustatory pleasures-going out for Sunday breakfast.

  Everybody in America goes out for Sunday breakfast. It is such a popular pastime that you generally have to line up for a table, but it's always worth the wait. Indeed, the inability to achieve instant oral gratification is such an unusual experience in America that lining up actually intensifies the pleasure. You wouldn't want to do it all the time, of course, you wouldn't want to get British about it or anything, but once a week for twenty minutes is "kinda neat," as they say. One reason you have to line up is that it takes the waitress about thirty minutes just to take each order. First you have to tell her whether you want your eggs sunny-side up, over easy, scrambled, poached, parboiled, or in an omelette, and in an omelette, whether you want it to be a plain, cheese, vegetable, hot-spicy, or chocolate-nut-'n'-fudge omelette; and then you have to decide whether you want your toast on white, rye, whole wheat, sourdough, or pumpernickel bread and whether you want whipped butter, pat butter, or low-cholesterol butter substitute; and then there's a complicated period of negotiation in which you ask if you can have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll and link sausages instead of patties. So the waitress, who is only sixteen years old and not real smart, has to go off to the manager and ask him whether that's possible, and she comes back and tells you that you can't have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll, but you can have Idaho fries instead of the short stack of pancakes, or you can have an English muffin and bacon instead of whole wheat toast, but only if you order a side of hashed browns and a large orange juice. This is unacceptable to you, and you
decide that you will have waffles instead, so the waitress has to rub everything out with her nubby eraser and start all over again. And across the room the line on the other side of the "Please Wait to Be Seated" board grows longer and longer, but the people don't mind because the food smells so good and, anyway, all this waiting is, as I say, kinda neat.

  I drove along Highway 24 through a landscape of low hills, in a state of tingly anticipation. There were three little towns over the next twenty miles and I felt certain that one of them would have a roadside restaurant. I was nearly to the South Dakota state line. I was leaving the ranching country and entering more conventional farmland. Farmers cannot exist without a roadside restaurant every couple of miles, so I had no doubt that I would find one just around the next bend. One by one I passed through the little towns-Hulett, Alva, Aladdin-but there was nothing to them, just sleeping houses. No one was awake. What kind of place was this? Even on Sundays farmers are up at dawn.

  Beyond Beulah I passed the larger community of Belle Fourche and then St. Onge and Sturgis, but still there was nothing. I couldn't even get a cup of coffee.

  At last I came to Deadwood, a town that, if nothing else, lived up to its first syllable. For a few years in the 1870s, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, Deadwood was one of the liveliest and most famous towns in the West. It was the home of Calamity Jane. Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead while playing cards in a local saloon. Today the town makes a living by taking large sums of money off tourists and giving them in return some crappy little trinket to take home and put on their mantlepiece. Almost all the stores along the main street were souvenir emporia, and several of them were open even though it was a Sunday morning. There were even a couple of coffee shops, but they were closed.

  I went in the Gold Nugget Trading Post and had a look around. It was a large room where nothing but souvenirs were sold-moccasins, beaded Indian bags, arrowheads, nuggets of fool's gold, Indian dolls. I was the only customer. I didn't see anything to buy, so I left and went in another store a couple of doors away-The World Famous Prospectors Gift Shop-and found exactly the same stuff at identical prices and again I was the only customer. At neither place did the people running things say hello or ask me how I was doing. They would have in the Midwest. I went back out into the miserable drizzle and walked around the town looking for a place to eat, but there was nothing. So I got back in the car and drove on to Mount Rushmore, forty miles down the road.

  Mount Rushmore is just outside the little town of Keystone, which is even more touristy than Deadwood, but at least there were some restaurants open. I went into one and was seated immediately, which rather threw me. The waitress gave me a menu and went off. The menu had about forty breakfasts on it. I had only read to number seventeen ("Pigs in a Blanket") when the waitress returned with a pencil ready, but I was so hungry that I just decided, more or less arbitrarily, that I would have breakfast number three. "But can I have link sausages instead of hashed browns?" I added. She tapped her pencil against a notice on the menu. It said NO

  SUBSTITUTIONS. What a drag. That was the most fun part. No wonder the place was half empty. I started to make a protest, but I fancied I could see her forming a bolus of saliva at the back of her mouth and I broke off. I just smiled and said "Okay, never mind, thank you!" in a bright tone. "And please don't spit in my food!" I wanted to add as she went off, but somehow I felt this would only encourage her.

  Afterwards I drove to Mount Rushmore, a couple of miles outside town up a steep road. I had always wanted to see Mount Rushmore, especially after watching Cary Grant clamber over Thomas Jefferson's nose in North by Northwest (a film that also left me with a strange urge to strafe someone in a cornfield from a low-flying airplane). I was delighted to discover that Mount Rushmore was free. There was a huge terraced parking lot, though hardly any cars were in it. I parked and walked up to the visitors' center. One whole wall was glass, so that you could gaze out at the monument, high up on the neighboring mountainside. It was shrouded in fog. I couldn't believe my bad luck. It was like peering into a steam bath. I thought I could just make out Washington, but I wasn't sure. I waited for a long time, but nothing happened. And then, just as I was about to give up and depart, the fog mercifully drifted away and there they were-Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, staring glassily out over the Black Hills.

  The monument looked smaller than I had expected. Everybody says that. It's just that positioned as you are well below the monument and looking at it from a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile, it looks more modest than it is. In fact, Mount Rushmore is enormous. Washington's face is b0 feet high, his eyes 11 feet wide. If they had bodies, according to a sign on the wall, the Rushmore figures would be 465 feet tall.

  In an adjoining room there was an excellent and more or less continuous movie presentation giving the history of Mount Rushmore, with lots of impressive statistics about the amount of rock that was shifted, and terrific silent film footage showing the work in progress. Mostly this consisted of smiling workmen packing dynamite into the rock face followed by a big explosion; then the dust would clear and what had been rock was now revealed to be Abraham Lincoln. It was remarkable.

  The whole thing is an extraordinary achievement, one of America's glories, and surely one of the great monuments of this century.

  The project took from 1927 to 1941 to complete. Just before it was finished, Gutzon Borglum, the man behind it all, died. Isn't that tragic? He did all that work for all those years and then just when they were about to crack open the champagne and put out the little sausages on toothpicks, he keeled over and expired. On a bad luck scale of 0 to i0, I would call that an 11.

  I drove east across South Dakota, past Rapid City. I had intended to stop off and see Badlands National Park, but the fog and drizzle were so dense that it seemed pointless. More than that, according to the radio I was half a step ahead of another perilous "frunnal" system. Snow was expected on the higher reaches of the Black Hills. Many roads in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana were already shut by fresh snowfalls, including the highway between Jackson and Yellowstone. If I had gone to Yellowstone a day later, I would now be stranded, and if I didn't keep moving, I could well be stranded for a couple of days in South Dakota. On a bad luck scale of 0 to 10, I would call that a 12.

  Fifty miles beyond Rapid City is the little town of Wall, home of the most famous drug store in the West, Wall Drug. You know it's coming because every hundred yards or so along the whole of that fifty miles you pass a big billboard telling you so: STEAKS AND CAKES-WALL DRUG, 47

  MILES, HOT BEEF SANDWICHES-WALL DRUG, 36 MILES, FIVE CENT COFFEE-WALL

  DRUG, 25 MILES, and so on. It is the advertising equivalent of the Chinese water torture. After a while the endless drip, drip, drip of billboards so clouds your judgment that you have no choice but to leave the interstate and have a look at it.

  It's an awful place, one of the world's biggest tourist traps, but I loved it and I won't have a word said against it. In 1931, a guy named Ted Hustead bought Wall Drug. Buying a drugstore in a town in South Dakota with a population of three hundred people at the height of the Great Depression must be about as stupid a business decision as you can make. But Hustead realized that people driving across places like South Dakota were so delirious with boredom that they would stop and look at almost anything. So he put up a lot of gimmicks like a life-size dinosaur, a 1908 Hupmobile, a stuffed buffalo, and a big pole with arrows giving the distances and directions from Wall Drug to places all over the world, like Paris and Hong Kong and Timbuktu. Above all, he erected hundreds of billboards all along the highway between Sioux Falls and the Black Hills, and filled the store with the most exotic and comprehensive assortment of tourist crap human eyes have ever seen, and pretty soon people were pouring in. Now Wall Drug takes up most of the town and is surrounded by parking lots so enormous that you could land a jumbo jet on them. In the summer they get up to 20,000 visitors a day, though when I arrived things were decide
dly more quiet and I was able to park right out front on Main Street.

  I was hugely disappointed to discover that Wall Drug wasn't just an overgrown drugstore as I had always imagined. It was more a mini shopping mall, with about forty little stores selling all kinds of different things-postcards, film, western wear, jewelry, cowboy boots, food, paintings, and endless souvenirs. I bought a very nice kerosene lamp in the shape of Mount Rushmore. The wick and glass jar that encloses it sprout directly out of George Washington's head. It was made in Japan and the four presidents have a distinctly oriental slant to their eyes. There were many other gifts and keepsakes of this type, though none quite as beautiful or charming. Sadly, there were no baseball caps with plastic turds on the brim. Wall Drug is a family store, so that sort of thing is right out. It was a pity because this was the last souvenir place I was likely to encounter on the trip. Another dream would have to go unfulfilled.

  CHAPTER 28

  I DROVE ON and on across South Dakota. God, what a flat and empty state. You can't believe how remote and lonely it feels out in the endless fields of yellow grass. It is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber. The car was still making ominous clonking noises, and the thought of breaking down out here filled me with disquiet. I was in a part of the world where you could drive hundreds of miles in any direction before you found civilization, or at least met another person who didn't like accordion music. In a forlorn attempt to pass the time, I thumbed through my Mobil guides, leaning them against the steering wheel while drifting just a trifle wildly in and out of my lane, and added up the populations and sizes of the four states of the high plains: North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Altogether they take up 385,000 square milesan area about the size of France, Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries combined-but they have a total population of just 2.6 million. There are almost four times as many people in Paris alone. Isn't that interesting? Here's another interesting fact for you. The population density of Wyoming is 1.9