Bill Bryson

by The Continent

  I went into what looked to be the best of them, the 4-Way Cafe, which I gather took its name from the fact that it consisted of a gift shop, restaurant, casino and bar. The casino was small, just a room with a couple of dozen slot machines, mostly nickel ones, and the gift shop was about the size of a closet. The cafe was crowded and dense with smoke and chatter. Steel-guitar music drifted out of the jukebox. I was the only person in the room who didn't have a cowboy hat on, apart from a couple of the women.

  It was absolutely, in my opinion, the worst food I have ever had in America, at any time, under any circumstances, and that includes hospital food, gas station food and airport coffee shop food. It even includes Greyhound bus station food and Woolworth's luncheon counter food. It was even worse than the pastries they used to put in the food dispensing machines at the Register and Tribune Building in Des Moines and those tasted like somebody had been sick on them. This food was just plain terrible, and yet everybody in the room was shoveling it away as if there were no tomorrow. I picked at it for a while-bristly fried chicken, lettuce with blackened veins, french fries that had the appearance and appeal of albino slugs-and gave up, despondent. I pushed the plate away and wished that I still smoked. The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggy bag.

  "No thank you," I said through a thin smile, "I don't believe I could find a dog that would eat it."

  On reflection, I can think of one eating experience even more dispiriting than dining at the 4-Way Cafe and that was the lunchroom at Callanan Junior High School in Des Moines. The lunchroom at Callanan was like something out of a prison movie. You would shuffle forward in a long, silent line and have lumpen, shapeless food dolloped onto your tray by lumpen, shapeless women-women who looked as if they were on day release from a mental institution, possibly for having poisoned food in public places. The food wasn't merely unappealing, it was unidentifiable. Adding to the displeasure was the presence of the deputy principal, Mr. Snoyd, who was always stalking around behind you, ready to grab you by the neck and march you off to his office if you made gagging noises or were overheard inquiring of the person across from you, "Say, what is this shit?" Eating at Callanan was like having your stomach pumped in reverse.

  CHAPTER 26

  I went back to the motel feeling deeply hungry and unsatisfied. I watched some TV and read a book, and then slept that fitful sleep you get when all of your body is still and resting except your stomach, which is saying, "WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DINNER? HEY, BILL, ARE YOU LISTENING TO

  ME? WHERE THE F-U-C-K IS MY EVENING SUSTENANCE?"

  HERE, APROPOS OF nothing at all, is a true story. In 1958 my grandmother got cancer of the colon and came to our house to die. At this time my mother employed a cleaning lady named Mrs.

  Goodman, who didn't have a whole lot upstairs but was possessed of a good Catholic heart. After my grandmother's arrival, Mrs. Goodman grew uncharacteristically sullen. Then one afternoon at finishing time she told my mother that she would have to quit because she didn't want to catch cancer from my grandmother. My mother soothingly reassured Mrs. Goodman that you cannot

  "catch cancer" and gave her a small pay increase to compensate for the extra work occasioned by my grandmothers clammy and simpering presence. So with ill-disguised reluctance Mrs. Goodman stayed on. And about three months later she caught cancer and with alarming swiftness died.

  Well, as you can imagine, since it was my family that killed the poor woman, I've always wanted to commemorate her in some small way and I thought that here would be as good a place as any, especially as I had nothing of interest to tell you about the drive from Wells, Nevada, to Twin Falls, Idaho.

  So, goodbye, Mrs. Goodman, it was nice knowing you. And we're all very, very sorry.

  Twin Falls was a nice enough place-Mrs. Goodman, I've no doubt, would have liked it; but then when you think about it a dead person would probably appreciate any change of scenery and the landscape in southern Idaho was greener and more fertile than anything Nevada had to offer. Idaho is known for its potatoes, though in fact Maine, just a third its size, produces more. Its real wealth comes from mining and timber, particularly in the higher reaches of the Rockies, up towards Canada, over 500 miles north of where I was now. I was headed for Sun Valley, the famous resort up in the Sawtooth Mountains, and the neighboring town of Ketchum, where Ernest Hemingway spent the last year of his life and blew his brains out. This has always seemed to me (not that it's any of my business, mind you) a particularly thoughtless and selfish way to kill oneself. I mean to say, your family is going to be upset enough that you are dead without your having to spoil the furniture and gross everyone out on top of that.

  In any case, Ketchum was touristy, though Sun Valley itself proved to be most agreeable. It was built as a ski resort in the 1930s by the Union Pacific Railroad as a way of enticing people to travel to the region during the winter. It certainly has a beautiful setting, in a bowl of jagged mountains, and is supposed to have some of the best skiing in the country. People like Clint Eastwood and Barbra Streisand have houses there. I looked in a window in a real estate office and didn't see anything for sale for less than $250,000.

  The town part of Sun Valley-it's really just a little shopping center-is built to look like a Bavarian village. I found it oddly charming. As so often with these things in America, it was supe rior to a real Bavarian village. There were two reasons for this: (1) It was better built and more picturesque; and (2) the inhabitants of Sun Valley have never adopted Adolf Hitler as their leader or sent their neighbors off for gassing. Were I a skier and rich, I would on these grounds alone unhesitatingly choose it over Garmisch-Partenkirchen, say. In the meantime, being poor and skiless, there was nothing much for me to do but poke around in the shops. For the most part these sold swish skiing outfits and expensive gifts-things like large pewter elk for $t00 and lead crystal paperweights at $150--and the people who ran them were those snooty types who watch you as if they think you might do a poo in the corner given half a chance. Understandably, this soured me on the place and I declined to make any purchases. "Your loss, not mine," I murmured sniffily as I left.

  Idaho is another big state-550 miles from top to bottom, 300 miles across at the base-and it took me the rest of the day just to drive to Idaho Falls, near the border with Wyoming. En route I passed the little town of Arco, which on December 20, 1951 became the first town in the world to be lighted with nuclearpowered electricity, supplied by the world's first peacetime nuclear reactor at a site ten miles southwest of town at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. The name is misleading because the so-called laboratory covers several hundred square miles of scrubby chaparral and is actually the biggest nuclear dump in the country. The highway between Arco and Idaho Falls runs for forty miles alongside the complex, but it is lined by high fences interspersed with military-style checkpoints. In the far distance stand large buildings where, presumably, workers in white spacesuits wander around in rooms that look like something out of a James Bond film.

  I didn't realize it at the time, but the US government had recently admitted that plutonium had been found to be leaking from one of the storage facilities on the site and was working its way downward through the ground to a giant subterranean reservoir, which supplies the water for tens of thousands of people in southern Idaho. Plutonium is the most lethal substance known to man-a spoonful of it could wipe out a city. Once you make some plutonium, you have to keep it safe for 250,000 years.

  The United States government had managed to keep its plutonium safe for rather less than 36 years.

  This, it seems to me, is a convincing argument for not allowing your government to mess, with plutonium.

  And this was only one leak out of many. At a similar facility in the state of Washington, 500,000

  gallons of highly radioactive substances drained away before anyone thought to put a dipstick in the tank and see how things were doing. How do you lose 500,000 gallons of anything? I don't know the answer to that que
stion, but I do know that I would not like to be a real estate agent trying to sell houses in Pocatello or Idaho Falls five years from now when the ground starts to glow and women are giving birth to human flies.

  For the time being, however, Idaho Falls remains an agreeable little city. The downtown was attractive and still evidently prospering. Trees and benches had been set out. A big banner was draped across one of the streets saying, IDAHO FALLS SAYS NO TO DRUGS. That's really going to keep the kids off the hard stuff, I thought. Small-town America is obsessed with drugs, yet I suspect that if you strip-searched every teenager in Idaho Falls you would come up with nothing more illicit than some dirty magazines, a packet of condoms and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. It will help them to cope when they find out there's plutonium in their drinking water.

  I had an excellent dinner at Happy's Chinese Restaurant. The room was empty except for one other party consisting of a middle-aged couple, their teenage daughter and a Swedish ex change student who was simply radiant-blond, tanned, softspoken, hypnotically beautiful. I stared at her helplessly.

  I had never seen anyone so beautiful in a Chinese restaurant in Idaho before. After a while a man came in who was evidently a passing acquaintance of the family and stopped at their table to chat.

  He was introduced to the Swedish girl and asked her about her stay in Idaho Falls and if she had been to the local sights-the lava caves and hot springs. (She had. Zey were vairy nice.) Then he asked The Big Question. He said, "Well, Greta, which do you like better, the United States or Sweden?"

  The girl blushed. She obviously had not been in the country long enough to expect this question.

  Suddenly she looked more child than woman. With an embarrassed flutter of hands she said, "Oh, I sink Sweden," and a pall fell over the table. Everyone looked uncomfortable. "Oh," said the man in a flat, disappointed tone, and the conversation turned to potato prices.

  People in middle America always ask that question. When you grow up in America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief-no, the understanding-that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on earth.

  Countries just don't come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious. I used to feel this way myself. In high school I shared a locker with a Dutch exchange student and I remember him asking me one day in a peevish tone why everybody, absolutely everybody, wanted him to like America better than the Netherlands. "Holland is my home," he said. "Why can't people understand that it's where I want to live?"

  I considered his point. "Yes," I said, "but deep down, Anton, wouldn't you really rather live here?"

  And funnily enough, in the end, he decided he did. The last I heard he was a successful realtor in Florida, driving a Porsche, wearing wraparound sunglasses and saying, "Hey, what's happening?"

  which of course is a considerable improvement on wearing wooden shoes, carrying pails of milk on a yoke over your shoulder and being invaded by Germany every couple of generations.

  In the morning I drove on to Wyoming, through scenery that looked like an illustration from some marvelous children's book of Western tales-snowy peaks, pine forests, snug farms, a twisting river, a mountain vale with a comely name: Swan Valley. That is the one thing that must be said for the men and women who carved out the West. They certainly knew how to name a place. Just on this corner of the map I could see Soda Springs, Massacre Rocks, Steamboat Mountain, Wind River, Flaming Gorge, Calamity Falls-places whose very names promised adventure and excitement, even if in reality all they contained were a DX gas station and a Tastee-Freez drive-in.

  Most of the early settlers in America were oddly inept at devising place names. They either chose unimaginative, semirecycled names-New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England-or toadying, kiss-ass names like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Jamestown in a generally pitiable attempt to secure favor with some monarch or powdered aristocrat back home. Or else they just accepted the names the Indians told them, not knowing whether Squashaninsect meant "land of the twinkling lakes" or "place where Big Chief Thunderclap paused to pass water."

  The Spanish were even worse because they gave everything religious names, so that every place in the Southwest is called San this or Santa that. Driving across the Southwest is like an S00 mile religious procession. The worst name on the whole continent is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, which means "the Blood of Christ Mountains." Have you ever heard of a more inane name for any geographical feature? It was only here in the real West, the land of beaver trappers and mountain men, that a dollop of romance and color was brought to the business of giving names.

  And here I was about to enter one of the most beautiful and understatedly romantic of them all: Jackson Hole.

  Jackson Hole isn't really a hole at all; it's just the name for a scenic valley that runs from north to south through the Grand Tetons, very probably the most majestic range in the Rockies. With their high white peaks and bluish-gray bases they look like some kind of exotic confection, like blueberry frappes. At the southern edge of Jackson Hole is the small town of Jackson, where I stopped now for lunch. It was a strange place, with an odd combination of bow-legged Yosemite Sams and upmarket stores like Benetton and Ralph Lauren, which are there for the benefit of the many well-heeled tenderfeet who come for the skiing in the winter and to dude ranches in the summer. Every place in town had a Wild West motif-the Antler Motel, the Silver Dollar Saloon, the Hitching Post Lodge. Even the Bank of Jackson, where I went to cash a traveler's check, had a stuffed buffalo head on the wall. Yet it all seemed quite natural. Wyoming is the most fiercely Western of all the Western states. It's still a land of cowboys and horses and wide open spaces, a place where a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, which on the face of it primarily consists of driving around in a pickup truck and being kind of slow. I had never seen so many people in cowboy apparel, and almost everybody owns a gun. Only a couple of weeks before, the state legislature in Cheyenne had introduced a rule that all legislators would henceforth have to check their handguns at the front desk before being allowed into the statehouse. That's the sort of state Wyoming is.

  I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there's another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That's an interesting fact-a topographical tit-bit, so to speak-that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I'd known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn't button his own fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

  At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through northwestern Wyoming took one look at the mountains and said, "Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife's tetons." Isn't it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn't discover the Grand Canyon, that's all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as ... well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don't look like tits at all, except perhaps to desperately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little bit like tits to me.

  Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park run together to form one enormous area of wilderness stretching over a hundred miles from north to south. The road connecting them, Route 191, had only just been reopened for the year, and the Teton visitors' centers were still closed. T
here were hardly any other people or cars around and for forty miles I drove in splendid isolation along the wild meadows of the Snake River, where herds of elk grazed against the backdrop of the tall and jagged Tetons. As I climbed into Yellowstone the clouds grew moody and looked heavy with snow.

  The road I was on is closed for six months of the year, which gives you some idea of the sort of winters they have there. Even now the snow along the roadside was five or six feet deep in places.

  Yellowstone is the oldest national park in the world (it was created in 1872) and it is enormous, about the size of Connecticut. I drove for over an hour without seeing anyone, except for a park warden in a wooden but who charged me ten dollars to get in. That must be an exciting job for a college graduate, to sit in a but in the middle of nowhere and take ten dollars off a tourist every two or three hours. Eventually I came to a turnoff for Grant Village, and I followed it for a mile through the snowy woods. The village was good-sized, with a visitors' center, motel, stores, post office and campgrounds, but everything was shut and every window was boarded. Snowdrifts rose almost to the rooftops of some of the buildings. I had now driven seventy miles without seeing an open place of business, and gave silent thanks that I had filled up with gasoline at Jackson.

  Grant Village and the neighboring village of West Thumb are on the banks of Yellowstone Lake, which the highway runs alongside. Steam was rising from fumaroles in the lake and bub bling up through the mud by the roadside. I was in the area of the park called the caldera. Once there was a great mountain here. But 600,000 years ago it blew up in a colossal volcanic eruption that sent 2¢0