The Lost Continent (36 page)

I drove for a while across this fearsome emptiness,
taking a back highway between Fallon and a spot on the map called Humboldt Sink, where I gratefully joined Interstate 80. This was a cowardly thing to do, but the car had been making odd noises off and on for the past couple of days – a sort of faint clonk clonk oh god help me clonk I’m dying oh god oh god clonk noise – which wasn’t covered in the trouble-shooting section of the owner’s manual. I couldn’t face the prospect of breaking down and being stranded for days in some Godforsaken dust-hole while waiting for an anti-clonk device to be shipped in from Reno on the weekly Greyhound. In any case, Highway 50, the nearest alternative road, would have taken me 150 miles out of my way and into Utah. I wanted to go a more northerly route across Montana and Wyoming – the ‘Big Sky’ country. So it was with some relief that I joined the interstate, though even this was remarkably empty – usually I could see one car in the distance far ahead and one in the distance far behind – considering it was the main artery across the country. Indeed, with a sufficiently capacious fuel tank and bladder, you could drive the whole way between New York and San Francisco without stopping.

At Winnemucca I pulled off for gas and coffee and called my mother to let her know that I hadn’t been killed yet and was doing all right for underwear – a matter of perennial concern to my mother. I was able to reassure her on this score and she reassured me that she hadn’t willed her money to the International Guppy Institute or anything similarly rash (I just like to check!), so we were able to continue our respective days with light hearts.

In the phone booth was a poster with a photograph of a young woman on it under the caption ‘Have you seen this
girl?’ She was attractive and looked youthful and happy. The poster said she was nineteen years old and had been driving from Boston to San Francisco on her way home for Christmas when she disappeared. She had called her parents from Winnemucca to tell them to expect her the next afternoon and that was the last anyone had heard of her. Now she was almost certainly dead, somewhere out there in that big empty desert. Murder is terrifyingly easy in America. You can kill a stranger, dump the body in a place where it will never be found and be 2,000 miles away before the murdered person is even missed. At any given time there are an estimated twelve to fifteen serial murderers at large in the country, just drifting around, snatching random victims and then moving on, leaving behind few clues and no motives. A couple of years earlier in Des Moines, some teenaged boys were cleaning out an office downtown for one of their fathers on a Sunday afternoon when a stranger came in, took them into a back room and shot each of them once in the back of the head. For no reason. That guy was caught, as it happens, but he could as easily have gone off to another state and done the same thing again. Every year in America 5,000 murders go unsolved. That is an incredible number.

I spent the night in Wells, Nevada, the sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town I’ve ever seen. Most of the streets were unpaved and lined with battered-looking trailer homes. Everyone in town seemed to collect old cars. They sat rusting and windowless in every yard. Almost everything in town appeared to exist on the edge of dereliction. Such economic life as Wells could muster came from the passing traffic of Interstate 80. A number of truck stops and
motels were scattered around, though many of these were closed down and those that remained were evidently struggling. Most of the motel signs had letters missing or burnt out, so that they said ‘Lone St r Mot I – V can y’. I had a walk around the business district before dinner. This consisted mostly of closed-down stores, though a few places appeared still to be in business: a drugstore, a gas station, a Trailways Bus depot, the Overland Hotel – sorry, H tel – and a movie-house called The Nevada, though this proved upon closer inspection also to be deceased. There were dogs everywhere, sniffing in doorways and peeing on pretty much everything. It was cold, too. The sun was setting behind the rough, distant peaks of the Jackson Mountains and there was a decided chill in the air. I turned up my collar and trudged the half-mile from the town proper to the interstate junction with US 93, where the most prosperous-looking truck stops were gathered, forming an oasis of brightness in the pinkish dusk.

I went into what looked to be the best of them, a large café, consisting 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 café was crowded and dense with smoke and chatter. Steel-guitar music drifted out of the juke-box. I was the only person in the room who didn’t have a cowboy hat on, apart from a couple of the women.

I sat in a booth and ordered fried chicken. The waitress was real friendly, but she had little open sores all over her hands and arms and only about three teeth, and her apron looked as if she had spent the afternoon butchering piglets. This put me off my dinner a bit, to tell you the
truth, and then she brought my dinner and that put me off eating altogether.

It was absolutely 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 shovelling 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 doggie 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 that café and that was the lunch-room at Callanan Junior High School in Des Moines. The lunch-room 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 on to 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.

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 grandmother’s 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 of 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 neighbouring 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 purpose-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 centre – is built to look like a Bavarian village. I found it oddly charming. As so often with these things in America, it was superior 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 neighbours 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 $200 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 lit with nuclear-powered electricity, supplied by the world’s first peacetime nuclear reactor at a site ten miles south-west 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 check-points. In the far distance stand large buildings where, presumably, workers in white space suits 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 thirty-six 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 question, but I do know that I would not like to be the 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 Daniels. Personally, I think the young people of Idaho Falls ought to be encouraged to take drugs. 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 teenaged daughter and a Swedish exchange student who was simply radiant – blonde, tanned, soft-spoken, 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?’