The Lost Continent (28 page)

‘It must be tough,’ I agreed.

‘Dortmeier gave me the name of his supplier so I could go and get some myself. Well, this guy was in Kansas City. I had no idea. So I drove all the way down there, just to buy a couple of ounces of pot, and it was crazy. The house was full of guns. The guy kept looking out the window like he was expecting the police to tell him to come out with his hands up. He was half convinced that I was an undercover narcotics officer. I mean here I am, a thirty-five-year-old family man, with a college education and a respectable job, I’m 180 miles from home and I’m wondering if I’m going to get blown away, and all so that I can just have a little something to help me get through
Love Boat
reruns on TV. It was too crazy for me. You need somebody like Dortmeier for a situation like that – somebody with a lust for drugs and no brain.’ Horner shook the beer can by his ear to confirm that it was empty and then looked at me. ‘You wouldn’t by any wild chance have any dope with you?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry, John,’ I said.

‘Shame,’ said Horner and went out to the kitchen to get us more beers.

I spent the night in Horner’s spare room and in the morning stood with him and his pleasant wife in the kitchen drinking coffee and chatting while small children swirled about our legs. Life is odd, I thought. It seemed so strange for Horner to have a wife and children and a paunch and a mortgage and to be, like me, approaching the cliff-face of middle age. We had been boys for so long
together that I suppose I had thought the condition was permanent. I realized with a sense of dread that the next time we met we would probably talk about gallstone operations and the relative merits of different brands of storm windows. It put me in a melancholy mood and kept me there as I reclaimed my car from its parking space downtown and returned to the highway.

I drove along old Route 6, which used to be the main highway to Chicago, but now, with Interstate 80 just three miles to the south, it is all but forgotten, and I hardly saw a soul along its length. I drove for an hour and a half without much of a thought in my head, just a weary eagerness to get home, to see my mom, to have a shower, and not to touch a steering wheel for a long, long time.

Des Moines looked wonderful in the morning sunshine. The dome on the state capitol building gleamed. The trees were still full of colour. They’ve changed the city completely – downtown now is all modern buildings and bubbling fountains and whenever I’m there now I have to keep looking up at the street signs to get my bearings – but it felt like home. I suppose it always will. I hope so. I drove through the city, happy to be there, proud to be part of it.

On Grand Avenue, near the governor’s mansion, I realized I was driving along behind my mother, who had evidently borrowed my sister’s car. I recognized her because the right turn signal was blinking pointlessly as she proceeded up the street. My mother generally puts the turn signal on soon after pulling out of the garage and then leaves it on for pretty much the rest of the day. I used to point this out to her, but then I realized it is actually a good thing because it alerts other motorists that they are
approaching a driver who may not be entirely on top of matters. I followed along behind her. At Thirty-First Street the blinking turn signal jumped from the right side of the car to the left – I had forgotten that she likes to move it around from time to time – as we turned the corner for home, but then it stayed cheerily blinking on the left for the last mile, down Thirty-First Street and up Elmwood Drive.

I had to park a fair distance from the house and then, despite a boyish eagerness to see my mother, I took a minute to log the final details of the trip in a notebook I had been carrying with me. It always made me feel oddly important and professional, like a jumbo jet pilot at the end of a transatlantic flight. It was 10.38 a.m., and I had driven 6,842 miles since leaving home thirty-four days earlier. I circled this figure, then got out, grabbed my bags from the trunk, and walked briskly to the house. My mother was already inside. I could see her through the back window, moving around in the kitchen, putting away groceries and humming. She is always humming. I opened the back door, dropped my bags and called out those four most all-American words: ‘Hi, Mom, I’m home!’

She looked real pleased to see me. ‘Hello, dear!’ she said brightly and gave me a hug. ‘I was just wondering when I’d be seeing you again. Can I get you a sandwich?’

‘That would be great,’ I said even though I wasn’t really hungry.

It was good to be home.

I WAS HEADED
for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch. In the middle of the state is a river called the Platte, which at some times of the year is two or three miles wide. It looks impressive until you realize that it is only about four inches deep. You could cross it in a wheelchair. On a landscape without any contours or depressions to shape it, the Platte just lies there, like a drink spilled across a table-top. It is the most exciting thing in the state.

When I was growing up, I used to wonder how Nebraska came to be lived in. I mean to say, the original settlers, creaking across America in their covered wagons, must have passed through Iowa, which is green and fertile and has, as I say, a hill, but stopped short of Colorado, which is green and fertile and has a mountain range, and settled instead for a place that is flat and brown and full of stubble and prairie-dogs. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Do you know what the original settlers made their houses of? Dried mud. And do you know what happened to all those mud houses when the rainy season came every year? That’s correct, they slid straight into the Platte River.

For a long time I couldn’t decide whether the original settlers in Nebraska were insane or just stupid, and then I saw a stadium full of University of Nebraska football fans in action on a Saturday and realized that they must have been both. I may be a decade or so out of touch here but when I left America, the University of Nebraska didn’t so much play football as engage in weekly ritual slaughters. They were always racking up scores of 58–3 against hapless opponents. Most schools, when they get a decent lead, will send in a squad of skinny freshmen in unsoiled uniforms to let them run around a bit and get dirty and, above all, to give the losers a sporting chance to make the score respectable. It’s called fair play.

Not Nebraska. The University of Nebraska would send in flamethrowers if it were allowed. Watching Nebraska play football every week was like watching hyenas tearing open a gazelle. It was unseemly. It was unsporting. And of course the fans could never get enough of it. To sit among them with the score 66–0 and watch them bray for more blood is a distinctly unnerving experience, particularly when you consider that a lot of these people must work at Strategic Air Command in Omaha. If Iowa State ever upset Nebraska, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they nuked Ames. All of these thoughts percolated through my mind on this particular morning and frankly left me troubled.

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 80, 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 semi-obsessional 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,
I
think we should ask directions’, in a tone suggesting 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 café 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 700 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 daughter’s 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 fanbelts, of all things, and apparently has the largest collection of pre-war fanbelts 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 board 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. South-west 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 on to 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 chalk, 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 bone-cracking 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 shirt-sleeves, 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, autumn 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.’