The Lost Continent (40 page)

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 miles – an 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 people per square kilometre; in South Dakota it is a little over two people per square kilometre. In Britain, there are 236.2 people per square kilometre. The number of people airborne in the United States at any given time (136,000)
is greater than the combined populations of the largest cities in each of these four states. And finally, here’s a really interesting fact. According to a survey by
Current Health Magazine
, the percentage of salad bar customers in the United States seen ‘touching or spilling food or otherwise being unsanitary’ is sixty per cent. I am of course aware that this has nothing to do with the population of the northern plains states, but I thought a brief excursion into irrelevancy was a small price to pay for information that could change your life. It certainly has changed mine.

I stopped for the night in a nothing little town called Murdo, got a room in a Motel 6 overlooking Interstate 90 and went for dinner in a big truck stop across the highway. A highway patrol car was parked by the restaurant door. There is always a highway patrol car parked by the restaurant door. As you walk past it you can hear muffled squawking on the radio. ‘Attention, attention! Zero Tango Charlie! A Boeing 747 has just crashed into the nuclear power plant on Highway 69. People are wandering around with their hair on fire. Do you read me?’ Inside, oblivious of all this, are the two highway patrolmen, sitting at the counter eating apple pie with ice-cream and shooting the breeze with the waitress. Every once in a great while – perhaps twice in a day – the two patrolmen will get up from the counter and drive out to the highway to ticket some random motorists for trying to cross the state at seven miles an hour above the permitted limit. Then they will go and have some more pie. That is what it is to be a highway patrolman.

In the morning I continued on across South Dakota. It was like driving over an infinite sheet of sandpaper. The skies
were low and dark. The radio said there was a tornado-watch in effect for the region. This always freaks out visitors from abroad – chambermaids in hotels in the Midwest are forever going into rooms and finding members of Japanese trade delegations cowering under the bed because they’ve heard a tornado siren – but locals pay no attention to these warnings because after years of living in the tornado belt you just take it as part of life. Besides, the chances of being hit by a tornado are about one in a million.

The only person I ever knew who came close was my grandfather. He and my grandmother (this is an absolutely true story, by the way) were sleeping one night when they were awakened by a roaring noise like the sound of a thousand chain-saws. The whole house shook. Pictures fell off the walls. A clock toppled off the mantelpiece in the living-room. My grandfather plodded over to the window and peered out, but he couldn’t see a thing, just pitch blackness, so he climbed back into bed, remarking to my grandmother that it seemed a bit stormy out there, and went back to sleep. What he didn’t realize was that a tornado, the most violent force in nature, had passed just beyond his nose. He could literally have reached out and touched it – though of course had he done so he would very probably have been sucked up and hurled into the next county.

In the morning, he and Grandma woke up to a fine clear day. They were surprised to see trees lying everywhere. They went outside and discovered, with little murmurings of astonishment, a swath of destruction stretching across the landscape in two directions and skirting the very edge of their house. Their garage was gone, but their old Chevy
was standing on the concrete base without a scratch on it. They never saw a single splinter of the garage again, though later in the day a farmer brought them their mailbox, which he had found in a field two miles away. It just had a tiny dent in it. That’s the sort of thing tornadoes do. All those stories you’ve ever read about tornadoes driving pieces of straw through telegraph poles or picking up cows and depositing them unharmed in a field four miles away are entirely true. In south-west Iowa there is a cow that has actually had this happen to it twice. People come from miles around to see it. This alone tells you a lot about the mysteries of tornadoes. It also tells you a little something about what there is to do for fun in south-west Iowa.

In mid afternoon, just beyond Sioux Falls, I at last left South Dakota and passed into Minnesota. This was the thirty-eighth state of my trip and the last new one I would visit, though really it hardly counted because I was just skimming along its southern edge for a while. Off to the right, only a couple of miles away over the fields, was Iowa. It was wonderful to be back in the Midwest, with its rolling fields and rich black earth. After weeks in the empty west, the sudden lushness of the countryside was almost giddying. Just beyond Worthington, Minnesota, I passed back into Iowa. As if on cue, the sun emerged from the clouds. A swift band of golden light swept over the fields and made everything instantly warm and spring-like. Every farm looked tidy and fruitful. Every little town looked clean and friendly. I drove on spellbound, unable to get over how striking the landscape was. There was nothing much to it, just rolling fields, but every colour was deep and vivid: the blue sky, the white clouds, the red barns, the
chocolate soil. I felt as if I had never seen it before. I had no idea Iowa could be so beautiful.

I drove to Storm Lake. Somebody once told me that Storm Lake was a nice little town, so I decided to drive in and have a look. And by golly, it was wonderful. Built around the blue lake from which it takes its name, it is a college town of 8,000 people. Maybe it was the time of year, the mild spring air, the fresh breeze, I don’t know, but it seemed just perfect. The little downtown was solid and unpretentious, full of old brick buildings and family-owned stores. Beyond it a whole series of broad, leafy streets, all of them lined with fine Victorian homes, ran down to the lakefront where a park stood along the water’s edge. I stopped and parked and walked around. There were lots of churches. The whole town was spotless. Across the street, a boy on a bike slung newspapers on to front porches and I would almost swear that in the distance I saw two guys in 1940s suits cross the street without breaking stride. And somewhere at an open window, Deanna Durbin sang.

Suddenly I didn’t want the trip to be over. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would go to the car now and in an hour or two I would crest my last hill, drive around my last bend, and be finished with looking at America, possibly for ever. I pulled my wallet out and peered into it. I still had almost $75. It occurred to me to drive up to Minneapolis and take in a Minnesota Twins baseball game. Suddenly this seemed an excellent idea. If I drove just a little bit maniacally, I could be there in three hours – easily in time for a night game. I bought a copy of
USA Today
from a street-corner machine and went with it into a coffee shop. I slid into a booth and eagerly opened it to the sports
pages to see if the Twins were at home. They were not. They were in Baltimore, a thousand miles away. I was desolate. I couldn’t believe I had been in America all this time and it hadn’t occurred to me before now, the last day of the trip, to go to a ball game. What an incredibly stupid oversight.

My father always took us to ball games. Every summer he and my brother and I would get in the car and drive to Chicago or Milwaukee or St Louis for three or four days and go to movies in the afternoon and to ball games in the evening. It was heaven. We would always go to the ballpark hours before the game started. Because dad was a sports writer of some standing – no, to hell with the modesty, my dad was one of the finest sports writers in the country and widely recognized as such – he could go into the press-box and on to the field before the game and to his eternal credit he always took us with him. We got to stand beside him at the batting cage while he interviewed people like Willie Mays and Stan Musial. If you’re British this means nothing to you, I know, but believe me it was a real privilege. We got to sit in the dug-outs (they always smelled of tobacco juice and urine; I don’t know what those guys got up to down there) and we got to go in the dressing-room and watch the players dress for the games. I’ve seen Ernie Banks naked. Not a lot of people can say that, even in Chicago.

The best feeling was to walk around the field knowing that kids in the stands were watching us enviously. Wearing my Little League baseball cap with its meticulously-creased brim and a pair of very sharp plastic sunglasses, I thought I was Mr Cool. And I was. I remember once at Commiskey Park in Chicago some kids calling to me from
behind the first base dug-out, a few yards away. They were big city kids. They looked like they came from the Dead End Gang. I don’t know where my brother was this trip, but he wasn’t there. The kids said to me, ‘Hey, buddy, how come you get to be down there?’ and ‘Hey, buddy, do me a favour, get me Nellie Fox’s autograph, will ya?’ But I paid no attention to them because I was . . . Too Cool.

So I was, as I say, desolate to discover that the Twins were a thousand miles away on the east coast and that I couldn’t go to a game. My gaze drifted idly over the box scores from the previous day’s games and I realized with a kind of dull shock that I didn’t recognize a single name. It occurred to me that all these players were in junior high school when I left America. How could I go to a baseball game not knowing any of the players? The essence of baseball is knowing what’s going on, knowing who’s likely to do what in any given situation. Who did I think I was fooling? I was a foreigner now.

The waitress came over and put a paper mat and cutlery in front of me. ‘Hi!’ she said in a voice that was more shout than salutation. ‘And how are you doin’ today?’ She sounded as if she really cared. I expect she did. Boy, are Midwestern people wonderful. She wore butterfly glasses and had a beehive hairdo.

‘I’m very well, thank you,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

The waitress gave me a sideways look that was suspicious and yet friendly. ‘Say, you don’t come from around here, do ya?’ she said.

I didn’t know how to answer that. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ I replied, just a trifle wistfully. ‘But you know, it’s so nice I sometimes kind of wish I did.’

Well, that was my trip, more or less. I visited all but ten of the lower forty-eight states and drove 13,978 miles. I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see and a good deal that I didn’t. I had much to be grateful for. I didn’t get shot or mugged. The car didn’t break down. I wasn’t once approached by a Jehovah’s Witness. I still had $68 and a clean pair of underpants. Trips don’t come much better than that.

I drove on into Des Moines and it looked very large and handsome in the afternoon sunshine. The golden dome of the state capitol building gleamed. Every yard was dark with trees. People were out cutting the grass or riding bikes. I could see why strangers came in off the interstate looking for hamburgers and gasoline and stayed for ever. There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought, and turned the car for home. It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I almost felt serene.

Bill Bryson’s acclaimed
A Short History of Nearly Everything
won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. He is much loved for his bestselling travel books, from
The Lost Continent
to
Notes from a Small Island
and
Down Under
, and he has also written books about language and Shakespeare. His latest bestsellers are a memoir,
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
, and
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
.

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A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid