The Lost Continent (36 page)

In the morning I drove north from Sonora along Highway 49, wondering what the day would bring. I wanted to head east over the Sierra Nevadas, but many of the passes were still closed. Highway 49, as it turned out, took me on an agreeably winding journey through hilly country. Groves of trees and horse pastures overlooked the road, and occasionally I passed an old farmhouse, but there was little sign that the land was used for anything productive. The towns I passed through—Tuttletown, Melones, Angels Camp—were the places where the California Gold Rush took place. In 1848, a man named James Marshall found a lump of gold at Sutter Creek, just up the road, and people went crazy. Almost overnight, 40,000 prospectors poured into the state and in a little over a decade, between 1847 and 1860, California’s population went from 15,000 to nearly 400,000. Some of the towns have been preserved as they were at the time—Sonora is not too bad in this regard—but mostly there’s not much to show that this was once the scene of the greatest gold rush in history. I suppose this is largely because most of the people lived in tents and when the gold ran out so did they. Now most of the little towns offered the customary stretch of gas stations, motels and hamburger emporia. It was Anywhere, USA.

At Jackson, I found that Highway 88 was open through the mountains—the first open passage through the Sierras in almost 300 miles—and I took it. I had expected that I would have to take the next but one pass along, the infamous Donner Pass, where in 1846 a party of settlers became trapped by a blizzard for several weeks and survived by eating each other, an incident that caused a great sensation at the time. The leader of the group was named Donner. I don’t know what became of him, but I bet he took some ribbing whenever he went into a restaurant after that. At any rate, it got his name on the map. The Donner Pass was also the route taken by the first transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific, and first transcontinental highway, old Route 40, the Lincoln Highway, on their 3,000-mile journey from New York to San Francisco. As with Route 66 further south, Route 40 had been callously dug up and converted into a dull, straight interstate highway, so I was pleased to find a back road open through the mountains.

And it was very pleasant. I drove through pine-forested scenery, with occasional long views across unpeopled valleys, heading in the general direction of Lake Tahoe and Carson City. The road was steep and slow and it took me much of the afternoon to drive the hundred or so miles to the Nevada border. Near Woodfords I entered the Toiyabe National Forest, or at least what once had been the Toiyabe National Forest. For miles and miles there was nothing but charred land, mountainsides of dead earth and stumps of trees. Occasionally I passed an undamaged house around which a firebreak had been dug. It was an odd sight, a house with swings and a wading pool in the middle of an ocean of blackened stumps. A year or so before, the owners must have thought they were the luckiest people on the planet, to live in the woods and mountains, amid the cool and fragrant pines. And now they lived on the surface of the moon. Soon the forest would be replanted and for the rest of their lives they could watch it grow again, inch by annual inch.

I had never seen such devastation—miles and miles of it—and yet I had no recollection of having read about it. That’s the thing about America. It’s so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies—a dozen people killed by floods in the South, ten crushed when a store roof collapsed in Texas, twenty-two dead in a snowstorm in the East—and each of them treated as a brief and not terribly consequential diversion between ads for hemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newscasters in America, but mostly it is just the scale of the country. A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain—as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.

I entered Nevada about ten miles south of Lake Tahoe. Las Vegas had so put me off that I had no desire to go to another sink of iniquity, though I was later told that Tahoe is a really nice place and not at all like Las Vegas. Now I shall never know. I can tell you, however, that Carson City was just about the most nothing little city you could ever hope to zip through. It’s the state capitol, but mostly it was just Pizza Huts and gas stations and cheap-looking casinos.

I headed out of town on US 50, past Virginia City and towards Silver Springs. This was more or less the spot on “Bonanza” where the map used to burst into flames. Remember that? It has been many years since I’ve seen the program, but I recall Pa and Hoss and Little Joe and the surly-looking one whose name I forget all living in a landscape that was fruitful and lush, in a Western, high-chaparral sort of way. But out here there was nothing but cement-colored plains and barren hills and almost no habitations at all. Everything was gray, from the sky to the ground. This was to remain the pattern for the next two days.

It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada. It has a population of just 800,000 in an area about the size of Britain and Ireland combined. Almost half of that population is accounted for by Las Vegas and Reno, so most of the rest of the state is effectively just empty. There are only 70 towns in the entire state—the British Isles have 40,000, just to give you some comparison—and some of them are indescribably remote. For instance, Eureka, a town of 1,200 in the middle of the state, is sixty miles in any direction from the nearest town. Indeed, the whole of Eureka County has just three towns and a total population of under 2,500—and this in an area of a couple of thousand square miles.

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 troubleshooting 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 anticlonk 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, H
AVE
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 I-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, L
ONE
S
T
R
M
OT
L
—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, 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.

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?”

26

H
ere, 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.