48states

A 2001 drive around the 48 states in 48 days
September 23, 2011

Day 32. NE: pioneers, Pony Express, geodesic domes, amazing space

There was little sorrow to be felt leaving town. Nebraska wasn’t a state that I’d had particularly high expectations of, but I had hoped for something a little more elevated than a brush with Lucy does Lincoln.

I’d also hoped that coffee might have been available at the motel in the morning, but their generosity only went as far as free pornography. The breaking of dawn saw me escape towards the delightfully named town of Friend, with its convenient population of 1,111. Such specific numbers were not unusual as cited populations, but the figures were rarely so round at the same time. It made me wonder how often they bothered to update the signs.

Nebraska was another state that seemed largely comprised of huge flat fields. It would have been as dull as Iowa if it hadn’t been for the birds. These birds were startling, they didn’t so much flock as swarm.

All along the route they would suddenly appear as one black mass, and then just as quickly disappear down onto the ground. It was impossible to see how they achieved this remarkable feat of co-ordination, at speed and with no obvious lead bird. It was perfectly synchronized but with no regular shape, like a plague of locusts working its way across the countryside.

I had set out so early that it was only just gone nine when I pulled into my first port of call, the small prairie town of Minden. I would have been there even earlier, but I got caught behind a slow moving truck that I had been unable to overtake.

I probably could have tried, but today wasn’t the day to get arrested. It was far too cold and windy. I had also concluded that it wasn’t worth risking an accident. If I were to die in the course of this trip, I definitely did not want it to happen in Nebraska.

The streets of Minden were as quiet as you would expect at that time on a Sunday morning. An “open” sign on the main highway directed me four blocks south to JJ’s City Café. It sat on the main square, in the middle of which was a tall and imposing old courthouse with a white dome.

American flags all around beat in the gusty wind that had picked up. It was chilly when I got out of the car, and I was pleased to have been able to park close to the café door. Inside the  temperature and atmosphere were warm. The inside of the windows were smoked with condensation. I snuggled in to a booth and awaited a proper home cooked American breakfast.

Four blocks away was the Pioneer Village, a museum that charted the development of America from a newly independent nation through to its emergence as the world’s number one superpower. Its 20 acres housed 28 buildings and 50,000 exhibits dating back to 1830.

It covered anything that touched American life, from decorations and furniture through hobbies to transportation. It included the oldest combustion engine, the first Model T Ford to roll off the production line and the first jet aeroplane. A number of original historic structures, such as Minden’s original church and a sod house, had been rebuilt around a village green.

One building housed an extensive collection of correspondence and you could watch demonstrations of some traditional crafts like blacksmithing and broom-making by hand. It was all intriguing and the time whistled by. I spent half an hour just reading through letters to Nebraska’s senator sent by various Presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton.

Three hours had disappeared while I was in the museum and I still felt that I had only scratched the surface. It was close to lunchtime and so I needed to get going. I motored north in search of the Interstate. My goal was Gothenburg, a town that not surprisingly had Swedish origins, but before I got there a roadside sign warned me that there was a monument ahead and that I was not to slow down.

Blatantly flouting the law I did, and I can’t say that it was worth it. The sign was more memorable than whatever the site was supposed to be. The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument? Answers on a postcard please.

Gothenburg was home to an original Pony Express Station, a compact hut which now doubled as a gift shop selling predictable paraphernalia. The woman running the place gave a quick lecture to me and a couple of other visitors on the history of the Pony Express. Reprints of the old recruitment posters were available, citing the requirement for “young wiry fellows under 18, preferably orphans” and wages of $25 a week (at a time when the average salary was just a dollar).

I drove due north and then dog-legged via Anselmo to Dunning. This part of the world felt a lot like England, with rolling hills and familiar-looking trees. When I had telephoned to book the room, the woman had warned me that there was no food to be had anywhere around those parts and that I had best eat before or bring some of my own.

She had suggested stopping in Thedford, 47 miles to the south of where she was and the last major town that I would pass before I got to her place. As major towns go, Thedford proved to be pretty minor. A sign announced: “Welcome to Thedford. Fuel. Food. Lodging. Churches.” It was Sunday I suppose.

With supplies in place I continued north into the wilderness of enormous Cherry county, one of the largest fifty counties in the whole country. It was bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware put together, spanned two time zones but only had one town of any note, called Valentine.

I listened to an interview on the radio with a woman who had been in the first tower on the storey where the terrorist plane had hit the building. She’d been on the other side of the building from the impact and had managed to get out just before the collapse. She had had to crawl in pitch black across devastation-strewn offices and pick her way down various staircases as there wasn’t one that led all the way down to the ground floor.

The interviewer asked if she wanted revenge. She didn’t. She thought that the first thing that was needed was to understand why there were people out there in the world who hated Americans so badly that they could have done this. Until that could be understood nothing could be done about these problems.

The place I was staying at was 17 miles short of Valentine and a couple of miles back from the highway. There was no obvious landmark to watch out for so I had to keep an eye on my mileometer. If I hadn’t turned off by the time I was 48 miles north of Thedford then I’d have missed it.

Thankfully, I managed to find it at first time of asking. At the end of a long track was a building that looked incongruous to say the least. The technical term for it was a geodesic dome, and it looked like a spaceship had landed.

At first I couldn’t believe that this was Lovejoy Ranch but there wasn’t another building for miles, apart from an old barn. As I parked, the door opened and a middle-aged woman came out and introduced herself as Cheryl.

She showed me into and around the house. She lived there alone and I was the only guest staying that evening. I had been offered the choice between the King and the Queen sized bed. I had opted for the latter, on the basis that even my lardy backside barely justified a King sized bed to itself. I didn’t see the other room, but the one that I ended up with could have slept a small troop of Scouts.

Cheryl explained that her husband’s great grandfather had come out to Nebraska in 1884 in the days when the government had offered 150 acres for every five that were planted with forest. Unfortunately, her landholding had diminished through it being divided up among all the children as it was passed down, and now all she had left were about 4000 acres. The old man must have put down an awful lot of trees.

Cheryl was keen that I go for a walk while it was still light. In one direction the hills rolled away forever, and I walked until the house was just a dot behind me. This was isolation of the highest order. I was in a field by myself and, not including Cheryl, tens of miles from the nearest person on earth.

An hour and a quarter had passed by the time I returned to the house, where Cheryl was in the kitchen baking. She didn’t look that much older than me, but had two grown-up children. Her son was pursuing love interests in South Dakota and her daughter was married and lived nearby. She and her husband used Cheryl’s land for ranching and in return looked after Cheryl’s cattle for her.

It was a precarious way to make a living as there were only two points in the year when any real trading was done, following weaning in the Spring and Fall. Cheryl’s annual income was largely dependent on meat prices at those points in time. These fluctuated significantly, according to climatic and economic factors beyond her control. I got the impression that she was weary of the business.

Cheryl asked if I had any photographs of my nearest and dearest. I had brought a small album of 24 snaps in case this question ever came up, but Cheryl was the first person whom I’d met who had enquired.

As I went off to fetch the photos, she asked what she could get me. To my surprise, it was a reference to alcohol. I had become accustomed to middle-America’s revulsion at social drinking and had just accepted that it would be another dry evening. The choice on offer was between scotch and gin.

The conversation became as free-flowing as Cheryl’s measures, and soon three hours and four gins had slipped by. She was very easy going, extraordinarily so for an American. Usually I found them quite intense and in your face but there was a contentment about Cheryl that was even more startling given that she’d not had the easiest of lives.

Also unusually, she was more interested in listening than talking about herself. Her only words were in response to things that I said. She tried to help me out with some of the holes in my story. She reckoned the birds that I had seen swarming earlier that day were red wing blackbirds and she wrote down the name of the parasitic ivy from Alabama on a scrap of paper (that I lost almost immediately).

With a casual disregard for any English concept of distance, Cheryl explained that she used Valentine, 17 miles to the north, for her “day to day shopping” but that for “more important purchases” (her example was a bucket), she would go to Denver CO. According to my rough calculations, that was almost 500 miles away. I learnt that it was also the nearest international airport, with Chicago being the second nearest. I gulped, and hoped that I didn’t need to swing by a Hertz in the near future.

When the conversation turned to September 11th as sooner or later it had to, I repeated a point that I had made on a number of occasions previously: I couldn’t imagine what could incite you to jump out of a window a hundred storeys up in the sky. However hopeless you saw your position to be, jumping only guaranteed you one fate.

Cheryl said she could understand it perfectly. She’d been in a fire and it was terrifying to the point that you lose all sense of proportion and just become desperate to get out. It doesn’t cross your mind how high up you are, you need to go and can worry about whether it’s ten, a hundred or a thousand feet on the way down.

Their original ranch house had burned down in 1979 and it was in this fire that she had lost her husband. She had lived for a while in a mobile home with her small kids and then decided to get the place built where we were now sitting. She wanted something completely different – environmentally friendly and energy efficient – which was certainly what she got with her geodesic dome.

I stepped out on to the deck for a cigarette. It was a perfectly still and clear night. I stood shivering for my addiction and gazed at the sky. I had never realized that so many stars even existed.

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September 22, 2011

Day 31. IA/NE: Republicans, windmills, bridges, porn shoots

I was astonished when I went down for breakfast to discover other guests had spent the night in the hotel. Perhaps they’d all been in bed by nine.

Ron was in a white apron in the kitchen, doing the cooking and serving it himself. He made a point of coming over to me to apologize for the fact that he was the president of the local Republican Party.

This seemed an odd confession to make, but he went on to explain that this meant he had to leave at 8.30 because of a meeting some miles away.

Before departing, he made a joke. He told me that they had had someone from London stay in the hotel before. He then scampered off to fetch an old cracked frame with a yellowed leaf from the 1919 registration book in it. Clearly scrawled on the page was the name T S Eliot. How I smiled. Never mind that Eliot had been born in nearby St Louis and hadn’t become a British subject until 1927.

My accent alerted a couple at the next table heard and they asked me if I was the Englishman that they had heard was staying. I guessed I must be. They said they had something that might interest me and passed over a flier for an auction that morning in Donnellson. I thanked them for their consideration and hurriedly finished off my coffee.

Out in the car I checked where Donnellson was. Unfortunately it was in the opposite direction to where I was going and so I had to deny myself the opportunity of bidding for furniture and farm machinery on that occasion. Otherwise it would obviously have been right up my street.

I was now doubling back once more on myself, heading away from the east coast. My first port of call was Pella. I had read quite a lot about this Dutch community and was intrigued to see what it was really like. A sign at the city limits bade me “Welkom”.

It wasn’t the season for the tulip festival, but the windmills were still there. The Visitors’ Center was located in one, and I went to get some information about the town. The woman in there was wearing Dutch National dress. She told me that the Fall Festival was being held that day at the historical village near the new windmill two blocks away.

Fall had fallen officially that morning at 6.04 am. Despite her precise directions, the nearest I got was the Bibliotheek but I did end up walking along the canal-side. The canal itself was only about a foot deep and was there to evoke Amsterdam I supposed. The local shops did their best to add to the effect. If I’d wanted to buy some Delft pottery or lace souvenirs, I could have filled my boots.

Next stop was Winterset, birthplace of John Wayne and the capital of Madison County, as in the bridges of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep fame. I was surprised to find out that there were six covered bridges and that they weren’t exactly close to one another. Cedar Bridge was pretty, but I couldn’t figure out what it was for as it had a perfectly good road that led around it. Hogback was even more pointless than Cedar. It was on a grass verge at the side of the road spanning a small ditch.

These bridges were proving a waste of time but, having started, I wanted to see the Roseman Bridge. I’d learnt from the Visitors’ Center that this was the one that had been used for all the shooting of the film.

It was down more unmade roads to get there, and its setting was certainly very sylvan. I walked through the bridge, the inside of which was covered in romantic graffiti. Nearby was a cottage that doubled as a gift shop. Outside a sign said “Gift shop open”, and underneath another read “Yes. We really are open”.

Inside TV sets were playing The Bridges of Madison County on a continual loop. Among the treats that could be purchased were small squares of wood that had been cast off from the bridge when it was renovated in the early nineties. They cost eight bucks apiece and two hungry punters were handing over their cash as I was in there. You could also buy colored stones inscribed with sickly romanticized love heart messages. These were being flogged on the basis that they had been painted by Meryl Streep’s stand-in. The film had proved to be good business for these people.

Back on the highway, the corn spread for miles. The road was flat with no bends in sight. Things couldn’t get much duller. At one point, I stopped and scrambled up a bank at the side of the road. In all directions, corn stretched to the horizon.

All day I’d been on the lookout for a payphone so I could book a room in Nebraska. In Pella, I had found one but it transpired that it was only operative during summer months. The woman in the Visitors’ Center couldn’t explain why they went to the effort of disconnecting it for the winter months. Initially, I thought that this might just have been some sort of Dutch quirk, but no gas stations in Iowa had call boxes either.

As I turned south, the cornfields continued to abound and approaching Red Oak, my stomach rumbled. If I’d had a camping stove and a pot of water, I could’ve eaten corn on the cob until I popped but as it was, I had to stop at McDonald’s.

The kid who served me wasn’t as eager as Keosauqua Eric, but he was still fairly enthusiastic. He was a big fat guy, like a mentally errant version of John Candy. With a labored and polite excuse me sir, he asked if I was Australian. I told him I was English, from London, which he thought was a fantastic place. I asked him if he’d ever been there which he seemed to take as a highly amusing question. Muffling his laughter, he said that he hadn’t. I think that I may as well have asked him if he’d been to Jupiter.

The most eventful thing in the news was an announcement from Washington DC that today would be the last day that flags would be flown at half-staff following September 11th. Another step along the return to “normalcy”.

As I drove towards Sidney, on a stretch of highway sponsored by the local lodge of the Freemasons, I passed a house with a huge placard leant against the front of it. On the placard was painted the profile of an eagle with a tear falling from its eye against a background of the stars and stripes. The following words were written underneath: “This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail. God bless America.”

Saturday nights had not been too successful so far on the trip. I’d had the porch of West Virginia, the debauchery of New Orleans, the isolation of Nevada, and the drunkenness of Utah. Every small town that I had visited seemed to be on the wrong night, but the one time that was supposed to be fun everywhere was Saturday and I was determined that mine were going to pick up.

My intended haunt for that evening was Nebraska City. According to my guidebook, Nebraska City was an old Missouri River town, set among apple and cherry orchards and heir to over 300 properties on the National Register of Historic Places. It was supposed to have a downtown that demonstrated nicely how the old and new could work together. It sounded promising.

No sooner had I crossed the bridge over the Missouri than I was in town. I drove into the centre and found the main street. I’d been expecting something like the Royal Docks in Liverpool but this was more like the dodgy end of Whitechapel Road.

A check of the atlas showed that Lincoln was about an hour’s drive away. It was the state capital, and so I figured that there must be some cosmopolitan life to be found there. I decided to shelve grim Nebraska City and hit the freeway.

Lincoln was dark as I approached. I had been told that Nebraska was so flat that you could see Lincoln from about 16 miles away. Rubbish. Like most towns,  you see it when you get to it.

Not much was  happening around the supposed hub of O Street. There was a Holiday Inn, but not  a bar or restaurant in sight. I turned left and found myself on a flyover on a route out of town. I couldn’t pull over and I couldn’t turn around.

Truthfully,  I had no desire to do either. I was resigned to another Saturday of disappointment and decided that I would motor until I saw a cheap motel and crash the night there. A few miles down the road, I noticed a bar that looked inviting, and opposite it a motel that said it also had a restaurant. Ideal. Well, adequate at least. I checked in and went to look for my room. It was nowhere obvious to be found.

Back in reception, the woman explained that I needed to go around the corner. The building was built in a horseshoe wrapped around a swimming pool and car park at the front. My room was on the outside.

I drove round and was perplexed to find that mine was the last room on the far corner, on the ground floor, on a side of the motel that looked out onto an unlit street. It looked dicey to say the least.

My concerns weren’t abated when I went into the room and found that it had no lock as such, only a hole in the door where the barrel of a lock used to be. Inside I moved the wardrobe against the door to stop it falling ajar, cracked open a beer and flicked through the TV stations. It was a classy joint. The adult channels came gratis.

Storm clouds had been gathering over Lincoln as I’d approached, and these were now letting rip in the skies. I levered the wardrobe out of the way, and looked outside. I had never seen orange lightning before, nor rain quite like this. The bar across the road was no longer visible and the only thing to be seen on the road was the glow of moving headlights. On the ground in front of me, shafts of water bounced up about two feet.

I watched and waited for ten minutes, then made a dash for the restaurant. At the end of the meal, I had a quick look in the adjacent bar. I’d seen a car of lads arrive when I’d first checked in who had the same inane grins that I’d encountered at the Mason’s Bar in Lambertville NJ. They were the only people in there, and two of them were squaring up to each other. It didn’t feel like it was my kind of place.

The rain had eased off, but was still heavy. I was now less than sure that I wanted to venture out to the bar across the road. I didn’t want to take my valuables out with me, nor did I want to leave them in the car, and I obviously couldn’t leave them in my room.

There wasn’t much on TV, so I surfed around and drank some more beer. I lay on the bed and popped a quarter in the slot marked “electronic massage” that was on the bedside table. The mattress vibrated violently for about ninety seconds.

I was just about to turn in for the night when I heard a car pull up outside. It was parked right outside my door. I shunted the wardrobe enough to have a peak. It was a large white Dodge with rusty paintwork, only one headlight and seven bullet holes in the windshield. It was not a calming sight.

I reinforced the door with a chest of drawers behind the wardrobe. Then I put a chair between the drawers and the wall. It wouldn’t withstand a battering ram, but it at least made it difficult to get in. I had just completed the operation when I heard a car door slam outside, an engine revving and then a wheel-spinning screech away. The Dodge had gone.

Ten minutes later it was back. I peeked through the blinds to see them unloading what looked like lighting equipment. They were taking it up the outside stairs. I could hear furniture being moved around in the room immediately above me. Then the Dodge took off again.

Something odd was going on, but I didn’t much fancy going out to ask questions. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the men had a pistol tucked in the back of his jeans.

I’ve only twice had a loaded gun pointed at me. The first time had been at the Hungarian-Romanian border in 1984 during a spat with a Soviet customs official over my about-to-be-confiscated passport. The second time had been in the basement sitting room of a naked sixty-year old transvestite who was telling me how he’d fought in the Rhodesian bush alongside Joshua Nkomo and who was unimpressed by my refusal to join him in his bedroom for a scotch. It was one of the unluckier calls during my time as a door-to-door salesman.

I hadn’t enjoyed either of those experiences too much and I knew that the current situation called for a degree of bravery that was out of my league. I couldn’t run, but I could certainly hide.

The Dodge returned, and so had the rain. There was a commotion outside and the sound of distressed female voices. I took another peek. Two girls were scrambling out of the car and running for cover. They were big breasted and scantily clad, and wearing enough make-up for it to have run in the rain.

A guy was manhandling some camera equipment out of the trunk and cursing the weather. They obviously hadn’t told him about this bit when he’d applied for the position of skin-flick roadie.

At some point I must have drifted off to sleep, because I was woken with a start at just after four. A raunchy soundtrack was being played at full volume upstairs. Perhaps it had been playing all night and had only disturbed me at that moment. Perhaps they’d come to a particular scene that required synch-sound shooting. Perhaps it was just to help the “actresses” get in the mood.

Whatever it was, I didn’t get back to sleep again. As the sun began to rise, I decided it was time to leave. It was 5.45 am.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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September 21, 2011

Day 30. MO/IA: mattress talk, Doc Marten’s, wankers, underpants

Breakfast was not until eight and I didn’t share Dick’s inclination for a sunrise stroll, preferring instead a dip in the cowboy bathtub. A talk show was on the radio where the current crisis was being discussed. It sounded like a serious program until one caller asserted that bin Laden suffered from a medical condition that meant his penis was deformed. I mean, please.

Downstairs, Dick and his wife were reading the papers. He confirmed that he’d been for his walk, but it was unclear whether his wife had accompanied him. It was also unclear what her name was, as it sounded like he just introduced her to me as “my wife”. I assumed she must have had a name of her own, but didn’t want to ask in case it was some tribal Welsh one and I had just misunderstood.

The other couple who were staying came downstairs and introduced themselves heartily to me as The Bowlings. All this formality didn’t make for easy conversation over breakfast, where again we discussed the recent events on the east coast.

I had to be on my toes as my natural inclination is to make reference to what other people have said and it can be tricky when three of the four in your company you only know as Bowling Man, Bowling Woman and Wife of Dick.

The hotelier Mike had been chatty at breakfast time, going into tremendous detail about the new mattresses that he’d bought last year for every room in the hotel.

He gave an elaborate explanation of the pitfalls of sourcing and transporting mattresses, and the life expectancy of each based on how many nights a year the average room was let, and the commercial benefit of having a good reputation for mattresses: “I always say that when you stay some place there are only two things that touch you, the mattress and the food.”

In my previous career, I had sat in meetings for multi-million pound advertising campaigns where clients had given out less information about their business than I learned about the Southern Hotel that morning. When I went to pay, he said that he’d prefer for me not to use American Express, and then went on to explain the minutiae of his arrangements with each of the major credit card companies. His beef with Amex was that he felt that they had reneged on a deal so he’d told them to take a hike.

Ste Genevieve was the furthest east that I had been since Kosciusko MS, and it was strange to be heading west once more. Well, north-west. This was the point where I began a loop back on myself and started to pay the price for covering the states consecutively without re-entering any.

On the way out of St Louis, I found myself behind an SUV with “Happy 100th birthday, Walt Disney” emulsion-painted in orange and white letters on the back. It was just a little too neat to be vandalism. The bloke must have done it to his vehicle himself.

Although I had time on my hands today, I soon used much of my leeway up on another fruitless diversion. I wasted an hour motoring west across the state to Wright City in search of the Elvis is Alive Museum. It was closed for the day for redecoration. Declining the invitation to come back the next day, I reconciled myself to being unable to judge at first hand the “incontrovertible DNA evidence” that the body buried at Graceland didn’t belong to the King.

Approaching Clarksville the traffic drew strangely to a halt. As I neared the front of the queue, I could see that there were people at the junction stopping all the cars. They were holding buckets and money was being thrown in. When it came to my turn, I threw a couple of bucks in and was given a bow made out of red, white and blue string with a pin attached. The man with the bucket spoke quietly but firmly: “Please make sure you wear it sir”. They were collecting money for the families of the NYPD and FDNY killed in the World Trade Centre.

Hannibal, hometown of Samuel Clemens, proved to be much less touristy than I had anticipated. The only clues were the Mark Twain Museum and the Mark Twain Mississippi steamship, but otherwise it seemed like a perfectly normal town.

A distant school memory told me that young Sam had chosen his pen name because there was a call that went “By the mark twain”, which was some reference to the waterline. I was pleased to see that the Mark Twain ship sat at mark two in the river.

I’d telephoned ahead and booked a room in Iowa, and felt sure that I’d made the right choice when I pulled over the bridge into Keosauqua and saw the Hotel Manning. This was a big hotel and it looked like a proper town.

Closer inspection showed the main structure of the building to be wooden, and not in a particularly good state of repair. The paint was peeling and some parts looked rotten. It was a struggle creaking the door open. It no longer fitted the hole that it filled very well.

Inside it felt like my grandmother’s home. The furniture and fittings were from the 19th Century and there was a musty smell. It was quiet, apart from the echoing tick-tock from the clock. I rang the bell on the desk and a guy looked round the door from a room at the back. He was sat down and didn’t move his chair beyond the swivel needed to see out front.

It turned out that he was the owner, and a very friendly fellow to boot. His name was Ron. He remembered me as the English guy who had called earlier, and wanted to know about London.

He was about to get married and the honeymoon was to be in Nairobi but they were flying via London and stopping off for four days. The hotel was just off Park Lane. He was grateful to learn about the Heathrow Express (they’d been thinking of taking a cab) and I recommended a few places to eat and drink.

He called his wife-to-be, Mel, out from another corner of the hotel because he knew that she had shopping in mind. It transpired that she had orders from friends and family for 30 pairs of Doctor Marten’s. They cost $130 a pair in the States, but she’d heard they were much cheaper in England.

I explained where she needed to go in Covent Garden and how to get there. She wanted to know whether the shop would arrange for them to be shipped back to Iowa. I told her that she could ask.

I still hadn’t checked in when we got on to the subject of places to eat and drink in Keosauqua, and I was pleased to hear that there were three bars and a couple of restaurants. They suggested that I stick to either the Town & Country or Tillie’s, but steer clear of the Vet’s Club if I wanted to avoid fights.

They said that they could only recommend one restaurant and that had to be the one that was run by the bride-to-be’s mother. All would be quiet this evening until about 9.30, because there was a game of football at the local high school and that the whole town would be going to watch it.

The Town & Country was pretty rough and unwelcoming. I ordered a beer and sat there awkwardly, very conscious that all eyes were on me the stranger. People were playing pool for money, and it soon became apparent that I didn’t belong there so I left after one.

I decided to eat before trying the other place. I was now happy to take the advice and avoid the Vet’s Club altogether. If they thought it was rough, then that was good enough for me.

I was met at the restaurant by one of the most enthusiastic waiters that I have ever come across. He was probably in his late twenties, but he looked as if he were eighteen or nineteen. He definitely still lived with his mum and suffixed every sentence with “sir”.

He was terribly eager to explain the menu to me, terribly eager to fetch me a drink, terribly eager that I help myself to the salad bar and terribly eager to find out whether I was enjoying my meal and, if so, why wasn’t I smiling sir. It was like something out of Happy Days on acid.

He wanted to know where I came from and greeted the news that it was London with disproportionate excitement. His agitation went off the top of the scale when he heard that I was travelling around the states and was trying to write a story about it. That was precisely what he dreamed of doing, but not in America.

When I asked him where he wanted to travel to, he answered “The World”. His head was up to about fifty nods a second. He asked if I would mind swapping e-mail addresses and I think that he might have ejaculated when I said that I’d be happy to. He bustled off to the kitchen in a frenzy to clean himself up.

When he came back, he was nervously fingering a yellow scrap of paper on which he had scrawled his e-mail address under the title “Eric Rysdam. Inventor, book writer, author wannabe.”

By a possibly unrelated mental process, the thought dawned on me that I had not yet heard anyone use the term “wanker” in the thirty days that I had been on the road. Perhaps it had not yet made it into the American vernacular.

I thought of asking Eric if he knew what the word meant but decided against it on the off-chance that he was familiar with the term and took offense.

Tillie’s, the other “safe” bar that I had not yet visited, was just as intimidating. Unfortunately there was a seat at the bar that I felt obliged to occupy. It meant sitting in between a buxom cowgirl who was entertaining one end of the bar with her banter, and an awesome looking guy who looked like he pulled trees up with his bare hands for a living. I only lasted one drink there too.

It was still early but I had the impression that the continuation of my good health depended upon my not seeking any conversations in either of the bars that I had visited. I contemplated returning to the restaurant to see if Eric was close to knocking off yet and fancied a drink but quickly dismissed the idea as patently ridiculous.

A man wearing nothing but a pair of underpants came striding down the middle of the road. I watched as he walked purposefully off into the unlit distance. Keosauqua. Crazy name, crazy town.

Back at the hotel all was quiet. The lights had been turned off on the ground floor and nobody was around. A car drew up and out jumped a girl of about twenty, who smiled at me and then skipped inside. Five minutes later she was back out and off down the road. Across the green, about a dozen teenagers were playing with a volleyball in the forecourt of the gas station.

I wandered down to the river to sit on the bench and look at the water. Behind me, I heard a couple of the kids coming across the green gabbling excitedly. They went into the hotel, so I went to investigate.

Through the door from the porch, I could see one of them doing her hair in a mirror to the side of the reception while chatting to someone in another room. The second girl came out of the room and they both came towards me to leave the hotel. They passed by on to the green without noticing me. The room inside was the female restroom. The hotel was clearly treated by the locals as a public lavatory.

With nobody around and no lights on at all inside the hotel, it felt quite creepy when I got back to my room. The key took four goes to unlock the door but finally I got in. I went to bed with the feeling that if ever the axe-man was going to come in the night, this could be the time. I would be glad when morning arrived.

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September 20, 2011

Day 29. AR/MO: rednecks, Knob Lick, declaration of war, quilt vandalism

In the reception of the hotel were some freesheets celebrating Lovely County. One of them had an article on the Main Street Café and the best breakfasts in town.

Grinning off the page was a photograph of ten guys in baseball caps sitting around a large circular table with the caption “Rednecks enjoy breakfast at the Main Street Café”. I had shaken off the impression that a gang of rednecks equated to a lynch mob at rest, but I still made a mental note to be careful when I went in.

The circular table was towards the rear of the restaurant, so I shimmied over to a booth near the window and sat facing the street. My intention was to avoid catching anyone’s eye, but I still found myself confronted by an awkward situation. At the table in front of me was a couple from clear redneck stock. He was wearing a cap with “Pulchrina Chow” on it and had a complexion that was half coal miner, half geriatric. She looked like she’d just popped out but needed to get back soon to continue stripping down the engine block that was dangling from a chain at her garage.

It wasn’t their appearance that I found awkward. It wasn’t even the fact that they were spending all their breakfast time snogging. It was more the fact that they were eating grits for breakfast while continuing to snog. Grits are every bit as unpleasant as they sound. It’s like a bag of gravel in a soup of white wallpaper paste. A waste of a clean plate indeed. I found that I didn’t have much of an appetite by the time my sausage and egg finally arrived.

A map in the centre of one of the freesheets outlined a circuit that could be driven around town to see the sights. It was all very nice and cutesy, but I was beginning to sense something very fabricated about this place.

The drive back out along the highway confirmed this view. The previous night it may have seemed like Yuletide, but by daylight it became another assault on the senses. In the same way that Las Vegas could overpower you with lights and sounds, Eureka Springs delivered a sugary overload that ended up feeling quite sterile. All along the road were an assortment of gingerbread gift shops and churches. This didn’t last for a few hundred yards, but for about eight miles. It got to the point where I never thought I was going to see the end of them.

Along this stretch was Christ of the Ozarks, an Arkansan equivalent of the Redeemer statue on Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio. It was very white and slightly flakey. It looked like it had been made by pouring a large amount of plaster mixture into an equally large rubber mold. It was tall and imposing and probably came from a remarkable feat of engineering, but you wouldn’t describe it a classically artistic.

It was on the same site where each night the Ozark Passion Play is performed. They had also secured a four-foot section of the Berlin Wall, complete with original graffiti of Psalm 23 in German. Coaches ferried hoards of photographing gawpers in and out. There was something both anodyne and self-congratulatory about the experience.

Along the highway, the gift shops finally started to thin out but the churches kept coming thick and fast. I was back in the heart of the Bible Belt, but things had changed since I was last in this neck of the woods. The notice-boards outside these churches no longer had signs calling to prayer or threatening damnation, they had taken on a far more base and patriotic tone post September 11th. “Pray for our military” seemed fine enough, but “Our God is best” was possibly going a bit far.

Once into Missouri, I picked up MO 19 up to Winona. It undulated beautifully through the Mark Twain National Forest, and stretched effortlessly into the distance. If there were a more enjoyable stretch of road to ride in the whole of the US, I didn’t find it during these 48 days.

I’m unsure what expectations I’d had of Missouri but I found myself strangely seduced by it. I’d imagined it being bland, a continuation of the nothing terrain of the plains of the Midwest. It wasn’t as stunning, in the bizarre sense, as the southwestern states but it was just as beautiful.

I felt almost homesick, but not for England. I had been out west for almost three weeks and had a curious yearning to see the Mississippi again. It represented a part of America that seemed like home. I picked my way through the forest and the delightful towns of Centerville (population 200, 2 shops, 3 churches), Pilot Knob, Caledonia and Bismarck.

I took a slight diversion south on an unfruitful search for a postcard from one of the tougher addresses in the English-speaking world – the tiny town of Knob Lick – before heading east to my overnight stop on the river itself.

Ste Genevieve was the first settlement west of the Mississippi. Thanks to the perpetual threat of flooding, the town had moved itself back from the riverbank but still retained many of the original buildings. The streets were empty and I followed the signs down to the ferry that led over to Illinois. It certainly felt more Huck Finn than Natchez-under-the-Hill MS had done.

Back in town all was quiet. There were some hotels near the centre, all in the shadow of the huge church steeple that dominated the town. I tried my luck at one, but it was closed. It had a blackboard outside advertising room rates, but no sign of life behind the locked door.

Round the corner from it was a more grandiose looking place called the Southern Hotel. This too was locked, but at least it had a doorbell marked “Hotel” which I pushed.

A jovial middle-aged bloke came bounding into view and we agreed a price. He introduced himself as Mike, and said that I could have an $85 room at a special businessman’s rate of $69, without really explaining the basis of the discount.

He enthusiastically showed me around the public areas, all of which were furnished with pieces from before the civil war. There was even a 19th Century pool table, which he invited me to have a game on later if I wished. He also pointed out the guest quilt that I would be welcome to sign as had become the custom for folks staying there.

The wooden stairs were painted in an ornate pattern of reds, yellows and greens. My room was at the top of the building and had all sorts of stuff in it: masses of books and toys and ornaments, a collection of dolls, and an old four-poster bed. In an alcove to the side, separated by a pull-across screen, was a basin, lavatory and one of those old-fashioned western bathtubs. The whole mess was delicious.

Mike went to great lengths to explain where was good for what type of food and what time they stayed open until. I asked him where he would recommend eating above all else and he nominated a place called The Brick on the nearest corner “provided you like fried chicken”. They did the best fried chicken in the state apparently.

The only place to get a drink in town was at the restaurants, so I’d need to choose carefully. It may have done the best chicken this side of Venus, but The Brick was empty which never boded well for conversation. I checked that there was a TV and decided to come back to eat. I wanted to be able to see the presidential address that was scheduled for 8.30 Central Time that evening.

The next place, The Anvil, was more full and so I went in and asked whether I could just sit at the bar and order a drink. The woman said that would be fine and I was promptly given a menu and left there for fifteen minutes. Eventually, I went up to one of the waitresses and asked if I had to order a drink through her. She attracted the attention of one of the barmaids and finally I got my beer. It was lively and I would have stayed, but I had to gulp the drink down in order to be back at The Brick before it closed.

By the time I got back, things had picked up slightly and four or five locals had now congregated at the bar. I had to imagine they were here for the presidential address too as they were all intently staring at the TV. I ordered the chicken and positioned myself so that I had a good view of the box. I was the only one eating and so the food arrived quickly. Loads of it. And the hotelier was right. It sure was mighty fine chicken.

Unfortunately the people in the bar didn’t seem as intent on listening to the address as I’d hoped. It was difficult hearing what the President had to say above the commotion and raucous laughter coming from the counter.

It surprised me. I’d imagined that every American would want to listen carefully to this speech, but perhaps they too were becoming overloaded with media analysis and just wanted to get back to normality. Or “normalcy”, as the Americans put it.

I eked out my beer and food until the end of the speech, by which time I was the last one left and the bar was closing. It looked like that was that for my evening in Missouri. Back at the hotel, I took advantage of my sobriety and the hour to sort out my once-again catastrophic trunk.

It took a good fifteen minutes of transferring bits of paper I had collected along the way from the passenger footwell to the right boxes and bags in the back. Then I had to organize my souvenirs, some of which were rattling around on the back seat, and get together the paperwork that I needed to update. Finally, it came to my clothes. It had been a while since I had done any laundry and I needed to segregate the most noxiously dirty from the passably clean. I bundled together what I needed for the evening and walked across the street to the hotel door.

Unseen by me, a fellow guest was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch chortling to himself and sipping a bourbon. He had been watching me fannying around all this time and seemed amazed that I’d had so much moving about to do. He said that he’d started by wondering what I was doing and ended up thinking that I was never going to finish.

His name was Dick and he was a lawyer from St Louis. I was still weighed down by the armfuls that I was taking inside, so I asked if he would still be there in five minutes after I had dropped it all up in my room. I ran upstairs and was back again in two. To his enormous amusement, I then returned to the car to grab a couple of cans of beer from the back.

Dick proved to be both pleasant and entertaining company and we stayed out the front until almost midnight. He occasionally went inside for a refill of Bourbon, a bottle of which was with his wife, although she never ventured outside herself.

He described Eureka Springs as a “flim-flam” town. This meant that it was a non-settlement but had been fabricated for the benefit of tourists. He laughed about the Oklahomans and liked my observation that it should perhaps re-coin its nickname the “Get out of it sooner State”.

I mentioned that I had come across little casual drinking culture but Dick reckoned that this was a new development in American life. The old boozing culture had been busted apart by the much more stringent recent laws on DWI (driving while intoxicated). There was now a statutory thirty-day license suspension that was impossible for most Americans to contemplate.

In a country the size of the US with little public transport, losing your license was more than just a pain in the arse. It meant that you couldn’t get to work or even to the shops. And with most people west of the Mississippi living tens of miles from the population centres, very few remained prepared to risk it.

He said that nowadays, any more than six or seven beers and you would be sailing close to the wind. When I pointed out that the guideline limit in England was more like one and a half beers, he was astonished. He said that he’d always thought that the US had the toughest drink-drive regime in the world.

It was all jovial stuff until the subject of September 11th came up. Just the mention of the date had a transforming effect upon the calm, thoughtful and intelligent man that I had been getting to know. Perhaps it was the Bourbon, but he began manically advocating the widespread bombing of every Arab country on the planet.

When I dared to point out the flaw in this strategy, he became angrier still. He thought that a few dead Arabs, even if they were innocent civilians, would be no great loss to the world. It exercised him greatly that there had yet to be any military response and that the US was even bothering with all this pussyfooting around talking to other nations.

It came almost as a relief when Dick announced that it was time for bed because he liked to get up at dawn for a walk. I bade him goodnight and finished my drink. When I felt the coast was clear, I crept into the hotel and pulled the covers off the pool table. Even the balls looked like they were antique as I chinked them around the table for a couple of frames before bedtime.

Before retiring, I sat in one of the leather armchairs and looked at the guest quilt. I had noticed that a number of these were hanging on the walls, and that all the writing had been embroidered up. A fine felt pen was on the table for additional autographs, and I duly added mine.

I wasn’t the first Englishman to have passed by this way, judging by the “Hereford Boot Boys kick to kill” slogan that was scrawled on one of the patches. I couldn’t decide which was more moronic: the gratuitous defacing of a gentle memento or the choice of a guest quilt in Missouri as the canvass for an aggro graffito. Either way, perhaps if they had kicked to score instead, the twats would still be in the Football League.

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September 19, 2011

Day 28. KS/OK/AR: giraffe licks, desolation, christmas lights, karaoke

The ostriches were still there in the morning. They looked as if they hadn’t moved position once in the night, and were still glancing around curiously waiting for something to happen. A gentle cacophony of braying, mooing and oinking bounced around the farmyard.

Part of the deal with staying at Hedrick’s was that you got to be shown around in the morning and introduced to a load of the animals. It meant leaving later than I would ideally have liked, but I thought it would be worth it. Especially as the only place that I was going to that day was Oklahoma.

The tour was hosted by Kathy, who had also cooked our breakfast. It started ten minutes late when the elderly couple who were also staying couldn’t be found. Kathy walked us round with a running commentary in her broad Kansan accent and took us into the pens themselves. It was the first time that I had been nudged over by a zebra while trying to take a photograph.

The old man was very friendly and offered to lend me his binoculars, which was a kind but unnecessary gesture given that the animals we were looking at were only about three feet away.

We got the chance to feed the giraffes and the kangaroos. Kathy demonstrated how to get Geoffrey the Giraffe to kiss her, by holding a carrot in her mouth and offering it to him. I was happy to turn down the chance to replicate the experience for myself, being slightly choosy about the species that I allow to lick my face.

We also learned a lot. I didn’t know that giraffes gave birth standing up and that the fall to the ground (or, more accurately, the impact upon hitting it) was what started the newborn breathing. It was quite a thing, bearing in mind that a baby giraffe would be six foot tall and weigh 200 pounds at birth. I had also always assumed that zebras were striped simply for the purpose of camouflage, but apparently the alternate black and white serve as a natural air conditioning system to regulate its internal temperature.

All in all it was a beguiling hour. It was too short a time to take it all in, but I was getting used to thinking that about a lot of what I saw. This place had been particularly charming though and I was sad to be leaving so quickly.

I was re-entering the Bible Belt, and it showed from the radio broadcasts. One programme was talking about the issue of Islam in God’s eyes. They were urging listeners not to take it out on Muslims after September 11th. As the guy carefully explained, God loves the sinner and so loves all Muslims. It’s only the sin that God hates, and so he just hates Islam and all that it stands for.

For all the charges against bin Laden’s “medieval” world view, you had to bear in mind that almost 60% of American adults believed in the physical existence of angels. Perhaps the fundamentalists in the US were not quite as extreme as the Taliban – I was unaware of any communities that actually lived to the letter of Leviticus 15 – but plenty of language about the “Christian Just War” had been bandied about since September 11th with nobody explaining how this differed from the universally reviled “Jihad”.

By noon I was in Oklahoma, which had the dubious claim to fame that it executed more people per capita each year than either Iran or China. This had been the state that had impressed me least on my previous trek across the States.

On that occasion, we’d driven east to west on Interstate 40 for 330 miles of tedium, punctuated only by the blandness of Oklahoma City. It wasn’t that it was a bad place, it was just that there was little there other than farmland. This time I was going to try the northeast corner where the Osage Nation lived, and see if things were any better there.

I drove through Ponca City (pronounced “Ponka”) and reached Pawhuska, the Osage capital, without seeing much. I had the horrible feeling that I might end up with nothing to report whatsoever from Oklahoma.

I stopped for lunch at a grim transport-style café. There wasn’t so much as a hubbub inside, more of a low groan from the lone diners mumbling to themselves.

Next door I bought two postcards for $2 each plus tax. The shop was empty except for a corpse-like young girl with a blonde bob and grey complexion behind the counter. She spoke with a slurred monotone. One of the postcards commemorated the “Trail of Tears” which the townsfolk of Pawhuska seemed to be reliving to this day.

Perhaps the thing that had really upset the Native Americans was not being uprooted from their homelands and relocated far away, but the realization that they were going to be made to live in Oklahoma.

I drove south from Pawhuska to a pretty little village called Hominy and then headed east. My illusions about the state had been far from shattered and I wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible.

I was listening again to one of the limper radio stations, when they announced the answer to that afternoon’s “Nearly impossible brain twister”.  I hadn’t been tuned in when they set the conundrum, but the answer was that William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies. Perhaps it was nearly impossible if you happened not to know the book, but it struck me that it was extremely possible if you happened to have read it. It might have been more accurately called the “Quite difficult trivia question”.

As a final roll of the dice, I decided that I had just enough hair to justify stopping at a barber’s in the hope of having a chat. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any at all in the whole of northwest Oklahoma. The last town before Arkansas was Jay and so I had a thorough search. I was just about to give up and move on when finally I spotted one. The blinds were down and a sign on the door said that hours of business were 8.00 to 5.00. Appointments not needed. I glanced at my watch. It was 5.04.

The next stop looked like it would be Bentonville in Arkansas, and so I was surprised when I saw a sign showing that a place called Grove was only five miles away. I checked my map to find that I had somehow got on the road going north. I span around and returned to Jay. At the main crossroads in town, I took a left figuring that if I were coming from the north that this must take me east. I ended up in some residential back street.

I was becoming more than a little exasperated as I high-revved a three point turn. I went back to the crossroads and went straight across, the only option that I had yet to try. That led nowhere also. I was now finding it all extremely infuriating. Perhaps there was some sort of Oklahoman conspiracy to prevent hapless visitors from ever escaping.

I roared back to town and pursued the residential street that I had previously tried. I thought that it might lead somewhere if I followed it out of town. It soon became clear that this wasn’t going to happen.

I saw a man walking down the street with perfectly coiffured hair. He’d obviously made it to the barber’s in time. I skidded to a halt, wound down my window and demanded through gritted teeth to be told how to get to Arkansas.

“You wanna go to Gravette?”

“If that’s in Arkansas, yes.”

“Hey. You’re on the wrong road here buddy.”

I’d figured that much out already. For the first time on the trip I was having difficulty controlling my temper in public. My dudgeon was not being lowered by his general insouciance.

I listened as he hummed and ha-ed and gathered that I had to take a nearby side road back to the main highway and turn right when I reached the get and go. I assumed that this was an Oklahoman term for crossroads.

With a “Yes thank you. Thank you”, I sped off leaving him still mumbling on the sidewalk. Given that I was probably the first European he had ever met, it probably didn’t do much to encourage him to make plans for any foreign trips in the near future. Then again, he probably assumed that I was from South Carolina and was just off to shoot someone in Arkansas.

Soon I was back on the highway and at the same point approaching Jay that I had been almost an hour previously. I arrived at the accursed crossroads and looked right. It led back to the street that I’d just had the conversation in. I went straight across and past the barber’s shop. It was now 6.15 and I was resigned to going to Grove and trying to get over to Arkansas via Missouri.

Fifty yards later I saw a gas station called Get ‘n’ Go and opposite it was a small side turn perpendicular to the highway with no sign. I disappeared into the concealed road and picked my way down a tree-lined lane. Two hundred yards later, a sign informed me that I was headed for Gravette AR.

Halley bloody lulleya. The most exultant feeling about Oklahoma came a couple of miles later when I left the state and entered Arkansas.

The escape had been the culmination of an unsatisfying visit to the only place to which I had no inclination ever to return. I felt like getting out of my car and flagging down any oncoming traffic to warn them that if they went much further that they would end up in the accursed Sooner state.

It was late and starting to get dark. I had no booking for the night and no numbers to try, but I was aiming for a place called Eureka Springs. The main road was overrun on both sides with motels and B&Bs of all shapes and sizes, and all decked out with colored fairy lights. A mile along the drag a turning off the highway led into town.

It was a curious place, built on the side of a couple of hills and maintained the festive atmosphere throughout. I found a hotel at the far end of the main street. The girl on reception looked like she was about three minutes away from literally dying of boredom. She was probably contemplating her next vacation in Oklahoma.

I asked about a room and was quoted $85. I winced and it provoked a remarkable reaction. She asked me if I didn’t really want to pay that much. When I nodded she said that I could have the room for $59 then. Congratulating myself on my astonishing negotiation skills, I accepted.

The receptionist recommended going out to The Chelsea, which was where the locals went to drink and wasn’t a tourist bar. Inside it was quiet, even for a Wednesday evening. Three or four people were gaggling at the bar but all the tables were empty. I ordered a pint of Bass and sat there ear-wigging.

The main topic of conversation concerned what music the barman should put on next. One guy who seemed slightly the worse for wear was lobbying for Led Zeppelin much to the disdain of the rest of the gang.  I didn’t want to get involved but almost got sucked in when he turned to me and asked how my Bass was.

I told him it was fine, and he replied with an “Mmm Bass” like a slightly obtuse version of Homer Simpson. He was wearing shorts and a fishing hat under which his moustachioed face grinned inanely. He introduced himself as Hat, which was fractionally better than Shorts or Moustache I suppose. I toyed with giving my name as Shirt but ended up telling the truth.

The usual conversation followed about my trip, but for once I needed to do most of the talking. He listened intently as he tried not to fall off his bar stool and asked me whether I’d been to Iowa yet.  He said that the only place worth going in Iowa was Iowa City, that is if I wanted chicks and drugs.

The subject turned to September 11th when I asked if it was normal for the bar to be that empty. Hat said that people were staying at home and I made the mistake of expressing surprise. This roused him momentarily and he banged his fist on the counter and hollered “People are fucking depressed, man” before slipping back into drooling stupor.

I found my way through town to another pub. A couple near the bar were finishing off their dinner. When they heard me speak they leant over and asked where I was from.

They were keen to know what the non-American world thought about September 11th, and whether to believe the media hype suggesting universal sympathy. I must have said something right because they bought me a drink. They didn’t come from Eureka Springs but had moved here because it was the “best city in the whole of the USA.” Strong recommendation indeed.

They claimed that there was no place like it anywhere else. Without batting an eyelid, they reassured me that the Crescent Hotel on the hill “definitely had at least five ghosts”.

The man told me that he’d run twelve different businesses in his life, “only two of which had failed”. They now ran a silversmith shop on the main street. He’d gone into jewellery because he was a “natural magpie”. He asked if I knew what that meant, and then explained to me about liking shiny things even after I’d said that I did.

He’d been to NYC to study gemology, which he pointed out was the “study of gems” in case I hadn’t guessed. They were about to leave and that gave me the excuse to walk out with them. I was keen to go to a club that was opposite the hotel. I felt as if I hadn’t spent time with anyone under forty for about three years. I don’t usually like young people’s places, but this place promised karaoke, so I kind of assumed it wouldn’t be too frenetic.

It was down in the basement and you could hear the noise from the street. It looked less of a karaoke night and more like a standard concert. A guy on the stage was crooning to a mainly female crowd that was bobbing up and down screaming. Some were holding their heads and shaking like prepubescents at an Osmonds’ concert.

Next up were three girls who sang a number together. The crowd got once more to its feet, but this time organized itself into formation for line dancing. The full barn dance ritual followed, with partners being taken in hand and swung around with dozy does and the whole works. It might not have been so strange if the song being sung wasn’t Madonna’s Get into the Groove.

I was watching from the sanctity of the bar. A girl from the dance floor who had come to the bar asked me why I wasn’t dancing. It may not have actually been an invitation, but it was enough to throw me into a blind panic.

Everyone from medical practitioners to well-meaning friends has strongly advised me never to dance in public again. Perhaps I’d had too much to drink but I had to think quickly, and blurted out something about dancing being like picking your nose or wiping your backside. They could all be great fun until you realize that somebody’s watching you.

I thought I was just being lightly conversational but her grimace suggested she hadn’t taken kindly to my rebuff. She left looking decidedly perplexed and returned to her friends on the other side of the room. When I saw her talking to some lads at a table and pointing angrily over at me, I figured that it was perhaps time to leave. I was in no mood to be challenged to a duel for using filthy language in front of Billie-Lynn-Sue or whatever her name was.

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September 18, 2011

Day 27. CO/KS: canyons, cow farts, camels and ostriches

I came down in the morning to find the lobby as devoid of life as ever. In the raised area at the back, where Pavel had indicated breakfast would be served, some tables with crumbs on looked like they’d not be wiped for a couple of days. There was a toaster and one opened packet of bagels with three left. I went through to the kitchen and found a jug of tepid coffee.

Pavel was talking on the telephone behind the reception desk. I asked him to show me on my map the best way to get back to US 50. I was hoping that my information about the unmade road might be wrong and that I wouldn’t have to return via Florissant. He told me that he had a much better map and produced one that was identical to mine from behind the desk.

He pointed to the squiggle that led due south to the main highway and told me to take the right fork as I was leaving town. It was a “good road” and “the best way to reach the highway 50”. That was all that our “good conversation over breakfast” amounted to and soon another phone call took his attention away.

The right fork to which he’d referred was easy to find and soon I was on my way down a very pleasant mountain road. About five miles out of town the tarmac stopped and I was on to mud and sand. A roadside sign warned vehicles over 25’ to go no further. Quite where such a vehicle would be able to turn around even at that point in the road was far from clear.

The road ahead was narrow and winding with no further points at which it would have been possible even for a car to turn around. It remained unmade for the next 31 miles and provided a hair-raising drive. It ran the length of a small ravine, thankfully most of it along the canyon floor. Where it rose sharply to the ridge, I found myself driving along an unguarded precipice with nothing but gravity between me and a 200 feet fall.

The gradients of Colorado had tested the tiring engine on my Mazda to the limit. Now it was the turn of the suspension to be put through its paces. There were more potholes than road on this stretch. It took almost two hours to complete the journey and I joined the main road at just after ten. Never before had tarmac felt so luxurious. Beware Yugoslavs bearing road directions.

I still hadn’t procured a souvenir from Colorado and I realized that I was running out of options. While passing through Fowler, I noticed an antique shop down a side street and doubled back around the block. I had learnt that items in American antique shops often amounted to no more than second hand curios and junk.

An old man was sat outside and looked surprised when I got out of the car to go into the shop. He asked if he could help and apologized. He explained that he hadn’t expected me to come into his shop. I told him that I hadn’t expected to either and described what sort of a thing I was after.

He suggested that I look at some shelves sporting an assortment of garage glassware, while he went to have a look out back. He returned after a few minutes brandishing an old chipped tankard emblazoned with Colorado State University and its crest. It was about the best I was going to do.

He asked me if I was with the military because it would entitle me to a discount. I told him I wasn’t. The price was $2.50 and I’d probably be his only customer that day as it was.

I’d come to the conclusion that too much serious radio wasn’t proving good for my mental health, and so tuned in to something a touch lighter. It played a variety of easy listening music, interspersed with phone-ins and the occasional competition. I listened intently as some guy managed to win for himself two cinema tickets to see Pulp Fiction this Saturday. The movie had been on general release for seven years.

He was thrilled at the prize, especially as he was getting married that day and it would provide the perfect ending to the special occasion.

For the last hundred odd miles, Colorado failed to resemble anything like the state that had so struck me when I had entered at the Four Corners. The mountains disappeared to be replaced by flat featureless plains that then stretched for another thousand miles before you hit the Mississippi. The only vaguely entertaining thought to be had was that I was now only 24 hours from Tulsa.

By the time I reached Syracuse, 16 miles into Kansas, I needed to fill up, so I pulled into a gas station. I ended up buying about five dollars more fuel than I needed to when the cut-off failed to work and gas started spewing out all over the forecourt as I was trying to dislodge bugs from my windscreen.

The eccentricity guidebook told about a B&B situated on an “exotic animal” farm near a town called Nickerson, which sounded promising. I called the place to find out if it actually existed and whether it had a room. Amazingly the answer to both questions was yes, and so I made a reservation and set off for Dodge City, which I figured had to be a good for souvenirs.

Kansas looked incredibly dull on the map and I was sorry to find out that it wasn’t much better in the actual experience. Fields, fields and more fields, without even a hedgerow in sight. Somewhere over the rainbow to my right was the Wizard of Oz museum, but that amounted to the only tourist sight for over a hundred miles around.

And the stink was incredible. It was what my dad used to refer euphemistically to as “the smell of the country”. Most people just call it shit.

The boredom that had set in as I’d hit the plains back in Colorado was now festering, making each minute seem like an hour. I kept looking at the clock, finding it hard to believe that only ten minutes had passed since I had last checked. A sign alerted me to an approaching a “Scenic View” where I could “stop and rest”.

At last, some small respite of interest. Eagerly I pulled off the road and parked near the picnic benches. I hurried up the path to the viewing point. To the horizon stretched a brown muddy field and a sea of cows. In the foreground was a meat processing plant.

I was tempted to visit Garden City. According to some posters, it had the largest free swimming pool in the world. Not only that, it also had rhinos and elephants and giraffes, although it wasn’t specified whether they were in the pool or elsewhere.

If only I had had the time, but sadly it was three in the afternoon and I had between four and five hours on the road still to go. As I drew near to the city spur, the smell of poop went off the top of the scale and my mind was finally made up.

To compensate for the absence of anything closely related to scenery, the promise of further superlatives continued to entertain. Somewhere out there in this agrarian tundra could be found the World’s Largest Hand Dug Well. What will they think of next?

I tried to keep myself amused by smoking more cigarettes, but decided that too much nasal danger was to be had even opening the car window an inch. I was also somewhat wary of holding a lit object in such a methane rich atmosphere. It was easy to speculate as to why the paint was peeling off the buildings in Cimarron.

Dodge City proved to be like any modern American city and nothing like the name conjured up. Opposite a huge McDonald’s was the Historic Front Street, home to the Boot Hill Museum. An old western town had been recreated at the site and was very reminiscent of Tombstone AZ, only more sanitized.

I was aware that the Earp brothers had come from Dodge City but it seemed strange to commemorate a cemetery from another state that was situated almost a thousand miles away. Inside were plenty of souvenirs and I was spoilt for choice.

I also picked up a postcard with the legend “Kansas Tornado” on it and a photograph of the same. Even allowing for the probability that tornadoes were the most interesting thing to happen in Kansas, it still seemed slightly bizarre. I found myself wondering whether you could get San Francisco Earthquake postcards, or how long it would be before someone brought out one from New York showing the Twin Towers collapsing.

The road all the way from Dodge City to Hutchinson was marked on my map as a scenic route, which just went to show that everything was relative. For a state that considered a field of cows an attraction then I guess it might have been, but the most engaging thing I found was that the telegraph poles either side of the highway weren’t the same height.

Towns in this part of Kansas seemed to amount to little more than a huge grain silo, a gas station and an agricultural supplies store. There was the occasional post office or hotel or saloon, but very little else. They certainly weren’t residential hubs in any significant sense of the word. Given the strictly utilitarian nature of these settlements, perhaps somebody might have thought of erecting a big air freshener in each of them, and done us all a favor.

The road from Hutchinson brought me in past Hedrick’s B&B. A field of ostriches next to a field of camels suggested that I’d arrived.

It was unusual to say the least. At the end of the drive was a big house and next to it the B&B, which had been made to look like the frontage to a Wild West street. It showed a bank, a livery stable and a firehouse. All sorts of animals were mixed in with one another in the same pens, but they were settling down for the night. My headlights caught some zebras and giraffes as I parked, and a couple of cats ran out to greet me.

Inside was another warm welcome. There was a pool table and lounge area where coffee and cold drinks were available 24-hours a day. I was staying in the camel room, which was decked out thematically as all the rooms were. This one looked like something out of Cleopatra’s barge. Everything was deep reds and greens and laced with gold brocade. A door led out onto the communal balcony. I was given a key but I wasn’t sure why. Neither of the doors had locks.

I went into town to find something proper to eat. The woman at Hedrick’s had recommended going to the Sunshine Café. Nickerson had one junction and two streets and it soon became clear that I didn’t need a recommendation. The Sunshine Café was the only option in town. It was empty and they were doing that cashing up and sweeping the floor thing that suggested they were about to close.

The waitress looked about fourteen and was very timid. After I’d finished eating, she came up and asked apologetically whether I was from Nickerson. When I said I wasn’t, she looked almost relieved. My accent had clearly been bothering her.

I explained where I was from and what I was doing. When I mentioned that I’d been staying near Colorado Springs the night before, her eyes lit up and she said that she used to live there. She had only moved to Nickerson the previous week to look after her mother, who was ailing. She worked at Hedrick’s during the day and the café in the evenings. It seemed like a tough life for a girl that young to be away from her friends and supporting a sick mother by doing two jobs that probably paid her pennies between them.

Back at Hedrick’s I took my beer and cigarettes on to the balcony and soaked in the atmosphere. Every few moments another strange noise would come from an animal in some quarter. Against the lights from the street, I could see the silhouettes of the ostriches standing stock-still and occasionally swivelling their heads.

Down in the yard, the fatter of the cats chased a mouse and caught it.  It was the most relaxing place that I’d spent the night so far. Everything about it was delicious. It didn’t even smell that much of manure.

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September 17, 2011

Day 26. UT/CO: fire, old timers, casinos, vomit

Thankfully the grunts and moans from next door had stopped by the time I took to the porch for my early morning cigarette, but they were soon superseded by something even more intrusive and disturbing.

The silence was broken by a whirring klaxon, of the sort that I had only ever heard before on WWII films during air raids. My initial reaction was to worry that it had something to do with “America’s New War”.

My fears were soon abated by some action that looked like a color version of a Charlie Chaplin film. An old man, dressed in shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, came running as fast as he could – his legs were going like the clappers but he was only moving about the speed that I walk – across the car park.

He scurried over to a yellow truck on the far side of the lot opposite where I was smoking and proceeded to pull hoses, Wellington boots, and all sorts of other stuff out of the cab. He then took his sandals off and struggled to pull a pair of big rubber trousers over his shorts. It looked like something off the Generation Game. Then he yanked a pair of wellies on and tore off his jumper. On the back of his T-shirt, it read “San Juan County Fire Fighters”.

After he’d collected up most of the stuff and thrown it into the cab he roared off in the truck, which turned out to be a fire engine. He got to the road and had to reverse back. He’d left some hoses on the bonnet of one of the cars near to where he’d got changed. When I went in for breakfast I learned from the woman on reception that there had been a storm in the night and a bolt of lightning had hit an oil terminal near to Aneth.

The fire had been spotted by some kids on a passing school bus that morning, and was still raging. All fire hands in the county had been called to the scene. She explained carefully to me that the way they had to deal with the situation was to smother the flames with foam. You could have blown me down with a feather.

I had to drive through Aneth on my way out to Colorado, but I couldn’t see anything by the time I got there. Ten miles down the road I was entering Colorado, and five after that I was technically back in New Mexico. I didn’t take this as breaking my re-entering a state rule as it was the only way to visit the Four Corners Monument. It’s the one place in America where four different states meet, but to get there you had to approach from either Arizona or Colorado and the entrance itself was in New Mexico. There was a physical spot where the intersection was adjudged to be located and it was positioned on a small dais next to which was a raised pulpit for taking photos.

I did all the usual stuff. I put my hand and then my backside on the spot, just to make sure that my body had been in all four states at one time. I took several pictures and then I walked around the dais through all four states. I was parked in New Mexico but there were market stalls in Utah and Arizona.

It was still early on and the traders from the Ute Reservation were only just setting up shop, but there were some interesting hand-made knick-knacks to look at. I would have liked to buy one of the bows and some of the flint-tipped arrows, but I expected that in the current climate I might have had difficulty persuading security to let me on the aeroplane home with them.

It transpired that George W was now showing an 84% approval rating in the polls, the fourth highest score ever behind FDR, Harry Truman and his father. The three higher scores had all been achieved at times of military conflict. Everyone had happily forgotten that he’d spent 42% of the first six months of his Presidency on vacation.

The road took me into Colorado proper and the deep red barren wilderness gave way to the greens, yellows and reds of the mountains in late summer bloom. I followed the highway to Cortez, a town clearly showing signs of Native American influence and reverence for whomever it was who’d invented the pedestrian crossing.

A sign in a gas station forecourt suggested that Pepsi was stepping up the pressure in its battle with Coke. It appeared to have trademarked the line “The joy of cola”. Eh? Maybe they’d run a competition to come up with the most shit slogan imaginable and this had been the winner. I’m no copywriter but even I thought I could beat that. How about “It’s fizzy and tastes quite nice” or “Pepsi. So good I ate the can”? It was hard to believe some people made a living doing that stuff.

By the time I reached Ouray, it had started to rain. I wandered up and down the street and most places were shut. A sign in one window read “Closed for reflection. Hope to open later this week.” I needed to change some Travellers’ Checks and so I went to the Citizens’ State Bank, only to find it teeming with old people.

They were gathered round a table by the tills, drinking tea and eating cake. I stood at the back, assuming that at least some of them must have been waiting to be served (although they formed more of a huddle than a queue), and dreading the prospect of tea drinking and cake eating as a compulsory preliminary to doing business.

It soon became clear that none of them were there for anything other than what they could put in their mouths, and so I approached the till. The woman seemed quite taken aback that someone wanted to carry out a banking transaction. Despite the fact that I was clearly disconcerted, the woman didn’t throw any light on what was going on. Perhaps it was just part of their standard pensioner customer service programme.

It was a shame not to have met anyone who was up for a chat. In the new atmosphere that pervaded since September 11th, conversations had come more easily. Everyone had discovered a renewed sense of common cause, a communion that even strangers were invited to join in. The participation of outsiders could give affirmation to the sound reasoning at the foundation of the emotional turmoil that was being felt. I had just been unlucky to have hit Ouray on Citizens’ Cake Morning.

There was little to do or see on the road apart from drinking in the mountain scenery. A combination of the temperature at those altitudes and the continuing rain meant that I wasn’t keen to stop and get out of the car much.

The discussion on the radio turned to the subject of US culpability. The point being made was that arguably since 1948, and certainly since 1967, the US had been running the Middle East after the fashion of a colony, and therefore had provoked the recent attacks from a subjugated sovereign people who just wanted to assert their autonomy. It ran against most of what I had heard to date, but at least that argument was being considered.

The worst time to arrive in an American provincial town by yourself is 5.30 pm. It’s the dead hour when all the shops have closed and nothing has yet opened for the evening. I pulled into Salida at 5.29 pm. My guidebook had made it sound idyllic: turn-of-the-century, snow-capped mountains, crystal-clear streams, wildflower-covered slopes, bright yellow aspens etc but it seemed nowhere near that Elysian.

It wasn’t helped by the drizzle, but it reminded me of Wednesday afternoons where I grew up, when everything shut early. I went to recce some of the B&Bs suggested in the book. One of them didn’t look like it was still in business and the only other one I could find looked desperate. From the street I could see through the large plate glass window into the lounge where five or six old people were staring gormlessly into space. It appeared to be a hospice for the terminally ill.

I took a northern loop up via Johnson Village. I fancied visiting Cripple Creek, supposedly a real Wild West mining town, but it involved a gamble. It was 18 miles off the main highway and, literally, on the road to nowhere. Daringly, I steeled myself and turned right at Florissant. The road was narrow, poorly maintained and there was no light from anywhere apart from the several oncoming vehicles that I met along the way. It was very heavy going and, by the time I got towards the end of it I was far from keen to attempt a return journey that night.

Every hotel in town appeared to be a casino. It was like Las Vegas without the style. The first two places I tried were just casinos, despite the word “hotel” above their entrances. In the third place, I asked one of the punters and was directed to the reception at the back where I learned that they had a room for $110. I asked if there were any cheaper options in town and was directed over the road.

This place at least had a separate entrance at the side of the casino. I pressed the bell marked “hotel” and a woman’s voice came over the speaker and told me to hold on. After a couple of minutes, she opened the door wearing a dressing gown and slippers. She said she had a room for $54, but that she “didn’t take no credit cards”. I asked if she took Travellers’ Checks. No. Cash only. I thanked her and went on my way.

My one last hope was the nearby town of Victor. I knew nothing of the place, apart from the fact that its only onward connection to civilization was down an unpaved mountain road that was treacherous in daytime let alone after dark. It was effectively a town at the end of a 25-mile dead end road.

No lights could be seen in the windows of any of the buildings in the street that I first drove up. I didn’t take this as a good sign and so I was very relieved to see an arrow with the word “hotel” at the fourth corner. The place it referred to was imaginatively called the Victor Hotel, and looked enormous. It was beyond belief that it could ever be full in a town like this. The annual total of visitors probably struggled to get in to double figures.

Inside there was little sign of life. I saw one man who asked me what I wanted and when I told him I needed a room, scurried up the stairs in panic. Some minutes later, I heard a gruff voice coming down the corridor. He seemed angry about something and greeted me brusquely. He was a large man, but not fat in the American sense. His face was round with a small moustache and he was bald on top.

As soon as I spoke, he asked me what part of England I was from. His accent was non-American and when I asked him the same question, he said he came originally from Yugoslavia. He asked me whether I liked soccer. I said that I did and he told me that he used to play for Red Star Beograd when he was in the army. He was called Pavel but he didn’t give me his surname, so I had no way of investigating whether he was bullshitting.

He told me that he had lived in America for fifteen years and then returned to Europe. He claimed to have lived and worked in every country in the European Union. He’d returned to the US six years ago and bought this hotel, which seemed an extraordinary thing to have done from a whole number of perspectives.

More than twenty years living in this country had not done much for his spoken English. I asked him whether there was anything in town that would still be open and he reassured me that there were lots. He suggested that I went to a bar that was just across the road and pointed through the window at it.

As soon as I had been given my room key, he was off again. He called back down the corridor that I was an interesting young man and he looked forward to having a good conversation with me over breakfast the next morning.

My room was on the top floor and was large and breezy. The windows ran almost the entire height of the room, but only had blinds on the lower portion and these were blowing in the draught. I sat on the bed and thought it was going to collapse. It squeaked with every slight movement. I checked under it to find legs that were made of bamboo not much thicker than a pencil. The bathroom was bereft of towels. I had noticed a linen cupboard down the corridor, so I went and fetched my own. There was something very Marie Celeste about this whole deal.

It was time to go and investigate the “lots” going on in town that Pavel had referred to. The bar across the road was appropriately named It’s Some Place Else.

Inside was particularly dingy, with eight or nine locals either playing pool or listening to the jukebox. The barmaid was a stunning beauty and seemed out of place in this joint. I surmised her name was Laura. At the bar were three women, less good looking but all with perfectly manicured painted nails and waist-length hair. A teenager was watching TV by herself. She was the only person in there under the age of thirty.

The loud music didn’t help any prospective conversation, but I was occasionally able to earwig the women to my left. They weren’t saying much, but I managed to catch Laura talking about some people who had come down from Denver and had been surprised to find out that they did have schools in Victor. Not much love was lost for these city slickers.

At the end of the bar was the kitchen area, which looked more suited for changing the oil of a car than for preparing food for human consumption. Laura chopped up an onion, dropped half of it on the floor and then threw it in the pot regardless. No doubt she had a pair of redneck underpants through which to strain it before serving. A scrap of grubby paper was taped to a pillar by the bar, optimistically proclaiming “Goulash and a roll. $4.95 while it lasts”.

The vat into which the soiled ingredients kept on getting chucked was more like a cauldron, and probably could have fed the 5000. In the three hours that I was in the bar, I didn’t see anyone eat a mouthful of food, but perhaps they were expecting a rush after midnight. I was nowhere near hungry enough to order anything myself.

I was running low on cigarettes and asked Laura if they sold them. She apologized that they only had GPC. I said that I’d try a pack. They were incredible. Forget nicotine patches or hypnotherapy, anyone wanting to give up smoking should try a couple of these. On the first drag you can feel your temples pulsate. On the second, your skull and thoracic cavity feel as if they’ve been filled with a thick, acidic soup. And less than sixty seconds later you are left with an overwhelming nausea that dizzies you into a stupor. I’ve never known anything like it, and had to put the cigarette out after those first couple of puffs.

One of the pool players came over to put his arm round his girl and squelched her left bosom. He was an odd-looking character who didn’t subscribe to the usual American obsession with dental health. Either that, or he was practising early for Hallowe’en. This guy didn’t just have English teeth, he had Greek teeth.

He’d just put a record on the jukebox and wanted to dance. He’d had a few beers and was swaying, and the girls were laughing at him. When That’s Amore came on the jukebox, he staggered over and put his arm around me and asked if I’d seen the film Moonstruck.

I nodded apprehensively and he went over to put another track on. I don’t know if it was from the film also, but I couldn’t remember ever hearing it before. He came over to me and asked me if I’d sing along with him. I had to confess that I didn’t know the words.

Just as I was leaving, three or four guys had turned up to swell the numbers. Each was wearing an oversized Stetson. As I got up from my stool, I could hear them begin a conversation about the Middle East. They were musing about the inevitable victory and what it would be like “owning a country” on the other side of the world.

Back in the hotel, the juddering windows and the squeaking bedstead ensured that I was still awake some time later when everyone finally left the bar. The sounds of retching suggested that, even in Victor, at least one person had had a very good night.

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September 16, 2011

Day 25. UT: salt lake, arches, native arts, shaggers

My hotel didn’t seem like the kind of place that many revellers would stay in, and the breakfast room was empty when I got there. The woman who ran the hotel emerged from the kitchen and starting jabbering away about nobody being up yet.

Her name was Delphine and she had moved from Canada to Park City with her husband some years back “because of the Mormon Church”. I braced myself for the inevitable onslaught of persuasive tales of buried tablets and magic specs, but it never came. The closest to proselytising that she came was to recommend enthusiastically that I go and see the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

It was little more than a half hour drive from Park City, and would also mean that I could go and see the Salt Lake itself. The Tabernacle was easy to find, but not as striking as I’d expected. It seemed almost hidden behind the high perimeter walls. I’d also imagined hoards of worshippers swarming around, but there were comparatively few people. Those going in and out wore the recognizable clean-cut Mormon look, an old fashioned Sunday best of sober suits and sensible shoes.

I was reminded of a point made on the radio back in Delaware during the debate on Tom Green. Someone rang in to say that it annoyed him when folks had a go at Mormons, not because he agreed with their religion but at least they tried to live good lives. They didn’t smoke or drink, they followed the Ten Commandments, and a solid work ethic lay at the centre of their lives.

Utah as a territory was so inhospitable that none of the early pioneers had thought that it could ever be settled successfully. This didn’t put off Brigham Young and his cohorts when they arrived from Illinois, and they set to work building the infrastructure of irrigation projects that made farming possible. Later generations exploited the huge mineral wealth of the area, and mining soon became a major business. It wasn’t without reason that the state symbol was a beehive to denote collective industry.

The drive out to the Lake took me in the direction of the airport, and I was taken aback to see an aeroplane in the sky. It was the first one that I had seen in the five days since the attack.

In the time that it took for me to reach the airport, I saw seven planes take off in quick succession. I wasn’t overjoyed to find that the Interstate ran immediately under the early flight path of these ascending jets, and I quickened my speed accordingly. In my rush, I passed a Transit Van with red, white and blue letters spelling out a chilling message in both rear windows: “Hunt them now”.

The Great Salt Lake is the largest inland body of water in the western hemisphere. Its surface area fluctuates, but at its height in the late 19th Century it occupied over 2,400 square miles (or about half a Northern Ireland). Whatever its size nowadays, it remained very big. Standing at its edge was like looking out to sea. The water went to the horizon and beyond.

It wasn’t just the “Great” bit that was accurate in its name. It fully justified the association with salt. I had no idea of the composition of the water, but the saline smell was overwhelming and waves lapped at a salt encrusted shoreline stretching back yards across the beach.

I tuned in to a program called the Travel Show, where people were phoning in looking for advice on how to cancel vacations that had already been paid for. Each claimed to have a special reason for wanting a refund, but every time the advice was the same. The panellists first advised callers to go ahead with their trips and that everything was now OK. When everyone responded to this advice by becoming hysterical, they were then told to take it up with the operator concerned but that no tour operator or airline was obliged to give any money back.

The hysteria was tinged with anger. One caller explained that she was “really mad with that pilot training school in Florida” for teaching those terrorists how to fly commercial airliners. She didn’t understand why they had done it. She appeared to think that the school should have known that they were going to hijack some jets and fly them into the World Trade Center.

My original plan was to get to Moab for lunch, but that was looking ambitious after the Salt Lake diversion. By the time I reached Provo, it was eleven and my anticipated lunch stop was still 200 miles away. I needed to rethink the agenda, but my route didn’t leave much choice. I was about to join US 6, a road not inundated with centers of population.

A radio commercial attracted my attention, offering a potential solution to one of my other problems. It was for the “million dollar vocabulary”, with the 55 key words that were crucial to success and another 600 new ones that were guaranteed to impress and influence people. It was available risk free on trial for seven days, though they didn’t explain quite how you were supposed to give your newfound vocabulary back after that time when you found out that it was all a load of mephitic bovine ordure.

The landscape was now becoming very unwholesome. This wasn’t just inhospitable desert, it was like I’d imagine the surface of Mars to be. It was all a deep browny-red, and the rock formations were weird and wonderful. It was awe-inspiring for me, but at least I could read about it and know that it was supposed to be like this. My mind went back to the early pioneers encountering this on slow-moving wagon trains. It wouldn’t take much for you to believe that you’d come to the end of the earth.

The terrain in Utah was generally alien, but the Arches National Park was almost unreal. The intermittent strata of Entrada and Navajo Sandstones made you feel as if you were walking across a huge cake, and there were over 2000 arches to marvel at ranging from 3 to 306 feet across. I picked up a leaflet, which told of the history of the place and made reference to a saltbed deposited across the Colorado Plateau some 300 million years ago.

It was difficult to square this with the fact that over half the adult population of the USA believe that the world was made within the last 10,000 years, a proportion that presumably rose here in creationist Utah. Perhaps in deference to such sensibilities, the leaflet concluded with “This is the geological story of the Arches – probably. The evidence is largely circumstantial.”

An overnight possibility presented itself as I drove through Moab. A sign inviting me to stay at the Apache Lodge “where John Wayne stayed the night” shouted at me from across the road. By the look of the establishment, I couldn’t imagine that the Duke had had many options on that particular night. I’d already booked a room further down the road in Bluff and didn’t feel overwhelmed by any temptation to ring up and cancel it.

The wind was blowing a gale, with tumbleweed bouncing wildly across the road from time to time. It didn’t saunter in that lackadaisical fashion familiar from the westerns. This stuff rocketed, as if just despatched from the serving racquet of Pete Sampras. The car felt unstable enough in the wind, but I almost took it off the road myself when I heard a track come on the radio with the refrain “All she gotta do is just give me a wink”. To the English ear, the country lilt of the final word gave the song a rather shocking connotation.

There were numerous other geological wonders on the road south through Monticello and Blanding, but I was chasing my dinner. As I passed the sign saying that I had arrived in Bluff, a towering canyon stretched up on both sides of the road. I reached a T-junction and puzzled whether to take a left or a right. It was pitch black and I could see nothing but dark and shadows in both directions.

I took a chance on right and a mile further on came to some lights. It was a gas station and a small diner. Opposite it, back from the road and hidden by trees was the Recapture Lodge. The motel proprietor suggested I go for something to eat at a place close to the T-junction back where I’d been puzzled.

It was called the Cow Canyon and was run by a Belgian who had married an Native American. The only thing was that there was no menu. You got what the Belgian felt like cooking that evening. I was warned that it would take some finding as it was their house and didn’t look much like a restaurant from the outside. He showed me a photograph of the establishment, which I tried to memorize.

It did take a while to find the place in that dark. It might have been more helpful if the guy had just told me that it was on the corner of the junction with UT 162 off to Montezuma Creek. I went in to the front room where a teenage Indian girl sullenly greeted me. The room was decked out with native craftwork, and she thought I’d come to buy a rug.

Disappointed by my eating intentions, she showed me through to a conservatory at the back where there was one other table of diners. It was some sort of enchilada that evening and it was very fine. As well as only having the choice of one dish, the promise of “a selection of imported and domestic beers available” actually amounted to a choice of bottled Bass ale imported from England, or water.

Back at Recapture Lodge, I sat out on the porch to enjoy the rest of a pleasant and still evening. My peace was shattered when I came back out from the bathroom at one point to find that the couple next door were watching TV loudly and had opened their window. The sounds emanating from the window suggested that they weren’t just watching TV. If that was all they were doing then they seemed to be deriving a disproportionate amount of pleasure from the experience.

In some ways it was the perfect culmination to my Sunday in Utah, the day on my schedule that I had most been dreading and which had turned out to be nothing like I had expected. I went inside to see what might be on TV myself, but couldn’t get the hang of the ancient contraption masquerading as a set. I twiddled the dials until I finally got a picture and then couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing off. The fuzz and hiss of poor reception became my lullaby for the evening as I slipped off to the land of Nod.

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September 15, 2011

Day 24. WY/UT: Armageddon, cigarettes, teasing barmaids, exposed underwear

There was no way that I’d have found my way back to civilization by myself, so I followed John’s car when he left for work. I gratefully gasped in my first cigarette for over 14 hours, for some reason being careful to hold it below the level of the windscreen so that John didn’t see it and disapprove of me.

Suddenly he lurched into a lay-by and jumped out of the car. He came running back to me and said we were about to pass a spot where there had been a forest fire and that he’d flash his hazards and I should look left. That would be nice, I coughed, blowing smoke into his face.

The hazards flashed at the appropriate time and I saw the charred line along the mountainside where the fire had reached. Five minutes later, at some lights, John’s door opened and he stuck his turned-around head out. I wound down my window in time to hear him shout “Osprey” at me. I looked in the sky and couldn’t see a thing. Perhaps it was some sort of curious Masonic farewell greeting or something, because at the next turning he disappeared and I was on my own.

The discussion on the radio was about how long it was going to be until even affectionate jokes could be made at the expense of New York City again. Someone said that the city needed that, and America needed NYC to be like that. It was like a loud-mouthed and boisterous uncle or brother-in-law who had been laid low. However much he got on your nerves, there was a yearning to see him bounce back to being his former bumptious self. It was certainly preferable to him remaining the shadow of the former person that you once knew.

As it was, nobody was making any jokes. It seemed that everyone was trying to leave the city instead. One guy said that if he owned a car then he would be gone. It was only the difficulty of hiring a vehicle or getting hold of a train ticket that had kept him in the Big Apple.

One of the things that had been bothering me most since the events of September 11th was the tendency of the radio’s religious broadcasters to interpret them as somehow related to biblical apocalypses. This was accompanied by a nigh on smugness of the “I told you so” variety – as if what had happened were the natural and divinely ordained consequence of the moral disorder in the country – and even a slight hint of celebration that the age of the Final Order was at last about to be ushered in.

To my mind, there was indeed a connection between apocalyptic literature and these events but not quite the one that many people seemed to be making. The earliest apocalypses could be dated to the period around the Exile of Israel in the Old Testament era. At the time, there had been two prevailing views of God among the Jews, one that saw Him as the perfectly just and supreme ruler of the whole universe, and another which saw Him in a reciprocal relationship with Israel where He was their (local) God and they were His righteous and chosen people.

Until the crisis of the Exile, the incompatibility of these two views had never been an issue. In the wake of the disaster that the Exile to Babylon proved to be, the notion of righteous suffering to be followed by vindication (as part of a pre-ordained divine plan) emerged to provide some of the answer to the reality of defeat for a people who believed themselves to enjoy sacrosanct favor and protection from the Almighty.

The relevance of all this to the present situation was (it could be argued) that America pre-September 11th had a similar view of its position in the world to the one held by pre-Exilic Israel. The USA viewed itself as pre-eminent in the known world (now even including reaches beyond this planet) and sincerely believed that this was, if not by divine ordination, then at least as a result of being most good and most right. The corollary of this perception of pre-eminence was an expectation of inviolability.

The dissolution of such an illusion required an explanation in the minds of ordinary people, and you could see that happening all over the place. Whether it was President Bush telling the country that it was because the terrorists hated freedom, or Michael Savage blaming it on liberal intellectuals, or zealous preachers talking about adultery and abortion, or just the man in the street deciding that he now hated all people of Asian origin, it was the same thing. It was a clutching at straws to make sense of nasty events in one’s own terms rather than from the perspective of the perpetrators. And that’s precisely what apocalyptic literature did also.

It was only a half-baked theory, but I was soon to have the chance to test it out. Approaching Grover, I pulled off at the Star Valley rest area for a break. I took the opportunity to reorganize the growing chaos in my trunk and, as I was sorting through the mayhem, a woman came up to me and asked if I were a traveler.

Glancing around to see how many permanent residents of the rest area there were, I said that I was but that it was a rather grandiose way of putting it. She laughed and introduced herself as Cindy. Although she was pleasant enough, five minutes of banality later it had reached the stage in the conversation where I just wanted to say goodbye and be left alone.

She obviously sensed this and pulled a copy of The Watchtower and Awake! from her handbag. Having more than a passing familiarity with Jehovah’s Witnesses, I beat her to the punch and said that I was already quite au fait with these publications and didn’t really want them. It didn’t mean to be as rude as it probably sounded, but I pointed out that I had quite enough junk in my car as it was.

Without breaking her smile, she checked that I was sure, especially in the light of the recent events, which showed that what they had been saying for a long while was now coming true. It was at this point that I felt obliged to outline my particular theory, which I finished off by telling her that I’d been to Armageddon – the Mount of Megiddo – and that it was about the size of two football pitches.

I had no idea what effect my sermon had on her as she remained smiling throughout. Something happened though because at the end of my speech, she downgraded her offer of two magazines for one much smaller leaflet entitled Life in a Peaceful New World. It seemed almost ironic that on the day when I was steeling myself to enter the Mormon state of Utah that I got nabbed unawares by a Jehovah’s Witness. Still, it had given me the chance to practice reciting my piece for when the inevitable missionary assaults came my way over the next day or two.

What had the promise of an intelligent discussion was taking place on the radio. A calm voice seemed at last to be putting things into proper perspective: “The problem here is not with Islam, or Arabs or people of color. This is not a war on Islam. It is not even a war on terrorism. It’s a war on fanaticism.” I found myself nodding at the perspicacity. The same voice continued: “And the sooner that people realize that all fanaticism that is not founded in Holy Scripture is wrong, the better.” Cut to furrowing of brow and shaking of head in disbelief.

My route was taking me dangerously close to the Idaho state line, but my map clearly showed that WY 89 cut south to US 30 before we got there. I passed a sign saying “Welcome to Idaho”, and then something about potatoes. I was horrified, but it was at that point that I realized that I was going to attempt to complete the trip. I was back to being bothered about petty ephemera like not re-entering the same state twice. It took me less than 3 miles and five minutes to be back in Wyoming, and for that entire time I only looked east so as to see as little as possible of my unplanned visit.

John had suggested stopping in Kemmerer, because it was where the first ever J C Penney store could be found. Indeed it was one of the first things that I saw as I pulled into town. There was a place called As You Like It opposite with tables outside, at one of which a bloke was sat reading a paper and smoking a cigarette.

I got out of the car and went to have a look to check that it was a café. I asked the smoker if it was open and whether they were serving lunch. He smiled and said that yes he was, and then added that he’d not expected that accent when he’d seen the Carolina plates.

Over soup, he introduced himself as Richard and told me that there were three things worth knowing about Kemmerer. The first was the J C Penney thing, the second was that it had the largest working open face coal mine in the US and the third was that it was the fossil fish capital of the world. I told him that I hadn’t known either of these two latter points.

An old man came in and had some soup (it was the only thing on the menu). He started talking about September 11th but said little beyond bemoaning how terrible it all was and how there would be no short, sharp resolution. He reckoned ten years would be a conservative estimate.

Meanwhile, the owner was rummaging around behind the counter and when I went to pay he produced a carrier bag and gave it to me. He told me that it contained a J C Penney mug, a lump of coal and a piece of fossil fish. The cumulative value of these presents may not have been much, but it was more than the four bucks that my lunch had cost and it was one of the sweetest gestures that I had come across so far anywhere.

An important thing to know about Mormons is that they don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. In fact, I don’t think they smoke anything. I figured that I might need to stock up on booze and cigs before I reached Utah, where I was due to endure two nights.

There was still Evanston to  go before I reached the state line, and the size of type on my map suggested that it was a town of some substance. This proved not to be the case, and I drove around looking for an off license but to no avail. I even tried the pharmacy but ended up with nothing but some gift-wrap and sticky tape. It looked like I was going to have to make my three remaining beers and 18 cigarettes last through both Saturday and Sunday night. It promised to be a riot.

Dejected I hit the Interstate and headed west. Five miles over the state line, a huge warehouse loomed up on the opposite side of the road. Red letters on its roof proudly declared “Utah State Liquor Store”. It was impossible to cross over to it, and I wasn’t sure whether this was some sort of concession to visitors like the dollar shops in pre-1989 Eastern Europe. But at least it meant that it was theoretically possible to get a drink in the Mormon state.

I pulled off at a gas station at the Park City exit and filled up. To my overwhelming joy, when I went to pay I found not the usual supermarket but a temple to alcohol and nicotine. Apart from taking payment for gas, all they seemed to sell was booze and smokes. Magic. I bought enough of each to have seen Peter Cook through a fortnight and went happily on my way.

I had no details of anywhere to stay in Park City, so it was good for once to be arriving early enough to catch the Visitors’ Center before it closed. As I got out of the car, I heard and felt a rip in my nether regions. My capacious (by British standards) buttocks had worn through my short-trousers leaving my undergarments visible to any Mormon who happened to be passing.

I wasn’t sure whether kecks-exposure was against Utahn law, but I wasn’t prepared to take the chance. I hurriedly grabbed a sweatshirt from the boot and tied it around my waist, giving temporary relief to my embarrassment.

The Washington School Inn had an (expensive) room, which I reserved. It was less than five minutes down the road and right in the middle of town. Once settled, I went for a walk to size up the place, see what souvenirs were on offer and get some new shorts.

It was another rich and fashionable town. Apart from the Mormon Family Welcome Center and the man walking down the road with an owl on his shoulder, there was nothing to mark it out as any different.

With newly purchased shorts, I returned to the hotel to make the most of the luxury that I’d shelled out for. I washed some socks and T-shirts in the basin, cracked open a can of beer and gazed at the space atop the cabinet where the TV might have been if the room had had one. Of course, it was a no smoking room but that didn’t really matter. I was getting well used to such restrictions. To spice things up, I wrapped some presents instead.

Although the town boasted a number of bars and pubs they were all open only to members, which seemed to fly in the face of the very concept of pub. I asked the man on the door at one of them whether there was anywhere that the general public could get a drink and he explained that anyone could go into any bar provided they joined.  At that particular establishment, which curiously was called The Bar with No Name, guest membership was available for $5 for the evening.

There were two striking and unusual things about the inside of the bar, specifically about the people there. Firstly, they were all very young and very beautiful. Secondly, they were all very inebriated. In my experience to date, both these things were very hard to find in America, at least in the same place. It was also the first time since Tuesday that I had heard people laughing.

Wandering barmaids were plying drinks on anyone who hesitated even for a moment. These girls were disturbing Lolita characters, with long blonde hair, full make up, and birth certificates from the late 1980s. Their clothing was modest in volume if not in style, leaving very little to the imagination.

They wafted up and coquettishly whispered invitations for more beer in your ear. I was on my third pint without even thinking. I thought of taking a photo of one of them, but concluded that I’d probably be arrested when I got back and took the film in to Boots to be developed.

So far, Utah had stymied all my expectations of it. For the good of my blood pressure, I decided to go and get something to eat. Even though it was Saturday night, most places were closing by the time I got there. I finally found somewhere called the Claim Jumper Restaurant, which was above the Claim Jumper Pub (private members only).

They were about to close, but offered me a seat and served me hurriedly. Within twenty minutes, I was out on the porch having a cigarette and watching the numerous drunks staggering up and down the hill. My waitress had shown signs of no religious inclinations beyond Trappism and, when no invitation to be admitted to the pub after the meal was forthcoming, neither was a tip from me.

As I walked down on to the street, a woman in front of me stopped and looked at me. She was mid-thirties, with cropped peroxided hair and under her coat she was wearing one of those dresses with buttons all the way up the front. Most of the buttons had come undone, giving full view to her black knicks and bra but she seemed largely oblivious to this. In fact, she seemed largely oblivious to most things, and after a further moment’s hesitation continued her high-heeled stagger down the hill past me.

Swedish people have a bad reputation in Denmark for being drunkards. They have strict alcohol laws in Sweden but when they come over to Copenhagen they go for it and, being unaccustomed to booze, get out of control very quickly. I could only assume that a similar thing was happening here, and that Park City was some sort of oasis in the alcohol desert of the surrounding state.

Whatever the explanation, it was an odd feeling going to bed in America knowing that I was one of the most sober people in town.

Half way there. Cumulative mileage: 9597

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September 14, 2011

Day 23. MT/WY: turd birds, bubbling mud, intellectuals

Predictably for somewhere so nice, it was a non-smoking room but cigarettes were allowed in the reception lounge where morning coffee was also available on tap.

As I dosed up on toxins, I contemplated my road atlas. Today was the day for Yellowstone National Park. I had originally planned to go the long way round via the Bear Tooth Pass to enter it at the Northeast Entrance, but I was now inclined to follow the Yellowstone River, which was a more direct route from Livingston.

A number of people had told me that the Pass, while spectacular, was a very slow road. It certainly wiggled all over my map and I didn’t like the look of the 10,947 feet altitude reading.

I still needed to get a Montana souvenir. Next to the hotel was a shop called Gil’s, which posted the rather outrageous claim outside that if you couldn’t get it there, you couldn’t get it anywhere. I went in to have a look around and was taken by the shelf full of Montana Turd Birds. These were preserved (I assumed and hoped) herbivore faeces on pipe-cleaner legs with little feathers and bug eyes stuck on.

They were quite cute, and certainly something that I couldn’t imagine finding elsewhere and so I bought one. In noticeable contrast to the Clinton egg woman, the assistant carefully packaged it up as if she were wrapping a delicate flower.

I was buying these oddities as presents for my much better half’s birthday, which would coincide with the end of the trip when she was due to fly out and join me in the US to celebrate (hopefully). It was pleasing that I could now downplay expectations by telling her I’d just got her some old shit, while remaining entirely truthful about it.

It was cold and misty as I left Livingston and the same dampness held in the air throughout the drive down to the state line. I wished that I hadn’t warned John to identify me by my blue corduroy shorts as I could have done with wearing long trousers in those temperatures. The numerous maniacs that I saw on bicycles seemed blissfully oblivious to the rain and the chill.

New Mexico Pete had told me that the Yellowstone River appears to run uphill as you drive down this road, but I couldn’t see it myself. I stopped to have a look, but it definitely seemed to be running in the proper direction.

At Gardiner, I paid my 20 bucks entrance and was given a map and an info pack. The guy on the gate informed me that all roads were open apart from the one between Norris and Madison. A quick glance told me that this would mess up my plans. It meant that I wouldn’t be able to do a continuous loop if I wanted to see Old Faithful. It also meant that I’d miss out on such deliciously sounding places as Fountain Paint Pot, Firehole Lake and Biscuit Basin. The upside was that I’d now get to see the Mud Volcano.

The sights of Yellowstone, the first ever National Park as well as the largest caldera in the world, are well documented and it was a truly wondrous place. I had allowed myself an unusually generous 6 hours to drive around, and it was not nearly enough. There was good reason to get out of the car every few minutes, and you could click off a whole reel of film without even thinking about it.

For once, things absolutely did live up to their names. The stone was yellow, the petrified trees did look like rock, the mud volcano was a bubbling vat of stinky mud, and anything called Fall constituted quite a drop. I saw birds, bees, bears and bison, and legion other creatures whose names I’d never know. Even on this dank, grey day it was all a delight to behold.

I had arranged to meet John at 6 pm and so I made my way down to Old Faithful for about three. I had no idea that it erupted as frequently as every 30-90 minutes and I’d just missed one. It was next due to go off at 4.30, and it would be a squeak to make Jackson in ninety minutes.

I didn’t really want to be late for John. Not only had I never met him and he was doing me a massive favor by letting me stay at his house, Adam had also given me the impression that they’d not yet invented enough noughts to give a true reflection of the balance on his bank account. I figured that he was just not the sort of bloke you kept hanging around.

It was a tough call, but in the end I stayed. It seemed silly to be less than an hour from seeing something actually happen that I’d first learned about when I was nine, and miss it just for the sake of a social rendezvous.

I wandered about the Old Faithful area and marvelled at the colors and smells of the numerous natural hot springs. With fifteen minutes to the appointed time, I took up position. Old Faithful also lived up to its name and shot up its spew of boiling water bang on time. Well, more or less; it was three minutes late by my watch but it seemed churlish to quibble.

It was gone 5.30 by the time I escaped the park and joined the highway down to Jackson. The views of the Teton Range to my right were fantastic but I barely had time to look. I thought about stopping to telephone John, but there wasn’t a building in sight let alone a call box.

I motored on frantically. Luckily there was very little traffic and I was able to break the law quite a lot. We were due to be meeting in Nora’s Fish Creek Inn in Wilson, and my map suggested that there might be a short-cut bypassing Jackson if I turned right at Moose. When I came to the junction all that I could see was the Jackson Hole Airfield. I decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Taking the shortcut, or ever using an aeroplane to try to get to Jackson.

I pulled into the gravelled car park of the restaurant at 6.30 precisely. Inside was medium-posh. A middle-aged man approached holding out his hand to shake mine. The tentative “Kevin?” confirmed that this was John. I apologized profusely and he laughed. He’d been delayed himself and had only arrived three minutes before me. He couldn’t have been friendlier and was eager to find out all about my trip, although inevitably we were soon discussing the events of the last few days.

John described September 11th as America’s bar mitzvah. After years of sending in the cavalry to sort out problems in other lands, it had now had its nose bloodied on its own back doorstep and had thereby come of age. He felt that Europe’s great sympathy was down to the fact that both continents could now identify with each other better on the subject of terrorism. America was now “one of the gang”.

He also thought that the status of New York had been repositioned within America. Previously, most of the USA had begrudged being defined by what happened in NYC (and LA). New York had now become part of the heart of the US in a way that it hadn’t been a week ago.

He reckoned that since the end of the Cold War, the American public had been guilty of resting on their laurels. Having won the Cold War, people had not only become complacent but also a lot more selfish. In the absence of a common enemy or external threat to unify their spirit, the cry of “America, America, America” had been usurped by the cry of “Me, me, me”.

We drove back in tandem to his house that was way off the beaten track up in the hills. John said that I’d be welcome to watch the news on the TV if I wanted to, but that he wasn’t interested himself.

Today had been designated a national day of prayer, and he had no desire to “see America at its mawkish worst”. He didn’t care to be subjected to the national anthem being repeatedly mangled. He thought the US should consider adopting a different tune to the Star Spangled Banner, as “only a handful of folk in the country possessed the requisite operatic reach to sing it properly”.

John was originally from the east coast, but had moved here four years ago to get closer to nature. He’d intended moving to Colorado, but this was the only place he’d looked at where he’d felt really at home. Colorado was spoilt now and Jackson was getting that way too. The reason was that too many wealthy folk from the coasts were taking it into their heads to move to these parts and the new money was redefining the place. It had all become crassly commercialised, prices of everything were rocketing and all the local people were being forced out. I wasn’t sure whether John counted himself as a local or a new money arriviste.

John was one of the most circumspect, accomplished and erudite Americans whom I’d met, and a well of stories about all manner of subjects. I got the feeling that all these anecdotes had some principle behind them that he was trying to illustrate, but they were all strangely devoid of punch lines.

One of them was about a cook who got attacked by a bear. John recounted it in florid detail, elaborating on what the guy had been cooking, how he’d made the mistake of wiping his hands on his apron, how he’d curled up in a ball when attacked and then escaped into the river. I was almost on the edge of my seat as I heard that the bear then followed him into the water, when the tale just petered out.

When I excitedly asked what happened next, I was met by a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive “Oh, some guys came along in a row-boat and hit the bear with the oars and the cook was able to escape.” If I hadn’t asked, I would have just been left there dangling never to learn the outcome.

The next time it happened we just stared at each other. After what seemed like ten of the more bizarre minutes of my life (though in fact it was probably more like three), we both stood up, bade each other goodnight and agreed to be up at crack of sparrows for breakfast.

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