The Lost Continent (39 page)

I drove into Buffalo. In 1892 it was the scene of the famous Johnson County War, the incident that inspired the movie
Heaven’s Gate,
though in fact the term
war
is a gross overexaggeration of events. All that happened was that the local ranchers, in the guise of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, hired a bunch of thugs to come to Johnson County and rough up some of the homesteaders who had recently, and quite legally, begun moving in. When the thugs killed a man, the homesteaders rose up and chased them to a ranch outside town, where they laid siege until the cavalry rode in and gave the humbled bullies safe passage out of town. And that was it: just one man killed and hardly any shots fired. That was the way the West really was, by and large. It was just farmers. That’s all.

I reached Buffalo a little after four in the afternoon. The town has a museum dedicated to the Johnson County War, which I was hoping to see, but I discovered when I got there that it is only open from June to September. I drove around the business district, toying with the idea of stopping for the night, but it was such a dumpy little town that I decided to press on to Gillette, seventy miles down the road. Gillette was even worse. I drove around it for a few minutes, but I couldn’t face the prospect of spending a Saturday night there, so I decided to press on once again.

Thus it was that I ended up in Sundance, thirty miles further down the road. Sundance is the town from which the Sundance Kid took his name, and from all appearances that was the only thing in town worth taking. He wasn’t born in Sundance; he just spent some time in jail there. It was a small, charmless place, with just one road in and one road out. I got a room in the Bear Lodge Motel on Main Street, and it was pleasant in a basic sort of way. The bed was soft; the television was hooked up to HBO, the cable movie network; and the toilet had a “Sanitized for Your Protection” banner across the seat. On the far side of the street was a restaurant that looked acceptable. Clearly I was not about to have the Saturday night of a lifetime here, but things could have been worse. And indeed very soon they were.

I had a shower and afterwards as I dressed I switched on the television and watched the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, a TV evangelist who had recently been caught dallying with a prostitute, the old rascal. Naturally this had put a certain strain on his credibility and he had taken to the airwaves, more or less continuously as far as I could tell, to beg for mercy. Here he was once again appealing for money and forgiveness, in that order. Tears rolled from his eyes and glistened on his cheeks. He told me he was a miserable sinner. “No argument there, Jimbo,” I said and switched off.

I stepped out onto Main Street. It was “ten of seven,” as they say in this part of the world. The evening was warm and in the still air the aroma of charbroiled steaks floated over from the restaurant across the street and berthed in my nostrils. I hadn’t eaten all day and the whiff of sirloin made me realize just how hungry I was. I smoothed down my wet hair, needlessly looked both ways before stepping off the sidewalk—there was nothing moving on the road for at least a hundred miles in either direction—and went over. I opened the door and was taken aback to discover that the place was packed with Shriners.

The Shriners, if you are not familiar with them, are a social organization composed of middle-aged men of a certain disposition and mentality—the sort of men who like to give each other hotfoots and pinch the bottoms of passing waitresses. They seem to get drunk a lot and drop water balloons out of hotel windows. Their idea of advanced wit is to stick a cupped hand under their armpits and make farting noises. You can always tell a Shriner because he’s wearing a red fez and his socks don’t match. Ostensibly, Shriners get together to raise money for charities. This probably is what they tell their wives. However, here’s an interesting fact that may help you to put this claim into perspective. In 1984, according to
Harper’s Magazine,
the amount of money raised by the Shriners was $17.5 million; of this sum, the amount they donated to charities was $182,000. In short, what Shriners do is get together and be assholes. So you can perhaps conceive of my disquiet at the prospect of eating dinner amid a group of fifty bald-headed men who are throwing pats of butter around the room and setting fire to one another’s menus.

The hostess came over. She was chewing gum and didn’t look overfriendly. “Help you?” she said.

“I’d like a table for one, please.”

She clicked her chewing gum in an unattractive fashion. “We’re closed.”

I was taken aback once more. “You look pretty open to me.”

“It’s a private party. They’ve reserved the restaurant for the evening.”

I sighed. “I’m a stranger in town. Can you tell me where else I can get something to eat?”

She grinned, clearly pleased to be able to give me some bad news. “We’re the only restaurant in Sundance,” she said. Some beaming Shriners at a nearby table watched my unfolding discomfort with simple-minded merriment. “You might try the gas station down the street,” the lady added.

“The gas station serves food?” I responded in a tone of quiet amazement.

“No, but they’ve got potato chips and candy bars.”

“I don’t believe this is happening,” I muttered.

“Or else you can go about a mile out of town on Highway 24 and you’ll come to a Tastee-Freez drive-in.”

This was great. This was just too outstanding for words. The woman was telling me that on a Saturday night in Sundance, Wyoming, all I could have for dinner was potato chips and ice cream.

“What about another town?” I asked.

“You can try Spearfish. That’s thirty-one miles down Route 14 over the state line in South Dakota. But you won’t find much there either.” She grinned again, and clicked her gum, as if proud to be living in such a turdy place.

“Well, thank you
so
much for your help,” I said with elaborate insincerity and departed.

And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice. In the Midwest the hostess would have felt bad about my going hungry. She would have found me a table at the back of the room or at least fixed me up with a couple of roast beef sandwiches and a slab of apple pie to take back to the motel. And the Shriners, subimbecilic assholes that they may be, would have been happy to make room for me at one of their tables, and probably would even have given me some pats of butter to throw. People in the Midwest are good and they are kind to strangers. But here in Sundance the milk of human kindness was exceeded in tininess only by the size of the Shriners’ brains.

I trudged up the road in the direction of the Tastee-Freez. I walked for some way, out past the last of the houses and onto an empty highway that appeared to stretch off into the distance for miles, but there was no sign of a Tastee-Freez, so I turned around and trudged back into town. I intended to get the car, but then I couldn’t be bothered. There was something about the way they can’t even spell freeze right that’s always put me off these places. How much faith can you place in a company that can’t even spell a monosyllable? So instead I went to the gas station and bought about six dollars’ worth of potato chips and candy bars, which I took back to my room and dumped on the bed. I lay there and pushed candy bars into my face, like logs into a sawmill, watched some plotless piece of violent Hollywood excrescence on HBO, and then slept another fitful night, lying in the dark, full and yet unsatisfied, staring at the ceiling and listening to the Shriners across the street and to the ceaseless bleating of my stomach: “Hey, what is all this crap in here? It’s nothing but chocolate. This is disgusting. I want some real food. I want steak and mashed potatoes. Really, this is just too gross for words. I’ve a good mind to send this all back. I’m serious, you’d better go and stand by the toilet because this is coming straight back up in a minute. Are you listening to me, butt-face?”

And so it went all night long. God, I hate my stomach.

I awoke early and peeked, shivering, through a gap in the curtains. It was a drizzly Sunday dawn. Not a soul was about. This would be an excellent time to firebomb the restaurant. I made a mental note to pack gelignite the next time I came to Wyoming. And sandwiches. Switching on the TV, I slipped back into bed and pulled the covers up to just below my eyeballs. Jimmy Swaggart was still appealing for forgiveness. Goodness me, but that man can cry. He is a human waterfall. I watched for a while, but then got up and changed the channel. On all the other channels it was just more evangelists, usually with their dumpy wives sitting at their sides. You could see why they all went out for sex. Generally, the program would also feature the evangelist’s son-in-law, a graduate of the Pat Boone school of grooming, who would sing a song with a title like “You’ve Got A Friend in Jesus And Please Send Us Lots of Money.” There can be few experiences more dispiriting than to lie alone in a darkened motel room in a place like Wyoming and watch TV early on a Sunday morning.

I can remember when we didn’t even have TV on Sunday mornings; that’s how old I am. You would turn on WOI and all you would get was a test pattern and you would sit there and watch that because there was nothing else. Then after a while they would take off the test pattern and show “Sky King,” which was an interesting and exciting program, at least compared to a test pattern. Nowadays they don’t show test patterns at all on American TV, which is a shame because given a choice between test patterns and TV evangelists, I would unhesitatingly choose the test patterns. They were soothing in an odd way and, of course, they didn’t ask you for money or make you listen to their son-in-law sing.

It was just after eight when I left the motel. I drove through the drizzle to Devils Tower, about twenty-five miles away. Devils Tower was the mountain used by Steven Spielberg in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
the one on which the aliens landed. It is so singular and extraordinary that you cannot imagine what Spielberg would have used as an alternative if it hadn’t been available. You can see it long before you get to it, but as you draw nearer the scale of it becomes really quite awesome. It is a flat-topped cone of rock 865 feet high, soaring out of an otherwise flat and featureless plain. The scientific explanation is that it was a volcanic fluke—an outsized lump of warm rock that shot out of the earth and then cooled into its present arresting shape. In the moonlight it is said to glow, though even now on a wet Sunday morning with smoky clouds brushing across its summit it looked decidedly supernatural, as if it were placed there eons ago for the eventual use of aliens. I only hope that when they do come they don’t expect to eat out.

I stopped at a lay-by near the tower and got out to look at it, squinting through the drizzle. A wooden sign beside the road said that the tower was considered sacred by the Indians and that in 1906 it became the first designated national monument in America. I stared at the tower for a long time, hypnotized both by its majesty and by a dull need for coffee, and then realized that I was getting very wet, so I returned to the car and drove on. Having gone without dinner the night before, I intended to indulge myself in that greatest of all American gustatory pleasures—going out for Sunday breakfast.

Everybody in America goes out for Sunday breakfast. It is such a popular pastime that you generally have to line up for a table, but it’s always worth the wait. Indeed, the inability to achieve instant oral gratification is such an unusual experience in America that lining up actually intensifies the pleasure. You wouldn’t want to do it all the time, of course, you wouldn’t want to get British about it or anything, but once a week for twenty minutes is “kinda neat,” as they say. One reason you have to line up is that it takes the waitress about thirty minutes just to take each order. First you have to tell her whether you want your eggs sunny-side up, over easy, scrambled, poached, parboiled, or in an omelette, and in an omelette, whether you want it to be a plain, cheese, vegetable, hot-spicy, or chocolate-nut-’n’-fudge omelette; and then you have to decide whether you want your toast on white, rye, whole wheat, sourdough, or pumpernickel bread and whether you want whipped butter, pat butter, or low-cholesterol butter substitute; and then there’s a complicated period of negotiation in which you ask if you can have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll and link sausages instead of patties. So the waitress, who is only sixteen years old and not real smart, has to go off to the manager and ask him whether that’s possible, and she comes back and tells you that you can’t have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll, but you can have Idaho fries instead of the short stack of pancakes, or you can have an English muffin and bacon instead of whole wheat toast, but only if you order a side of hashed browns and a large orange juice. This is unacceptable to you, and you decide that you will have waffles instead, so the waitress has to rub everything out with her nubby eraser and start all over again. And across the room the line on the other side of the “Please Wait to Be Seated” board grows longer and longer, but the people don’t mind because the food smells so good and, anyway, all this waiting is, as I say, kinda neat.

I drove along Highway 24 through a landscape of low hills, in a state of tingly anticipation. There were three little towns over the next twenty miles and I felt certain that one of them would have a roadside restaurant. I was nearly to the South Dakota state line. I was leaving the ranching country and entering more conventional farmland. Farmers cannot exist without a roadside restaurant every couple of miles, so I had no doubt that I would find one just around the next bend. One by one I passed through the little towns—Hulett, Alva, Aladdin—but there was nothing to them, just sleeping houses. No one was awake. What kind of place was this? Even on Sundays farmers are up at dawn. Beyond Beulah I passed the larger community of Belle Fourche and then St. Onge and Sturgis, but still there was nothing. I couldn’t even get a cup of coffee.

At last I came to Deadwood, a town that, if nothing else, lived up to its first syllable. For a few years in the 1870s, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, Deadwood was one of the liveliest and most famous towns in the West. It was the home of Calamity Jane. Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead while playing cards in a local saloon. Today the town makes a living by taking large sums of money off tourists and giving them in return some crappy little trinket to take home and put on their mantlepiece. Almost all the stores along the main street were souvenir emporia, and several of them were open even though it was a Sunday morning. There were even a couple of coffee shops, but they were closed.