The Lost Continent (40 page)

I went in the Gold Nugget Trading Post and had a look around. It was a large room where nothing but souvenirs were sold—moccasins, beaded Indian bags, arrowheads, nuggets of fool’s gold, Indian dolls. I was the only customer. I didn’t see anything to buy, so I left and went in another store a couple of doors away—The World Famous Prospectors Gift Shop—and found exactly the same stuff at identical prices and again I was the only customer. At neither place did the people running things say hello or ask me how I was doing. They would have in the Midwest. I went back out into the miserable drizzle and walked around the town looking for a place to eat, but there was nothing. So I got back in the car and drove on to Mount Rushmore, forty miles down the road.

Mount Rushmore is just outside the little town of Keystone, which is even more touristy than Deadwood, but at least there were some restaurants open. I went into one and was seated immediately, which rather threw me. The waitress gave me a menu and went off. The menu had about forty breakfasts on it. I had only read to number seventeen (“Pigs in a Blanket”) when the waitress returned with a pencil ready, but I was so hungry that I just decided, more or less arbitrarily, that I would have breakfast number three. “But can I have link sausages instead of hashed browns?” I added. She tapped her pencil against a notice on the menu. It said
NO
SUBSTITUTIONS
. What a drag. That was the most fun part. No wonder the place was half empty. I started to make a protest, but I fancied I could see her forming a bolus of saliva at the back of her mouth and I broke off. I just smiled and said “Okay, never mind, thank you!” in a bright tone. “And please don’t spit in my food!” I wanted to add as she went off, but somehow I felt this would only encourage her.

Afterwards I drove to Mount Rushmore, a couple of miles outside town up a steep road. I had always wanted to see Mount Rushmore, especially after watching Cary Grant clamber over Thomas Jefferson’s nose in
North by Northwest
(a film that also left me with a strange urge to strafe someone in a cornfield from a low-flying airplane). I was delighted to discover that Mount Rushmore was free. There was a huge terraced parking lot, though hardly any cars were in it. I parked and walked up to the visitors’ center. One whole wall was glass, so that you could gaze out at the monument, high up on the neighboring mountainside. It was shrouded in fog. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. It was like peering into a steam bath. I thought I could just make out Washington, but I wasn’t sure. I waited for a long time, but nothing happened. And then, just as I was about to give up and depart, the fog mercifully drifted away and there they were—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, staring glassily out over the Black Hills.

The monument looked smaller than I had expected. Everybody says that. It’s just that positioned as you are well below the monument and looking at it from a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile, it looks more modest than it is. In fact, Mount Rushmore is enormous. Washington’s face is 60 feet high, his eyes 11 feet wide. If they had bodies, according to a sign on the wall, the Rushmore figures would be 465 feet tall.

In an adjoining room there was an excellent and more or less continuous movie presentation giving the history of Mount Rushmore, with lots of impressive statistics about the amount of rock that was shifted, and terrific silent film footage showing the work in progress. Mostly this consisted of smiling workmen packing dynamite into the rock face followed by a big explosion; then the dust would clear and what had been rock was now revealed to be Abraham Lincoln. It was remarkable. The whole thing is an extraordinary achievement, one of America’s glories, and surely one of the great monuments of this century.

The project took from 1927 to 1941 to complete. Just before it was finished, Gutzon Borglum, the man behind it all, died. Isn’t that tragic? He did all that work for all those years and then just when they were about to crack open the champagne and put out the little sausages on toothpicks, he keeled over and expired. On a bad luck scale of 0 to 10, I would call that an 11.

I drove east across South Dakota, past Rapid City. I had intended to stop off and see Badlands National Park, but the fog and drizzle were so dense that it seemed pointless. More than that, according to the radio I was half a step ahead of another perilous “frunnal” system. Snow was expected on the higher reaches of the Black Hills. Many roads in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana were already shut by fresh snowfalls, including the highway between Jackson and Yellowstone. If I had gone to Yellowstone a day later, I would now be stranded, and if I didn’t keep moving, I could well be stranded for a couple of days in South Dakota. On a bad luck scale of 0 to 10, I would call that a 12.

Fifty miles beyond Rapid City is the little town of Wall, home of the most famous drugstore in the West, Wall Drug. You know it’s coming because every hundred yards or so along the whole of that fifty miles you pass a big billboard telling you so:
STEAKS
AND
CAKES
—
WALL
DRUG
, 47
MILES
,
HOT
BEEF
SANDWICHES
—
WALL
DRUG
, 36
MILES
,
FIVE
CENT
COFFEE
—
WALL
DRUG
, 25
MILES
, and so on. It is the advertising equivalent of the Chinese water torture. After a while the endless drip, drip, drip of billboards so clouds your judgment that you have no choice but to leave the interstate and have a look at it.

It’s an awful place, one of the world’s biggest tourist traps, but I loved it and I won’t have a word said against it. In 1931, a guy named Ted Hustead bought Wall Drug. Buying a drugstore in a town in South Dakota with a population of three hundred people at the height of the Great Depression must be about as stupid a business decision as you can make. But Hustead realized that people driving across places like South Dakota were so delirious with boredom that they would stop and look at almost anything. So he put up a lot of gimmicks like a life-size dinosaur, a 1908 Hupmobile, a stuffed buffalo, and a big pole with arrows giving the distances and directions from Wall Drug to places all over the world, like Paris and Hong Kong and Timbuktu. Above all, he erected hundreds of billboards all along the highway between Sioux Falls and the Black Hills, and filled the store with the most exotic and comprehensive assortment of tourist crap human eyes have ever seen, and pretty soon people were pouring in. Now Wall Drug takes up most of the town and is surrounded by parking lots so enormous that you could land a jumbo jet on them. In the summer they get up to 20,000 visitors a day, though when I arrived things were decidedly more quiet and I was able to park right out front on Main Street.

I was hugely disappointed to discover that Wall Drug wasn’t just an overgrown drugstore as I had always imagined. It was more a mini shopping mall, with about forty little stores selling all kinds of different things—postcards, film, western wear, jewelry, cowboy boots, food, paintings, and endless souvenirs. I bought a very nice kerosene lamp in the shape of Mount Rushmore. The wick and glass jar that encloses it sprout directly out of George Washington’s head. It was made in Japan and the four presidents have a distinctly oriental slant to their eyes. There were many other gifts and keepsakes of this type, though none quite as beautiful or charming. Sadly, there were no baseball caps with plastic turds on the brim. Wall Drug is a family store, so that sort of thing is right out. It was a pity because this was the last souvenir place I was likely to encounter on the trip. Another dream would have to go unfulfilled.

28

I
drove on and on across South Dakota. God, what a flat and empty state. You can’t believe how remote and lonely it feels out in the endless fields of yellow grass. It is like the world’s first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber. The car was still making ominous clonking noises, and the thought of breaking down out here filled me with disquiet. I was in a part of the world where you could drive hundreds of miles in any direction before you found civilization, or at least met another person who didn’t like accordion music. In a forlorn attempt to pass the time, I thumbed through my Mobil guides, leaning them against the steering wheel while drifting just a trifle wildly in and out of my lane, and added up the populations and sizes of the four states of the high plains: North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Altogether they take up 385,000 square miles—an area about the size of France, Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries combined—but they have a total population of just 2.6 million. There are almost four times as many people in Paris alone. Isn’t that interesting? Here’s another interesting fact for you. The population density of Wyoming is 1.9 people per square kilometer; in South Dakota it is a little over 2 people per square kilometer. In Britain, there are 236.2 people per square kilometer. The number of people airborne in the United States at any given time (136,000) is greater than the combined populations of the largest cities in each of these four states. And finally here’s a really interesting fact. According to a survey by
Current Health
magazine, the percentage of salad bar customers in the United States seen “touching or spilling food or otherwise being unsanitary” is 60 percent. I am of course aware that this has nothing to do with the population of the northern plains states, but I thought a brief excursion into irrelevancy was a small price to pay for information that could change your life. It certainly has changed mine.

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

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

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

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

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