The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

by Bill Bryson

Most schools, when they get a decent lead, will send in a squad of skinny freshmen in unsoiled uniforms to let them run around a bit and get dirty and, above all, to give the losers a sporting chance to make the score respectable. It’s called fair play. Not Nebraska. The University of Nebraska would send in flamethrowers if it were allowed.

The problem with my dad was that he was a great talker. This is always a dangerous thing in a person who gets lost a lot. He would go into a cafe to ask the way to Giant Fungus State Park and the next thing you knew he would be sitting down having a cup of coffee and a chat with the proprietor or the proprietor would be taking him out back to show him his new septic tank or something.

It was all quite pretty, though in a rather monotonous way. That is the problem with Nebraska. It just goes on and on, and even the good bits soon grow tedious.

I was headed for something far more exciting—the geographical center of the United States. You reach it by turning off the highway just outside the little town of Lebanon and following a side road for about a mile through the wheat fields. Then you come to a forlorn little park with picnic tables and a stone monument with a wind-whipped flag atop it and a plaque saying that this is the centermost point in the continental United States, by golly.

It was a strange feeling to think that of all the 230 million people in the United States I was the most geographically distinctive. If America were invaded, I would be the last person captured.

In the event, Dole dropped out of the race two days later, primarily because nobody could stand him, apart from his family and some other people around Russell, and the town, alas, lost its chance at fame.

Same result in 96

Kansas calls itself “the Wheat State.” That kind of says it all, don’t you think? It really makes you want to cancel that Barbados trip, doesn’t it?

In one corner of the window was a poster for a concert by—you are never going to believe this—Paul Revere and the Raiders. Can you beat that? There they were, still dressed up like Continental soldiers, prancing about and grinning, just like when I was in junior high school. Goodness me, what assholes.

Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot.

At its peak, Dodge City was the biggest cow town and semen sink in the West, full of drifters, drovers, buffalo hunters and the sort of women that only a cowboy could find attractive.

In all those years, there were only thirty-four people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery and most of those were just drifters found dead in snowdrifts or of natural causes. I know this for a fact because I paid $2.75 to go and see Boot Hill and the neighboring “Historic Front Street,” which has been rebuilt to look like it did when Dodge City was a frontier town and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were the sheriffs.

Bat Masterson ended his life as sports editor of the New York Morning Telegraph.

All that a trip to Holcomb would achieve would be to provide me with the morbid thrill of gawping at a house in which a family had long before been senselessly slaughtered. Still, that’s about all I ask out of life, and it was bound, at the very least, to be more interesting than Historic Front Street in Dodge City.

The problem was that there was no way to turn around. One side of the road hugged a wall of rock, rising up and up, like the side of a skyscraper; the other fell sharply away to a creek of excited water.

The road led up and over the Wilkerson Pass and then down into a long valley of rolling meadows with glittering streams and log cabins set against a backdrop of muscular mountains. It looked like a scene out of a deodorant commercial.

I had a niece at a small, exclusive college in Santa Fe whom I hadn’t seen for a long time and I was sure she would be delighted for all her friends on campus to witness a slobby, overweight man pull up in a cheap, dusty car, leap out and embrace her, so I decided to drive straight there.

Between Saguache and Monte Vista lies one of the ten or twelve longest stretches of straight road in America: almost forty miles without a single bend or kink.

More than that, my legs now didn’t seem to be getting on at all well with each other. One of them started for the stairs, as instructed, but the other, in a burst of petulance, decided to make for the rest room. The result was that I lurched through the bar like a man on stilts, grinning inanely as if to say, “Yes, I know I look like an asshole. Isn’t this amusing?”

you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off.

Ok boomer

I drove through a snow-whitened landscape towards the Grand Canyon. It was hard to believe that this was the last week of April.

And you moved to NH

The fog parted. It just silently drew back, like a set of theater curtains being opened, and suddenly we saw that we were on the edge of a sheer, giddying drop of at least a thousand feet. “Jesus!” we said and jumped back, and all along the canyon edge you could hear people saying, “Jesus!” like a message being passed down a long line.

The scale of the Grand Canyon is almost beyond comprehension. It is ten miles across, a mile deep, 180 miles long. You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it.

Whereas at the Grand Canyon you are on the top looking down, at Zion you are at the bottom looking up. It is just a long, lush canyon, dense with cottonwood trees along the valley floor, hemmed in by towering copper-colored walls of rock—the sort of dark, forbidding valley you would expect to pass through in a hunt for the lost city of gold.

Here’s a riddle for you. What is the difference between Nevada and a toilet? Answer: You can flush a toilet.

What most surprised me—what most surprises most people—is how many vacant lots there were. Here and there among the throbbing monoliths there were quarter-mile squares of silent desert, little pockets of dark calm, just waiting to be developed.

all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had barked into a telephone, “Gimme twenty thousand yards of the ugliest carpet you got.” It was like woven vomit.

You could, if you wished, fry an egg on the roof of your car in Death Valley, then drive thirty miles into the mountains and quick-freeze it in a snowbank.

I think it’s a pity that we can’t have some good wholesome entertainment like we had when I was a boy, when the heroes wore masks and capes, and carried whips, and liked other men a whole bunch.

My plan was to drive up through the hidden heart of California, through the fertile San Joaquin Valley. Nobody ever goes there. There is a simple reason for this, as I was about to discover. It is really boring.

The Donner Pass was also the route taken by the first transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific, and first transcontinental highway, old Route 40, the Lincoln Highway, on their 3,000-mile journey from New York to San Francisco.

I looked in a window in a real estate office and didn’t see anything for sale for less than $250,000.

Lol

Small-town America is obsessed with drugs, yet I suspect that if you strip-searched every teenager in Idaho Falls you would come up with nothing more illicit than some dirty magazines, a packet of condoms and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

People in middle America always ask that question. When you grow up in America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief—no, the understanding—that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best.

Most of the early settlers in America were oddly inept at devising place names. They either chose unimaginative, semirecycled names—New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England—or toadying, kiss-ass names like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Jamestown in a generally pitiable attempt to secure favor with some monarch or powdered aristocrat back home.

The Spanish were even worse because they gave everything religious names, so that every place in the Southwest is called San this or Santa that. Driving across the Southwest is like an 800-mile religious procession.

The worst name on the whole continent is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, which means “the Blood of Christ Mountains.” Have you ever heard of a more inane name for any geographical feature?

Nah Bill that's badass.

Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park run together to form one enormous area of wilderness stretching over a hundred miles from north to south. The road connecting them, Route 191, had only just been reopened for the year, and the Teton visitors’ centers were still closed.

The road I was on is closed for six months of the year, which gives you some idea of the sort of winters they have there. Even now the snow along the roadside was five or six feet deep in places.

Cody takes its name from Buffalo Bill Cody, who agreed to be buried there if they named the town after him. There were presumably two further stipulations: (1) that they waited until he was dead before they buried him, and (2) that they filled the town with as much tourist tat as they could possibly manage.

The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I’m awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill’s birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local.

they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollock, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don’t make anything of that because, I suppose, Pollock was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo.

The visitors’ center contained a small but absorbing museum with relics from both the Indians and soldiers, and a topographical model of the battlefield, which employed tiny light bulbs to show you how the battle progressed. Mostly this consisted of a string of blue lights moving down the hill in a confident fashion and then scurrying back up the hill pursued by a much larger number of red lights.

Custer was an idiot and a brute and he deserved his fate. His plan was to slaughter the men, women and children of the Cheyenne and Sioux nations as they camped out beside the Little Bighorn River and it was just his bad luck that they were much more numerous and better armed than he had reckoned.

In fact, nobody really knows what happened there that day in June 1876 because the Indians gave such conflicting accounts and none of the white participants lived to tell the tale. All that is known for sure is that Custer screwed up in a mighty big way and got himself and 260 men killed.

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.

Just before it was finished, Gutzon Borglum, the man behind it all, died. Isn’t that tragic?

Nah he was a piece of shit

Fifty miles beyond Rapid City is the little town of Wall, home of the most famous drugstore in the West, Wall Drug.

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.

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.

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.