The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [101]
Eventually I found what I was looking for: Winterset, birthplace of John Wayne. I drove around the town until I found his house – Winterset is so small that this only took a minute – and slowed down to look at it from the car. The house was tiny and the paint was peeling off it. Wayne, or Marion Morrison as he then was, only lived there for a year or so before his family moved to California. The house is run as a museum now, but it was shut. This didn’t surprise me, as pretty much everything in the town was shut, quite a lot of it permanently from the look of things. The Iowa Movie Theater on the square was clearly out of business, its marquee board blank, and many of the other stores were gone or just hanging on. It was a depressing sight because Winterset was really quite a nice-looking little town with its county courthouse and square and long streets of big Victorian houses. I bet, like Winfield, it was a different place altogether fifteen or twenty years ago. I drove back out to the highway past the Gold Buffet (‘Dancing Nitely’) feeling an odd sense of emptiness.
Every town I came to was much the same – peeling paint, closed businesses, a deathly air. South-west Iowa has always been the poorest part of the state and it showed. I didn’t stop because there was nothing worth stopping for. I couldn’t even find a place to get a cup of coffee. Eventually, much to my surprise, I blundered on to a bridge over the Missouri River and then I was in Nebraska City, in Nebraska. And it wasn’t at all bad. In fact, it was really quite pleasant – better than Iowa by a long chalk, I was embarrassed to admit. The towns were more prosperous-looking and better maintained, and the roadsides everywhere were full of bushes from which sprang a profusion of creamy flowers. 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 drove for hours along an undemanding highway, past Auburn, Tecumseh, Beatrice (a town of barely 10,000 people but which produced two Hollywood stars, Harold Lloyd and Robert Taylor), Fairbury, Hebron, Deshler, Ruskin.
At Deshler I stopped for coffee and was surprised at how cold it was. Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor-sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the house. It brings piles of snow and bone-cracking cold. From November to March you walk leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futilely at ice that seems to have been applied to the windows with Superglue. And then one day spring comes. The snow melts, you stride about in shirt-sleeves, you incline your face to the sun. And then, just like that, spring is over and it’s summer. It is as if God has pulled a lever in the great celestial powerhouse. Now the weather rolls in from the opposite direction, from the tropics far to the south, and it hits you like a wall of heat. For six months, the heat pours over you. You sweat oil. Your pores gape. The grass goes brown. Dogs look as if they could die. When you walk downtown you can feel the heat of the pavement rising