The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [107]
Beyond the bridge wet snow began to fly about. It mixed with the hundreds of insects that had been flinging themselves into the windscreen since Nebraska (what a senseless waste of life!) and turned it into a brown sludge. I attacked it with window washer solution, but this just converted it from a brown sludge to a creamy sludge and I still couldn’t see. I stopped and jumped out to wipe at the window with my sleeve, certain that at any moment a bobcat, seeing the chance of a lifetime, would drop onto my shoulders and rip off my scalp with a sound like two strips of Velcro being parted. I imagined myself, scalpless, stumbling down the mountainside with the bobcat nipping at my heels. This formed such a vivid image in my mind that I jumped back into the car, even though I had only created a small rectangle of visibility about the size of an envelope. It was like looking out of a tank turret.
The car wouldn’t start. Of course. Drily I said, ‘Oh, thank you, God.’ Up here in the thin air, the Chevette just gasped and wheezed and quickly became flooded. While I waited for the flooding to subside, I looked at the map and was dismayed to discover that I still had twenty miles to go. I had only done eight miles so far and I had been at it for well over an hour. The possibility that the Chevette might not make it to Victor and Cripple Creek took root in my skull. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps no-one ever came along this road. If I died out here, I reflected bleakly, it could be years before anyone found me or the Chevette, which would obviously be a tragedy. Apart from anything else the battery was still under warranty.
But of course I didn’t die out there. In fact, to tell you the truth, I don’t intend ever to die. The car started up; I crept up over the last of the high passes and thence into Victor without further incident. Victor was a wonderful sight, a town of Western-style buildings perched incongruously in a high green valley of the most incredible beauty. Once it and Cripple Creek, six miles down the road, were boom towns to beat all boom towns. At their peak, in 1908, they had 500 gold mines between them and a population of 100,000. Miners were paid in gold. In twenty-five years or so the mines produced $800 million worth of gold and made a lot of people rich. Jack Dempsey lived in Victor and started his career there.
Today only a couple of working mines are left and the population is barely a thousand. Victor had the air of a ghost town, though at least the streets were paved. Chipmunks darted among the buildings and grass was growing through cracks in the sidewalk. The town was full of antique stores and craft shops, but almost all of them were closed, evidently waiting for the summer season. Quite a few were empty and one, the Amber Inn, had been seized for non-payment of taxes. A big sign in the window said so. But the post office was open and one café, which was full of old men in bib overalls and younger men with beards and pony tails. All the men wore baseball caps, though here they advertised brands of beer – Coors, Bud Lite, Olympia – rather than brands of fertilizer.
I decided to drive on to Cripple Creek for lunch, and then wished I hadn’t. Cripple Creek stands in the shadows of Mt Pisgah and Pikes Peak and was far more touristy than Victor. Most of the stores were open, though they weren’t doing much business. I parked on the main street in front of the Sarsaparilla Saloon and had a look around. Architecturally, Cripple Creek was much the same as Victor, but here the businesses were almost all geared to tourists: gift shops, snack bars, ice-cream parlours, a place where children could pan for gold in an artificial creek, a miniature golf-course. It was