The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [115]
‘Still,’ I said, trying to help them look on the bright side, ‘I bet you’ve gotten in a lot of good shagging.’ I didn’t really say that. Even I wouldn’t say that. I just made sympathetic noises and said what a shame it was about the weather and wished them luck. I walked on in a reflective mood to the car, thinking about the poor honeymooners. As my father always used to tell me, ‘You see, son, there’s always someone in the world worse off than you.’
And I always used to think, ‘So?’
I headed north on Highway 89 towards Utah. The radio was full of more news of bad weather in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas, and of roads closed by rockslides and heavy snow, though here in northern Arizona there was no snow at all. Absolutely none. Ten miles beyond the Grand Canyon it just disappeared and a few miles after that it was like spring. The sun came out. The world was warm. I rolled the window down a little.
I drove and drove. That is what you do in the West. You drive and you drive and you drive, advancing from one scattered town to the next, creeping across a landscape like Neptune. For long, empty hours your one goal in life is to get to Dry Gulch or Cactus City or wherever. You sit there watching the highway endlessly unfurl and the odometer advancing with the speed of centuries and all you think about is getting to Dry Gulch and hoping by some miracle it will have a McDonald’s or at least a coffee shop. And when at last you get there, all there is is a two-pump gas station and a stall with an old Indian woman selling Navajo trinkets and you realize that you have to start the process all over again with another impossibly isolated hamlet with a depressingly unpromising name: Coma, Doldrum, Dry Well, Sunstroke.
The distances are almost inconceivable. There is often thirty miles between houses and a hundred miles or more between towns. What would it take to make you live in a place where you had to drive seventy-five miles just to buy a pair of shoes – and even then they would look as if they came from a funeral home?
The answer to my question, of course, is that not many people do want to live in such a place, except for Indians, who were never given much choice. I was now driving across the largest Indian reservation in America – a Navajo reservation stretching for 150 miles from north to south and 200 miles from east to west – and most of the few cars along the highway were driven by Indians. Almost without exception these were big old Detroit cars in dreadful condition, with all the trim gone or flopping loosely, and with at least one mismatched door and important-looking pieces hanging from the undercarriage, clattering on the highway, shooting sparks or dense smoke. They never seemed to be able to get over about forty miles an hour, but they were always difficult to pass because of the way they drifted around on the highway.
Occasionally they would drift far off to the right, sometimes even kicking up desert dust, and I would shoot past. Always it was the same sight: a car packed with Indian men and boys and a driver drunk beyond repair, sitting there with a wet-dream look on his face – the look of a man who is only barely conscious but having a splendid time none the less.
At Page, Arizona, home of the Glen Canyon Dam, I passed into Utah and almost immediately the landscape improved. The hills grew purplish and red and the desert took on a blush of colour. After a few miles, the sage-brush thickened and the hills became darker and more angular. It all looked oddly familiar. Then I consulted my Mobil guidebook and discovered that this was where all the Hollywood westerns were made. More than a hundred film and television companies had used Kanab, the next town down the road, as their headquarters for location shooting.
This excited me, and when I got to Kanab, I stopped and went into a café to see if I could find out more. A voice from the back called out that she would be just a minute, so I had a look at the menu on the