The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [127]
And it was very pleasant. I drove through pine-forested scenery, with occasional long views across unpeopled valleys, up and over Mokelumne Peak (9,332 feet), heading in the general direction of Lake Tahoe and Carson City. The road was steep and slow and it took me much of the afternoon to drive the hundred or so miles to the Nevada border. Near Woodfords I entered the Toiyabe National Forest, or at least what once had been the Toiyabe National Forest. For miles and miles there was nothing but charred land, mountainsides of dead earth and stumps of trees. Occasionally I passed an undamaged house around which a firebreak had been dug. It was an odd sight, a house with swings and a paddling-pool in the middle of an ocean of blackened stumps. A year or so before the owners must have thought they were the luckiest people on the planet, to live in the woods and mountains, amid the cool and fragrant pines. And now they lived on the surface of the moon. Soon the forest would be replanted and for the rest of their lives they could watch it grow again, inch by annual inch.
I had never seen such devastation – miles and miles of it – and yet I had no recollection of having read about it. That’s the thing about America. It’s so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies – a dozen people killed by floods in the South, ten crushed when a store roof collapsed in Texas, twenty-two dead in a snowstorm in the east – and each of them treated as a brief and not terribly consequential diversion between ads for haemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newsreaders in America, but mostly it is just the scale of the country. A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain – as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.
I entered Nevada about ten miles south of Lake Tahoe. Las Vegas had so put me off that I had no desire to go to another sink of iniquity, though I was later told that Tahoe is a really nice place and not at all like Las Vegas. Now I shall never know. I can tell you, however, that Carson City was just about the most nothing little city you could ever hope to zip through. It’s the state capital, but mostly it was just Pizza Huts and gas stations and cheap-looking casinos.
I headed out of town on US 50, past Virginia City and towards Silver Springs. This was more or less the spot where the map used to burst into flames on Bonanza. Remember that? It has been many years since I’ve seen the programme, but I recall Pa and Hoss and Little Joe and the surly-looking one whose name I forget all living in a landscape that was fruitful and lush, in a Western, high chaparral sort of way. But out here there was nothing but cement-coloured plains and barren hills and almost no habitations at all. Everything was grey, from the sky to the ground. This was to remain the pattern for the next two days.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada. It has a population of just 800,000 in an area about the size of Britain and Ireland combined. Almost half of that population is accounted for by Las Vegas and Reno, so most of the rest of the state is effectively just empty. There are only seventy towns in the entire state – the British Isles have 40,000, just to give you some comparison – and some of them are indescribably remote. For instance, Eureka, a town of 1,200 in the middle of the state, is 100 miles in any direction from the nearest town. Indeed, the whole of Eureka County has just three towns and a total population of under 2,500 – and this in an area of a couple of thousand square miles.
I drove for a while across this fearsome emptiness,