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By Root 1342 0

taking a back highway between Fallon and a spot on the map called Humboldt Sink, where I gratefully joined Interstate 80. This was a cowardly thing to do, but the car had been making odd noises off and on for the past couple of days – a sort of faint clonk clonk oh god help me clonk I’m dying oh god oh god clonk noise – which wasn’t covered in the trouble-shooting section of the owner’s manual. I couldn’t face the prospect of breaking down and being stranded for days in some Godforsaken dust-hole while waiting for an anti-clonk device to be shipped in from Reno on the weekly Greyhound. In any case, Highway 50, the nearest alternative road, would have taken me 150 miles out of my way and into Utah. I wanted to go a more northerly route across Montana and Wyoming – the ‘Big Sky’ country. So it was with some relief that I joined the interstate, though even this was remarkably empty – usually I could see one car in the distance far ahead and one in the distance far behind – considering it was the main artery across the country. Indeed, with a sufficiently capacious fuel tank and bladder, you could drive the whole way between New York and San Francisco without stopping.

At Winnemucca I pulled off for gas and coffee and called my mother to let her know that I hadn’t been killed yet and was doing all right for underwear – a matter of perennial concern to my mother. I was able to reassure her on this score and she reassured me that she hadn’t willed her money to the International Guppy Institute or anything similarly rash (I just like to check!), so we were able to continue our respective days with light hearts.

In the phone booth was a poster with a photograph of a young woman on it under the caption ‘Have you seen this girl?’ She was attractive and looked youthful and happy. The poster said she was nineteen years old and had been driving from Boston to San Francisco on her way home for Christmas when she disappeared. She had called her parents from Winnemucca to tell them to expect her the next afternoon and that was the last anyone had heard of her. Now she was almost certainly dead, somewhere out there in that big empty desert. Murder is terrifyingly easy in America. You can kill a stranger, dump the body in a place where it will never be found and be 2,000 miles away before the murdered person is even missed. At any given time there are an estimated twelve to fifteen serial murderers at large in the country, just drifting around, snatching random victims and then moving on, leaving behind few clues and no motives. A couple of years earlier in Des Moines, some teenaged boys were cleaning out an office downtown for one of their fathers on a Sunday afternoon when a stranger came in, took them into a back room and shot each of them once in the back of the head. For no reason. That guy was caught, as it happens, but he could as easily have gone off to another state and done the same thing again. Every year in America 5,000 murders go unsolved. That is an incredible number.

I spent the night in Wells, Nevada, the sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town I’ve ever seen. Most of the streets were unpaved and lined with battered-looking trailer homes. Everyone in town seemed to collect old cars. They sat rusting and windowless in every yard. Almost everything in town appeared to exist on the edge of dereliction. Such economic life as Wells could muster came from the passing traffic of Interstate 80. A number of truck stops and motels were scattered around, though many of these were closed down and those that remained were evidently struggling. Most of the motel signs had letters missing or burnt out, so that they said ‘Lone St r Mot I – V can y’. I had a walk around the business district before dinner. This consisted mostly of closed-down stores, though a few places appeared still to be in business: a drugstore, a gas station, a Trailways Bus depot, the Overland Hotel – sorry, H tel – and a movie-house called The Nevada, though this proved upon closer inspection also to be deceased. There were dogs everywhere, sniffing in doorways