The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [130]
Well, as you can imagine, since it was my family that killed the poor woman, I’ve always wanted to commemorate her in some small way and I thought that here would be as good a place as any, especially as I had nothing of interest to tell you about the drive from Wells, Nevada, to Twin Falls, Idaho.
So, goodbye, Mrs Goodman, it was nice knowing you. And we’re all very, very sorry.
Twin Falls was a nice enough place – Mrs Goodman, I’ve no doubt, would have liked it; but then when you think about it a dead person would probably appreciate any change of scenery – and the landscape in southern Idaho was greener and more fertile than anything Nevada had to offer. Idaho is known for its potatoes, though in fact Maine, just a third of its size, produces more. Its real wealth comes from mining and timber, particularly in the higher reaches of the Rockies, up towards Canada, over 500 miles north of where I was now. I was headed for Sun Valley, the famous resort up in the Sawtooth Mountains, and the neighbouring town of Ketchum, where Ernest Hemingway spent the last year of his life and blew his brains out. This has always seemed to me (not that it’s any of my business, mind you) a particularly thoughtless and selfish way to kill oneself. I mean to say, your family is going to be upset enough that you are dead without your having to spoil the furniture and gross everyone out on top of that.
In any case, Ketchum was touristy, though Sun Valley itself proved to be most agreeable. It was purpose-built as a ski resort in the 1930s by the Union Pacific Railroad as a way of enticing people to travel to the region during the winter. It certainly has a beautiful setting, in a bowl of jagged mountains, and is supposed to have some of the best skiing in the country. People like Clint Eastwood and Barbra Streisand have houses there. I looked in a window in a real estate office and didn’t see anything for sale for less than $250,000.
The town part of Sun Valley – it’s really just a little shopping centre – is built to look like a Bavarian village. I found it oddly charming. As so often with these things in America, it was superior to a real Bavarian village. There were two reasons for this: (1) it was better built and more picturesque, and (2) the inhabitants of Sun Valley have never adopted Adolf Hitler as their leader or sent their neighbours off for gassing. Were I a skier and rich, I would on these grounds alone unhesitatingly choose it over Garmisch-Partenkirchen, say. In the meantime, being poor and skiless, there was nothing much for me to do but poke around in the shops. For the most part these sold swish skiing outfits and expensive gifts – things like large pewter elk for $200 and lead crystal paperweights at $150 – and the people who ran them were those snooty types who watch you as if they think you might do a poo in the corner given half a chance. Understandably, this soured me on the place and I declined to make any purchases. ‘Your loss, not mine,’ I murmured sniffily as I left.
Idaho is another big state – 550 miles from top to bottom, 300 miles across at the base – and it took me the rest of the day just to drive to Idaho Falls, near the border with Wyoming. En route I passed the little town of Arco, which on December 20, 1951, became the first town in the world to be lit with nuclear-powered electricity, supplied by the world’s first peacetime nuclear reactor at a site ten miles south-west of town at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. The name is misleading because the so-called laboratory covers several hundred square miles of scrubby chaparral and is actually the biggest nuclear dump in the country. The highway between Arco and Idaho Falls runs for forty miles alongside the complex, but it is lined by high fences interspersed with military-style check-points. In the far distance stand