The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [132]
I considered his point. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but deep down, Anton, wouldn’t you really rather live here?’ And funnily enough, in the end, he decided he did. The last I heard he was a successful realtor in Florida, driving a Porsche, wearing wraparound sunglasses and saying, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ which of course is a considerable improvement on wearing wooden shoes, carrying pails of milk on a yoke over your shoulder and being invaded by Germany every couple of generations.
In the morning I drove to Wyoming, through scenery that looked like an illustration from some marvellous children’s book of Western tales – snowy peaks, pine forests, snug farms, a twisting river, a mountain vale with a comely name: Swan Valley. That is the one thing that must be said for the men and women who carved out the West. They certainly knew how to name a place. Just on this corner of the map I could see Soda Springs, Massacre Rocks, Steamboat Mountain, Wind River, Flaming Gorge, Calamity Falls – places whose very names promised adventure and excitement, even if in reality all they contained were a DX gas station and a Tastee-Freez drive-in.
Most of the early settlers in America were oddly inept at devising place-names. They either chose unimaginative, semi-recycled names – New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England – or toadying, kiss-ass names like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Jamestown in a generally pitiable attempt to secure favour with some monarch or powdered aristocrat back home. Or else they just accepted the names the Indians told them, not knowing whether Squashaninsect meant ‘land of the twinkling lakes’ or ‘place where Big Chief Thunderclap paused to pass water’.
The Spanish were even worse because they gave everything religious names, so that every place in the south-west is called San this or Santa that. Driving across the south-west is like an 800-mile religious procession. The worst name on the whole continent is the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, which means the ‘Blood of Christ Mountains’. Have you ever heard of a more inane name for any geographical feature? It was only here in the real West, the land of beaver trappers and mountain men, that a dollop of romance and colour was brought to the business of giving names. And here I was about to enter one of the most beautiful and understatedly romantic of them all: Jackson Hole.
Jackson Hole isn’t really a hole at all; it’s just the name for a scenic valley that runs from north to south through the Grand Tetons, very probably the most majestic range in the Rockies. With their high white peaks and bluish-grey bases they look like some kind of exotic confection, like blueberry frappés. At the southern edge of Jackson Hole is the small town of Jackson, where I stopped now for lunch. It was a strange place, with an odd combination of bow-legged Yosemite Sams and upmarket stores like Benetton and Ralph Lauren, which are there for the benefit of the many well-heeled tenderfeet who come for the skiing in the winter and to dude ranches in the summer. Every place in town had a Wild West motif – the Antler Motel, the Silver Dollar Saloon, the Hitching Post Lodge. Even the Bank of Jackson, where I went to cash a traveller’s cheque, had a stuffed buffalo head on the wall. Yet it all seemed quite natural. Wyoming is the most fiercely Western of all the Western states. It’s still a land of cowboys and horses and wide open spaces, a place where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which on the face of it primarily consists of driving around in a pickup truck and being kind of slow. I had never seen so many people in cowboy apparel, and almost everybody owns a gun. Only a couple of weeks before, the state legislature in Cheyenne had introduced a rule that all legislators would