The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [135]
I got a room in the Del Mar Motel in Livingston, had some dinner and went for a walk out along the highway at the edge of town. With the sun sinking behind the nearby mountains, the evening quickly grew cold. A bleak wind came whipping down from the emptiness of Canada, 300 miles to the north, the kind of wind that slips up the back of your jacket and humiliates your hair. It resonated down the telephone lines, like a man whistling through his teeth, and made the tall grass seethe. Somewhere a gate creaked and banged, creaked and banged. The highway stretched out flat and straight ahead of me until it narrowed to a vanishing-point some miles away. Every so often a car would come at me down the highway from behind, sounding eerily like a jet taking off. As it came nearer and nearer I would half wonder for one moment if it was going to hit me – it sounded that close – and then it would flash past and I would watch its tail-lights disappear into the gathering gloom.
A freight train came along on some tracks that ran parallel to the highway. At first it was a distant light and short bursts of horn, and then it was rolling past me, slow and stately, on its nightly procession through Livingston. It was enormous – American trains are twice the size of European ones – and at least a mile long. I counted sixty freight cars on it before I lost track, all of them with names on them like Burlington & Northern, Rock Island, Santa Fe. It struck me as curious that train lines were so often named after towns that never amounted to much. I wondered how many people a century ago lost their shirts buying property in places like Atchison and Topeka on the assumption that one day they would be as big as Chicago and San Francisco. Towards the end of the train one car went by with its door open and I could see three shadowy figures inside: hoboes. I was amazed to find that such people still existed, that it was still possible to ride the rails. In the dusk it looked a very romantic way to spend your life. It was all I could do to keep from sprinting along and climbing aboard and just disappearing with them into the night. There is nothing like an evening train rolling past to make you take leave of your senses. But instead I just turned around and trudged back along the tracks into town, feeling oddly content.
Chapter twenty-seven
THE NEXT DAY I was torn between driving back into Wyoming further east along Interstate 90 and going to the little town of Cody, or staying in Montana and visiting the Custer National Battlefield. Cody takes its name from Buffalo Bill Cody, who agreed to be buried there if they named the town after him. There were presumably two further stipulations: (1) that they waited until he was dead before they buried him, and (2) that they filled the town with as much tourist tat as they could possibly manage. Seeing the chance to collect a little lucre, the townspeople happily acceded and they have been cashing in on Cody’s fame ever since. Today the town offers half a dozen cowboy museums and other diversions and of course many opportunities to purchase small crappy trinkets to take back home with you.
The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I’m awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill’s birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollock, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don’t make anything of that because, I suppose, Pollock was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo.
So that was option one. Alternatively, as I say, I had the choice of driving on across Montana to Little Bighorn, where Custer came a cropper. To be perfectly frank, neither one of them seemed terribly exciting – I would