The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [139]
I trudged up the road in the direction of the Tastee-Freez. I walked for some way, out past the last of the houses and on to an empty highway that appeared to stretch off into the distance for miles, but there was no sign of a Tastee-Freez, so I turned around and trudged back into town. I intended to get the car, but then I couldn’t be bothered. There was something about the way they can’t even spell ‘freeze’ right that’s always put me off these places. How much faith can you place in a company that can’t even spell a monosyllable? So instead I went to the gas station and bought about six dollar’s worth of potato chips and candy bars, which I took back to my room and dumped on the bed. I lay there and pushed candy bars into my face, like logs into a sawmill, and watched some plotless piece of violent Hollywood excrescence on HBO, and then slept another fitful night, lying in the dark, full and yet unsatisfied, staring at the ceiling and listening to the Shriners across the street and to the ceaseless bleating of my stomach.
And so the night passed.
I woke early and peeked shivering through a gap in the curtains. It was a drizzly Sunday dawn. Not a soul was about. This would be an excellent time to firebomb the restaurant. I made a mental note to pack gelignite the next time I came to Wyoming. And sandwiches. Switching on the TV, I slipped back into bed and pulled the covers up to just below my eyeballs. Jimmy Swaggart was still appealing for forgiveness. Goodness me but that man can cry. He is a human waterfall. I watched for a while, but then got up and changed the channel. On all the other channels it was just more evangelists, usually with their dumpy wives sitting at their sides. You could see why they all went out for sex. Generally, the programme would also feature the evangelist’s son-in-law, a graduate of the Pat Boone school of grooming, who would sing a song with a title like ‘You’ve Got A Friend in Jesus And Please Send Us Lots of Money’. There can be few experiences more dispiriting than to lie alone in a darkened motel room in a place like Wyoming and watch TV early on a Sunday morning.
I can remember when we didn’t even have TV on Sunday mornings; that’s how old I am. You would turn on WOI and all you would get was a test pattern and you would sit there and watch that because there was nothing else. Then after a while they would take off the test pattern and show Sky King, which was an interesting and exciting programme, at least compared to a test pattern. Nowadays they don’t show test patterns at all on American TV, which is a shame because given a choice between test patterns and TV evangelists, I would unhesitatingly choose the test patterns. They were soothing in an odd way and of course they didn’t ask you for money or make you listen to their son-in-law sing.
It was just after eight when I left the motel. I drove through the drizzle to Devils Tower, about twenty-five miles away. Devils Tower was the mountain used by Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the one on which the aliens landed. It is so singular and extraordinary that you cannot imagine what Spielberg would have used as an alternative if it hadn’t been available. You can see it long before you get to it, but as you draw nearer the scale of it becomes really quite awesome. It is a flat-topped cone of rock 850 feet high, soaring out of an otherwise featureless plain. The scientific explanation is that it was a volcanic fluke – an outsized lump of warm rock that shot out of the earth and then cooled into its present arresting shape. In the moonlight it is said to glow, though even now on a wet Sunday morning with smoky clouds brushing across its summit it looked decidedly supernatural, as if it were placed there aeons ago for the eventual use of aliens. I only hope that when they do come they don’t expect to eat out.
I stopped at a lay-by near the tower and got out to look at it, squinting through the drizzle. A wooden sign beside