The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [140]
Everybody in America goes out for Sunday breakfast. It is such a popular pastime that you generally have to queue for a table, but it’s always worth the wait. Indeed, the inability to achieve instant oral gratification is such an unusual experience in America that queuing actually intensifies the pleasure. You wouldn’t want to do it all the time, of course, you wouldn’t want to get British about it or anything, but once a week for twenty minutes is kinda neat, as they say. One reason you have to queue is that it takes the waitress about thirty minutes just to take each order. First you have to tell her whether you want your eggs sunny side up, over easy, scrambled, poached, parboiled or in an omelette, and if in an omelette whether you want it to be a plain, cheese, vegetable, hot ’n’ spicy or chocolate nut ’n’ fudge omelette, and then you have to decide whether you want your toast to be white, rye, whole wheat, sourdough, or pumpernickel bread and whether you want whipped butter, pat butter, or low-cholesterol butter substitute, and then there’s a complicated period of negotiation in which you ask if you can have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll and link sausages instead of patties. So the waitress, who is only sixteen years old and not real smart, has to go off to the manager and ask him whether that’s possible, and she comes back and tells you that you can’t have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll, but you can have Idaho fries instead of the short stack of pancakes or you can have an English muffin and bacon instead of whole wheat toast, but only if you order a side of hashed browns and a large orange juice. This is unacceptable to you, and you decide that you will have waffles instead, so the waitress has to rub everything out with her nubby little eraser and start all over again. And across the room the queue on the other side of the ‘Please Wait to Be Seated’ board grows longer and longer, but the people don’t mind because the food smells so good and anyway all this waiting is, as I say, kinda neat.
I drove along Highway 24 through a landscape of low hills, in a state of tingly anticipation. There were three little towns over the next twenty miles and I felt certain that one of them would have a roadside restaurant. I was nearly at the South Dakota state line. I was leaving the ranching country and entering more conventional farmland. Farmers cannot exist without a roadside restaurant every couple of miles, so I had no doubt that I would find one just around the next bend. One by one I passed through the little towns – Hulett, Alva, Aladdin – but there was nothing to them, just sleeping houses. No-one was awake. What kind of place was this? Even on Sundays farmers are up at dawn. Beyond Beulah I passed the larger community of Belle Fourche and then St Onge and Sturgis, but still there was nothing. I couldn’t even get a cup of coffee.
At last I came to Deadwood, a town that, if nothing else, lived up to its first syllable. For a few years in the 1870s, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, Deadwood was one of the liveliest and most famous towns in the West. It was the home of Calamity Jane. Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead while playing cards in a local saloon. Today the town makes a living by taking large sums of money off tourists and giving them in return some crappy little trinket to take home and put on their mantelpiece. Almost all the stores along the main street were souvenir emporia, and several of them were open even though it was a Sunday morning. There were even a couple of coffee shops, but they were