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By Root 1353 0

the world where you could drive hundreds of miles in any direction before you found civilization, or at least met another person who didn’t like accordion music. In a forlorn attempt to pass the time, I thumbed through my Mobil guides, leaning them against the steering wheel while drifting just a trifle wildly in and out of my lane, and added up the populations and sizes of the four states of the high plains: North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Altogether they take up 385,000 square miles – an area about the size of France, Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries combined – but they have a total population of just 2.6 million. There are almost four times as many people in Paris alone. Isn’t that interesting? Here’s another interesting fact for you. The population density of Wyoming is 1.9 people per square kilometre; in South Dakota it is a little over two people per square kilometre. In Britain, there are 236.2 people per square kilometre. The number of people airborne in the United States at any given time (136,000) is greater than the combined populations of the largest cities in each of these four states. And finally, here’s a really interesting fact. According to a survey by Current Health Magazine, the percentage of salad bar customers in the United States seen ‘touching or spilling food or otherwise being unsanitary’ is sixty per cent. I am of course aware that this has nothing to do with the population of the northern plains states, but I thought a brief excursion into irrelevancy was a small price to pay for information that could change your life. It certainly has changed mine.

I stopped for the night in a nothing little town called Murdo, got a room in a Motel 6 overlooking Interstate 90 and went for dinner in a big truck stop across the highway. A highway patrol car was parked by the restaurant door. There is always a highway patrol car parked by the restaurant door. As you walk past it you can hear muffled squawking on the radio. ‘Attention, attention! Zero Tango Charlie! A Boeing 747 has just crashed into the nuclear power plant on Highway 69. People are wandering around with their hair on fire. Do you read me?’ Inside, oblivious of all this, are the two highway patrolmen, sitting at the counter eating apple pie with ice-cream and shooting the breeze with the waitress. Every once in a great while – perhaps twice in a day – the two patrolmen will get up from the counter and drive out to the highway to ticket some random motorists for trying to cross the state at seven miles an hour above the permitted limit. Then they will go and have some more pie. That is what it is to be a highway patrolman.

In the morning I continued on across South Dakota. It was like driving over an infinite sheet of sandpaper. The skies were low and dark. The radio said there was a tornado-watch in effect for the region. This always freaks out visitors from abroad – chambermaids in hotels in the Midwest are forever going into rooms and finding members of Japanese trade delegations cowering under the bed because they’ve heard a tornado siren – but locals pay no attention to these warnings because after years of living in the tornado belt you just take it as part of life. Besides, the chances of being hit by a tornado are about one in a million.

The only person I ever knew who came close was my grandfather. He and my grandmother (this is an absolutely true story, by the way) were sleeping one night when they were awakened by a roaring noise like the sound of a thousand chain-saws. The whole house shook. Pictures fell off the walls. A clock toppled off the mantelpiece in the living-room. My grandfather plodded over to the window and peered out, but he couldn’t see a thing, just pitch blackness, so he climbed back into bed, remarking to my grandmother that it seemed a bit stormy out there, and went back to sleep. What he didn’t realize was that a tornado, the most violent force in nature, had passed just beyond his nose. He could literally have reached out and touched it – though of course had he done so he would very probably