The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [99]
Des Moines looked wonderful in the morning sunshine. The dome on the state capitol building gleamed. The trees were still full of colour. They’ve changed the city completely – downtown now is all modern buildings and bubbling fountains and whenever I’m there now I have to keep looking up at the street signs to get my bearings – but it felt like home. I suppose it always will. I hope so. I drove through the city, happy to be there, proud to be part of it.
On Grand Avenue, near the governor’s mansion, I realized I was driving along behind my mother, who had evidently borrowed my sister’s car. I recognized her because the right turn signal was blinking pointlessly as she proceeded up the street. My mother generally puts the turn signal on soon after pulling out of the garage and then leaves it on for pretty much the rest of the day. I used to point this out to her, but then I realized it is actually a good thing because it alerts other motorists that they are approaching a driver who may not be entirely on top of matters. I followed along behind her. At Thirty-First Street the blinking turn signal jumped from the right side of the car to the left – I had forgotten that she likes to move it around from time to time – as we turned the corner for home, but then it stayed cheerily blinking on the left for the last mile, down Thirty-First Street and up Elmwood Drive.
I had to park a fair distance from the house and then, despite a boyish eagerness to see my mother, I took a minute to log the final details of the trip in a notebook I had been carrying with me. It always made me feel oddly important and professional, like a jumbo jet pilot at the end of a transatlantic flight. It was 10.38 a.m., and I had driven 6,842 miles since leaving home thirty-four days earlier. I circled this figure, then got out, grabbed my bags from the trunk, and walked briskly to the house. My mother was already inside. I could see her through the back window, moving around in the kitchen, putting away groceries and humming. She is always humming. I opened the back door, dropped my bags and called out those four most all-American words: ‘Hi, Mom, I’m home!’
She looked real pleased to see me. ‘Hello, dear!’ she said brightly and gave me a hug. ‘I was just wondering when I’d be seeing you again. Can I get you a sandwich?’
‘That would be great,’ I said even though I wasn’t really hungry.
It was good to be home.
PART TWO
West
Chapter twenty
I WAS HEADED for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch. In the middle of the state is a river called the Platte, which at some times of the year is two or three miles wide. It looks impressive until you realize that it is only about four inches deep. You could cross it in a wheelchair. On a landscape without any contours or depressions to shape it, the Platte just lies there, like a drink spilled across a table-top. It is the most exciting thing in the state.
When I was growing up, I used to wonder how Nebraska came to be lived in. I mean to say, the original settlers, creaking across America in their covered wagons, must have passed through Iowa, which is green and fertile and has, as I say, a hill, but stopped short of Colorado, which is green and fertile and has a mountain range, and settled instead for a place that is flat and brown and full of stubble and prairie-dogs. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Do you know what the original settlers made their houses of? Dried mud. And do you know what happened to all those mud houses when the rainy season came every year? That’s correct, they slid straight into the Platte River.
For a long time I couldn’t