I was headed for Nebraska. Now theres a sentence you dont 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 tabletop. 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, had to 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. Doesnt 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? Thats correct, they slid straight into the Platte River. For a long time I couldnt decide whether the original settlers in Nebraska were insane or just stupid, and then I saw a stadium full of University of Nebraska football fans in action on a Saturday and realized that they must have been both. I may be a decade or so out of touch here but when I left America, the University of Nebraska didnt so much play football as engage in weekly ritual slaughters. They were always racking up scores of 58-3 against hapless opponents. Most schools, when they get a decent lead, will send in a squad of skinny freshmen in unsoiled uniforms to let them run around a bit and get dirty and, above all, to give the losers a sporting chance to make the score respectable. Its called fair play. Not Nebraska. The University of Nebraska would send in flamethrowers if it were allowed. Watching Nebraska play football every week was like watching hyenas tearing open a gazelle. It was unseemly. It was unsporting. And of course the fans could never get enough of it. To sit among them with the score 66-0 and watch them bray for more blood is a distinctly unnerving experience, particularly when you consider that a lot of these people must work at the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. If Iowa State ever upset Nebraska, I wouldnt be at all surprised if they nuked Ames. All of these thoughts percolated through my mind on this particular morning and frankly left me troubled. I was on the road again. It was a little after 7:30 A.M. on a bright but still wintry Monday morning in April. I drove west out of Des Moines on Interstate 80, intending to zip across the western half of Iowa and plunge deep into Nebraska. But I couldnt face Nebraska just yet, not this early in the morning, and abruptly at De Soto, just fifteen miles west of Des Moines, I pulled off the interstate and started wandering around on back roads. Within a couple of minutes I was lost. This didnt altogether surprise me. Getting lost is a family trait. My father, when behind the wheel, was more or less permanently lost. Most of the time he was just kind of lost, but whenever we got near something we were intent on seeing he would become seriously lost. Generally it would take him about an hour to realize that he had gone from the first stage to the second. All during that time, as he blundered through some unfamiliar city, making sudden and unpredictable turns, getting honked at for going the wrong way down one-way streets or for hesitating in the middle of busy intersections, my mother would mildly suggest that perhaps we should pull over and ask directions. But my father would pretend not to hear her and would press on in that semi-obsessional state that tends to overcome fathers when things arent going well. Eventually, after driving the wrong way down the same one-way street so many times that merchants were beginning to come and watch from their doorways, Dad would stop the car and gravely announce, Well, I think we should ask directions in a tone that made it clear that this had been his desire all along. This was always a welcome development, but seldom more than a partial breakthrough. Either my mom would get out and stop a patently unqualified person - a nun on an exchange visit from Costa Rica usually - and come back with directions that were hopelessly muddled or my father would go off to find somebody and then not come back. The problem with my dad was that he was a great talker. This is always a dangerous thing in a person who gets lost a lot. He would go into a cafe to ask the way to Giant Fungus State Park and the next thing you knew he would be sitting down having a cup of coffee and a chat with the proprietor or the proprietor would be taking him out back to show him his new septic tank or something. In the meantime the rest of us would have to sit in a quietly baking car, with nothing to do but sweat and wait and listlessly watch a pair of flies copulate on the dashboard. After a very long time my father would reappear, wiping crumbs from around his mouth and looking real perky. Darnedest thing, he would say, leaning over to talk to my mom through the window. Guy in there collects false teeth. Hes got over seven hundred sets down in his basement. He was so pleased to have someone to show them to that I just couldnt say no. And then his wife insisted that I have a piece of blueberry pie and see the photographs from their daughters wedding. Theyd never heard of Giant Fungus State Park, Im afraid, but the guy said his brother at the Conoco station by the traffic lights would know. He collects fan belts, of all things, and apparently has the largest collection of prewar fan belts in the upper Midwest. Im just going down there now. And then, before anybody could stop him, hed be gone again. By the time he finally returned my father would know most of the people in town and the flies on the dashboard would have a litter of infants. Billy Bryson Lost Continent (1989)
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 11:33:44 +0000
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