I entered Nevada about ten miles south of Lake Tahoe. Las Vegas had so put me off that I had no desire to go to another sink of iniquity, though I was later told that Tahoe is a really nice place and not at all like Las Vegas. Now I shall never know. I can tell you, however, that Carson City was just about the most nothing little city you could ever hope to zip through. It's the state capital, but mostly it was just Pizza Huts and gas stations and cheaplooking casinos.
I headed out of town on US 50, past Virginia City and towards Silver Springs. This was more or less the spot on 'Bonanza' where the map used to burst into flames. Remember that? It has been many years since I've seen the program, but I recall Pa and Hoss and Little Joe and the surly-looking one whose name I forget all living in a landscape that was fruitful and lush, in a Western, high-chaparral sort of way. But out here there was nothing but cement-colored plains and barren hills and almost no habitations at all. Everything was gray, from the sky to the ground. This was to remain the pattern for the next two days.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada. It has a population of just 800,000 in an area about the size of Britain and Ireland combined. Almost half of that population is accounted for by Las Vegas and Reno, so most of the rest of the state is effectively just empty. There are only 70 towns in the entire state the British Isles have 40,000, just to give you some comparison-and some of them are indescribably remote. For instance, Eureka, a town of 1,200 in the middle of the state, is sixty miles in any direction from the nearest town.
Indeed, the whole of Eureka County has just three towns and a total population of under 2,500--and this in an area of a couple of thousand square miles.
I drove for a while across this fearsome emptiness, taking a back highway between Fallon and a spot on the map called Humboldt Sink, where I gratefully joined Interstate S0. This was a cowardly thing to do, but the car had been making odd noises off and on for the past couple of days-a sort of faint clank clank oh god help me clank I'm dying oh god oh god clank noise-which wasn't covered in the troubleshooting section of the owner's manual. I couldn't face the prospect of breaking down and being stranded for days in some godforsaken dust hole while waiting for an anticlonk device to be shipped in from Reno on the weekly Greyhound. In any case, Highway 50, the nearest alternative road, would have taken me 150 miles out of my way and into Utah. I wanted to go a more northerly route across Montana and Wyoming-the Big Sky country. So it was with some relief that I joined the interstate, though even this was remarkably emptyusually I could see one car in the distance far ahead and one in the distance far behind-considering it was the main artery across the country.
Indeed, with a sufficiently capacious fuel tank and bladder, you could drive the whole way between New York and San Francisco without stopping.
At Winnemucca I pulled off for gas and coffee and called my mother to let her know that I hadn't been killed yet and was doing all right for underwear-a matter of perennial concern to my mother. I was able to reassure her on this score and she reassured me that she hadn't willed her money to the International Guppy Institute or anything similarly rash (I just like to check!), so we were able to continue our respective days with light hearts.
In the phone booth was a poster with a photograph of a young woman on it under the caption, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? She was attractive and looked youthful and happy. The poster said she was nineteen years old and had been driving from Boston to San Francisco on her way home for Christmas when she disappeared. She had called her parents from Winnemucca to tell them to expect her the next afternoon and that was the last anyone had heard of her. Now, she was almost certainly dead, somewhere out there in that big empty desert. Murder is terrifyingly easy in America.
You can kill a stranger, dump the body in a place where it will never be found and be 2,000 miles away before the murdered person is even missed. At any given time there are an estimated twelve to fifteen serial murderers at large in the country, just drifting around, snatching random victims and then moving on, leaving behind few clues and no motives. A couple of years earlier in Des Moines, some teenaged boys were cleaning out an office downtown for one of their fathers on a Sunday afternoon when a stranger came in, took them into a back room and shot each of them once in the back of the head. For no reason. That guy was caught, as it happens, but he could as easily have gone off to another state and done the same thing again. Every year in America S,000 murders go unsolved. That is an incredible number.
I spent the night in Wells, Nevada, the sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town I've ever seen.
Most of the streets were unpaved and lined with battered-looking trailer homes. Everyone in town seemed to collect old cars. They sat rusting and windowless in every yard. Almost everything in town appeared to exist on the edge of dereliction. Such economic life as Wells could muster came from the passing traffic of I-80. A number of truck stops and motels were scattered around, though many of these were closed down and those that remained were evidently struggling. Most of the motel signs had letters missing or burnt out, so that they said, LONE ST R MOT L-V CAN Y. I had a walk around the business district before dinner. This consisted mostly of closed-down stores, though a few places appeared still to be in business: a drugstore, a gas station, a Trailways bus depot, the Overland Hotel-sorry, H tel-and a movie house called the Nevada, though this proved upon closer inspection also to be deceased. There were dogs everywhere, sniffing in doorways and peeing on pretty much everything. It was cold, too. The sun was setting behind the rough, distant peaks of the Jackson Mountains and there was a decided chill in the air. I turned up my collar and trudged the half-mile from the town proper to the interstate junction with US 93, where the most prosperous-looking truck stops were gathered, forming an oasis of brightness in the pinkish dusk.
I went into what looked to be the best of them, the 4-Way Cafe, which I gather took its name from the fact that it consisted of a gift shop, restaurant, casino and bar. The casino was small, just a room with a couple of dozen slot machines, mostly nickel ones, and the gift shop was about the size of a closet. The cafe was crowded and dense with smoke and chatter. Steel-guitar music drifted out of the jukebox. I was the only person in the room who didn't have a cowboy hat on, apart from a couple of the women.
It was absolutely, in my opinion, the worst food I have ever had in America, at any time, under any circumstances, and that includes hospital food, gas station food and airport coffee shop food. It even includes Greyhound bus station food and Woolworth's luncheon counter food. It was even worse than the pastries they used to put in the food dispensing machines at the Register and Tribune Building in Des Moines and those tasted like somebody had been sick on them. This food was just plain terrible, and yet everybody in the room was shoveling it away as if there were no tomorrow. I picked at it for a while-bristly fried chicken, lettuce with blackened veins, french fries that had the appearance and appeal of albino slugs-and gave up, despondent. I pushed the plate away and wished that I still smoked. The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggy bag.
'No thank you,' I said through a thin smile, 'I don't believe I could find a dog that would eat it.'
On reflection, I can think of one eating experience even more dispiriting than dining at the 4-Way Cafe and that was the lunchroom at Callanan Junior High School in Des Moines. The lunchroom at Callanan was like something out of a prison movie. You would shuffle forward in a long, silent line and have lumpen, shapeless food dolloped onto your tray by lumpen, shapeless women-women who looked as if they were on day release from a mental institution, possibly for having poisoned food in public places. The food wasn't merely unappealing, it was unidentifiable. Adding to the displeasure was the presence of the deputy principal, Mr. Snoyd, who was always stalking around behind you, ready to grab you by the neck and march you off to his office if you made gagging noises or were overheard inquiring of the person across from you, 'Say, what is this shit?' Eating at Callanan was like having your stomach
