said, 'Well, Greta, which do you like better, the United States or Sweden?'
The girl blushed. She obviously had not been in the country long enough to expect this question.
Suddenly she looked more child than woman. With an embarrassed flutter of hands she said, 'Oh, I sink Sweden,' and a pall fell over the table. Everyone looked uncomfortable. 'Oh,' said the man in a flat, disappointed tone, and the conversation turned to potato prices.
People in middle America always ask that question. When you grow up in America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief-no, the understanding-that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on earth.
Countries just don't come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious. I used to feel this way myself. In high school I shared a locker with a Dutch exchange student and I remember him asking me one day in a peevish tone why everybody, absolutely everybody, wanted him to like America better than the Netherlands. 'Holland is my home,' he said. 'Why can't people understand that it's where I want to live?'
I considered his point. 'Yes,' I said, 'but deep down, Anton, wouldn't you really rather live here?'
And funnily enough, in the end, he decided he did. The last I heard he was a successful realtor in Florida, driving a Porsche, wearing wraparound sunglasses and saying, 'Hey, what's happening?'
which of course is a considerable improvement on wearing wooden shoes, carrying pails of milk on a yoke over your shoulder and being invaded by Germany every couple of generations.
In the morning I drove on to Wyoming, through scenery that looked like an illustration from some marvelous children's book of Western tales-snowy peaks, pine forests, snug farms, a twisting river, a mountain vale with a comely name: Swan Valley. That is the one thing that must be said for the men and women who carved out the West. They certainly knew how to name a place. Just on this corner of the map I could see Soda Springs, Massacre Rocks, Steamboat Mountain, Wind River, Flaming Gorge, Calamity Falls-places whose very names promised adventure and excitement, even if in reality all they contained were a DX gas station and a Tastee-Freez drive- in.
Most of the early settlers in America were oddly inept at devising place names. They either chose unimaginative, semirecycled names-New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England-or toadying, kiss-ass names like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Jamestown in a generally pitiable attempt to secure favor with some monarch or powdered aristocrat back home. Or else they just accepted the names the Indians told them, not knowing whether Squashaninsect meant 'land of the twinkling lakes' or 'place where Big Chief Thunderclap paused to pass water.'
The Spanish were even worse because they gave everything religious names, so that every place in the Southwest is called San this or Santa that. Driving across the Southwest is like an S00 mile religious procession. The worst name on the whole continent is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, which means 'the Blood of Christ Mountains.' Have you ever heard of a more inane name for any geographical feature? It was only here in the real West, the land of beaver trappers and mountain men, that a dollop of romance and color was brought to the business of giving names.
And here I was about to enter one of the most beautiful and understatedly romantic of them all: Jackson Hole.
Jackson Hole isn't really a hole at all; it's just the name for a scenic valley that runs from north to south through the Grand Tetons, very probably the most majestic range in the Rockies. With their high white peaks and bluish-gray bases they look like some kind of exotic confection, like blueberry frappes. At the southern edge of Jackson Hole is the small town of Jackson, where I stopped now for lunch. It was a strange place, with an odd combination of bow-legged Yosemite Sams and upmarket stores like Benetton and Ralph Lauren, which are there for the benefit of the many well-heeled tenderfeet who come for the skiing in the winter and to dude ranches in the summer. Every place in town had a Wild West motif-the Antler Motel, the Silver Dollar Saloon, the Hitching Post Lodge. Even the Bank of Jackson, where I went to cash a traveler's check, had a stuffed buffalo head on the wall. Yet it all seemed quite natural. Wyoming is the most fiercely Western of all the Western states. It's still a land of cowboys and horses and wide open spaces, a place where a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, which on the face of it primarily consists of driving around in a pickup truck and being kind of slow. I had never seen so many people in cowboy apparel, and almost everybody owns a gun. Only a couple of weeks before, the state legislature in Cheyenne had introduced a rule that all legislators would henceforth have to check their handguns at the front desk before being allowed into the statehouse. That's the sort of state Wyoming is.
I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there's another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That's an interesting fact-a topographical tit-bit, so to speak-that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I'd known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn't button his own fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.
At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through northwestern Wyoming took one look at the mountains and said, 'Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife's tetons.' Isn't it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn't discover the Grand Canyon, that's all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as ... well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don't look like tits at all, except perhaps to desperately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little bit like tits to me.
Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park run together to form one enormous area of wilderness stretching over a hundred miles from north to south. The road connecting them, Route 191, had only just been reopened for the year, and the Teton visitors' centers were still closed. There were hardly any other people or cars around and for forty miles I drove in splendid isolation along the wild meadows of the Snake River, where herds of elk grazed against the backdrop of the tall and jagged Tetons. As I climbed into Yellowstone the clouds grew moody and looked heavy with snow.
The road I was on is closed for six months of the year, which gives you some idea of the sort of winters they have there. Even now the snow along the roadside was five or six feet deep in places.
Yellowstone is the oldest national park in the world (it was created in 1872) and it is enormous, about the size of Connecticut. I drove for over an hour without seeing anyone, except for a park warden in a wooden but who charged me ten dollars to get in. That must be an exciting job for a college graduate, to sit in a but in the middle of nowhere and take ten dollars off a tourist every two or three hours. Eventually I came to a turnoff for Grant Village, and I followed it for a mile through the snowy woods. The village was good-sized, with a visitors' center, motel,
