The Lost Continent (30 page)

I said I thought that was surprising. If I had grown up in a place where something famous had happened I would want to read about it. ‘So would I,’ Kennedy said. ‘So would most people from our generation. But kids these days are different. A lot of them can barely read. And you just can’t teach them anything. There’s no spark of enthusiasm there. It’s as if years of watching TV have hypnotized them. Some of them can hardly speak a coherent sentence.’

We agreed that this was, you know, weird.

There is nothing much to be said for the far west of Kansas except that the towns are small and scattered and the
highways mostly empty. Every ten miles or so there is a side road, and at every side road there is an old pickup truck stopped at a stop sign. You can see them from a long way off – in Kansas you can see everything from a long way off – glinting in the sunshine. At first you think the truck must be broken down or abandoned, but just as you get within thirty or forty feet of it, it pulls out onto the highway in front of you, causing you to make an immediate downward adjustment in your speed from sixty miles an hour to about twelve miles an hour and to test the resilience of the steering wheel with your forehead. This happens to you over and over. Curious to see what sort of person could inconvenience you in this way in the middle of nowhere, you speed up to overtake it and see that sitting at the wheel is a little old man of eighty-seven, wearing a cowboy hat three sizes too large for him, staring fixedly at the empty road as if piloting a light aircraft through a thunderstorm. He is of course quite oblivious of you. Kansas has more drivers like this than any other state in the nation, more than can be accounted for by simple demographics. Other states must send them their old people, perhaps by promising them a free cowboy hat when they get there.

I SHOULD HAVE
known better, but I had it in my mind that Colorado was nothing but mountains. Somehow I thought that the moment I left Kansas I would find myself amid the snow-tipped Rockies, in lofty meadows of waving buttercups, where the skies were blue and the air was as crisp as fresh celery. But it was nothing like that at all. It was just flat and brown and full of remote little towns with charmless names: Swink, Ordway, Manzanola. They in turn were all full of poor-looking people and mean-looking dogs nosing around on the margins of liquor stores and gas stations. Broken bottles glittered among the stubble in the road-side ditches and the signs along the way were pocked from shotgun blasts. This sure wasn’t the Colorado John Denver was forever yodelling on about.

I was imperceptibly climbing. Every town along the highway announced its elevation, and each was several hundred feet higher than the previous one, but it wasn’t until I had nearly reached Pueblo, 150 miles into the interior, that I at last saw mountains. Suddenly there they were, blue and craggy and heavy with snow.

My plan was to take State Highway 67 north up to Victor and Cripple Creek, two old gold-mining towns. The road was marked on my map as scenic. What I didn’t realize was that it was unpaved and that it led through a mountain pass ominously called Phantom Canyon. It was the most
desolate and bone-shaking road I have ever been on, full of ruts and rocks – the kind of road that makes everything in the car dance about and doors fly open. The problem was that there was no way to turn around. One side of the road hugged a wall of rock, rising up and up, like the side of a skyscraper; the other fell sharply away to a creek of excited water. Meekly I pressed on, driving at a creeping pace and hoping that things would improve in a while. But of course they didn’t. The road grew even steeper and more perilous. Here and there the two sides of the canyon would narrow and I would be hemmed in for a while by walls of fractured stone that looked as if they had been struck with a hammer, and then suddenly it would open out again to reveal hair-raising views down to the twisting canyon floor far, far below.

Everywhere above me house-sized boulders teetered on pin-heads of rock, just waiting to tumble down the mountainside and make a doormat of me. Rockslides were evidently common. The valley floor was a graveyard of boulders. I prayed that I would not meet another vehicle coming down the hill and have to reverse all the way to the valley floor. But I needn’t have worried because of course not a single other person in the whole of North America was sufficiently moronic to drive through Phantom Valley at this time of year, when a sudden storm could turn the road to mud and bog the car down for months, or send it slipping and sliding over the void. I wasn’t used to dealing with landscapes that can kill you. Cautiously I pressed on.

High up in the mountains I crossed a wooden bridge of laughable ricketyness over a deep chasm. It was the sort of bridge on which, in the movies, a slat always breaks, causing the heroine to plunge through up to her armpits
with her pert legs wiggling helplessly above the chasm, until the hero dashes back to save her, spears falling all around them. When I was twelve years old, I could never understand why the hero, operating from this position of superiority, didn’t say to the lady, ‘OK, I’ll save your life, but later you have to let me see you naked. Agreed?’

Beyond the bridge wet snow began to fly about. It mixed with the hundreds of insects that had been flinging themselves into the windscreen since Nebraska (what a senseless waste of life!) and turned it into a brown sludge. I attacked it with window washer solution, but this just converted it from a brown sludge to a creamy sludge and I still couldn’t see. I stopped and jumped out to wipe at the window with my sleeve, certain that at any moment a bobcat, seeing the chance of a lifetime, would drop onto my shoulders and rip off my scalp with a sound like two strips of Velcro being parted. I imagined myself, scalpless, stumbling down the mountainside with the bobcat nipping at my heels. This formed such a vivid image in my mind that I jumped back into the car, even though I had only created a small rectangle of visibility about the size of an envelope. It was like looking out of a tank turret.

The car wouldn’t start. Of course. Drily I said, ‘Oh, thank you, God.’ Up here in the thin air, the Chevette just gasped and wheezed and quickly became flooded. While I waited for the flooding to subside, I looked at the map and was dismayed to discover that I still had twenty miles to go. I had only done eight miles so far and I had been at it for well over an hour. The possibility that the Chevette might not make it to Victor and Cripple Creek took root in my skull. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps no-one ever came along this road. If I died out here, I reflected
bleakly, it could be years before anyone found me or the Chevette, which would obviously be a tragedy. Apart from anything else the battery was still under warranty.

But of course I didn’t die out there. In fact, to tell you the truth, I don’t intend ever to die. The car started up; I crept up over the last of the high passes and thence into Victor without further incident. Victor was a wonderful sight, a town of Western-style buildings perched incongruously in a high green valley of the most incredible beauty. Once it and Cripple Creek, six miles down the road, were boom towns to beat all boom towns. At their peak, in 1908, they had 500 gold mines between them and a population of 100,000. Miners were paid in gold. In twenty-five years or so the mines produced $800 million worth of gold and made a lot of people rich. Jack Dempsey lived in Victor and started his career there.

Today only a couple of working mines are left and the population is barely a thousand. Victor had the air of a ghost town, though at least the streets were paved. Chipmunks darted among the buildings and grass was growing through cracks in the sidewalk. The town was full of antique stores and craft shops, but almost all of them were closed, evidently waiting for the summer season. Quite a few were empty and one, the Amber Inn, had been seized for non-payment of taxes. A big sign in the window said so. But the post office was open and one café, which was full of old men in bib overalls and younger men with beards and pony tails. All the men wore baseball caps, though here they advertised brands of beer – Coors, Bud Lite, Olympia – rather than brands of fertilizer.

I decided to drive on to Cripple Creek for lunch, and then wished I hadn’t. Cripple Creek stands in the shadows
of Mt Pisgah and Pikes Peak and was far more touristy than Victor. Most of the stores were open, though they weren’t doing much business. I parked on the main street in front of the Sarsaparilla Saloon and had a look around. Architecturally, Cripple Creek was much the same as Victor, but here the businesses were almost all geared to tourists: gift shops, snack bars, ice-cream parlours, a place where children could pan for gold in an artificial creek, a miniature golf-course. It was pretty awful, and made worse by the bleakening weather. Flurries of snow were still swirling about. It was cold and the air was thin. Cripple Creek is nearly two miles up. At that altitude, if you’re not used to it, you feel uncomfortably breathless a lot of the time and vaguely unwell all of the time. Certainly the last thing I wanted was an ice-cream or a game of miniature golf, so I returned to the car and pressed on.

At the junction of US 24, I turned left and headed west. Here the weather was superb. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Out of the west, a flotilla of clouds sailed in, fluffy and benign, skimming the peaks. The highway was of pink asphalt; it was like driving along a strip of bubble gum. The road led up and over the Wilkerson Pass and then down into a long valley of rolling meadows with glittering streams and log cabins set against a backdrop of muscular mountains. It looked like a scene out of a deodorant commercial. It was glorious, and I had it almost all to myself. Near Buena Vista the land dramatically dropped away to reveal a plain and beyond it the majestic Collegiate Peaks, the highest range in the United States, with sixteen peaks of over 14,000 feet along a thirty-mile stretch. I fell with the highway down the mountainside and crossed the plain towards the Collegiate range, tall
and blue and snow-peaked. It was like driving into the opening credits of a Paramount movie.

I had intended to make for Aspen, but at the turning at Twin Lakes I found a white barrier barring the way and a sign saying that the highway to Aspen over Independence Pass was closed because of snow. Aspen was just twenty miles down the closed road, but to reach it by the alternative northern route would have required a detour of 150 miles. Disappointed, I looked for some place else to go for the night and drove on to Leadville, a place about which I knew nothing and indeed had never even heard.

Leadville was outstanding. The outskirts of the town were ragged and shabby – there’s a surprising amount of poverty in Colorado – but the main street was broad and lined with sturdy Victorian buildings, many of them with turrets and towers. Leadville was another gold and silver mining town; it was here that the Unsinkable Molly Brown got her start, as did Meyer Guggenheim. Like Cripple Creek and Victor, it now catered to tourists – every place in the Rockies caters to tourists – but it had a much more genuine feel to it. Its population was 4,000, enough to give it an independent life apart from what the tourists brought it.

I got a room in the Timberline Motel, had a stroll around the town and a creditable meal at the Golden Burro Café – not the greatest food in the world, or even possibly in Leadville, but at $6 for soup, salad, chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, coffee and pie, who’s bitching? – followed by a moonlight stroll back to the motel, a hot shower and a little TV. If only life could always be so simple and serene. I was asleep
by ten, dreaming happy dreams in which I manfully dealt with pouncing bobcats, swaying wooden bridges and windscreens full of sticky insects. The heroine even let me see her with her clothes off. It was a night to remember.

IN THE MORNING,
the weatherman on the TV said that a ‘frunnal system’ was about to dump many inches of snow on the Rockies. This seemed to please him a lot. You could see it in his twinkling eyes. His map showed a band of unpleasantness sitting like a curse over almost the whole of the West. Roads would be shut, he said, a hint of a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, and travel advisories would be issued. Why are television weathermen always so malicious? Even when they are trying to be sincere, you can see that it’s a front – that just under the surface there lurks a person who spent his childhood pulling the wings off insects and snickering whenever another child fell under the wheels of a passing vehicle.

Abruptly, I decided to head south for the arid mountains of New Mexico, over which the weather-map showed nothing much in particular happening. I had a niece at a small, exclusive college in Santa Fe whom I hadn’t seen for a long time and I was sure she would be delighted for all her friends on campus to witness a slobby, overweight man pull up in a cheap, dusty car, leap out and embrace her, so I decided to drive straight there.

I headed south on US 285, which runs along the line of the continental divide. All around me was the most incredible natural beauty, but the landscape was con
stantly blemished by human intrusions – ugly trailer parks, untidy homesteads, even junk yards. Every town was mostly a collection of fast food places and gas stations, and all along the road for many miles stood signs the size of barns saying
CAMPGROUND, MOTEL, RAFTING
.

The further south I went the more barren the landscape grew, and after a while the signs disappeared. Beyond Saguache the wide plain between the mountains became a sweep of purple sage, interspersed with dead brown earth. Here and there a field of green had been snatched from the scrub with the aid of massive wheeled water-sprinklers. In the middle of these oases would stand a neat farmhouse. But otherwise the landscape between the distant mountain ranges was as featureless as a dried seabed. Between Saguache and Monte Vista lies one of the ten or twelve longest stretches of straight road in America: almost forty miles without a single bend or kink. That may not sound such a lot on paper, but it feels endless on the road. There is nothing like a highway stretching off to an ever-receding vanishing-point to make you feel as if you are going nowhere. At Monte Vista, the road takes a left turn – this makes you perk up and grip the wheel – and then there is another twenty-mile stretch as straight as a ruler’s edge. And so it goes. Two or three times in an hour you zip through a dusty little town – a gas station, three houses, one tree, a dog – or encounter a fractional bend in the road which requires you to move the steering wheel three centimetres to the right or left for two seconds, and that’s your excitement for the hour. The rest of the time you don’t move a muscle. Your buttocks grow numb and begin to feel as if they belong to another person.