Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I'm afraid, but the guy said his brother at the Conoco station by the traffic lights would
know.Hecollectsfanbelts,ofallthings,andapparentlyhasthelargestcollectionofprewar
fan belts in the upper Midwest. I'm just going down there now.” And then, before anybody
could stop him, he'd 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.
Eventually I found what I was looking for: Winterset, birthplace of John Wayne. I drove
around the town until I found his house-Winterset is so small that this only took a minute-
and slowed down to look at it from the car. The house was tiny and the paint was peeling
off it. Wayne, or Marion Morrison as he then was, only lived there for a year or so before
his family moved to California. The house is run as a museum now, but it was shut. This
didn't surprise me as pretty much everything in the town was shut, quite a lot of it perman-
ently from the look of things. The Iowa Movie Theater on the square was clearly out of
business, its marquee blank, and many of the other stores were gone or just hanging on. It
was a depressing sight because Winterset was really quite a nice-looking little town with
its county courthouse and square and long streets of big Victorian houses. I bet, like Win-
field, it was a different place altogether fifteen or twenty years ago. I drove back out to the
highway past the Gold Buffet (“Dancing Nitely”) feeling an odd sense of emptiness.
Every town I came to was much the same-peeling paint, closed businesses, a deathly air.
Southwest Iowa has always been the poorest part of the state and it showed. I didn't stop
because there was nothing worth stopping for. I couldn't even find a place to get a cup of
coffee. Eventually, much to my surprise, I blundered onto a bridge over the Missouri River
and then I was in Nebraska City, in Nebraska. And it wasn't at all bad. In fact, it was really
quitepleasant-betterthanIowabyalongshot,Iwasembarrassedtoadmit.Thetownswere
more prosperous-looking and better maintained, and the roadsides everywhere were full of
bushes from which sprang a profusion of creamy flowers. It was all quite pretty, though in
a rather monotonous way. That is the problem with Nebraska. It just goes on and on, and
even the good bits soon grow tedious. I drove for hours along an undemanding highway,
past Auburn, Tecumseh, Beatrice (a town of barely 10,000 people but which produced two
Hollywood stars, Harold Lloyd and Robert Taylor), Fairbury, Hebron, Deshler, Ruskin.
At Deshler I stopped for coffee and was surprised at how cold it was. Where the weather is
concerned, the Midwest has the worst ofboth worlds. Inthe winter the wind is razor sharp.
It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the
house. It brings piles of snow and bonecracking cold. From November to March you walk
leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for
your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futilely at ice that seems to have
been applied to the windows with superglue. And then one day spring comes. The snow
