Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Bobbi and I went over to London two years ago and our hotel room didn't even have a
bathroom in it,” Mr. Piper would go on. “If you wanted to take a leak in the middle of the
night you had to walk about a mile down the hallway. That isn't a clean way to live.”
“Mr. Piper, the English are paragons of cleanliness. It is a well-known fact that they use
more soap per capita than anyone else in Europe.”
Mr.Piperwouldsnortderisivelyatthis.“Thatdoesn'tmeandiddly-squat,boy,justbecause
they're cleaner than a bunch of Krauts and Eye-ties. My God, a dog's cleaner than a bunch
of Krauts and Eye-ties. And I'll tell you something else: If his daddy hadn't bought Illinois
for him, John F. Kennedy would never have been elected president.”
I had lived around Mr. Piper long enough not to be thrown by this abrupt change of tack.
The theft of the 1960 presidential election was a longstanding plaint of his, one that he
brought into the conversation every ten or twelve minutes regardless of the prevailing
drift of the discussion. In 1963, during Kennedy's funeral, someone in the Waveland Tap
punched Mr. Piper in the nose for making that remark. Mr. Piper was so furious that he
went straight out and crashed his car into a telephone pole. Mr. Piper is dead now, which is
of course one thing that Des Moines prepares you for.
When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines
was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des
Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where
peoplewearthree-piece suitsanddarksocks,oftensimultaneously.Duringtheannualstate
high-school basketball tournament, when the hayseeds from out in the state would flood
into the city for a week, we used to accost them downtown and snidely offer to show them
how to ride an escalator or negotiate a revolving door. This wasn't always so far from real-
ity. My friend Stan, when he was about sixteen, had to go and stay with his cousin in some
remote, dusty hamlet called Dog Water or Dunceville or some such improbable spot-the
kindofplacewhereifadoggetsrunoverbyatruckeverybodygoesouttohavealookatit.
By the second week, delirious with boredom, Stan insisted that he and his cousin drive the
fiftymilesintothecountytown,Hooterville,andfindsomethingtodo.Theywentbowling
at an alley with warped lanes and chipped balls and afterwards had a chocolate soda and
looked at a Playboy in a drugstore, and on the way home the cousin sighed with immense
satisfaction and said, “Gee thanks, Stan. That was the best time I ever had in my whole
life!” It's true.
I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and I went on a back road just to see the country. But
there was nothing to see. It's just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs.
