AUGUST 5, 1936-Items, Just Items, Including Mystery of Hotel Key No. 29½
THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1936
Items, Just Items, Including Mystery of Hotel Key No. 29½
By ERNIE PYLE
AFTON, Minn. — The following could be entitled “Items, Just Items,” or “What to Do Till the Undertaker Comes,” or almost anything else.
The other night in a little hotel in a South Dakota village, the woman at the desk (she was the owner, I assume) gave me key 29½ and I carried my bags upstairs and started hunting my room.
I couldn’t find 29½ but I did find a 29, so I put the bags down in the hall and went downstairs and told the woman what I’d found.
She said: “Yes, 29 is your room. The key is to the bathroom. That’s 29½. There isn’t any key to the room itself.”
So I went back up and went in, and then I got to puzzling over that key-to-the-bathroom business. After a while it got the best of me, so I went back down and said: “What’s the point in my having a key to my bathroom and none to my main door?”
She just smiled and said, “Well, a person sort of likes to have a key to his bathroom sometimes.”
I saw I was whipped. So I went back up and locked the bathroom door and then went out to supper, leaving my room unlocked.
A person who drives almost constantly, as I do, sees hundreds of dead things lying in the road — rabbits, skunks, birds, cats, dogs, sheep, snakes — all killed by cars.
And yet, in a lifetime of driving, I have never killed a thing with the car, other than knats and grasshoppers. Never, that is, until last week.
And in this one week my car killed four birds and two gophers. The first bird — I saw it through the mirror, flopping in the road behind me — almost made me sick, and I felt as if I had killed a human. It flew into the radiator, as though it couldn’t see.
The roads are thick with gophers in eastern North Dakota, and they are either stupid or trying to commit suicide because of the drought. They sit in the road and won’t move, and when you try to dodge them they jump in front of your wheels. After a while I got so I didn’t feel so bad when I killed something. But I didn’t feel so good, either.
The Northwest has some odd characteristics.
For instance, the hotels all make up your bed with a heavy blanket and a heavy coverlet tucked neatly around it, and there’s an extra blanket lying over the foot of the bed.
And this while the thermometer says 112 in the shade, and the weather man sees nothing ahead but heat.
And the other odd thing is the waitresses. No place in the world have I ever seen such a sour lot as the waitresses of the Dakotas and eastern Montana.
They hate the customers, the management and each other. In two weeks I was not served one single meal with pleasantness, courtesy or even common civility. I asked several people about it, but nobody knew why.
A hitch-hiker to North Dakota who rode with me all day, insisted on buying my lunch. Even got sore when I said I could pay for my own lunches.
Another hitch-hiker said he had been tending bar in a town out West during roundup. He said that about 4 o’clock one morning, when all the farmers and cow men were getting drunk and the bar was running short of gin, he kept track of how much they rang up on the last bottle. He said they collected exactly $52 from that one bottle of gin, and the cow hands never knew the difference. I don’t believe it.
My companion and I have a silly habit of always watching the speedometer when it turns over a new thousand miles. It has turned 32 times since we have been roving, and we have missed it only once. I usually catch it along about 993 and keep pretty close watch till it’s past 999, and then I’ll say “There she goes,” and we’ll both watch it turn over the three zeroes.
If you miss it, it’s gone into the past forever like yesterday noon. That one time we missed it we were both sore as mud hens for half a day.
