getting my kicks on Route 66

Monday. fastest route from South Bend to somewhere after St. Louis. 8 a.m. and I’m not good with mornings.

Lincoln, Illinois. lunchtime and we pick up Route 66 accidentally, exiting to go to Bonanza. buffet and there’s cherry pie. how bad can it be? very. salty pasty crust. pretty sure these were never cherries. could be composed of play-doh, perhaps. back on the road.

St. Louis, Missouri and we realize I forgot the actual guidebook. fail. this is going to be exciting and a lot more difficult than we expected. GPS refuses to help. tries to send us on roads that don’t exist. won’t acknowledge existence of Route 66. who needs directions for a quest? we do.

Eureka! no, really. Eureka, Missouri. Route 66 State Park. used to be Times Beach. shut down by  EPA due to horrific dioxin contamination. buildings razed, residents forced out, no one ever even fined for it. per EPA: Soil samples from Route 66 State Park show no significant [emphasis added] health risks for park visitors or workers. insignificant health risks?

“I’ve never been past Kansas on 66,” chatty park employee tells us. “A lot of people come through doing the drive.” pause. “Most of them aren’t Americans, though.”

Meramec Caverns. signs over 200 miles away in every direction. Illinois. Iowa. Kentucky. Tennessee. go? nah. not gonna end years of wondering. keep the mystery alive.

Cuba, Missouri. Wagon Wheel Motel. how much? owner smiles at us, hesitates. trying to decide whether we’re together. eventually tells us rates for “one queen bed…or two double beds.” sure. we’ll take it.

cool reassuring metal clink of room key. real key, not swipe card. (checking out the next day, other patrons suggest to owner that plastic swipe cards would really be an improvement.) plastic medallion attached advising us we are in room 18. rooms paired in gingerbread-y cottages.

tile floor. bathroom door sticks because of humidity; placard in room asks us to be careful with the vintage doors and points out that the 70-year-old windows do not open. enormous cow skull stares down at bed with balefully empty eyes. headboard: route 66 sign. decorative thingy with straw and bone (?) also attached. cute. and anxiety inducing—no flailing while I sleep here.

Missouri Hick’s BBQ. log façade. sign has hillbilly holding a pig. kitschy. questionable. more importantly, next door. please be good to my mouth. five sauces on table. looks like Famous Dave’s. even more questionable. we try them. classy people use bread. we use our fingers. honey. sweet. original. smoky. sweet and spicy. tomato-based, sweet like a six-year-old’s tea party, slow heat like a sip of ice-chilled whiskey. hello. I just met you…but we’re gonna be so good together.

I get pork. of course. it’s barbecue. pulled pork. tender, juicy, a little weak on flavor but my new sweetheart can fix that. mac and cheese: like someone made Kraft what you always wished it would be. green beans: butter, shreds of meat, butter, sugar, butter, pepper, butter. yes please and thank you. free coffee with dessert? I’m in. apple cobbler: canned pie filling taste, store-bought crust, totally acceptable. and free coffee. my favorite kind of coffee. yes I drink coffee right before bed. shut up. decent ice cream, even.

Tuesday. Cuba, Missouri. first things first coffee please don’t make me do anything without coffee. pre-coffee, I can’t even shower. goes all wrong, like toothpaste-in-my-hair, soap-in-my-mouth, deodorant-behind-my-ears wrong.

“I figured I’d bring the coffeemaker so you could have coffee before we get more coffee.”

hosannas. rainbows. unicorns. glitter. kittens. glitter kittens riding rainbow unicorns belting out hosannas. would sing some Motown hit about attacking him with my love, but there’s coffee. hard to sing with a mouthful of coffee. not that I can ever sing.

Route 66 Fudge Shop? of course we stopped how can you even wonder. peanut cluster. chocolate-covered Oreo. baby cakes. Neil Gaiman? no…hope not, anyhow.

“what are baby cakes?”

“!@^%$#^%$...chocolate cake...!@*&!@*(&()&@...covered in chocolate.” no idea what else she actually said because those were the important words.

“do you have any left?”

“I’m making more right now, so I’ll have some this afternoon.”

crushing disappointment. quite possibly I sniffled.

“but you know what, I could give you a package of two. I made them for an order of a thousand, but I can make more. you can have these.”

there is so much love in this morning.

the edges of the Ozarks. signs say falling rock  and stone cliffs shimmer the nearly-metallic gray of limestone with highlights of white-clear quartz and maybe milky dolomite but it’s hard to tell the difference at 60 miles per hour and two hundred feet up. feels so much like Pennsylvania I almost want to kneel down and kiss this new familiar ground. creeks and streams anywhere but not everywhere. they appear and disappear like god’s been drunkenly waving a magic wand over it all.

gas station in Missouri. small town or maybe not even a town. rack of bumper stickers. every one of them has to do with guns. if you can read this, you’re in range. keep honking, I’m reloading. if babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted. I’m not even sure what that means.

Elbow Inn Bar & BBQ. a brown-and-white dog of questionable parentage lies in the road across the way. he raises his head and considers us as we pass, then puts his head back down. not sure whether we passed muster or failed. Hooker Cut and Devil’s Elbow: a slice through the rocks that takes us two hundred miles above the river. lookout. probably that’s Devil’s Elbow down there but the trees make it hard to see a definite bend in the river, the kind that would cause log jams and cursing. black-eyed susans march along the limestone guard walls. hot and wet, the air tastes green like growing with undertones of black rot. humidity clings to my camera lens. when I look down I can see the hairs on my arms sucking in the moisture. even my eyelashes are curlier.

repent now or burn later. this is the Bible belt. I bled for you. what have you done for me lately? – Jesus. maybe not so much like Pennsylvania after all. America is a Christian nation. not my America.

rock juts out from a cliff. someone has painted a frog (or maybe a turtle—the artistic quality is not the best here) onto the jutting rock. giant frog’s big bulgy eyes gaze benevolently down upon Route 66 traffic. comforting.

Lion’s Den Adult Store. billboard across the street. PORN KILLS. picture of a white, blonde, blue-eyed third-grader with her hair in pigtails wearing a pink checked dress no one in this century who isn’t Amish or Mennonite has worn aside from Halloween costumes. her facial expression is somewhere between “can I have a cookie?” and “no one mentioned there were thorns in this grass.”

Picher, Oklahoma. ghost town sounds like it just died but this town was killed. mandatory evacuation by the EPA. lead-zinc mining. toxic waste. first thing we see is the Picher Mining Museum. looks almost like it could be in business except for the three-foot-tall prairie grass in the yard and the window hanging open, black and empty, on the side. streets lead to empty house foundations. church windows stare blankly at us. signs telling us that this is property of the U.S. federal government block off some of the roads. so many butterflies fill the air. I think I could hear the sound of their wings if not for the deafening hum of the cicadas. keep out tidily spraypainted on buildings there is no longer a road to reach. be bold be proud together a drug-free America. this is the sign that gets me. desperate sniffle, trying to hold it together. once there was a town here. someday there will be no sign that there ever was (just like the bulldozed buildings of Times Beach because now that’s a state park and the only record of what it once was is in words and old pictures) but right now, the empty streets and bright yellow-orange butterflies still tell the story of people whose America didn’t work the way it should have.

driving 66 in Oklahoma. me behind the wheel. cruising. after a moment: “that was a turtle. in the road.” turn the car around, flip on the hazards (he has to hit the button, I can never find it in this car), and jump out to rescue turtle (technically a tortoise because he’s a box turtle but whatever no one really cares about that distinction anyway). behind me, a red Dodge with extra-large tires brakes, then veers around me. probably it has a hemi. carefully put turtle on the other side of road, several feet from the shoulder. he doesn’t say thanks. you know how turtles are.

do not drive into smoke the road signs tell us. seems like good advice but why would there be smoke and what are we supposed to do if there is other than not drive into it?

just outside Oklahoma City. construction? looks more like demolition. guess they didn’t want that school anymore but—holy shit that’s what tornado damage looks like how do you even begin to recover from that—there is a house that has a tree driven through the roof. houses before and after no problem. three lots down the road the walls are ripped off a little red mobile but the trees next to it are fine. conversation falters, hesitates, lapses into silence.

oil storage tanks everywhere. we didn’t know Oklahoma had so much oil. or so many grasshoppers. little crickets. big crickets. little grasshoppers. big grasshoppers. watch the side of the road carefully. you can see them everywhere. we stop at a McDonald’s somewhere just outside Tulsa for coffee and a bathroom. standing in the parking lot smoking, we hear a thud then another then another. grasshoppers. landing heavily on the ground. a black-and-white stray cat walks past, nose in the air, unconcerned about us but avoiding stepping on the grasshoppers. it is followed by three more, each a slight distance behind, clearly conveying that they each happen to be going in the same direction rather than being part of a group.

Wednesday. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

again: oil tanks. oil derricks. oil everywhere. gas stations proudly advertise that their fuel contains no ethanol. this is oil country, not corn country. definitely not in Indiana anymore. put the windows down and sometimes you can smell the oil as you drive past. grasshoppers everywhere still.

I don’t know what town we’re in but it’s very small and there’s parking in the middle of Main Street which is seriously screwing with my head because I’ve never seen this before and I don’t understand it. instead of driving down the street you can just…stop. right in the middle. where there are parking spaces, used-to-be-white paint delineating them on the sun-baked asphalt. why this is the thing I can’t cope with I don’t know but I know I can’t. it feels like I drove us into some other time, not just another place, and we leave town heading west.

repent or die. God hates sin. judgment day is coming.

red red dirt. where it’s been cleared recently for power lines the red seems to glisten in the sunlight, a bleeding wound ripped into the earth with the sun-bleached white of felled trees shining like bones. red dust covers everything. when I rinse my hands in a gas station bathroom, the water is red-tinged. dust on my hands or iron in the water. I don’t know which. red like I always think of Mars as being. where am I really?

obey warning signs state law, Texas tells us. isn’t it that the point of warning signs?

the Texas Panhandle is gorgeous. mesas. canyons. hills. valleys. heather. mesquite. agave. yucca. prairie grasses. and what looks like cotton exploding out of black sunburned pods. silver-green fuzzy cactus. this was not what I expected from Texas. oil everywhere here, too. oil tanks. oil derricks. no one even bothers to point out here that there’s no ethanol in the gasoline. I guess that’s a given in Texas. plastic grocery bags struggle to free themselves from barbed wire fences. looking at them, I realize after a moment that not all of the white is plastic. some of it is shed snakeskin. from really big snakes. oh my god.

we stop to pee by the side of the road somewhere in Texas. a little turn-off with a shed. fire ants roaming aimlessly. peeing on them gives them a clearer goal: you. turns out they don’t like being urinated on. go figure. the only ones who don’t care are the mound of fire ants eating what I think is maybe a scorpion. the lowing of cattle fills the air with thrumming sound but we can’t see any cows at all. sound carries so far in land like this.

it is storming ahead somewhere. lightning stabs the sky, flickers like nature loves disco, licks the ground. where we are, no thunder or rain. with land this flat, we can see for miles. is that storm in Amarillo, or even further west? despite the storm, the air is dusty sandy dry. radio says it’s 90 degrees but it feels like 75 with a perfect constant breeze and a faint hint of crispness to the air. no green taste here, just brown. we love this.

cattle. everywhere. no longhorn cattle yet that we’ve seen. dead armadillos by the side of the road, almost all of them looking like they just fell over. no apparent injury. life was just too much. something else, too. maybe a giant lizard? I’m not sure. no billboards here. haven’t seen one for hours. no houses, either. just oil and cows.

Thursday. Amarillo, Texas.

Texas has horrible off-ramps. driving on 66, we’re on the side roads. signs say yield but the traffic comes in to the side. would need an extra set of eyes to be able to adequately see cars showing up. plus side: no one actually exits. ever.

we stop at the Cadillac Ranch. before I even get out of the car, the chemical smell of spray paint hits the back of my throat. this place is hopping, the busiest we’ve been through the whole trip. families, couples, teenagers, and what I swear is some kind of church youth group all wearing matching yellow T-shirts. empty and half-empty cans of spray paint litter the ground, as omnipresent as the heaps of cow dung. the sun is blinding-hot but the breeze makes it bearable. parents help their kids spraypaint their names onto the cars, concerned about the wind bringing paint back into their faces. as we leave, a father is carefully lifting each of his children over the turnstile, clearly trying to prevent them from getting their feet muddy: a doomed cause, given that the cars are surrounded by pools of dirty water bordered by shoe-sucking mud. in a gas station parking lot across the highway we make pb&j sandwiches and eat them in the car. with the windows up, there’s still a hint of cow shit scenting the air, imparting a manure taste to our sandwiches. I don’t know whether that’s our shoes or just Texas.

Adrian, Texas. the midpoint of Route 66 (to be fair, the town just east claims that, too, but this one seems to be making a bigger point of it, so I’ll accept that). Midpoint Café, where we have ugly pie (not all that ugly, but not very pretty either; more like “not as aesthetically appealing as it could be” pie but that doesn’t have a good ring to it I guess) and stop into the shop next door, which, oddly, is run by the woman who used to own the Midpoint Café. we know this because she tells us, seconds after greeting us with, “oh thank God, you speak English.” neither of us quite knows how to react to this statement—more often I get people doubting whether I do—but that fazes her not at all. “where are y’all from?” “Indiana.” “oh, well, that’s just about next door! we’re neighbors!” question: how do you get someone in Texas to proclaim that Indiana and Texas are the same place? answer: come in after a half-dozen people from Europe.

longhorn cattle, finally. a couple dozen in a field. the stare from live ones is only marginally less baleful than from the empty eyes of longhorn skulls. I didn’t even know cows could look hostile. they keep a watchful, distrusting eye on us as we drive past.

classic cars everywhere. maybe technically not “classic,” because these are just old cars, but there are fields chock full of them, they’re rusting out in fields (or what would be fields if they had crops but I’m not sure what you call it when it’s just an expanse with scrubby bushes in it). if lust is a sin then I’m sinning very very hard right now because I want these cars bad.

Glenrio, Texas/Glenrio, New Mexico. silent. not even the sound of cicadas or grasshoppers here. just the absolute quiet of a town long since abandoned. signs: trespassers will be shot. thieves will be killed. warnings are always appreciated. getting here was on an old, old section of 66, with pavement sections that make the car’s tires go whap whap whap on the road. I can’t tell if the road I’m standing on is pavement covered over with dust or if it was always and forever dirt anyhow. my footsteps sound so loud. louder than the grasshoppers landing in Oklahoma.

Hereford, Texas. Beef Capital of the World. talk about places I never thought I’d be.

Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge. we are on our way out, having seen no wildlife whatsoever, when something bounds across our peripheral vision. a mule deer, we think, because whitetail deer do not move like that. this is the emptiest wildlife refuge I’ve ever entered. no people at all. not even birds. but the cicadas are loud again here.

Oklahoma City. traffic. merge now state law. but that’s after the first half-dozen merge signs. I guess this is the “for real you guys we mean it” sign, but drivers don’t seem to take this one any more seriously than the others. this is a mess.

stop for gas somewhere between Oklahoma City and Wichita. no stray cats here that I see, but grasshoppers and crickets and some enormous beetle that may or may not be a June bug. inside, there are a dozen on the floor of the gas station, some crushed, some about to be. I avoid stepping on them. I don’t like feeling things crunch under my feet. I walk around a little, go to look at…oh I wish I hadn’t seen that. dead mouse (or something that was once furry). almost completely covered by grasshoppers. they’re eating it. get back in the car. “let’s get out of Oklahoma, k?”

Friday. Wichita, Kansas. rain. the news channel on in the hotel breakfast room warns us about flash floods, but I have no idea what county we might be in. Koch Foundation commercial. a list of countries like the drop-down boxes on websites, with the U.S. at the bottom because it’s in alphabetical order. then let’s rise again and that does-anyone-seem-to-have-a-noose tingle around my neck and America Freedom America Freedom KEEP AMERICA FREE. does anyone else think this is weird? can’t tell. everyone’s staring at the walls.

leaving Wichita, there are signs everywhere warning us about high water and some of the fields are flooded. an egret hangs out in one of them, looking slightly out of place but committed to its position. I silently give him a raise-the-roof gesture. I feel ya, buddy.

everyone says Kansas is flat but I think I must be in the wrong part of Kansas because this is not what I expected. we’re in the Flint Hills. flint, shale, violet prairie clover, the occasional cow or hay bale, no houses at all. sinkholes and streams. a hawk hangs suspended between the green ground and blue sky, riding the wind. no wing beats, no moving, just a moment of stopped time. in El Dorado Lake, drowning trees reach desperate black claws for the sky. I want to save them but it’s already much too late for that. lake and sky are the same super-saturated shade, like they were carved from lapis lazuli.

wild turkeys in a hayfield outside Kansas City give us the hairy eyeball. more welcoming than a lot of the signs. homosexuality kills (with a picture of an AK). Sodom will die again. sinners die. not hard to remember that Kansas is the home of Westboro Baptist Church. praise God or face the consequences.

1:30 a.m., standing in the parking lot of a rest stop on the Indiana Toll Road. humid like Oklahoma with constant faint precipitation that can’t decide whether it wants to be rain or fog, but no grasshoppers here. faint hum of cicadas in the distance. the air tastes gray and yellow: drizzle and ethanol. almost home.