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