I should have been taking the soap the whole time. Why did I leave so much soap behind? If I'd collected all the soap and never washed, I could have 16 bars of soap right now instead of one. I could have two bars from Cleveland, two bars from St. Louis, two bars from Memphis, two bars from Baton Rouge, two bars from San Antonio, two bars from El Paso, two bars from North Platte, and two bars from Toledo. I really wish I'd thought about this earlier. They could have become good Christmas presents. I think a framed bar of motel soap would be a great gift. I would hang one in my bathroom. It would remind me how nice it is to be home. I am ready to be home.
Cheap motel rooms can seem like thrilling places at the outset of the trip. You never know who or what you will encounter. Will the person behind the reception desk be on the phone when you walk in? Will you remember to tell them that you want to pay the additional $2.99 for wifi? If you do remember to tell them, will they remember to charge you? And what about your room itself? How far will it be from the vending area? Will the ice machine nearest your room be functional? What will the bedspread in your room look like? Will there be a cigarette burn on the rim of the bathtub? Will the TV remote be placed on the bedside stand or next to the TV? Will the Gideons bible be visible or will it be in a drawer? How many plastic cups will you use? Two or Three? Maybe you'll only use one! And what about the nearby restaurants? Which chain restaurants will be at your disposal? Will they be within walking distance? Will there be a Red Lobster? And what cultural attractions will be nearby, should you decide to stay more than one night? Will it be some interesting caverns, or will it be a small, war memorial? Perhaps it will be a zoo with several, crummy animals in out-of-date cages. You just never know.
I have made this brochure stand more exciting that it is in real life. I tweaked the photograph on my computer to bring out its colors. The brochure stand is a regular feature of the cheap motel, and sometimes I wonder about the people who actually take the brochures, who stop and browse the brochures. At what rate are they traveling and for what purpose? Are they traveling with children? How bored or fascinated are they? How much time do they have on their hands? Do towns like Toledo, Ohio and North Platte, Nebraska really have that much to offer the traveler? Apparently they do. I have not come to one cheap motel yet that does not have a brochure stand with a fine offering of cultural and historical attractions. There seems to be something interesting around every corner, something interesting in every town that is big enough to host a cheap motel. If you look at this picture closely enough, you will see that there is a brochure for a Bass Pro Shops. Perhaps I should go there tomorrow to soak up some local, Toledo color.
The vending area is obviously one of the most important areas at any cheap motel. The vending area is where the traveler is most likely to encounter a fellow traveler. Social exchanges in the vending area tend to be brief and limited to the obvious and banal, but you never know! It's possible that the vending machine of your choice will malfunction and steal your money, or worse, dispense the wrong product, the wrong bag of chips, diet Pepsi instead of normal Pepsi. It can be very disheartening for the weary traveler to get Fritos when he wants Doritos. It can also be very disheartening to pay $1.75 for a bottle of Dasani. This is something that you can talk about with your fellow traveler, should you encounter him or her in the vending area. If you say something weird like, Hmm, looks like housekeeping forget to draw the blinds completely, you will certainly alienate yourself from your fellow traveler. Don't do that. We're all in this together, this corridor of life.
Sometimes, when you are in your motel, you will wander the corridors because you are bored or restless, and you will hear that the television is on in a nearby room; and you may think, God, I really want to talk to that person. I have been traveling alone and I want some human contact. I know there is a person on the other side of that aqua marine door. Are they sleeping? How would they respond if I knocked on their door and said, "Hi, I'm not a creep. I just want to meet another human being"? My best advice to the traveler is Keep to yourself. Don't go knocking on motel room doors. Someone knocked on my door in Cleveland. It was Gary. Earlier, I'd spoken to him for five minutes in the parking lot. He was walking around, drinking a beer, and so was I. I told him I was traveling X-Country, to a garlic farm in New Mexico, and that I'd come from Massachusetts. Massachusetts! You don't say! Gary told me that his nephew had just graduated from M.I.T. in Boston. We bid each other farewell and safe travels. But ten minutes later a knock comes on my door and it's Gary, asking me if I would be needing a hand job tonight. Would you be needing a hand job tonight, he said. No thanks, I said. It wasn't until I told this story to Arda while in Iowa City that I learned that Gary was probably a hooker on his nightly rounds of the cheap Cleveland motels. I wonder what he would have charged.
Tomorrow will be a long day, but it will be my last day on the road, and I will be home early enough to kick back and pop a couple brewskies. I'm really looking forward to that. It ain't easy being a semi-pro blogger on the road. Some days, in fact, it can be downright dreadful. In Baton Rouge, I completely freaked out. I woke up in the morning and felt that I could not do it. I was overwhelmed. I teach English on the internet. I had a bunch of papers to grade. I was road weary and getting sick. I'd promised my friend I'd be in San Antonio (9 hours away) for dinner, and I was coming down with a cold. I just wanted to say fuck it all and sit by the shitty pool all day. That was more than a month ago, and whatever bother I was feeling then is now way behind me. It's almost like it never happened. When you travel alone, it's like a lot never happened; but then you land somewhere and talk to some old friends, and the stories come spilling out. I'm sure I'll be talking about this trip for weeks to come. I'm sure my friends will ask me how my trip was and get an answer that is far more than they bargained for. There is just so much to tell, more than any blog can accommodate. Goodnight. And thanks to everyone who supported this trip, especially my brother.
So it's been three weeks since I left Massachusetts and three days shy of two weeks that I've been here in New Mexico. Homesickness has kept me quiet this week. Homesickness and loneliness. But I'm getting over it. Today I finished "Mississippi," the big road movie that's been sitting on my computer and hogging up a ton of space. I squeezed five days of travel along and around the Mississippi river and at least seven hours of footage into this nine minute film. All the unused footage has been shoved into a number of zipped folders. By journey's end, the bolt hole in my camera had become completely worn out from excessive use of the dashboard mounted camera swivel add-on. But it served its purpose. This is some of that purpose. Enjoy.
The second of several road videos...
I'm off the road and glad to be. The road wore me down. I started out with a bunch of apples, but I devoured them before I reached Decatur, Illinois. I haven't eaten a single healthy vegetable in ten days. At dinner tonight, Rose Mary asked me if I wanted salad—she'd been preparing a salad—but I said I haven't had a salad in ten days, why start now? Tomorrow I will eat a salad. We had fresh raspberries and ice cream for dessert tonight. I was famished and under the weather when I arrived. I hadn't eaten since El Paso. Below is a picture of a typical street in El Paso.
Before I arrived in Dixon, about twenty minutes before I pulled into town, I thought that Rose Mary would either tell me that I had changed or that I hadn't changed at all. I was hedging my bets that she'd say I looked older—I'd been noticing my gray hairs in the rear view mirror. Rose Mary heard me coming up the drive. She was outside, picking parsley for our dinner. I had my car windows down. She couldn't see me, but she said, Is that Jono? I said it was me. I parked and greeted her. She said, You haven't changed at all. You don't look one day older. I'd bet wrong. I'd prepared my hello speech for "You look older." I guess I look the same as I did last year. Here's another typical El Paso shot.
Lots of classic old trucks, bungalows, and dusty front yards in El Paso. I wish I could have spent more time there. One of the most difficult parts about traveling X-Country on a schedule is that you don't have the time to look around a town as much as you'd like. You end up "missing" a lot of things. You end up with half-formed ideas about places. For instance, one could never hope to write about Texas in one single blog post after driving across it. There is obviously so much more to see and know about. It's because I knew I'd passed up so much good stuff on this journey that I made a point this morning of finding something authentic in El Paso, or at least more authentic than Arby's. I left the motel and hunted around for something good to eat. I found Rafa's Burritos on Montana street.
The parking lot was packed. I had to park down the strip, in front of the hair salon. I had no idea what to expect. It wasn't clear that all the cars in the lot were there for Rafa's. When I could barely get into the door, I knew that I had done well. The dining room was packed, too, and there was a line to order take-out. I scanned the menu board. It was a Byzantine menu board and I could not understand it. Burritos were classified as "A" and "B" and then sub-classified in about twenty different ways. One burrito called out to me, the burrito maize. I tried to order that but apparently nobody wanted it and so Rafa's does not make it anymore. The cashier recommended the chicken. I asked him if he would have the cooks put the hot sauce in the burrito, rather than on the side, because I wanted to eat it while I drove. He looked at me like I was nuts. When I got the burrito, I understood why. It was beautiful. It was long and slender. The ends were not tucked in. The flour tortilla was homemade. It was so soft. It had char spots on it. It made me realize that the things I've had that pass for flour tortillas are really just rubber circles. Now I can return to New England with a benchmark. Here's the burrito.
I can safely say that this was the best burrito I ever ate. I did not even resemble the burritos I've known. Or maybe it resembled them in the slightest, but it resembled them in the way you resemble your second cousin. The chicken inside was also perfect. Driving north through New Mexico, I placed several phone calls and told everyone who answered about this burrito. It actually reminded more more of a French-style rolled omelette than it did what I had heretofore considered a burrito. It was all loosey-goosey, slender and long. I ate half of it in the parking lot outside of Rafa's. I had to retro-fit the other half to make it road worthy. The tortilla was real bread. It wasn't the bottom of a sneaker.
I feel rested but a little crappy this morning. I thought a night's sleep would knock out the head cold that started creeping up on me back in Baton Rouge. It did not. Oh, there goes my alarm. But I am up before it. Time change. I like the mornings best. Motels can be lonely places at night.
This is the view from my motel room door. Those mountains are in Mexico. It's the habit around here to write on the sides of mountains. In Sierra Blanca (USA) "S.B." is written on the side of the mountain. Here, the words Cd. Jaurez, La Biblia Es La Verdad are written on that mountain in the distance. The Bible is Truth. Juarez is a dangerous place. That drainage ditch in the foreground is probably a dangerous place as well. The feral cats that live around here probably drink from it. I saw bunches of them last night.
There are hummingbirds in that tree. Lots of them. They don't appear to be eating. They're mostly just sitting on branches. My door is wide open. The cleaning woman just dropped by and asked me if I spoke Spanish. I said, Poquito. She wanted to know when I would check out. I told her ten-thirty, which is an hour from now. Here's the view to the north. If you look closely, you can see the letter "A" on the hillside.
OK, I better get a move on. I want to tool around in El Paso before I head north into New Mexico. Today is the last day of my journey. This is my last road post. Thanks to everyone who made it possible. To conclude, here's a short video of the gator head...
I drove across half of Texas today. I drove over 500 miles. I drove "friendly." I drove with my shoes and socks off. Cruise control drove me.
It is 800 and 30 miles from Beaumont (at the Louisiana border) to El Paso. El Paso is the eastern-most tip of Texas. Compare that to this: it is only 790 miles from New York to Chicago. Texas is huge and beautiful. A four hour drive is nothing to a Texan.
The Texans I met were very friendly and helpful. Everyone was friendly. I got an oil change in San Antonio this morning. It took about half an hour. I bought and ate a burrito while I waited. Not a bad burrito, but not a great one either. By the time my car was ready, everyone at the Jiffy Lube was asking me about my trip and wishing me farewell. This was not fake. It was not a fluke. Texans are really nice.
I stopped to pump gas and stretch my legs an hour or two west of San Antonio. Remember that an hour or two in the north-east is like ten or twenty minutes in Texas. It was a dusty service station in a very remote town. I pumped my gas and drove across the lot to stop and take a picture of this home. There were a couple semis parked about fifty yards off. Their drivers were chatting. I took my picture and tied my shoe on the rear bumper. One of them whistled across the distance to me. Whiiiiiirrrrrrrriiiiiiit, your gas lid is open. Sure enough it was. He was perched atop the steps to his white cab, too far off in the distance to make out his face, but his whistle carried clear.
George W. Bush is a Texan, and I have a new soft spot in my heart for him. I had dinner with a progressive Democrat in San Antonio last night. As governors go, George was a good one. He compromised and worked well across party lines. Red and blue Texans liked him. He had progressive immigration policies. My dinner companion said he didn't know what happened when George became president. George was a bit of a simpleton, he said, a likeable simpleton. We ate nachos and drank beer (good beer) in a noisy brew-pub. We talked about politics and poetry. San Antonio is the seventh most populous city in the United States. We talked about the day, which is not too far off, when the color of political power will more accurately align with the color of the populous. In twenty years, Bill said, Texas will be a blue state. God, I hope so, I said. There's nothing wrong with powerful old white men, I said. I'd cling to power, too I said. But it's time for politics to represent the truth, we said. We'd had a few beers. We were feeling hopeful
I must have looked at that cloud for half an hour. The big one. It looks like Louisiana. Louisiana which apparently has a new, post-Katrina order. Baton Rouge was not hit as hard as New Orleans, and some of the center of Louisiana life moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge after Katrina. I was there during post-Isaac time. Isaac was a relatively small storm, but still there were huge piles of fallen branches on every curb throughout the city. After Katrina, the piles were fifteen feet high, and they stretched from home to home down every street in Baton Rouge. My host in Baton Rouge was jumping in the air with his arm stretched above his head while telling me this. He's a short man and so it was difficult for him to show me just how high the piles of post-Katrina branches were. It was not, however, difficult for him to be totally entertaining. I was able to see the damage Katrina did, and I had a fun time to boot. But we're talking about Texas now.
Texas is a place that I now love. If I had a million more lives, I would drive across Texas, slowly and a million more times. The road between San Antonio and El Paso is a beautiful stretch of highway. It's pristine. Distance and time collapse. They fold into landscape. You are alone, but it is not the kind of loneliness that makes men weep. It is a kind of silence. It is peace. On cruise control you can rub your feet for stretches of fifty miles. You can zone out and move through country. There is really nothing like crossing Texas. I am not surprised that Texans are so Texan. You can pass through thousands upon thousands of square miles and see nothing but roadway and hawks. For every car I saw today, I saw at least one hawk floating on a current of air above the land, its black wings extended above the earth, looking for a rodent kill.
This morning was a difficult morning. I did not want to leave my motel. I wanted to sit beside the pool all day and decompress. I did not want to drive from Baton Rouge to San Antonio. My mind was in forty different places, and none of them were good. My alarm went off at 8. I felt like someone had driven a U-Haul down my throat. I marched across the motel parking lot and ascended the little hill, up to the adjacent Chevron station. I needed water. I bought some water. The cashier asked me if the water was all I needed. I said, You don't sell what I need. Her assessment of me changed. I watched her face register the change. I was now insane. I left the Chevron with my water and descended the little hill behind it. All my fears about myself collided on that hill. Get the fuck over it, I said. Get over it. I called my mom. I told her that I did not want to drive to San Antonio. I told her that San Antonio was too far off. I told her that I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner there, but that I wanted to bail on him. This was around nine in the morning. I told her that my friend had always been very supportive of me and my work, and she told me that sometimes you just have to suck it up and do it. I sucked it up and did it. The bridge that spans the Mississippi river lifted my car high above the river and into the air, and my spirits lifted too. This long day then began to seem possible.
I called my mom after the bridge. I told her that I was still not in the best head space, but that I was going through with it anyway. That could be my life story. Western Louisiana was yielding to the hood of my Subaru. I told my mom that I've been unsatisfied with the work I've been doing on the road, that I put too much pressure on myself. She told me to take that pressure off. If you knew my mother, you would know how funny that is. She is the queen of impossibly high standards, the most industrious person I have ever known in my life. Taking the pressure off ourselves is something we don't know how to do. It would be like asking us to wear a car on our feet instead of a pair of shoes. So instead of taking the pressure off, I stepped on it and drove as hard as I could until I had to pee. I was chugging water and sipping coffee. I made my first ever, souvenir impulse purchase at a gas station near the Louisiana-Texas border. A gator skull caught my eye. I was still in an anxious dream. It was a baby skull. It's jaws were wide open, its teeth intact, its skin shrunken and leathery. I plunked down $11.99 and headed west toward Texas with the skull of a dead reptile in my passenger seat. Later, after dinner in San Antonio, I called my mom again and told her about the skull. She asked me if I'd named the skull yet. I told her I hadn't. But now I think I should name the skull after my mom. So until I come up with a better name, my gator's skull's name is Tina.
I should be going to bed now. El Paso is supposedly ten hours from here. But before I go to bed I do want to say that I have been taking and editing quite a lot of road video, and eventually I will post those videos here. Distressingly slow internet speeds have made it impossible for me to upload big files. But the videos are coming! As soon as I get to a good connection, I'll post one. Until then, here's the toilet paper in my San Antonio bathroom. Good night.
Lest you think that this whole 6 Motels Western Adventure isn't really about motels, as if yesterday's post about my room at the Jackson, Mississippi Motel 6 amounted only to a passing fancy with the cheap motels that are stacked upon the interstates on the outskirts of pretty much every medium to large city throughout this country, this post is here to remind you that you are wrong. YES, I cannot afford anything but the cheapest motels, but NO that does not mean that I don't love them. My fascination with them runs deep. It runs beyond mere "slumming." And for whatever reason, Motel 6 is the chain motel I cling to. Here is a picture of the broken ice machine. I went in search of ice, the nearest ice, but this machine was out of order.
It's not the first broken ice machine I've found on this trip. The ice machine in St. Louis was broken, too. Rather, one of the two ice machines in St. Louis was broken, and the same is true here in Baton Rouge. Generally, the ice machine furthest from your room is the one that works. That ice machine also happens to be the one closest to the reception desk. If I ran a low-budget motel on an interstate somewhere and I had to prioritize ice machines, I would probably repair the ice machine nearest the reception desk, too. Guests might have to walk an extra fifty yards for ice, but at $39.95 per night, who is gonna complain? What I like most about the broken ice machines is that you don't know how long they've been broken, nor do you know when they'll be fixed. In any case, you'l be gone. A broken ice machine is just a hunk of metal and wires. It can't dispense ice. It's like a mirage on the road. You thought you'd reached the end of your day, but there's actually still a bit more travel to do.
Everything is so rectangular at the best roadside motels. Apart from the insignificant things like plastic modular deck chairs, everything at a roadside motel is totally rectangular. When you enter the grounds of a cheap motel, you enter a colorful rectangular paradise. For people who love architecture and geometry, cheap motels are heaven. In this photograph alone, I can count over one hundred rectangles. The rectangle is obviously the most cost effective shape there is. Curves in architecture are reserved for the ultra poor and the ultra rich. Everybody else gets ninety degree angles and an OK night's sleep. The one circle in this picture is the life preserver tied to the fence around the pool. It's like a white, hovering donut of rebellion. If only somebody would actually have a swimming accident in the pool! I would probably socialize with them and abate some of this loneliness.
This laundry room photo is unlike the last one in that there's actually some laundry being done. Someone in this motel is doing their laundry. I'm not doing my laundry. I'm just going by the rule that if a pair of dirty pants sit long enough in a suitcase they eventually become clean. The same thinking cannot be applied to teeth. I have tried. This morning I was brushing my teeth in Mississippi, and I couldn't spit enough to stop the brown saliva. Too many days on the road and too many continuous cups of coffee—my dentist would not be proud. But I have gotten off track. I am tired and tomorrow is a long day. I need to reach San Antonio by dinner. That's an eight-hour drive from here, and it's already past midnight. I need my rest. If my clothes stink of the road, so be it. I am doing well and eating apples. I will roll into San Antonio tomorrow. After that it will be a short run to New Mexico. I like being on the road, but I am looking forward to being done with the road portion of this journey. Soon my dirty clothes will dry in the northern New Mexico breeze. They'll be stiff and smell like cacti and desert air. I'll catch up on lost work then. There is so much of this trip that I've yet to write about.
This Motel 6 has got it all! Everything a boy could ever want from a motel, this motel's got it. It's got a permanently secured window. It's got a deadbolt and a security latch. It's got a stunning view of Interstate 55, upon the opposite side of which the Watson Ford dealership of north Jackson sits with total aplomb. It's got two fully functional wall-mounted lamps, two ashtrays, two bars of soap, two Eames-looking wooden chairs, one television, one push-button phone, one writing desk, several functional three-prong outlets, one shower-n-tub combo, one toilet, two rolls of toilet paper (one partially used, one fresh), one vanity mirror, one Jestons-looking towel holster with three rolled towels in it, and a bunch of cold beers in the sink. On ice. There's even a pool and an elevator. I'm on the third floor. I requested the third floor. A walk around the terrace after the sun goes down is definitely in order. Until then I'm putting on iTunes and cranking out Booker T and the MGs. After passing eight zillion signs for the Mississippi blues trail today, I need some music.
There is one minor problem with this motel: the internet connection is sluggish. It's not as sluggish as the connection I had at the McDonald's in St. Genevieve, MO at lunch yesterday—that one was completely worthless—but it's pretty slow. Oh well. That only means that I'll have time between uploading photos to dance around the room or mosey about the terrace.
This is my writing station for the night. Apart from some minor adjustments I made to make my room look more awesome than it does—although we've already established that this room is totally awesome—this is what it looks like from my point of view. Pretty fabulous, right? Can I get a pretty fabulous? Thanks. I don't want any Debbie Downers in this room. Do you want to dance? I feel like dancing. I feel like jumping on the bed. I did jump on the bed in my Memphis Super 8 room this morning. I'd finally caught up on the sleep I'd been needing, and after eating one of the miniature pecan danishes provided for free in the lobby, I had so much energy I couldn't control myself. It was 8 A.M. in the morning and I had to get pumped up for the day. I was about to head south from Memphis into the Mississippi river delta. I was about to spend a fuck-load of time looking at ripe cotton. I was about to pass the warehouse HQ of Dollar General and Monsanto's enormous cotton plant research facility. I would need all the enthusiasm I could muster.
Writing on the road takes a certain amount of enthusiasm, a certain amount of energy, and an uncertain amount of who-the-hell-knows-what. At a gas station about ten miles from the Yazoo river today, some dude tapped on my car window. I was rolling a smoke. He wanted to bum one. Rolling a cigarette, he said through the glass, You must have just gotten out of the pen. I rolled my window down part way. I offered him the smoke I'd just rolled, but he told me I didn't know how to roll like they do in the penitentiary. I gave him a paper and some tobacco. He told to watch him roll. This is how you roll, he said. He rolled a terrible cigarette. It was a prison cigarette, all bent and crumpled. It looked like it had been stamped upon in the exercise yard, but he was really proud of it. He squeezed the middle of it, told me to notice how firm it was. My window was rolled down about half-way down at this point. I said, Yeah, that's nice. A total lie. His smoke sucked. I'll never see that ex-con again. Did I mention that this motel has a laundry room?
It does. But I'm not gonna wash my clothes. But maybe I'll take a dip in the pool after I get some dinner. There's an Applebees nearby. But then again, there's always the old expression: One bad Applebees spoils the barrel. Indeed it does, indeed it does.
Ok...that's enough clowning around for one night. I have a bunch more work to do. I have loads of pictures of the Mississippi delta and tons of road video that I need to sift through and edit. I took a phone call from president Obama while driving through central Illinois, and I absolutely must get to that. Bye!
One of the last things I do before I leave a motel is make one of these route maps. The idea did not occur to me until Day 2, so there is no route map for Day 1 (though I am tossing around the idea of making one; I can remember the roads I drove). The route maps are mainly practical—they help me know when I need to change roads; the pencil marks note any changes in the route. The route maps also serve a kind of aesthetic purpose. Making them pumps me up for the day's travel, and I treat them like little art objects. I'm hoping to turn the best couple route maps into postcards. I'm dreaming of letter pressing them. Three colors: red blue and black. I would love to send them in the mail to the people who have made this trip possible. Here they are, arranged on my desk in this Memphis Super 8.
So yeah...if you take a look at Day 5, you'll see that I am due in Jackson, Mississippi by the end of the day. See ya later.
One of the first things I do when I get into a motel room is put all my change into the spare ashtray. All smoking rooms have at least two ashtrays, and I've even seen three. When you're racing out the door in the morning to meet that eleven o'clock check-out time, as I was this morning in St. Louis (overslept, needed the sleep), it's much easier to dump the contents of the ashtray into your pocket than it is to slide all the change off the bedside stand, into your hand, and then into your pocket. Saves one step. Nice and tidy. Perhaps I'm a bit anal, or perhaps just a bit over-careful. At the rate I'm traveling, which admittedly is too fast, I cannot afford to leave a single thing in my room. This means I must be organized and methodical. The last thing I did before I left my room this morning was draw a map of my planned route. I've been drawing maps of each day's planned route and taking notes to mark changes in the planned route. The maps are cool documents, and one of them may show up in your mailbox one day. But not today. Today started out rough on account of stress. Some mild anxiety to start the morning—I was in a rush and feeling behind on my work—and then I hit rainy conditions as I barreled out of St. Louis for Highway 61.
Cape Girardeau is a pretty big town on the Mississippi river about halfway between St. Louis and Memphis, but I got off the interstate well before Cape Girardeau. When I was dreaming up this trip, I thought that I would spend this day leisurely ambling along the banks of the Mississippi as it wended its way from St. Louis to Memphis. That did not happen. You can never really see the river from Highway 61 until you hit Cape Girardeau. What you do see are a lot of pretty pasture lands among the rolling hills. Dairy cows. I stopped at a scenic overlook in small town called Bloomsdale. A lot of south-eastern Missouri looks like this. You can't see any massive pickup trucks in this picture, but I assure you that they're there.
When you travel X-country, there are many different ways to track the changes you encounter. You can track the changes in the terrain—flat lands, rolling hills, mountains—you can track the changes in the flora and fauna—today I saw a dead armadillo on the side of the road; first one I'd seen all trip—you can track the changes by looking at the obvious, outward political manifestations—some places are clearly packed with hard-core Republicans—and you can track the changes in the prices of things like gasoline and cigarettes. In fact, gas prices and cigarette prices are two of the most loudly and boldly advertised prices. They're right up there with hotel prices. It is the habit of hotels along the interstates to hoist their prices high aloft so that tired drivers can view them from the road and decide if they swing $59.99 per night or just $39.95. Tonight I ended up at a Super 8 for 45 bucks, which is admittedly more expensive than a Motel 6, this motel doesn't charge for internet access, there are some charming fake plants in the lobby, and there is a fridge in the room! I'm living in luxury tonight.
Sometimes when you're traveling serendipity plays a big role in what happens. When I planned this trip, I did not predict that this day of travel would be 90% overcast. I probably imagined sun because sunny days are my ideal days, but sun was not what I got for most of this day. But something happened when I hit Old Appleton, MO. The sun came out, a little, and my mood turned for the better. I felt behind schedule when I started the morning in St. Louis (and I felt behind schedule later in the day, too), but the charm of Old Appleton and good timing made me decide to stop for a more leisurely look. Stopping probably had something to do with this bridge as well. It spans a creek at the north end of town, where "town" means "quarter mile stretch of road with about 10 buildings." Main street Old Appleton runs parallel to Highway 61.
I obviously had to go onto the bridge, which was erected by H.W. Sebastian and Company, out of St. Louis, MO, in 1879. Was it always pink?
The bridge spans a damned creek. I looked down.
I saw this big turtle surfacing near a pile of algae. Planning this trip and this day, I could not have told you that turtle would be among the highlights, but there it is. That turtle was the best part of my day. A couple annoying highlights include the dude on the motor cycle near Cape Girardeau who was doing a wheelie for about two solid miles and a self-serve ice dispensing shack on the outskirts of a strip-mall parking lot in Perryville, MO. It was a drive-up ice house, sort of like a do-it-yourself car wash, but in this case rather than insert your money and vacuum out your car for four minutes, you insert your money and dispense ice. I didn't buy any ice, but further down the road I did cross this super cool bridge (and back again) from Cape Girardeau, MO, to East Cape Girardeau, IL. For all you pervs out there, there is a giant strip club and porno superstore on the right-hand side of the road as soon as you cross into Illinois. There is also a huge trailer park opposite the strip club. I turned around in that trailer park. There was a man smoking a cigarette in a lawn chair outside his trailer. It didn't ask him how much he paid for it.
And that pretty much sums up the better part of the day. After Cape Girardeau I decided that I was too behind schedule for any more scenic jaunts. I got back onto Interstate 55 for a while and headed toward Memphis. I was in four states today: Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas (very briefly), and Tennessee. Such is what happens in this corner of the country. It seems that everybody wants a piece of the Mississippi river. I'm gonna go get some #1 Memphis pit barbeque now. UPDATE: on my way to fetch dinner a rent-a-cop rear-ended me at a red light. I pulled into the bbq parking lot (place was closed), and the dude followed behind. He told me he'd been putting eye drops into his eyes when he hit me. He had his head tilted back, the dropper positioned and squirting periodically throughout our conversation.
I started the morning in my home town, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. I had a little trouble leaving. It can be hard to pull out of your driveway when your mom and dad, sister and brother, sister-in-law and brand new baby nephew are all milling about on the driveway, wishing you well and making family jokes. Yesterday I told my mom that I was actually thinking about moving back home—she's a little gullible—she'd been telling my dad about nearby homes for sale that my brother and his family could afford—and she got really excited for a moment when I told her this. Besides you guys, I said, You know there's nothing here for me. With a fresh, grandson-applied hickey on her chin she said, You made your life in Massachusetts. My new nephew will suck your chin if you give him the chance. It's like Give him an inch and he'll take a mile, but this case it's Give him your chin and he'll break your capillaries. He cracks me up. The house is so much more fun when he's around. I wonder if my family would say the same about me? I didn't wait to find out. I booked it around 11 A.M. after me and my dad hung a giant mirror in the entryway. It'll make the space brighter, my mom said. Yeah, when the door is open, my sister said. I chatted about my route with my dad and finally pulled out of the driveway.
I like people who decide to spruce up the whimsy factor in their lives and buy a giant, plastic, large-mouth bass for their mailbox. I was nearing what was supposed to be the last hour of my day on the road when I decided to get off the highway and take the smallest reasonable roads I could. My rear-view mirror has a compass on it; I carry an atlas; I did well in high school geography; eventually I would run into St. Louis. If I hit the Mississippi river, I would turn south. It would be as simple as that. And it was as simple as that, but my eyes started to rebel, and all the coffee and water I'd drunk throughout the day started to voice their opinions as well. In the last couple hours of travel, I must have pulled off the road four times to pee. I did not pee on this largemouth bass mailbox, though I did turn around and go back a couple hundred yards to take a picture of it. It's not the greatest photograph in the world—the neighbor across the street was watching me suspiciously. I just popped a shot and carried on down the road. I was nearing the place where southern Illinois gets squeezed toward St. Louis and the river. I wonder how many bills have been stuffed into that fish's mouth.
In southern Illinois, I went through a lot of small towns with populations of about two hundred. This dude is one of maybe 1000 residents of Benld. Besides his little dog on the end of what looks to be a flexi-leash, I didn't see another living soul as I passed through the town center. I got stuck at a railroad X-ing and watched box cars piled high with coal head west toward St. Louis. Here's another bit of Benld's downtown.
I kept driving, heading west, south, and south-west. I was getting very close to St. Louis, but it was impossible to tell that a major city was nearby. The world went from very rural and poor to urban in no time. I knew I was getting close to St. Louis when here and there among the farmlands I spotted a couple McMansions set back a couple hundred yards from the road. Being made out of brick and early 2000s bad taste, they looked very out of place among the farm houses and combines. Apparently a handful of upwardly mobile Americans with comparatively well-paying jobs in St. Louis have decided that they want to build giant, sore-thumb homes in the agricultural towns twenty and thirty miles from the outskirts of the city. But mostly the area looks like this:
And like this:
I'm not certain that I would want to move to Benld or a neighboring town, one of which is called Bunker Hill, but there is a certain charm to the openness and emptiness of the landscape. It's almost desolate, and one would think that one could be anyone in such a desolate place, that one could totally reinvent oneself in a place like this, but I'm not sure who I would reinvent myself to be. Abraham Lincoln? There is a bronze statue of him in the neighboring town of Bunker Hill. It's in the town center. Right across from the Pin-Up Bar and Grill. I stopped beside it to look at my atlas.
OK, I'll see you tomorrow for the riverside, country roads, St. Louis to Memphis portion of this journey. There will be another video coming again soon, too, a video about the road from northern Illinois to this part of southern Illinois. But now I must sleep. It's only 8 P.M. but I am zonked.
I'm off to my brother's 40th birthday party. Here's something to chew on in the meantime. I'll be back on the road tomorrow, St. Louis bound. Enjoy.
I woke up in my motel room in Cleveland Ohio this morning around 7:30 A.M. Eastern Time, and now I am in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, and I don't know what to write. The morning started out well. Approaching downtown Cleveland around 10 A.M. my pulse jumped up about 20 beats when I spotted a Doritos truck up ahead. I stepped on it hard and jockeyed through morning traffic to take some video of it. I was alive and I knew it, and the chip truck was barreling through traffic. It was headed to drop off a load of corn chips somewhere, corn chips for hungry Americans to snack on in their cars and offices. The sky up ahead spelled heavy rain, weather blown in from Hurricane Isaac. My morning exhilaration stopped hard—rather it was transformed into hyper-focused adrenaline when my car penetrated the center of the storm about 20 miles west of Cleveland. Windshield wipers went on full blast. If someone could design a truck that does not create an intense screen of spray when barreling full tilt over watery roadways, that person would become the God of road safety. Interstate 90 is a truck route, the most important vein of commerce that connects the two great, industrial power-houses of the north, New York and Chicago. At one point the tail-lights ahead of me vanished in the morass of precipitation and spray. When entering a storm on the interstate, it seems to be the habit of drivers to act as if nothing is happening. Visibility is drastically reduced, but the tempo of the traffic is a slow animal to respond. The truckers, carrying freight, dominate the tempo, and they cannot afford to lose a minute. Eventually traffic did slow down. It simply had to. One couldn't see more than fifty feet. I found an exit for a service station through the screen of solid grey and pulled off the road. This was the worst of the day. The rest was sunny and gorgeous.
I got off the interstate around Montpelier, OH (exit 13), and headed south on Ohio state road 15 toward Bryan. When I was planning my route this morning in my Cleveland motel room, I couldn't help but think about my roommate back home in Massachusetts. He spells his name B-R-I-A-N, but B-R-Y-A-N was close enough for me. I would get off the interstate around Montpelier and take Ohio 15 down to Bryan where I would pick up US HIGHWAY 6 and take it west. This is The 6 Motels Western Adventure after all, and my on-board compass read "W" most of the day. Bryan, as it turned out, was a classic, old middle-American town with a healthy-looking Main street—prosperous mom and pop businesses and well cared for period architecture. I kind of loved it. Of course, Bryan did have its share of modern glitz.
OK, so maybe some metallic streamers don't amount to modern glitz, but it's close enough for me. What I liked about Bryan from a glance was that it was decidedly sticking to its roots, but not sticking to them so hard as to be insane. Ohio is one of the political battleground states, and this particular Ohio town seemed to be very aware of its identity. Perhaps its identity is a little stuck in the past, and perhaps some of that identity is misguided and unfortunate—pesticide and herbicide ridden soybean and corn fields stretch from horizon to horizon, and there is land for sale everywhere—but Bryan has some pride of place. This world might not be perfect, but our town is still worth loving, so Bryan seemed to say. South of Bryan, I picked up US 6 and headed west into Indiana. Indiana, one of the most troublesome states of my heart. But that is another story.
Northeastern Indiana and northwestern Ohio look pretty much the same, and I imagine that apart from a few minor political differences and a couple state laws they are the same. They are both soy and corn based economies—fuck, so much of this country is—and their landscapes are pretty much the same, too. Rolling hills, grain elevators, straight roads and hardwood trees along fence lines. At one point in our history, this was the western frontier. People from the east came out here to stake their claims and make lives for themselves. I imagine that they were enterprising farmers. I imagine that they were blond Europeans, too. I saw a lot of chunky blond-headed Americans along this stretch of highway. I saw them in their cars at traffic lights, and I saw them with big Cokes at gas stations. It was like blue skies, green fields, silver grain elevators, and white people. I saw a lot of American flags, too, and I wondered about the upcoming election. When you live in cultured and educated place like Northampton, Massachusetts, you forget how anyone could ever be a Republican, or rather, how anyone could ever fall for the jingoistic rhetoric of RED WHITE AND BLUE. But the important thing about the flag is that it includes all three of those colors, not just red and not just blue. If only it included a couple more colors, I would be happy. I did take a detour to look at a beautiful lake.
I did also pop this shot of an Amish woman on her bicycle.
And famished, I did also stop for an Arby's beef and cheddar sandwich.
It seemed only fitting to eat one, seeing as I was surrounded by corn fields whose kernels of corn were destined to become feed for cheap beef. I am not a foodie. In fact, I hate the word. Food is something that I love and respect, and I do go to lengths to eat good food, but there is no food I am above. This sandwich was more than a little smooshed, and it didn't taste all that great—the meat was slippery and the cheddar was fake—but it was sustenance and I loved it all the same. The re-hydrated onions stuck to the tips of my fingers as I passed farm vehicles as soybean fields receded in my rear view mirror.
I am dog tired, but I made it to Cleveland. New York is a long state, and what it does best is take your money. Interstate 90 is a toll road all the way from the Massachusetts border to the north-eastern corner of Pennsylvania. They cut you a break as you pass by Buffalo, but then it's right back to toll road Charlie. It's like someone comes over God's loudspeaker and days, This is New York State speaking. Gimme all your money. The Pennsylvania welcome center never looked so good. I'm serious. I had to pee real badly. I was on the phone with Arda when I crossed border into Grape Town. That's the nickname of the little town tucked into the northeast corner of Pennsylvania. It's real name is a little more boring but just as factual: North East. It's in Erie County. First chance I got, I got off the interstate and headed north toward the lake. All along Pennsylvania state road number 5, I could feel the lake hugging the passenger side of my car.
Perhaps this is only because I'm an inlander, but I can feel when a great lake is nearby. My bones hum. There is something about the way the land slopes toward the horizon that mutely screams LAKE LAKE, BIG LAKE, BIG BIG LAKE NEARBY. But I'm a Great Lakes boy, born and bred, and so it's possible that a desert boy, or a river boy, or a mountain boy could drive all along the shore of Lake Erie without once knowing it's there, as if he were in a coma or sedate upon a heavy-duty prescription drug such as Xanax. Whatever gets you through the hard times, buddy, but the lake is a really big deal. It's great. I'm glad I got off the interstate to hunt it down.
The door to my Motel 6 room is wide open, and beyond the parking lot, which is hemmed by some ugly trees, I can see the bright red sign of the Texas Roadhouse. I'm gonna go there as soon as I finish writing. I need some food. And I figure that since I'll be in Texas next week, it wouldn't hurt to have a sneak peak now. But the lake. I drove west down Pennsylvania state road number 5, looking for some sign that would point me to a place where the public could access the lake. Most of the lake frontage is private property, but it's not all fancy millionaire homes. For every nice home, I saw at least two crummy, lakefront apartment complexes. I was really starting to like this part of the world. It seemed affordable. I was nearing Erie, PA. When I found the sign I was looking for, I hung a right and headed north toward the shore.
The woman pictured right was really suspicious of me when I got out of my car, taking pictures with both my camera and my phone. The man at the end of the boat launch, sort of just to the right of that sign, turned out to be her boyfriend or husband—I didn't ask—and he was surf casting for who knows what. Perch? Perch are good eating. I took a walk along the beach and collected one stone, a round and smooth grey stone that the waves of lake Erie had made that way over the course of who-knows how many years. Getting off the interstate and finding the lake was the best thing I did all day, but it also cost me an hour and change. The New York State through-way took my money and gave me little in return, but my detour through Erie PA was worth the hour it cost me.
Before setting out, I hung this ristra of home grown hot peppers from my rear-view mirror to act as a spiritual talisman for the road ahead of me. Before I left Erie, I stopped at a gas station to pee one more time. A woman was pumping gas. The interstate was nearby; the lake was behind me now; there was sprawl all around us. She had a crucifix hanging from her mirror. Some people hang a scented pine tree, some a crucifix, and some a strand of home grown chilies. The numbers on her gas ticker were probably rolling up. I related to that. In the past 24 hours, I'd pumped $100 bucks of gas myself. But there was a moment there when I felt connected to her, even at a distance and through my insect-splattered windshield. She had a talisman strung from her mirror and so did I. What difference did it make that mine was chilies and hers was church? We were both going somewhere. She was probably on her way home after a long day at work, and I was on my way to this motel on the outskirts of Cleveland. We were both people at a gas station in Erie, PA. The interstate was a giant hog that had been splayed into a rope of moving. I ate grapes off the back fence of the Pennsylvania Welcome Center this afternoon.
