Welcome to this travelog. The easiest way to follow this story is to start at the Point of Departure and read forward so you can follow events in order (instead of blog-style most recent first). Or skip around and see if you find something interesting. Comments are welcome and thanks for stopping by.
Chicago, IL
It’s always comforting to be on familiar ground after traveling to new places. We call it our “comfort zone” precisely because it feels so safe and secure, and after a while the fear of leaving it can outweigh the thrill of experiencing something new. The smell of vanilla dryer sheets from the disheveled linens strewn on my mattress is familiar and comfortable. It’s good to be home, to wake in my own bed, to feel the restlessness fade into the familiar. But I already miss the smell of starched linens and motel room disinfectant.
I wake up at 7:00AM to the sound of traffic on the Eisenhower expressway outside my window. This new apartment is surprisingly homey even with all these unpacked boxes littering the floor. I make myself coffee and eggs and sit on the patio to take in the vibe of morning commuters heading into the city. A pretty blonde girl bounces down the sidewalk and she reminds me of Paris Hilton and I imagine what Terrie might say: “What a slut!” which would get me thinking, “That girl reminds you of something that irritates you and you felt compelled to share. I happen not to agree, but thank you—sharing these observations is how we relate to each other. That’s what we do. There’s no outsmarting it.” But I would hold my tongue. Instead I’d smile and nod in recognition and enjoy the scenery.
It’s odd how distance—physical, emotional, intellectual—can make things so clear and at the same time so mysterious. It seems that keeping a fresh perspective on those familiar, comfortable slices of life enables a richer and fuller appreciation of all that we are and all we might be. In Zen there’s a concept called “beginner’s mind,” where one sets aside one’s assumptions and expectations, judgments and preferences, and simply takes things as they are. With practice an enormous sense of delight and gratitude in the sheer privilege of being able to participate in the wonder of the world emerges. All things are at once cloaked in familiarity and infused with possibility. In the west there’s a related concept called “intellectual curiosity” where one investigates things for the sake of the investigation, not for the sake of the investigator. Both ways are open and accepting and defer critical judgment. The essential difference is that the beginner’s mind doesn’t care about the investigation at all. It takes in with awe and wonder whatever disrupts one’s attention but chooses not to seek. It politely refuses the possibility of boredom and dwells in the immediacy of experience.
I feel an intense sense of beginner’s mind about all my past dramas and those yet to come. From the void of meaning we construct meaning, fill in existence with social obligations and self-disclosure and critical commentary. It’s a privilege to participate.
My first day back in the real world and I feel the urge to create some structure for the week. I break out my organizer and plan a schedule for the week. I plan who I’m going to call to catch up, what appointments I need to keep, when I’m going to write…but it doesn’t feel right. It's funny because I guess I don't mind having a plan and being organized (on the trip my plan was, "get there, get back, have fun"), I just hate being constricted by the unwarranted rigidity of a formal plan. I’ll ignore it and follow my explorer’s instincts for another week at least. But it’s there if I need it. Somehow that makes me more comfortable.
Cherry made me promise to wash her. I should do that this afternoon. Tonight I have my seminar on evolution and religion at the Lutheran seminary on the south side of town. I’ll drive Cherry to the meeting if I can get her overheating under control. She’s been a faithful companion on this trip, becoming more familiar and yet mysterious along the way. I love her for that.
At around noon I go downstairs to collect my backlog of mail and run into my artist friend McCoy and her dog. I’m happy to see her and she greets me with a big hug.
“How was the trip?”
“It was…interesting.”
“Good? Bad?”
“Um, not good or bad really,” I hesitate debating with myself. “Or maybe both. Interesting anyway. Have you been to Santa Fe? You’d love it there. We should catch up.”
“Great let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Starbucks, you can tell me about your trip and we’ll walk Buddy.” The dog perks up, wagging his tail at the sound of his name. I love her spontaneity and even though I promised, Cherry’s wash will have to wait.
We leave the lobby gabbing about apartment drama, her newly-fired assistant, and how tan I got. She lets Buddy run ahead of us and I ask, “What kind of dog is Buddy?”
“Buddy?” she asks and he freezes, looking back at us. “He’s a good dog!” she praises in a dog-owner baby talk coo. How strangely familiar, I think, and I wonder if she knows how perfectly right she is.
“He is a good dog,” I parrot, patting my lap to call him over. He’s friendly and frisky, but more to the point he’s an attentive disruption that lets disclose my opinion socially and benefit from a dose of halo effect.
“He sure is,” she says as she puts his leash on. “So did you get laid?”
I like the tone this conversation is taking. Cherry warned me that the trip isn’t over until I wash her. That wash will have to wait a while.
Foyil, OK to Chicago, IL
Aggressive schedules and leisure attitudes don’t mix. I’ve been on enough vacations where we’ve struggled to cram ten amazing things into three stressful days I’d end up screaming, “Let’s hurry the hell up and have fun!” I do not like that. I prefer certain things to take their own course, not to be rushed but to experienced and appreciated. Missing out on some must-do activities isn’t a problem because we did whatever we did with enthusiasm. I wasn’t half-gone sweating over the next thing on the list.
I oversleep in Claremore and make no haste getting on the road. I’d like to make Chicago by tomorrow, the arbitrary return date I established when I left. I’m flexible about when I get back home in that the bills are caught up and I don’t have pressing appointments. Being back home tomorrow feels about right. I’m having fun and the ride has mostly taken its course. If I get to southern Illinois by the end of the day I’ll consider that to be good progress. It takes ten hours to drive nonstop all the way to Chicago according to the guys I met last night at the motel’s front desk. I’d prefer to tear through Oklahoma and take Missouri leisurely to catch the Jesse James Wax Museum and maybe peek into the famed Meramec Caverns. We tourists love our traps.
The characters on this road trip have been fascinating and the drive has given me plenty of space to turn my attention to number of unexpected things. Yet somehow I don’t feel I cleared my head the way I intended. Something is missing, incomplete and I’m bothered that the trip will end without my dredging up…something I can’t put my finger on. I have this sinking sense that there’s unfinished business and I can’t say quite what it is. It’s remarkable what comes to mind when I let my guard down, suspend my own judgment, and let the thread unwind. It’s freeform and chaotic like excited conversations with good friends and like excited conversations often involves successive approximation of meaning built on utterances, miscommunications, and clarifications using words and body language in an effort to converge on apparently mutual understanding. Communicating with oneself in meditation, contemplation, and writing has the excited expressive quality of conversation, at times veering clean off the road and stumbling back again. When I drive the bright white lines guide me and ditches make it clear I’m off track. Taking the side roads through my own head doesn’t include historic brown highway signs or gigantic “Here It Is” billboards.
With a light breakfast and a packed car I trade pleasantries with the Claremore Inn attendant, a nice Indian woman who believes like me that discrimination by old white racists accounts for the “American Owned” signs spreading across Route motels. By 10:00AM I’m on my way north to Foyil, the nearest nowhere town along OK-66, the original alignment and the alternative to the turnpike out of Claremore. It doesn’t take long to find a row of boarded up ghosts of Route 66 past. The shell of a garage labeled “Cox Motor Co” once proudly sold Goodyear tires imposes itself alongside a Dairy Queen drive through that makes excellent backdrops for photos of Cherry, who appears right at home alongside the picnic benches under the nostalgic malt shop signs. The sun is intense and hot, the paint on every building in sight is peeling. Stifling. Even though it’s Sunday I’m surprised at how desolate the place feels. No cars, no kids playing, no dogs barking despite houses in the area. It’s just hot and quiet here with these relics.
Cherry feels the heat too. The temperature gauge is touching the red line already so I check the coolant, top off the radiator, and take things slowly. There’s no need to rush and seize the engine. It isn’t clear whether the fan is kicking on or if the thermostat is flakey and I wish the car would adjust itself for changes in heat, altitude, speed, and all that.
Most things don’t simply fix themselves, though. Most things require maintenance. Cars, houses, roads, buildings, relationships, bodies, minds, you name it. For the longest time I suffered from the delusion that basic adult competence involved doing everything only once, doing it the first time right, and never worrying about again. Dad installed that in me: If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. True if you know exactly what you’re doing, then doing it right is more sensible than screwing it up for the drama of it. Doing something right is not so easy when you’re figuring it out as you go. I should only need to explain an idea to a coworker once and my statement should fully and permanently transmit the details of the situation. Funny though that with product design, as with a lot of things, changes are a bitch to keep track of. Complex systems just don’t behave like simple tools. Hit a nail with a hammer and the nail goes into the board. Hit a computer with a hammer, though, and the computer doesn’t spring to life. Software is a complex system. People are complex too.
This incessant need for communication and clarification gave me a headache for a year on a product overhaul early in my career. I was spending two weeks each month away at corporate headquarters making a slew of interrelated product changes. Then I’d go to Minneapolis and tell the person in charge of engineering the essence of these changes, expecting him to figure out the details and propagate the necessary information to the right people. Of course it never occurred to me that I’d been immersed in this for two weeks but somehow I expected him to catch up in a few hours and catch up the team in a day. Inevitably someone wouldn’t hear and before I knew what was happening we had a broken product. So out of frustration and I’d call a staff meeting and make sure everyone was “on the same page” (managers love to talk in clichés because it makes us look like we’re in some kind of elite club for vacuous double-speaking idiots). A few days later a similar problem would surface, not because everyone had a different idea but because they had the same wrong idea. I would have left out some detail or a dependency that tied this or that a change to another product in a different department. I hadn’t anticipated all the little the connection and didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Disrupt everyone’s job, throw out a week’s worth of work and start over.
This happened more often than I care to admit. After the project ended I was having a beer and catching up with Tyson who was one of the programmers involved. He told me that about half of the time the engineering team expected that things would break but they did what I said anyway. “Really? Why didn’t you say something and save us all the hassle?” I asked. “Well,” he said directly, “you always seemed to know what was going on so we figured you anticipated all the consequences and told someone in the other department to adjust their design. When it broke we figured we must have done something wrong. And besides, you never asked what we thought.” That was tough to hear. I maintained an image of competence and control but didn’t maintain the relationships that would have made this complex project much more pleasant and productive. I had become commanding at the cost of being approachable. I was lucky to hear this from someone I trusted and respected, because I could actually hear it. I didn’t need to defend myself from it. I could work on my own maintenance. Revising dad’s maxim: If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong. Learn from the mistakes, though. Pay attention. Notice the details. Then do it right.
Catching sight of a bizarre folk sculpture in Chelsea I pull to the shoulder to let the lone car behind me pass. I’m confused at first as to whether this is a museum or a gift shop or some abandoned art project, and I realize it’s a mechanic’s garage. There are random objects d’art, sculpture, and miscellaneous signage. The letters above the rusted corrugated garage door spell “CARAGE” (which for some reason I find hysterical) and a giant barrel mounted on a flagpole in front advertise “Rotors Turned” and “Welding” in irregular block letters. It’s a service station circus and I wonder if they get much business on this stretch of road before I catch the “For Sale By Owner” sign in the front overgrown grass.
It’s not much farther to White Oak. I cruise quite slowly through town and come upon an unusual junkyard. Here are not your typical late-model wrecks but an assortment of classics left to rot in a desolate grassy field. Chevys, Packards, Plymouths, a Firebird, more chrome and rust than I’ve seen in one place in a while. Near the main office I spot an old black Mustang poking out from under a tarp. 
I leave Cherry running and get out for a closer look. From a distance I can tell it’s an early model year notchback. Standard package, not equipped with the Pony upgrades. Three-prong quarter panel ornament on the side. It’s a ’66 just like Cherry and it’s been in an accident. The rear quarter panel is smashed in what appears to have been a rear-end collision. The front fender is crumpled, presumably from being thrust into a pole or another car. Moving around the back I see the rear end is demolished. This is a wreck. I peek inside the open window to find aftermarket racing upgrades: bucket seats, a compact rubber steering wheel, chrome accelerator and brake pedals. An air scoop has been butchered into the hood. Someone beat this car up and got a little joyriding done before it met its end. Wandering across the field I browse a row of old chasses for other fascinating finds and realize that most of these machines have been picked over, harvested for engines, wheels, body parts, whatever was eligible for salvage. A gutted ’67 catches my attention, it’s that putrid vomit green that no one ever liked but they seemed to buy. Across from it is an ugly black Mustang 5.0, mid-80’s vintage with that horrible Fox chassis (“Can you make a Mustang that looks like an Escort please? Thanks.”). It’s hot and quiet here, peaceful. And dead. The stillness is like a graveyard but instead of being midnight and windswept it’s midday and humid.
Peaceful. Dead. They go hand-in-hand. When people disclose their desire for peace and tranquility I can’t help but to hear it as a kind of death wish. “Why can’t we just live in peace and avoid conflict?” Life, precisely by being alive, resists peace and tranquility. Life gets excited, surprised, irritated—it disequilibrates. Life survives. When that stops, by definition, life dies. Survival requires ongoing maintenance. Maintaining the individual means acquiring resources (like clothing and calories) often at the expense of other life forms. If I were a lion I’d eat a gazelle and end that particular gazelle’s life. I might not like that lions are carnivores and I may judge them to be ethically repugnant, but my critique is not likely to turn them into gazelle-loving herbivores. Maintenance of the species factor into life, too. Nothing personal, but in the ecological scheme of things your life doesn’t matter if your species doesn’t continue. If I were a lion I’d do my worst to mount a pretty lioness and fend off those other lions vying for her affection (so to speak). We’d snarl, bite, scratch, and fight…not to mention what might happen if I actually stumbled upon another male lion. It’s sloppy, messy, violent, and chaotic. Survival of the individual and survival of the species. The core themes in the dramatic performance of life.
Of course we happen to be humans not lions. We can plan and organize our way out of these primitive modes of mere subsistence and imagine an agrarian society whereby we farm the land so as not to kill animals and propagate the species through some prearranged mating scheme. No contests, no competition, no conflict, no drama.
Peace. Relentless peace. Interminable peace. How mindfuckingly boring.
That seems to be the crux of it. There’s a reason that the Christian conception of Heaven is rendered as some idyllic springtime meadow stolen straight from the myths of the Elysian Fields. Peace, tranquility, stillness, eternity. That describes the direct and immediate perception of the eternal ever-present and unchanging Godhead. That’s the freedom from drama, the freedom from suffering, the freedom from life. And that’s the point: it is freedom from life, it is not life. It comes before and continues after; life’s suffering not a delusion but a design. Survival of the individual includes at the very least the potential for competition over resources. And where the potential exists, the law of large numbers says the inevitable will follow. Conflict will arise because life, this planet, and the resources that cover it are finite and their acquisition benefits living beings. If I’m alive it’s a matter of time before I step on someone’s toes and we tussle.
Life sparks this ridiculous drama of survival. For millennia we as a species lived in small tribes like the small towns that dot Route 66 where my private business was everybody else’s soap opera. In these small tribes we worked together to stay alive, and when a couple of young boys became men they would fight for the attention of a young girl. Drama! And when one of the tribesmen confronted the tribe leader for dominance factions formed and infighting over “good leader/bad leader” erupted. Drama! And when years later someone remarked about the deposed leader old wounds surfaced and curses uttered. Drama! It’s part and parcel of social life. It’s the foundation for human life.
Eternal peace is something we will each achieve, of course. Just wait a while; none of us are getting out of this life alive. It’s just that we don’t live in peace; we die into it for all eternity. “Rest in peace,” the gravestone will implore as if there were a choice in the matter.
Cherry’s idle becomes irregular as I daydream about eternity in this godforsakenly hot podunk junkyard. At first I suspect she’s overheating. Then I realize we’re thinking along the same lines and she doesn’t want to be left here to rot in peace like all these other forgotten wrecks. She doesn’t see this as eternal paradise; rusting in the sun never to roll again is her concept of hell. I love her spark of life. As long as she’s alive she’s going to put up a fight. I crawl into the car and we make our way back to the turnpike, slowly though. This overheating concerns me. The radiator has overflowed several times in the past few days and if I push her I’m worried that Oklahoma will be Cherry’s Elysian Field.
Vinita is the last little town we cruise through before making our way off the old two lane alignment back onto the expressway. It’s a sleepy town with its very own downtown stoplight. I take it slow to soak up the scenery and see if anything catches my eye. Nothing does. We pass through town almost on the entrance ramp when a white ’66 passes in the other direction and the driver waves his hand slightly in recognition. I smile and nod back. Cherry’s healthy sister, I joke. She doesn’t think it’s funny—she’s still mourning Blackie back in the graveyard. Crossing the border into Missouri has become a minor self-imposed goal and I’m anxious to see if driving faster cools her down, in which case I suspect the fan is not pushing enough air at low speeds to cool the radiator. The sky turns cloudy but not overcast, just dark enough to make for a long and dull drive through the Ozarks.
Derelict autos and final resting places. Abandoned convenience stores and rehabbed service stations. The cycle of life and death is all around all the time, but I’m usually not giving it much attention. Here it’s brought to my attention and disrupts my awareness. No wonder poverty and Christianity correlate throughout the Bible belt. Without those precious few positive distractions like a good job and an annual vacation and a neurotic obsession about what college your kids get admitted to, then what drama gets created in life? The negative, destructive, existential kind. Life can easily become unstable like a pendulum swinging between sin and salvation, seeking drama and seeking peace in turn. There’s a natural tension between the two. Boredom tempts negative, destructive, existential activity like wanton sexuality and thrill aggression, self-destructive escapism, or main street drag racing. As biological animals we’re not perfectly suited for deciding when enough is enough, so sex turns into assault, fighting turns into manslaughter, alcohol turns into intoxicated collision. In failing to recognize it as drama self-imposed the quest turns to repentance, redemption, and rejoicing. Peace, tranquility, stillness. Until the boredom sets in again…and that repentance loses to repetition. Sin again. To and fro it comes and goes.
Of course it’s easy for me to cast aspersions from a distance as though all these human foibles are the shortcomings of idiots. I like to think I’ve got my shit together. I like to think I’m above average. It turns out that about ninety percent of us do too. To clarify: when asked about how attractive, intelligent, talented, or interesting subjects were with respect to a given group (their coworkers, classmates, etc.) who were also ask the same question, ninety percent thought were better than the group being considered. This is not about having incomplete information, since everyone knew who else was involved and who was being compared. The result is of course statistically impossible since the definition of average is that half the people in any given population are above it and half are below. Psychologists call this a self-serving bias and it leads to illusions about uniqueness and inhibits basic empathic function.
Cherry’s sister in Vinita and her dead cousins in the bone yard gets me thinking about what it means to be special. Cherry is different and unique and gets lots of attention when I stop at motels or restaurants. And yet they made half a million like her the year she was born. What makes her special? Hell, what makes me special? Or you? Or any of us? A deep sense of what makes something special helps combat the destructive implications of a self-serving bias. In short, we are each one of a kind. There’s nothing touch-feely about this fact. We are each one unique being with distinctive personalities, histories, tastes, values, preferences, cares, concerns, families—all the things that make up an individual. And at the same time we are each of a kind of creature that loves, fights, thinks, feels, survives, succeeds, fails—all the things that make us members of a species. That is the meaning of the word. We are special: members of a species. It’s convenient to forget that fact when it suits a purpose. Labels are useful tools to strip people of their status in the species, to turn a human being into a “nigger” or a “faggot” or a “hillbilly” or a “polack” and collapse the other into a single dimension of contemptible evaluation. As the hammer effortlessly drives the nail so the slur effortlessly eliminates the humanity.
The insight in realizing that we are “of a kind” is that it removes the basis for denying the intellectual, emotional, and experiential capacity of another mature human being. Children differ from adults because they are at an earlier stage of development, and people with neurological or physical defects may underperform the general population. Yet most normal people are like most other normal people. None of us have telepathy (sorry to burst any bubbles but subconscious perception is not “extrasensory”); none of us can leap buildings in a single bound; none of us can transform into lions. We all have human not superhuman strengths and abilities. Some are more talented in some areas than others, to be sure; Tiger Woods wouldn’t be remarkable if he had my handicap of 113. It is no surprise then that the demonstration of unusually strong talents and abilities tends to induce spectacle and celebration not for their alienation from human experience but for their familiarity. Tiger Woods is a celebrity not because he is the only person who ever played golf but because we each can in principle play golf (even if I happen to be awful) and he does it exceptionally well. There’s no denying the basic capacity; the degree of proficiency varies. It’s as if we all paint the unique portrait of our lives from the same basic palette of colors or compose our unique score from the same eighty-eight keys or choreograph our unique dance from the same collection of muscle movements and steps.
Empathetically connecting to other people involves the apparently incredible task of examining their interior world. How does someone get into the interior world of another? Absent conflicting evidence there is no reason to believe that other people are incapable of thinking, feeling, and acting like me even if they choose not to (or at the moment are not doing so). For example in a bout of depression it’s tempting to declare, “Nobody understands me! You don’t know how I feel!” While it’s true that an arbitrary person is probably not feeling the same way right now, the fact is that each of us have been depressed, many of us severely, in some cases bordering on suicide. What if everyone has known those depths of depression even if they are not experiencing it right now? To deny this is to deny help driven by unregulated emotion. Emotions are wonderful, even the awful ones, because they provide the palette for life’s drama; unregulated emotions create drama at the cost of social and interpersonal connectedness. Another example: “This is so amazing! She couldn’t possibly appreciate the genius of this artist.” While one may not be informed about this artist’s genius that does not suggest the person lacks the basic capacity for appreciation. What if everyone has known the heights of ecstasy, even if what produces it for me now doesn’t do it for them? Declaring her so shallow that nothing in her life might be savored is a social disclosure that reveals the speaker to be an elitist snob. I may not like what triggers these heights of ecstasy or depths of depression in another, and by that criteria I can judge them if I choose. Empathetic communication is still about meaning making, fraught with miscommunication and built on successive approximate. Built more solidly if we allow each other this kind of depth.
This realization itself does not suggest that I had better get along with all the other members of my species or treat them with undeserved dignity and respect. What is true, however, is that like it or not I’m stuck with them. Being one of a kind means that being “one” and being “of a kind” are both true at once. Cherry as one when we’re cruising in the Arizona sun or making small talk at a gas station with a classic car enthusiast. Cherry of a kind when I’m looking for replacement parts or comparing notes with other Mustang owners (or trespassing in Oklahoma junk yards). I am one in virtue of my unique combination of up and down experiences. I am of a kind in virtue of having the capacity for those up and down experiences. Naturally I can deny this fact when it suits me (we all can since it’s a human capacity not a James capacity). I can denigrate and mock for the sake of degrading others or for an evening of recreational hostility. The point is that if I want to get into the interior world of another the best way I know of is to understand the hell out of my own interior world and give the other person the benefit of the human experiential doubt. In this way I have the potential to relate to the other. Then differences of tastes, values, or beliefs aren’t a threat—they become points of comparison and contrast, of deeper, richer, more compassionate mutual understanding.
Stotts City, MO claims a few hundred residents whom I would likely never have encountered in my life if it weren’t for the gigantic “Adult Super Store” sign demanding my attention from I-44. It would be a hoot to ask the owner how inevitable conflict and the dramatic propagation of the species plays out in his sinful business here in the buckle of the Bible belt. The interstate exit sports the adult superstore on one side of the road, a gas station/liquor store on the other, and a church just across the overpass. This has all the makings for a drama economy: a shop to titillate the senses, a medium to inhibit judgment, and a church to beg forgiveness. I earn a suspicious glance from the proprietor of the liquor store as we cross the gravel lot and I park Cherry proudly in front. The video store and arcade itself is a large pole barn. I go inside not sure what to expect and get a toothless grin from the guy at the counter. He looks to be retirement age and he’s on the phone giving someone directions. I wait for him to finish and look around at the vast assortment of tits and ass, find a trucker and a young couple shopping inside.
When he’s done on the phone I tell him what I’m up to and he eyes me suspiciously and says, “Y’ask a lotta questions. Be bedder if y’ talk’uh thuh owners.”
“Okay, I’ll do. But what’s your take on it?”
“We run uh honest bidness, we cross er T’s and dot er I’s. I ain’t had no trouble in thuh time I been here.”
Not very informative. I leave with a business card to contact the owner and on my way to the car a young couple smoking and cuddling on the hood of an old Taurus at the edge of the parking lot catches my attention. They look at me suspiciously as I walk across the lot kicking up dust in my trail.
“Guys I’m passing through and I’m just curious, what do you make of a church and a liquor store and a porn shop all on the same block.”
“Fucked up, ain’t it?” the girl chimes.
“I suppose you need a place to sin if you’re gonna be saved,” the guy snickers.
That’s what I was thinking, I don’t say. “You guys live around here?”
“No, a shitty little hole up northern Missouri,” he says taking a long hard drag. He’s got narrow James Dean eyes and British teeth. “Until we get a chance to move the fuck on.”
I get a better sense of their style: inked, pierced, and punked out. The stage of rebellion following independence. The finding-my-way stage. “How’s life in the Bible belt?”
“Man it sucks!” she says enthusiastically. “I’m from Detroit and I just hhh-hate it here! But we’ll get out, I’m working on my mechanics certificate now.”
“I was in Portland for a while” he adds. “Had to come back for family. That’s the way it is here. Wages are just enough to keep you alive but not enough for you to save. Keeps you tied down, you know?”
“Yes, I think I do,” I say. “Now you guys seem clever and resourceful, she knows about cars…”
“Me too,” he cuts in, “but she does the engine and I do body work. Now, I mean. Used to work at a tattoo parlor.”
“You got any interesting ink?” I ask. The both flash knowing grins before getting half naked, hiking up their pant legs and rolling the sleeves. Very solid work. He’s got the face of The Predator on his leg and she’s got “Latina” written in cursive across her not very Latin-looking upper back.
“Back in the day I had eighteen piercings, ten in my ears alone!” he brags. I notice his shirt reads “Skin City Tattoo--$20 piercings above the waist.”
“I need a picture,” I blurt and ask them to wait while I get my camera. When they see I’m headed to Cherry they follow like baby ducks.
“That’s the hottest car ever!” she says.
“You ain’t kidding. Been overheating the last day or so and I can’t make out if it’s the thermostat or the radiator or what,” I grouse. “Care to take a look?”
“Hell yeah!” she says and I pop the hood and make them show their skin to the camera before she dives in and pushes, pokes, and prods the engine like a pro.
The boyfriend and I bullshit while I try not to leer at her khaki-covered ass but it’s uphill because (a) I’m in the parking lot of a porn shop with naked ladies on the brain, (b) she’s a female under the age of 60, and (c) she’s mechanically inclined which triples all other hotness. “No clogs and your gauge leads look about solid. But your manifold covers are brittle and rusted to hell. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have exhaust problems. When’s the last time you had the exhaust checked?” she asks. “Never,” I confess. “But if the headers are brittle I’ll replace them when I get home.” “Manifold covers,” she corrects. “This doesn’t have headers.” “No obvious reason for the overheating then?” I ask. “None that I can see, I’d need to get it on a lift to be thorough,” she says. “And you ain’t doing that here,” he laughs looking around at the porn shop parking lot. We chat a spell before I figure it’s best that I get across the rest of the state. I wish them well with the rest of their trip, not only through Missouri but through their finding-my-way stage.
The next couple of hours are dull. Clouds obscure the sun and I wonder if that sours my mood. Driving through Springfield I keep looking for some interesting excuse to exit that never comes. I go for over an hour pushing on the straight aways and pulling back on the hills to regulate Cherry’s temperature before I have to stop for gas. The Flying J faithfully provides ample fodder for cultural criticism when I step into the men’s room only to be stunned by the poster above the urinal promoting a delectable assortment of deep fried fat that passes for foodstuff targeting the intrepid traveler who needs an ungodly caloric excess to sustain himself through eight hours of vigorous sitting on his ass keeping the steering wheel steady. Thinking food cannot get any worse, a life-sized display of two-for-one King Size Elvis (get it?) Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cream Cups (‘member Elvis’ favorite sandwich, honey?) with a free mail order diecast Elvis racing car proves me wrong. This is a hillbilly’s wet dream: Elvis, Nascar, and sugar. I feel a little nauseous and a little guilty because if they replace the disgusting candy with Ursula Andress circa 1963 it’s my wet dream too.
Another hour and I’m craving something to disrupt my attention and distract me from the peace-death of these eternal Ozark hills. Every few miles there’s another sign reminding motorists that Meramec Caverns is a hundred and fifty miles away, a hundred and forty miles away, a hundred and thirty miles…then finally rounding a turn I catch a rundown retro service station barely discernible in the overgrown weeds. It takes a while to exit and backtrack; the crumpled old shanties on the service road show why there’s no demand for a mechanic around here. None of these cars actually run. This time it’s not the building but the mountain’s effort to tear the building down that fascinates me. Nature has proven relentless in its reclamation of this plot of land for her own purpose. Every crack in the old pavement is saturated with tall reedy grass. Vines smother the signpost latticework and nearby electrical poles. Every bit of glass is shattered, every light bulb broken, every exposed inch of metal rusted. The former arc light that illuminated the filling island rocks back and forth in the gentle breeze waiting for the base to give so it can collapse under its own weight. It’s as if nature were saying, “Oh, you’re all through with this now? Fine then, give us a minute and we’ll make things whole again.” Maintenance has not been done here in a long while.
Inside conceals the usual signs of vagrant life: a small fire pit, empty plastic water bottles, chemical containers, and trashbag bedding scattered with all form of debris in the corner farthest from the elements. Have the folks who once staked a claim here have moved beyond a primitive mode of mere subsistence? Could the government design an entitlement program to help them do so? Is that the point of the church, community groups, and nonprofit organizations? I swell up with this desire to give whoever slept here a meal and a couple of dollars. I can spare it. My frustration with poverty is that it can’t be fixed all at once. Starvation, scarcity, inequity, these are deep and perennial forces that have been with the species for as long as the species has been. That it can’t be fixed all at once is no excuse to do nothing at all, and right now I’d just like to help out the struggling soul I imagine keeping warm at night around this fire pit. But there’s not a soul around to help so I take some pictures of Cherry and the abandoned gas station and get back on the road.
The hazy sky makes the afternoon drag on. Around 5:00PM I make it to Bourbon, MO where I got to see Sammy Hagar’s Mustang and the area is carpeted with Jesse James and Meramec billboards. I’m more interested in the wax museum than the caverns since there’s some daylight left and I don’t feel like coming out of a cave after dark. We ease our way around the gentle curves into Meramec State Park and along the river that leads to the cave entrance. I’m surprised when the friendly attendant at the information desk/confection stand tells me I’ve overshot the wax museum and need to go back up out of the river valley. I decide to peruse the gift shop for a trinket or souvenir. Nothing worth parting with a few dollars. I’d rather give it to the next struggling homeless person I find.
Disappointed but hardly devastated I wander out of the cave entrance and along the river. A group of good looking teenagers are landing their canoes. A family is enjoying a picnic along the shoreline. A lady opens her truck door and lets out an excited Labrador who plays fetch with a tennis ball. The gentle sound of water and the voices of children playing are about the only sounds to be heard. It’s a peaceful and lazy afternoon with the sky now clear to let the sun shimmer through the trees as it falls lower in the sky. Crossing the open and empty parking lot I think right here and now is a little taste of heaven. I can’t imagine the Elysian Fields being any more beautiful than this.
Hustling back up and out of the river valley I spot the enormous Jesse James Museum sing that only a hasty idiot could miss. The very same sign I missed going in. The museum is closed of course being almost 6:00PM on Sunday. Oh well, visiting this afternoon was a self-imposed and arbitrary goal and I figure that to really enjoy the sights I’ll need to come back next summer and spend a few days. For now I’m satisfied with a few pictures as evidence of my brief stop. I feel fortunate to have taken my time through Missouri and got a second wind along the river valley, it was refreshing. If I’d have raced to get to the museum before its 5:00 closing time I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself. I’d have been frustrated and short tempered. Aggressive schedules and leisure attitudes don’t mix.
Before I make it back to the freeway a remarkable roadside attraction jars me into a double take. A huge billboard proudly proclaims “Fireworks Outlet: Gas – Diesel – Beer” which gets me thinking that if they added guns to the mix that would be a recipe for just about every major felony I can think of. Who thinks it’s a good idea to distribute fireworks and gasoline and beer in one convenient location? People looking for some self-imposed and arbitrary drama I suspect. Kareim would call it market efficiency, Jean would call it an unsafe travesty, and Tyson would laugh it off as southern culture. I’m not sure what I make of it. It just seems…remarkable.
I decide to push forward into Illinois until I get tired and then call it a night. The state line isn’t far and I take in a beautiful sunset several times behind me as the orange orb hides and reappears while easing up and down the rocky rolling hills leading into St Louis. Cherry is still running hot so I stay in the right lane and cruise along with traffic, thinking what other people that come to mind would make of the fireworks liquor store, then what they would make of getting to the museum after hours, and what their overall impressions of the trip so far might be.
Then it cracks wide open. It’s so obvious and so subtle. I get a flood of adrenaline, the taste of pennies in my mouth, and I have to pull over to snare the thought.
And like that this issue I’ve struggling to uncover makes itself clear.
Sometime after midnight I go back to where I started. I made my deadline, or I didn’t, I kind of lost track…swept up in all the excitement of being home I forgot to even bother with the camera at the planetarium. Instead I drive north along Lakeshore to Jackson, and turn left just after Grant Park toward Jackson and Michigan (the official start of Route 66 before the one-way pattern, and still the official terminus). I’m forced by the traffic pattern to veer onto Michigan and stop under the brown mile marker on Adams that signaled our departure. No maps of the route at the starting point. I love this city. I get out and take in the scenery on this late Sunday night. Somebody passes by coming from the direction of the Art Institute and I ask him to get a picture of me with Cherry, who I just now notice is steaming from under her hood. I thank the stranger and get back in the car. The thermostat is all red. I take it very slow the mile or so home and pull up under the lights outside the garage to inspect the car.
“I want you to wash me,” Cherry coos as I drag my suitcase out of the trunk and lock the door.Groom, TX to Claremore, OK
Anyone who has ever run a marathon knows a couple of things about setting and reaching arbitrary self-imposed goals. First, it takes a kind of dedication that can be all-consuming, making the runner single minded about spending hours in mostly solitary training that build endurance and reduce injury. Second, the winner will be from Kenya; the rest of us will not come in first, aren’t going to make any money, won’t receive significant fame or recognition, and none of that matters. Third, nobody cares who runs a particular number. Of course friends and family support their runner, maybe partners run together, but at the end of the day if I fall off the face of the planet they fill my slot with an alternate and someone else runs the race. Fourth, when the race is run there’s that feeling of emptiness, like that time when the party’s over. Delivering a major work project or graduating from college or finally taking a safari in South Africa—they can all feel the same when it’s over. That hard work and dedication has amounted to something. Before long there’s something else to invest that surplus time and energy and emotion into, but for a little while there’s a void in the act of completion. What next?
As a species we’ve largely clobbered the practical problems of human survival. We know how to produce plenty of food for everyone, how to create massive and cost-effective communal shelters, how to move our bodies over great distances with unthinkable speed, how to mass-educate a population. We haven’t figured out how to overcome the distribution and logistical problems of cost effectively delivering said surplus to impoverished third-world regions, but that consumes the attention of a lot of very smart socially aware individuals; breakthroughs in that regard would seem a matter of time. For those of us in the better-off areas of the world we have the privilege, the luxury, of filling our time with activities like running marathons, working for promotions, and driving across the country. This is no shameful recognition that we don’t all share the same level of concern, each and every one. It’s that those of us with the luxury of abundance face a new question that was once exclusively the faced by a few elite nobles: what do we do with ourselves now? As Maslow might ask, how do we self-actualize now that we’ve been released from the servitude of mere survival?
Thoughts of marathons and missions and higher callings knock around in my head as I reengage the lonely freeway eastbound out of Amarillo at 1:30AM on this Friday night turned Saturday morning. With the benefit of caffeine and curiosity I’ve imposed a couple of arbitrary goals for myself, a mini-marathon for the evening: revisit the cross in Groom, TX and bear witness to the neon lights adorning the tower of the restored Conoco gas station in Shamrock, TX. I saw both of these on my first pass and have it on good authority that these are remarkable sights after dark. A runner gets it into her head that a marathon is a good idea and makes the effort to go for it. I’ve got it in mine that tearing across Texas in the dead of night is a brilliant plan and lock onto that target like a tail gunner.
The Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ (my hand to God that’s its full name) is a 19 story bone-white cross that stands just south of Interstate 40 in Groom. It’s lit at night and drivers can see it from fifteen miles away. They say that over ten million motorists pass the cross each year. Bill at the Grill from Lucille’s told me that he found himself driving I-40 one stormy night and the clouds parted, revealing the cross. He found it moving. Jason from The 806 told me he was once on his way out of Amarillo for good and upon running into the cross he exited, turned around, and headed right back home. These stories were a little tongue in cheek, to be sure, but it got me curious. I stopped at the cross on my way westbound to see what all the fuss was about. Now Route 66 is notorious for its giants: muffler men, Indian statues, dinosaurs, and whatnot. A 19 story cross kind of takes the cake. It’s probably no surprise that my inner Catholic schoolboy expected that the setting would be some sort of peaceful retreat, a roadside sanctuary from the turmoil of everyday life; a little Texas chapel re-writ Texas size. Hardly. Visiting midday a week ago I found half a dozen Harley hogs in what appeared to be a recovery ceremony following the Stations of the Cross that encircle the massive base of the cross. A crew of lively German tourists videotaping the whole affair and narrating for posterity. Two enrapt parents ignoring several teen and preteen kids all of whom appeared impatient to move onto some unspecified water amusement park, some kneading the sandy ground with the tips of their tennis shoes with others playing hide and seek around Pontius Pilate. And, to my surprise, three or four semi rigs idling in the parking lot. Even truckers have a spiritual life, I know; but this don’t seem a Flying J to me.
I come upon the cross around 2:00AM as it makes its presence known at first as an apparition, ghostly and luminescent as the reflective surface twinkles from a distance in the thick night atmosphere. The closer I get the more massive it towers and eventually I can’t make out the top as I pass from the interstate and exit to the roundabout side road that takes Cherry and I directly underneath the enormous horizontal crossbeam. I take several long exposure photos of the cross in the middle of the night, and now as then there are three trucks in low idle hunkered down for the night in the parking lot alongside the cross. The statuary around the cross is lit from beneath, creating a decidedly eerie feel that suits the chill of the night air. I position myself facing south to get a broad shot of the cross and nearby gift shop/fountain and recall setting up the same shot the week before where I kept waiting for traffic to clear. Increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t get a pause to capture some still spirit that didn’t actually exist there, I said to myself, “Why the hell won’t these semis let up and give me a clear shot?” Then it dawned on me that this was the perfect shot, just as it was, semis and all. This place was not some remote spiritual sanctuary. It was a congested roadside attraction _and_ a spiritual sanctuary. Both all at once. It was the Texas equivalent of ancient Nara Park in modern Japan. “How remarkable,” I found myself saying aloud. I don’t like that the cross has this overloaded function, but it’s not about me liking it: it’s about the cross speaking to those who hear it whenever they’re ready. Recovering Harley hogs or wandering youth fleeing Amarillo, for example.
I’m content with my middle of the night photos of the Stations of the Cross. There’s something satisfying in the symmetry, a complement to San Miguel Chapel’s Stations this afternoon (although time has stretch and shifted on me—that’s what the road does—and it seems more like days ago I was in Santa Fe). I put Cherry back on the highway and make Groom a mental milestone, a halfway mark on tonight’s travel marathon. Breaking the trip into milestones helps overcome the road hypnosis that keeps setting in every ten minutes or so. I’ve taken in enough coffee and soda to keep me awake, but not necessarily engaged. The monotonous roadscape transforms after midnight into a straight shot out to the inky void. Roadside billboards, oncoming traffic, scanning for the Big Dipper now that it’s moved off of my shoulder; all these keep me from retreating inward as the urge to sleep keeps sweeping my body, sending tingle signals along my arms and legs and begging me to call it a night. Halfway, I think. Discipline, like a marathon runner. Not gonna quit now that I’m halfway to my arbitrary self-imposed goal of making Shamrock tonight and witnessing the Conoco Tower all lit up in its glory.
It never occurred to me that they would turn the neon lights off overnight. In a town of 2,000 with a donation-funded minor landmark, saving some of that electricity might reveal a pragmatic wisdom. At 3:30AM when I finally make it to the middle of town I find the Conoco station dead quiet and quite completely dark. For a moment I expect myself to well up with rage and disappointment and frustration. After all, this had been the whole purpose of pushing through the night and staving off road hypnosis despite the urge to sleep. But I watch myself, check myself, and find that I’m not really upset at all. Like a runner crossing the finish to no cheering crowds and no flash photos, just a sense of achievement in having attained my arbitrary self-imposed goal. Despite the dim lighting and mild chill I pose Cherry, get out, take a few pictures, and moved onto the next goal before that feeling of the void of completion sets in: where can I find a cheap motel at this hour?
Fortunately Shamrock has a few motels and I find an Indian-run place on the edge of town. I wake an older gentleman who I find out is named Pat, again not the name I would have expected. I bluff that I’m willing to push all the way through to Oklahoma City if I can’t get a deal on a room, and as I walk halfway out the door Pat stops me. “When are you planning to leave in the morning?”
“9 o’clock,” I tell him, “I’ve got a long way to go. I just need a few hours rest and a shower.”
“Okay, fine,” he says, saving face and meeting my price. “Room 101.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I inquire letting tired curiosity overtake my fear of being offense, “nothing personal but I’ve been on the road quite a bit and noticed that a lot of motels are run by Indian families while some advertise ‘American Owned and Operated.’ Is this an issue in the motel business?”
“I think it matters to some people. Older white people. For whatever reason they don’t like…no, I should be more precise. They prefer American hotels and motels.”
“Prejudice?”
“Maybe something like that. A lot of people don’t care: clean room, friendly service, good price. But some people, let’s just say they would rather stay at American hotels and motels.”
“Of course I don’t care, but seeing the signs around here got me thinking.”
“I don’t think it will matter much longer,” he says. “It’s mostly for older white people. I’ve owned this place for twenty years and sometimes still these white people walk out. But they’re getting older and older.”
I thank Pat for the room, arrange an 8:00AM wakeup call and go to my room. It’s clean, a good price, and the service is friendly. I brush my teeth, take out my contacts (which are dry as sand at this point) and go straight to bed, imagining I had run all the way from Amarillo to Shamrock to cheering crowds lining the neon-lit Conoco Tower in the middle of the night.
I fall asleep quickly, basking in the warm glow of completion.
BRRRRNG! 8:02AM and the wakeup call jars me out of bed. I snooze another twenty minutes and take my time leaving. I don’t expect Pat to knock at 9 on the button to kick me out and clean the room. I’m surprisingly refreshed for having so little sleep and go through a typical stretch and exercise routine to come into my body. After a brief shower I set out in search of a classic mom and pop breakfast café and decide that today is Tulsa, OK or bust. {Goal: Take in the sunset and neon strip of old 66 in Tulsa. Relevance: Self-imposed, arbitrarily high. Agent: Me for now, until it suits my purpose to blame someone else. Outcome: I’d have to dick around quite a bit or get in an accident not to make Tulsa. Alternatives: Curse the darkness; turn on the light in a motel in Oklahoma City.} Since I’m on the edge of town I decide not to backtrack but move ahead to Texola, OK or farther down the road and see if I can find a place to eat there. My inner explorer desperately wants to take two-lane side roads instead of the I-40 alignment of Route 66, and today I’m glad my inner explorer is driving because while both towns are a bust for eateries, Texola turns up scenery far better than any relic roadside café.
The buildings are collapsed, roof corrugates sag and hang on with all their might by one last rusting nail. It’s almost like tornados sweep through weekly and scatter debris across every overgrown field. Then I come upon the most peculiar reclamations I’ve ever seen. Ten feet from the road runs a wire fence blocking off the dirt driveway to an abandoned service station; the driveway is overgrown with field grass. But it won’t last, not with the three head of cattle grazing in the driveway just feet from the road. Now I know the wire fences that line rural highways are cattle fences; I don’t recall ever seeing cattle right up in the road, or such a natural reappropriation of land. Then I put myself in the farmer’s shoes: “Why hallo mah li’l uppity tourist buddy, if’n you ain’t like mah leavin’ them ol’ buildin’s standin’, why yer welcum t’ knock ‘em on over wicher bare hands. Lemme call Goober over to watch yawl work up a sweat thar.” I take a few pictures for posterity and keep a safe distance. Best not to look like a trespasser—it suddenly occurs to me (not true) that this is “shoot you for looking sideways at my property” country.
The Mother Road between Texola and Erick has been bypassed by the expressway. I pass a few moving vehicles (a pickup, a pickup, and an old boxy family sedan) and that’s it. Unless you live in this place this is no place to be, because there’s no other place like this godforsaken place anywhere near this place. Still, relics abound and reclamation seems more widespread here the desert. I find five strip motels that seem to have become infested by old car enthusiasts or crazy hoarders; I can’t tell which is which. The cars are not classics necessarily, just old junkers. They’re parked in the odd carports that separate the guest rooms and date the motels to the 1950s or so. The spirit of folk art that pervades Santa Fe finds its way out here, too. Coffee can plant pots painted dayglow shades and Blessed Virgin bathtub shrines give curb appeal to homes that seem to deserve no curb appeal whatsoever. Even the drabbest and most utilitarian dwellings can feel homey with the right touches, I suppose. And if I doesn’t bother the dweller it’s meaningless if it bothers me…if I’m not the one living there it’s not my concern.
“I saw our sign and I respect your property,” I point out, recalling my dad’s many hunting lessons. People can become their property. Property can feel like an extension of the person; whence the laws about trespassers, theft, and possession. Don’t assume, but ask. Nicely. “If I don’t have your permission I’ll move on…” I add.
I get the feeling that every revenue-generating structure leading into Erick has been repurposed as storage for never-to-be-restored vehicles and low-cost inhabitation. Cars and assorted chasses strewn inhabit long ago abandoned gas stations; tires stand neatly stacked chest-high in half open garages; kitschy motel signs slouch on spindly shafts, whitewashed or left to rust. What’s left of Route 66 here is ugly and filthy. I shake unexpectedly in a fit of empathetic tension, trying to imagine living in such poverty, such disrepair and how I’d set about changing everything about this place. Then my imagined farmer reminds me, “If’n you ain’t like ‘em, why yer welcum t’ knock ‘em on over.” My heart has me half ready to get out of the car, stop whoever passes by and shake him. “Do you want to live like this? Do you enjoy this sweltering oppressive poverty?” I want to help whoever I can, empower them, educate them, fix them. And there’s the rub—moving out of poverty involves no simple program but it is guaranteed to fail when change is always and forever threatening. Poverty is steeped in a fear-driven pursuit of permanence, despite what an honest investigation of an area’s history might reveal about this impermanent world. Podunk, OK is not Calico, CA and is under no obligation to maintain vintage Route 66 structures for my driving entertainment. Nor is it obliged to embrace its own past and create its own future. Neither is any given town anywhere in the world, for that matter. If I don’t like the awful greasy pizza here, or the aggressive driving style there, or the irritating use of the nonword “irregardless” somewhere else…well, complaining about it is social disclosure, isn’t it.
I have to confess my rather low expectations of Oklahoma City. Approaching from the west the city feels grimy and gritty, the freeway exchanges disorganized and poorly marked, and the gas stations near the exits overcrowded and chaotic. I decide to revisit the capitol building which I recall it being beautiful at dawn and I find an unexpected architectural surprise. Lincoln Boulevard comes across as though Palm Springs architects came to construct sets for a live-action version of The Jetsons. A massive condemned hotel, a row of vintage bank buildings, an old publishing office, and the like line the wide grassy boulevard leading to the capitol itself. This aggressively modernized Frank Lloyd Wright vibe suggests there was a development surge for a decade or two after the war, and as I come close to the capitol building I can see where all the Oklahoma area money came from: the capitol lawn sports its very own personal Phillips 66-branded oil well. There’s an oil well on the capitol lawn. A commercial-grade production oil well (or it was until it ran dry in the 1980s, what with that oil crisis stepping up production). Not a replica. Not a monument. A functioning fucking oil well. If they can’t raise crops from the ground they might as well milk it for whatever the market will buy, right?
The shock wears off soon enough and I pull Cherry into the parking lot to get a typical posed shot. As I pull her across two handicap parking spots a car pulls up alongside me and a nice family pour out, gabbing and goofing and videotaping their outing to the big city. “I’m not one to park quite so recklessly,” I joke as they approach, “but it’s for posterity. Would you mind?” I ask as I hand the father my camera and get a picture with Cherry of me in front of the capital. “Not at all!” he obliges in a decidedly country-fried twang and I ask about his trip. “This is our first time up to the capitol and I’ve lived in the southern part of Oklahoma all my life,” he shares. “Then maybe you can explain the oil well in front of the capitol?” I ask, and sure enough he fills me in. There were a number of wells erected in the 1930s all around the area when oil was struck in the area. “Remember the Beverly Hillbillies? That’s the idea. People found lots of oil around here and got the hell out.” I love his self-deprecating hillbilly label because I think he’s reclaimed it, taken the sting out, and takes pride wearing that label himself. With a thank you and the wish of safe travels we part company and I circle the parkway to take in a few more sights. But the state capitol on a warm Saturday afternoon holds few charms and I move on to make time to Tulsa.
It turns out the desolate city holds one more charm on its eastern outskirts that snares my interest: a wild retro gas station/truck stop/greasy spoon that’s like nothing I’ve seen on trip so far. It resembles so many other Route relics this one is abandoned, but it’s gone by the wayside somehow differently from the others. I take the first available exit and pass a Flying J that appears to have superseded the Conoco/Driver’s Diner that would seem to have been conveniently located along the freeway until the tollway exchanges made it more economical to shutter the operation and move business up the road. The Conoco didn’t disappear; it outgrew its shell and abandoned it for a bigger one up the shoreline. Shame, in that the sharp spiked roofline perfectly captures the rocketship architecture that so pervaded yesteryear’s optimistic design. The greasepaint lettering in the window read “C.C.’s Diner,” as though someone decided to make a go of running the place after the 24 hour truck stop moved on. I find myself hoping someone else decides to try it again.
This self inquiry game may not be fun or easy so it helps to have someone to play along with. My friend Tyson has been an amazing teammate because somehow he mastered the art of the assist. He started doing it in high school when he got turned onto all things avant garde and brought me into a world where John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Phillip Glass transfigured music’s content and intentionally provoked a response from the audience. He showed me how an open mind could give a lot of room to things like free jazz, an improvised form music that comes off as noise to the uninitiated ear, which I found entirely unlistenable—at first. Some of us acquire a taste for it, like coffee or wasabi. He made “difficult music” his thing while carrying on philosophical and psychic inquiry in an effort to come to terms with his own being in the world. And he practiced Zen. Kind of. I have no idea how seriously he meditated but he was steeped in the koan literature and had managed to penetrate the cosmic absurdity of everyday life. As our careers took off we worked together for a while, on one of those marathon projects where the end never arrives and the finish line keeps moving farther and farther away. After spending almost a year on tough systems engineering problem in which the software we were building would not “scale,” or grow to handle twice as much work with twice the number of machines, I suddenly saw a pattern (not true) where we could restructure the whole scheme or any other to scale as large as I liked. It was like discovering a universal code for unlimited technical growth. I was wildly excited and I explained the line of reasoning to the team; afterward I confided in Tyson that just when I thought I had everything about this product figured out, blam I get this new flash of insight.Topic X | Topic Y | Topic Z | |
Expert | A | B, C | A, C |
| Practitioner | B | - | - |
Amateur | C | A | B |
Consider Topic X where A is an expert, B is a practitioner (has working knowledge), and C is an amateur. It's likely be frustrating for everyone if the conversation locks in at any level: expert-level will tend to frustrate C given his struggle with the jargon, amateur-level will tend to bore A with its simplistic approach, and practitioner-level will seem unproductive to everyone since it's usually a transition level. In the course of collective inquiry, however, C can trade up by struggling through the jargon with the help of A and B; B can trade up by incorporating areas of expertise from Topic Y, for example; and A can trade up by verbalizing the expert insight and fishing for interdisciplinary insight from Topics Y and Z. Everybody trades up. The cost? Time, energy, miscommunication, jargon translation, and asking silly questions.
Why do this? Why waste precious moments of life considering ideas that don’t reinforce my own beliefs and risk exposing me to crazy, evil, hateful, wrong thoughts? The only reason I can think of is that there are times when I feel like exploring and appreciating our differences—maybe to consider a new perspective, become conversant in a subject, or pick up a chick at a bar. There are times when uttering those reassuring words, "I agree!" is simply not a priority; better to get that sense, "I disagree, but now I understand and I have no urge to reconcile our points of view." Whatever the reason, variety-seeking is itself variety-seeking: sometimes I’m up for a challenge and sometimes I want to be around a bunch of folks who think exactly like me. I’m just talking about how it works when I happen to be seeking variety. So instead of a politician, a theologian, and an environmental scientist coming together to entrench their respective positions about global climate change, the questions might be directed toward constructive awareness: What are the areas of agreement, if any? What are the areas of contention? What informs the debate? Is our rule of evidence going to be unequivocal proof, a statistically likely outcome, the public sentiment, history and tradition? If we embark on a program of X, what is the consequence? Who is affected? What does it cost? These questions seek not to reach harmony and agreement and peace but to reveal the assumptions, establish the decision criteria, and move the topic forward. Collective action to replace collective animosity.
Speaking of absolute positions, a prominent anti-abortion billboard welcomes me to Tulsa just before I catch sight of the familiar brown highway signs putting me on the right track. Route 66 slices straight across Tulsa along the newer 11th Street main drag as well as the older Admiral Place alignment. I opt to run Cherry up and down 11th Street first, passing the University of Tulsa and a stretch of motels and Mother Road commemoratives (“Walker’s on Route 66” service station and the like) and by late afternoon set out in search of nightlife venues, reasoning that if I’m going to make the most of the evening I should get my bearings. We cross back and forth on the route, noting old signage and remnant service stations enjoying a second life use as snack shops, antique stores, and art markets. As I wear out my interest in central route I head downtown in pursuit of some action. It’s becomes clearer to me that Tulsa is not a bustling metropolis booming with development. Far too many shuttered businesses, abandoned apartment complexes, and unrented warehouses for a growing metro area. In L.A. or Chicago these would be gobbled up as condo conversions faster than I could blink. My coolest finds are the Coney Island, a hole in the wall restaurant that inhabits what appears to be the former rental office of a dilapidated stilt supported four-story hotel with a catwalk balcony surrounding the whole building, and the Mayo Motor Inn with its deco signage calling attention to a 1950s parking garage built to handle the postwar traffic boom for the Sullivan-style Mayo Hotel directly across the street.
I wish I could have visited Tulsa in its heyday before declining oil prices gutted its economy in the 1980s because looking past the disrepair it appears to have been quite a sight. Vintage buildings with gothic entablature and complex frontispieces mingle with modern minimal simplicity, suggesting a development explosion (akin perhaps to Oklahoma City’s growth after striking oil?); unlike Chicago where an architectural potpourri gives vitality the cityscape this town feels more like rust and abandonment on stretches of the old route. My tour around downtown’s confines yields a few striking photos but there is scarcely a soul out in the dusking light and the appeal of striking conversation with one of the street people I encounter is even less than my interest in wasting time in one of the tiny ethnic bars that dot the alleyways and office building crevices. I chalk up the lack of bustle to my misread about of downtown’s nightlife, and there’s just enough construction and one-way road complication that I decide to roll toward the university and see what the action is like there.
Heading east along 11th I catch a glimpse of the biggest, reddest sun hanging over the steeple of the United Methodist church downtown and as luck would have it I turn off straight into the driveway of McElroy’s, a nicely preserved deco-style auto center. I arrange a stunning shot of the sun going down over town, the steeple tower gracefully impaling the orange orb. Zipping in and out of traffic I catch a few scowls from drivers apparently unaccustomed to tourists making like fools and taking pictures of nothing in particular. I wonder if they realize how truly beautiful this place is right now and I find myself hoping for their benefit they witness the scene that surrounds them. The gritty exterior belies the optimistic spirit to be found in rusted motels and abandoned warehouses and rehabilitated storefronts—the hope, the possibilities, the sheer potential is gorgeous.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I tell the clerk as I collect my ID. “I think I’ll make tracks a little further past town tonight.” 
“Hey, you! With the camera!” I think she’s hostile to the idea that I got her in the background, like maybe she’s lying low while the heat cools down. “You’re the guy who was standing in the road today. Taking pictures!”