America’s arterial ribbons of highway flowed across the atlas, connecting the Redwood forest I had begun to call home to the Gulf Stream waters I had left for college three summers ago. Convinced that shutting myself in a moving vehicle with my 18-year-old brother was a good summer plan, I left the Pacific shores where you can get avocado on everything, and headed toward the Atlantic where people honk if you don’t floor it the second the light turns green and it is mandatory to eat your pizza folded, dripping with grease.
Ojai, CA to Richfield, UT
We left the illusion of green created by Southern California’s controversial aqueduct-supplied water system and emerged into the brown nothingness of the state’s southeastern tip. Once labeled “the Great American Desert” on conventional maps, the stretch of land from Califronia’s inland to the hundredth meridian has seen continual efforts of civilization evaporate like mirages. As we drove, towns sprang up suddenly, boasting of slot machines and cheap liquor, only to fall out of existence, like cardboard signs blown over in the wind. Road signs warned of the extensive mileage between rest stops: “No joke,” the cartoon pony in chaps says, “no gas next 50 miles.” Abandoned cars dotted the shoulder, their vacant bodies left to conduct the desert heat and acquire dust. I continually checked the status of my tank, calculating the miles traveled and adding the miles to go.
Creeping along the Hoover Dam at 5 mph, I saw more scaffolding and roasting tourists then the dam itself. The smooth 726 foot 5 inch cement walls of the dam stretched up into walls of rosy desert rock, as the wires converting displaced water into electricity strung the canyon walls together. The water level was low, exposing chalk-white rock like a striking sock tan. The sky stretched cloudless and blue, offering no relief from the intense desert sun. With my past year of Environmental Studies lectures and headlines of Global Warming warnings flashing through my head, I peered out at the Southwest’s diminishing water and power supply.
Before me was sheer manpower and human obstinacy. The Hoover Dam, completed in less than three years on March 23, 1935 is awe inspiring and apocalyptic in its engineering majesty. Commissioned by Roosevelt and the Bureau of Reclamation, it was erected to pull the country out of economic depression by providing jobs and taming the Colorodo River, by harnessing its power and using its water to create a paradise in the harsh, arid desert.
But now there was no impression of life aside from the scorched sightseers posing for pictures. Two bronze, weathered angels exultantly raised their hands and wings into the air, guarding a plaque dedicated to those who died in order to “make the desert bloom” during the dam’s construction. Like knife blades reaching towards the sky, the metallic smoothness and geometric glory of the statues’ contours was striking against the rock, adding to the alien, comic book feeling of the site.
As I battled the oppressive heat to take a few pictures, I began to feel like something was horribly wrong with the Hoover Dam. While completely enchanted by the power contained in damming a river as wily as the Colorado, I felt uneasy about the repercussions of Lake Mead destroying its cement jail cell. I was even more spooked by the lack of life around me. Used to the tall Redwoods of Santa Cruz and the deciduous trees of the east, I failed to see the blooming desert Roosevelt had commissioned. The biblical promise of free flowing rivers and manna falling from the skies echoed eerily within the empty canyon, unfulfilled. All I could see from where I stood was rock and still water.
Richfield, UT to Denver, CO
We pulled into the Mom’s Cafe parking lot at 7 a.m., groggy and hungry. We entered through what was apparently the backroom and stood, two out-of-towners framed in the doorway, as every rancher turned his 10 gallon-hatted head to look at what the winds had blown in. Located in a whitewashed brick box at the corner of the town’s main street, Mom’s outer wall boasted “Famous Home Style Cooking Since 1929.” The staff was comprised of kind elderly women in elastic-waisted pants, teal aprons and white Keds, while the early morning customers were the usual rugged wrangler-wearing locals who laughed and flirted harmlessly with the waitresses, delaying their long, laborious day just a little. I ordered buttery biscuits and artery clogging gravy meant for a cowboy about to monitor flocks of sheep in the surrounding desert.
Back in the car, satiated by breakfast, my brother closed his eyes for a midmorning nap. With the red mesas reflected in my aviators, I couldn’t help but pause to consider what I’d look like in buckskin and a bandana.
The road from Salina to Denver is lonely, the landscape dry; beautiful and desolate, the solitude of the desert is breathtaking and frightening. Getting out at the scenic look out, an ominous feeling of quiet emptiness weighed down on me with the heavy heat of sun-baked rocks. I felt as if I had stepped outside the boundaries of time and would not have been surprised to see a T-Rex appear on top of the mesa or a stampede of stegosaurus charging through the ravine below.
The color green reappeared when we reached the Rockies. Aspens spiked up like day-old scruff as vegetation found roots in the rocky soil and higher elevation; ski slopes stood out on the hillsides in a softer shade of green as outdoor enthusiasts biked alongside the highway or kayaked the river below. Awestruck by the mountainsides surrounding us, I wondered at the pioneering perseverence that got those covered wagons over those peaks; the Prius barely made it, wheezing out the last couple hundred feet to the summit.
Raised on summers of Yankees games and lazy afternoons of batting practice in the park with Dad, it was only fitting that my brother and I attend a baseball game while on the road. The Phillies were in town so we decided to spend an evening at Coors Field.
Unlike the rambunctious Bronx Bomber crowd, who unabashedly start brawls and yell demeaning slogans at hometown and visiting players alike, Rockies fans are censored and quiet. Drunken New Yorkers were replaced by Dads, Moms and their numerous offspring, all composed and distanced from opinionated yelling matches. While fans usually run to the concession stand briefly between innings to replenish their beer and hotdog supply, the group of boys next to us got up every other inning, and returned to their seats with a different concession each time. My brother, a baseball player himself, muttered snide remarks to the often annoying commentary the grandfather behind us was pedagogically providing for his wife and uninterested granddaughter. But the highlight of my Coors Field experience was the skinny, pale, probably 17 or 18-year-old boy sitting in front of me with a wispy excuse for a mustache. He was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a fetus on the back. Framing the picture were the words “Do you really think this isn’t a baby?” I felt somehow exploited and violated and I resisted the urge to dump the contents of my Nalgene on his head and kick him in the groin, preventing him from ever forcing some female to make that decision. The translucent unborn child with its fish-like black eye was contrasted against the plastic stadium seat, out of place among the peanut shells and $7 plastic bottles of beer. Never would I have thought that while attempting to enjoy the all-american sport of baseball, I would find myself confronted with the moral debate of abortion. Alcohol consumption, inappropriate language and physical violence were to be expected, fetuses were not.
Denver, CO to Kansas City, MO
The undulating fields of corn that fuel so many American industries indicated our descent into the breadbasket of the United States. Billboards claiming Jesus as Lord punctuated the monotony of fast food-dominated rest stop signs as I looked out over the softly rolling plains formerly populated with buffalo and Native Americans. The agrarian landscape with its symmetrical rows of monoculture swayed like a congregation nodding along with an ecclesiastical sermon of consumption and agribusiness.
Then we began to see hand-painted billboards for Prairie Dog Town.
“Eight-thousand pound prairie dog,” one said. My brother and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows and exited into Oakley, Kansas with visions of grotesque masses of brown fur dancing in our heads.
The best vacation moments are often those that are unplanned. My brother and I have had a few memorable ones from giant monitor lizards crossing our path in Indonesia to bears in the Shenandoah National Park. This diversion promised to be no less than extraordinary. Met by the musty smell of taxidermy upon entering the gift shop, we approached the counter unsure of what hokey scams were in store.
After we paid a small admissions fee, the woman with white jeweled reading glasses and permed, tinted purple hair directed our attention to the first exhibit: “Rattlesnakes” the hand-painted sign read.
“Do you want to hear them rattle?” she asked.
My brother and I peered through mesh wire into a sun-lamp lit box filled with around 20 coiled, sand-colored serpents. She took a box filled with around 20 coiled, sand-colored serpents. She took a box and, before we could answer, proceeded to bang the screen with the vigor of an antagonizing bully. An angry chorus of rattles arose from the pile of reptiles. The woman smiled and directed us the two feet to a door labeled “Entrance” in slanting black magic marker. “Enjoy the animals,” she said with a smile.
A large skeptical warning light went off in my mind as I returned her smile. My brother and I opened the door apprehensively and were greeted by a gravel landscape with numerous cages. Something felt odd. Then we realized the ground was composed of prairie dog mounds. We laughed as several tan-furred rodents froze at the sound of our footsteps, standing on their hind legs, paws curled at the chest, noses in the air.
The “zoo” consisted of cages labeled with painted signs but the prairie dogs and goats refused to stay behind bars. There were longhorns and bison, goats and pigs, pheasants and geese, badgers, coyotes, foxes and raccoons passed out on their backs, paws in the air. The cage labeled “pigeons” consisted of all types and colors of pigeon with one mutant bird the size of a two-year-old child, proudly pacing the excrement-covered floor. All the animals looked hot and bored, a depressing state I was begin to share with them when, there in front of us, with its 4,000 pound offspring, was the 8,000 pound prairie dog, paws raised, nose in the air in all its cement glory. While some demented part of me had wanted to see a rodent the size of a mythical dragon lounging in the hot prairie sun, I was amused and relatively okay with being duped by a giant cement statue. The signs along the road hadn’t technically lied: there before me was an 8,000 pound prairie dog.
* * *
The concept of “go big or go home” is more than just a fast food slogan, it’s a Midwestern way of life. Kansas City straddles a river and a state line while the city spreads out across numerous highway exits in all directions. Kansas City is a quilt made from the fabric of blue-collar America, decorated with red brick, soot-covered factories, and stitched together by highways and barges. On the east coast the manufacturing centers of the country have since faded into poverty while the west coast is a strange mix of agriculture and hippie towns. Here, history and human sweat precipitate from the atmosphere of livelihoods dedicated to tillage and assembly lines. Used to the close, plotted streets of suburbia and the lazy ocean breezes of Santa Cruz, the heartland of America made me feel small, underfed and out of place.
Often hailed for its steak, Kansas City also happens to serve some of the best fried chicken. I had traded in this favorite caloric indulgence for burritos upon reaching the west coast, and was excited to be reunited with crispy fried flour crusted skin and moist white meat.
A complete racial and economic change from the boarded up factories and ethnic neighborhoods of the southern portion of the city, this manor house was hidden from the highway by trees and shared a road with a country club. There were families dressed in their Sunday church clothes sprinkled about the well-manicured lawn and my brother made the sarcastic but candid observation that not many Kansas City natives missed a meal. Apparently Sunday at Stroud’s was a popular ritual, made evident by the hour and forty-five-minute wait for a table. My brother had on a worn t-shirt and mesh football practice shorts, I had on cut off Levi’s and a black tank top. Uncomfortable, with low blood sugar and short tempers, we were both on the brink of strangling the other if food didn’t get into our stomachs in the next 20 minutes – so we opted for take-out.
Back in the car the smell of fried chicken seeped slowly from its Styrofoam container. I checked us into the Econolodge two exits down the highway and felt a little uneasy when I saw that the towel rack had been ripped out of the wall above the sink and was now wedged, useless, between the fridge and the chest of drawers. But we were happy to have food and a TV, so we turned to the take-out. About to enjoy some perfectly whipped mashed potatoes I realized, to my utter food-deprived dismay, that there were no utensils. Contemplating just shoving the potatoes into my mouth with my fingers, I decided to take a more civilized approach and walked to the 7-Eleven, bought a six-pack and swiped some forks. Back at the lodge, my brother had already consumed his portion of fried chicken by the time I returned, so I set to mine like a Dickensian orphan.
Dumont, NJ
Upon waking up in my Dad’s house in New Jersey, the cicadas droning and the lawn mowers going, I felt the urge to repack my bags and drive the 3,000 miles back to Santa Cruz. I found myself with a pile of laundry, my brother’s dirty dishes and an empty fridge.
Shell shocked from driving, I entered the Shop Rite I used to accompany my Dad to as a kid. As I pushed my cart through the aisles, I found myself staring absent-mindedly at the meat sections cradled in Styrofoam and contained by plasticwrap. Despite the fact that I had crossed the burning deserts of America, climbed the Rockies, bounded over its fields of glory and found a prairie dog the likes of which evolution could never imagine, I felt overwhelmed in front of the meat section. I glanced from chicken gizzards to veal cutlets and remembered the Hoover Dam and the frightening power of mankind contained within its serene, lifeless atmosphere; I turned away from the neatly-packaged rows of flesh.
Happy to be eating above the bottom half of the food pyramid I marveled at the well-stocked produce section. Corn, cheap and piled high, was being picked over by diligent shoppers, who pulled back its silky hairs to check the condition of its kernels.
I remembered the agricultural grids of the Midwest and the green rolling field of Vermont and New York, and mused at my home state’s nickname: the garden state. The enormous packaged portions of broccoli rabe and bags of potatoes were striking. Apperntly the residents of Emerson, New Jersey were also well fed.
I became lost in the crowds of shoppers and my inner contemplations as I recalled the asphalt veins connecting the two coasts. Here in New Jersey I felt a sense of confinement, the rules of life dictated by suburban and small town ideals of opinionated relatives, numerous religious organizations and a lot of nail salons. Here one was swallowed by steady rushes of rainfall and time. But the familiarity was comforting, even if the road rage was high.
