Cross-Country Mirage

My last post was an earlier version of the first half of this essay. I wanted to post a newer draft in its entirety so that the whole essay can be read in context. One of goals in this essay was to experiment with an opinionated, not-always-sympathetic narrator. Some people were a little put off by the narrator’s comments and that was my intention, to some degree. She is spinning her own reality and is caught up in her personal experience. The rest continues after the jump.

                                                         Cross-country Mirage

We’re flying down Route 66 through northwest Texas and the windshield is thick with bug juice. Actually, we’re humming, not flying, because Olivia got a $200 speeding ticket outside of Tulsa yesterday. And it’s not really 66: it’s I-40. We’re only running parallel to 66, passing exits and open country.  The dusty roadsides in Oklahoma grew redder in Texas and the air spun with long-limbed windmills, like Quixote’s giants. Now the roadside is sandier, flatter, and because this is my first time in the desert, I’m trying to take in everything. The bugs are a problem though. Water and wipers have no effect and Olivia leans over the steering wheel, squinting through the goo.

In Tucumari, New Mexico, half an hour over the border from Texas, we pull off at a lonely Phillips 66. It’s evening already and 220 miles still lie between us and Santa Fe, where we’ll stay for the night. The sky is a pastel fire of pink and periwinkle. It strikes me as a perfect O’Keefe sunset. I realize I’ve never seen an O’Keefe sunset- did O’Keefe paint sunsets?- but we are newly in the Southwest, only 40 miles into New Mexico, and I look for her touch in everything.

Cathy fills the tank, Olivia stretches, and I try to scrape the windshield clean. The guts smear together but I focus on the driver’s side and eventually clear a panel large enough for Olivia to see through. It should be enough to get us from place to place.

Inside, we sit at a table in the mini market but we don’t buy anything because we are college students.  We had stocked up on non-perishables before setting out and we keep them in a plastic bag in the back seat of the car so we don’t have to stop for food while driving. Tonight, I use Olivia’s pocket knife to saw through tin and pry open two tuna cans. Cathy grabs handfuls of salt, pepper, mustard and mayonnaise from the deli section, and we make barely edible sandwiches. There are a few Triscuits for flavor and a can of Dole pineapple rings for dessert.

We munch our food and Cathy pushes spilled pepper on the table around in circles.

“You guys want ice cream?” she says. Olivia and I shrug. We made rules about spending too much money and consuming too many calories, and two days ago we had Mile High Pie in a roadside café in Indiana. That burst of meringue and fluffy coconut cream carried us through 100 more featureless miles, but it was an indulgence, and accordingly, there will be no ice cream tonight. Olivia sees a map on the wall behind us and rushes over. It is a large map of the U.S., the borders highlighted and the states veined with all major highways and interstates.

“Look how far we’ve come!” Olivia says. She and Cathy identify our origin and current location, and I snap a picture: Cathy points to Hanover, New Hampshire, midway up the state, and Olivia finds the rough location of our gas station just west of the border in Tucumari, New Mexico. Only now, with all the states jumbled up against each other like this do I see the enormity of the distance. It is incredible, the space between their fingers. We have traveled over 2100 miles, three-quarters of the country, in only four days.

We are doing the obligatory college road trip shotgun style because spring break is short and Olivia has to sign a lease on her apartment in LA. We allow six days for the 3000 mile trip and book the cheapest motels in the big cities along the way: Cincinatti, St. Louis, Tulsa, Santa Fe, Williams and Las Vegas. We set aside a couple of hours to wander each city, and allot the better part of a day to the Grand Canyon and the Vegas strip.  We are three young students and I assume the trip will transpire as in On the Road: all adventure and youthful abandon. I haven’t actually read the book, but I plan on being the Dean of the group; my passion will burn, burn, burn and dictate the course of our journey. We plan our trip sitting in a campus café; we divide the cities among us and are each responsible for lodging and sights in the area. I ask if we’ll have a little time to make detours, to follow signs leading out of town and accept invitations from strangers, but Cathy and Olivia want to make sure we stay on schedule and make it to our reserved rooms each night. So we plan to stick to the highway and we make an itinerary. They print out detailed instructions and make sure we have a GPS to eliminate all chances of getting lost.

We leave the drained, March cold of Hanover for New Haven, Connecticut where we spend our first night at Olivia’s house. In the morning she says good bye to her parents and assures them she’ll survive LA, where she’s moving for six months to intern in the film world. This trip is a perk of the necessary relocation and we are proud of ourselves for using spring break as an opportunity to see the country, instead of tanning on bleached beaches and flashing our chests to sweaty men.

From New Haven we drive through New York, Pennsylvanian, West Virginia, and end in Cincinnati, Ohio. I sleep through most of it, waking only to take a picture in front a hunting- orange billboard advertising a Gun Show in Columbus. A gun show. That’s how far we’ve come from our liberal undergraduate bubble. Cincinnati is a modest urban center. I grew up on eastern Long Island and the word “city” brings Manhattan to mind; I find it hard to lump this collection of stocky, grey buildings in the same category as New York. In any case, Cincinatti is mostly empty on this Monday night, and after sampling beers at the Rock Bottom brewery and then wander the bleak winter streets. We ward off a man called Silver who wears his pants below his butt and says, “Hey, where you beauties from?” He reads Cathy’s sweatshirt and says, “Dart-mowth? Where the heck is Dart-mowth. Ahh come on ladies, lemme take you around, I’ll show you a real good time.” We refuse the guided tour, because he is a man and we are girls, and return to our $39.99 dollar a night room in a Motel 6 on the outskirts of the city.

Day Three is shorter; we hook north to skirt Indianapolis, then dip south again into Missouri. We spend St. Patrick’s Day eating cheap pizza in St. Louis because we can’t find an Irish pub, or any bar, with enough young people in it. No place is the right place, so we go home early. The morning is beautiful and we spend a wonderful day around St. Louis, deciding to stay longer here and sacrifice time in Tulsa. We wonder what is there to see in Tulsa anyway. The sky is blue, the weather balmier, and the grass greener now that we have traveled south from New England. We wear light zip-ups and can almost taste the sunshine that awaits us further west. We stand under the arch, but do not go up. We ramble through mazes and airplanes at the City Museum and are thrilled by the vintage clothing store on the top level where we play dress up for hours. Olivia and Cathy buy crazy, bold print shirts and dresses because they are hip kids who can pull off funkiness. Only a solid green blazer from the ‘50s fits me; I must conclude that 5’11” girls with broad hips and shoulders did not live in “vintage” times.

It’s a longer leg to Tulsa, 400 miles of pavement and bland countryside punctuated only by the billboards announcing our arrival in God’s country. They read Got Jesus? and, Abortion kills a beating heart  and make Olivia and Cathy cry in outrage, “This is crazy! This place is insane. Drive faster. Drive faster!” The speeding ticket, given by a humorless cop two hours before Tulsa, ends our giddy sing-along to ‘90s hits. Olivia fumes, keeping her eye on the speedometer, and we pass the flat fields in silence. Once in the city, we are grouchy and hungry, carsick and road-weary, and Hooters is the only place still open at 10:00 pm.  We go in, bearded men stare at us, and it all makes me feel a little bit dirty. And excited: I have never been in such a dim, neon-lit place and I have rarely been ogled. The men must be staring out of curiosity, I think, not lust, because we are rumpled in sweatpants and there are half a dozen mostly-naked girls sauntering around.

Our waitress is uncomfortable, sensing that we did not come here for the sensual pleasure of a woman. We are hungry only in the most literal, gastronomic sense. She is a role-player suddenly in the wrong play and she is a poor improviser, so she shifts her weight, and asks what we want, and tries to do it all without flirting. She asks, “Where y’all headed?” We say LA, and her eyes light up cause she’s planning on heading there someday soon to be an actress. She smiles a sad smile and she knows and we know she’s never leaving Tulsa. We eat our wings in silence. Sauce drips down the D’s on our on our sweatshirts and the waitress brings us more water. The men slurp their beers. The waitress moves more slowly now, partly because it is the end of the night, and partly because she knows and we know that we are leaving Tulsa; we are going to LA; we are students, dreamers, achievers.

From Tulsa we drop to Oklahoma City where we pick up I-40, and from here on out we are in Joad territory. Checotah, Dewar, Henryetta, Shamrock, Amarillo, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque, Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff, Kingsman… Exit signs announce the towns, a short detour off the highway and I think of that Ford Model T loaded with grampa and granma, and Ruth and Winnie, and Al and Tom, and Casey and Uncle John, and Rosasharn and Connie, and Ma and Pa, all of them bumping along this country. Twelve people in that truck, traveling west to the peach fields, just trying to get somewhere that’s green.

 I have spent the previous two months living in Ma Joad’s skin, bringing her to life every night on stage in the college’s production of The Grapes of Wrath.  I have read and reread Steinbeck’s words. I have memorized every wrinkle, every curve and plane in the Migrant Mother’s face. I know those Okies organized rabbit round ups, tracking down every hare in the area because there was nothing else to eat. I know Okie is a terribly insensitive word. I feel I’ve read everything there is to know about the Dust Bowl, The Depression, the westward migration. I have fallen in love with Ma; I wonder if a stronger woman ever lived. I lose track of where I end and she begins. My soul feels old when I speak her words and I, with her, cry my sadness into the Colorado River. My own mother comes to see the play and says it was a fine production, but it was impossible to look past my youthful skin and shiny hair and picture a bent, weathered woman who has seen too much of the world. I take this as a sign that I have failed as an actor. But living with Ma for two months teaches me strength, and I clutch Dorthea Lange’s image to my chest each night, dreaming of this woman who shepherded her brood across the country.

Now, driving parallel to 66, I am strung up with excitement, tickled to my core by the coincidence of my own westward venture. So soon after my immersion in Ma, I am actually retracing her steps and tasting her life. I burn each day to see more: the town where granma died, where Noah left me, where Tom fled. This feels meaningful; this is important and has come full circle and I, like Ma, am sliding down Route 66, crossing the southwest toward California.  I do not know what I expect to find on this road, but I press my face to the glass and look for a vision of Ma.

            The dirt, which grows redder and redder through Oklahoma and Texas, is familiar to me. It is the same burnt ochre color I rubbed into my nail beds before the show each night to achieve the hands of a laborer. After curtain calls, after I weathered the storm and left Roasasharn in the barn with the starving man, I stood over the sink and soaped the stain from my hands. Yes, this is the same dirt we’re passing, hour after hour. Here, the earth rises and levels into features I have, until now, only studied in textbooks: plateaus, steppes, tumbleweed, and sagebrush. The land grows sandy and drained, the colors blur and soften, the desert is stranger and more beautiful than I had expected.

There is little in the way of Joad ghosts. We speed along the pavement, listen to music from our teenage years and reminisce about our youth. We eat our tuna sandwiches at the Phillips 66 in Tucmari, New Mexico and then drive on. Shortly after the exit to Roswell, we follow a detour and get lost down a deserted dirt road that ends in a barrier. We pull to the side, turn off our lights, and wait for Garmin to tell us what to do next. The waning moon has not yet risen and the darkness is profound. We brave the certain risk of abduction and get out of the car because this night is primal and absolute. We stare at the desert sky, the distant twinkle of fire, the star-streaked night.

It is late when we pull into Santa Fe where we spend the night on a college campus with Olivia’s high school friend. We stay up too late, lazily flirting with co-eds in the dorm. One says, “You know this is the land of the Jackalope? You want to know what a Jackalope is?” We giggle and nod. “Well, it’s a jack rabbit… with the antlers of an antelope.” We have never heard anything funnier. We grow drowsy and nod to sleep on the floor.

            Santa Fe is an exotic city, made of white adobe only one story high. We have replaced our New Hampshire gloves and mittens for sun dresses and walk the wide, sunny streets browsing turquoise jewelry and dozens of art galleries. We pick out beads at a craft store and buy postcards of prairie dogs and gleaming skulls in the desert: I have found my O’Keefe. If there were a postcard of the Ford Model T, I would buy that too.

            From there we drive to Williams, Arizona, the cheaper, sadder brother of Flagstaff. We head due North from I-40, driving 55 miles to the entrance of the Grand Canyon.  I have lived in Southern Chile, traveled through Spain and hiked much of New England. I have seen buckled rock, glassy stones spit out of volcanoes, and mountains thrust up from the earth’s core, but I have never seen anything like this. I marvel the void, the channels gouged by water, all pink and orange and red. This land was painted with a different palette than my blue-green home on the cliffs of the Atlantic. We spend the day on the edge of the canyon, walking the un-railed trails, and stare into the gentle erosions of the river and the sharp, geometric cleaves in the rock. At twilight, we perch on a ledge with hundreds of others and brave the dry March chill to watch the sunset. The sun sears yellow-orange on the horizon and slips below, leaving the canyon in dim, muted twilight.

The next day we leave the Joad Road without having spied even a flicker of Ma and head north. We had not known the Hoover Damn lay smack between Flagstaff and Vegas and we are surprised to find ourselves suddenly inching forward in a line of cars over the cement behemoth. “Transformers,” Olivia says, “this is the ledge where Optimus Prime battled Megatron.”

“Yeah!” Cathy and I say, “He did! Right here!”

In Vegas we walk through every casino. We pose under the Eiffel Tower; we lean over Venetian canals; we stand like mummies beneath the Sphinx and like conquerors next to Caesar. We let men we don’t know stand in our pictures with us, their arms around our shoulders. We buy 99-cent margaritas and spend five dollars in slot machines because you can’t go to Vegas without drinking and gambling. On the sidewalk in front of the Bellagio Fountains, as the water arcs and spouts to synced music, we run into another slew of Dartmouth kids. We cannot believe how small the world is, how we have found them, our classmates, here, on the other side of the country, on one of the most crowded streets in America. They are spending spring break in Utah rock climbing. They packed an old van full of ropes, harnesses, carabineers and powder, drove to the rock walls and spend their days defying gravity. They sleep at night in tents and rise before dawn to watch the sun climb the sky. They are tanned, their faces are chapped, their hands are callused and their clothes breathe sweat and exertion. They have come to Vegas for the night to see the spectacle and eat a real meal, but tomorrow, they’ll return to the rock walls and dusty steppes of Utah.

We leave Vegas for LA, where we locate Olivia’s new apartment in Culver City. Our three days together in LA are a success because we see everything we’re supposed to see: Rodeo Drive, the Gucci, Versace, Tiffany’s, and Prada stores, UCLA, Beverly Hills, the Walk of Fame, a Superman impersonator on the Walk of Fame, the Hollywood sign, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the handprints and signature outside Grauman’s, Venice Beach, the pier and Ferris wheel. We go to a concert at the Hard Rock Café and feel that the musician will soon hit it big and we’ll be able to say, we saw him when… Olivia buys Ikea furniture for her apartment and is happy there is a pool, and a gym, and a lot of young guys in the complex. We order delivery for dinner, set up sleeping bags on the floor, watch When Harry Met Sally on Olivia’s laptop, and drink too much cheap white wine.

Then the trip is over. Cathy and I must return to to school and Olivia will stay here, from April through September to work behind the camera and learn about Hollywood. I get on a plane and fly home to New York. In the air, I cross the country without seeing even one of the 3000 miles, without witnessing the city change to desert to dust fields to corn fields to maples to green. I spend Easter with my family and tell them what a profound adventure it was. I return to school for spring term and profess that I too road-tripped across this great country of ours. I tell them I watched the earth change beneath me and saw the people transform and the countryside alter. I tell them I drove the Joad Road. I rewrite my story and, like Frost’s wanderer, I tell them that the three of us struck out on our own and saw new, distant corners of America. I do not tell them we were just three girls in a car, on a highway, who spent their nights in cheap motels, ate Nabisco snacks, and slept through every sunrise.