We’re flying down Route 66 and the windshield is thick with bug juice. Actually, we’re chugging, 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 wind mills. I watched them swoosh past and enjoyed the Quixotic reference- that our journey was punctuated with windmills gave it a sense of the epic. Moments ago, we realized that the passenger window is not, in fact, tinted, and that all of our staring and mugging at truck drivers has been perfectly observed. The bugs are a problem though- water and wipers have no effect- and Olivia leans over the steering wheel squinting through the gooey carcasses.
In Tucumari, New Mexico, half an hour over the border from Texas, we pull off at a Phillips 66. It’s evening already; 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.
We sit at a table in the mini market, but we don’t buy anything because we are college students. We used the last of our winter semester dining money to buy non-perishables from the campus convenience store and we generally feed ourselves with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, goldfish, Oreos, and granola bars. Tonight, we match this forlorn pit stop with an appropriately dismal dinner. I use Olivia’s pocket knife to saw through tin and pry open two cans of tuna. 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.
“This is such a sad dinner,” Cathy says.
“Well, the wings at Hooters last night weren’t free,” Olivia says.
“I can’t believe we went to Hooters,” I say. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Part of the experience though, right?” says Olivia.
“Mhh-hmm.”
Cathy swallows the last of her tuna. “What if we get ice cream? We can all split a small container. Ice cream? We should get it… right? Guys…?”
Olivia and I shrug. We had mile-high pie two days ago at a café somewhere in the southwest corner of Indiana, and then the Hooters stop yesterday in downtown Tulsa, and the Oreos in the car. Really, there’ve been a lot of calories, come to think of it. And not much physical movement. We don’t give her an answer, so Cathy munches a Triscuit and pushes the spilled pepper on the table around in circles. Olivia sees the 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 search the miniscule names of towns, trying to make out our route. When they’ve identified our origin and current location, 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.
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. We 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. None of us has read On the Road and although I don’t yet have these words to describe it, the absence of the Moriarty spirit makes me uncomfortable. I’m excited to cross the country and ready to give in to adventure and youthful abandon. We plan our trip sitting in a campus café; we divide the cities amongst us and are each responsible for lodging and sights in the area. I want to know if we’ll have a little time to make detours, to follow signs leading out of town to some bit of Americana. But Cathy and Olivia want to make sure we stay on schedule and make it to our reserved rooms each night: we’ll stick to the highway. They print out detailed turn-by-turn instructions from the internet to make sure we don’t stray from the path.
We leave the drained, March cold of Hanover for New Haven, Connecticut and spend our first night at Olivia’s house. In the dim, early hours of the next morning we stuff our bags into the car; Cathy and I are allowed only one a piece since the car is filled to bursting with Olivia’s possessions. She’s moving to Culver City, California for six months to intern in the film world. This trip is a just perk of the necessary relocation.
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 mostly empty on this Monday night; we sample beers at a brewery and 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 com’on ladies, lemme take you around, I’ll show you a real good time.” We return to our $38 dollar a night hotel on the outskirts of the city and think we’ve had quite an adventure, our first day on the road.
Day Three is shorter; we hook north to skirt Indianapolis, then dip south again into Missouri. We spend St. Patrick’s Day 2009 eating cheap pizza in St. Louis because we can’t find an Irish pub, or any bar, with people in it. We rise early and spend a beautiful day around St. Louis, deciding to stay longer here and sacrifice time in Tulsa. We wonder what there is to see in Tulsa anyway. 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 featureless countryside. This is when we enter God’s country. We are shocked by the Got Jesus? and Abortion kills a beating heart billboards. This is crazy, Olivia and Cathy say in outrage, these people are crazy. The speeding ticket, given by a humorless cop two hours before Tulsa, erases any of the giddiness with which we drove and sang along to ‘90s hits, and we pass the flat, fields in silence. Once in the city, we are grouchy and hungry and Hooters is the only place still open at 10:00 pm. We go in, feeling dirtier just by letting the bearded men in trucker hats stare at us. They must be staring out of curiosity, I think, not lust, because we are rumpled in sweatpants and there are half a dozen Hooters girls sauntering around.
Our waitress is uncomfortable, sensing that we did not come here for the sensual pleasure of a simpering young 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. 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 and I shouldn’t use it casually. 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 difficult 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, and hide it in the folds of Ma’s apron during the show, to help conjure this woman who shepherded her brood across the country.
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’s life, I am actually retracing her steps. I burn each day to see more, to witness the town where granma died, where Noah took to his own, 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 hope to find on this road. But I press my face to the glass in hopes that some mirage of Ma will appear.
No comments:
Post a Comment