Bike Odyssey 2014 – day 14 (May 30): Out of the Fire into the Panhandle

Thank goodness for cool southwester nights! Unfortunately last night at the Kampground a combination of interstate traffic and a lovesick bullfrog (really) kept me awake. Then it was up up & away onto Route 66. Official Amerika vs unofficial America: Route 66 is like Black history & Indian history – it’s there but officially it doesn’t exist. (Which incidentally is what Where Every Stranger is about.) Go to Mapquest: a road that traverses Amerika and you won’t find route 66 unless you use a magnifying glass. This is of course so as not to terrify Amerikans by encouraging them unknowingly to get onto a road that might peter out in a cornfield (TERROR! – Ma! They’re coming for us!), or bump along on gravel. Amerika forfend! What ever next? 66 runs like a dark twin, like Amerika’s crazy retarded brother locked away in the attic, like the bad-seed Cain of every American classic, like Amerika’s ghosts, like the past itself, declared – as in old Soviet Union days – an unperson. Yet it walks across Amerika, cherished by pilgrims, itself plodding on like a depression-era vagrant, like the dispossessed, tattered but tireless, eyes on the road ahead. All the way to Californy’s distant, golden arches. Which as in Updike’s The Coup, turn out to belong to MacDonald’s.

Romantic Route 66! Alas the truth is grim, not romantic. I own 4 of the countless guide books, mostly written by well-meaning Route 66 wankers (sorry, scrub that – by members of the pilgrim brotherhood). In truth Route 66 exists in 2 forms, one a sad service road bumping along parallel to the interstate, 30 feet away, with no signposts (official explanation: people steal them) to designate it a road at all. But this is more romantic than the other Route 66, a banal franchise-acne’d road through dismal, moribund towns like Elk City, where America itself seems to be dying, though no quicker in Elk City than anywhere else in the US. What else can our journey chronicle? It’s staring us in the face. Which reminds me: much of this week we’ve been following the Trail of Tears, that single worst blot on the American Presidency, on Congress, and on America itself. The soldiers who oversaw the deportation of the indigenous tribes, their miseries and deaths by the thousand, said that not even the horrors of the Civil War could match it for cruelty; and they begged the future’s forgiveness. We rode, Joe and I, through Custer County today, and I recalled the old term ‘hostiles,’ used to describe Indian braves, dubbed, in effect, America’s first ‘terrorists’ by invaders who couldn’t see that they themselves were the terrorists, laying waste to ancient cultures in their own land.

Then we were in Texas, on its endless barren plains that always seem as if God missed a memo to himself: Reminder – Put This Bit Underwater. Texas, where I used to teach, seems less like a place than a thing to be endured. I know – there are wonderful folks there, who love to live in Texas; there’s the hill country, not all that great even when the bonnets are bluely waving; there are women with earrings shaped like Texas (try imagining women with earrings shaped like Illinois), wearing cowboy hats although they’ve never touched a horse. And don’t start me on Corpus Christi, TX, World Capital of the Whataburger and the nearest thing to what Joe calls Butthole, USA.) Watching cowboy movies, growing up, I never wondered why John Wayne & co were always driving cattle north – but, hey, I might have asked, why couldn’t they keep ’em in Texas and sell them and butcher them right there? Well, little Johnny, because there’s nothing in Texas for them to eat, on those barren plains which came free (and too expensive, at that) to settlers. That’s why they’re driving the poor damn beasts to Missouri.

Coral, a self-proclaimed internetophobe, wouldn’t be photographed for our Motel Night Manager series, but consented to let her hands be included. And we do have a new front runner on the leaderboard, in our worst-paid-workers tour of the country: single-mother Angie, waitress at the 66 diner in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, for $2.50 an hour. Joe’s son Boris is currently doing a part-time job, in Melbourne, Australia, for $12.50 an hour. He’s sixteen.