America the Beautiful is truly beautiful (the landscape, that is – and the people in their kindness). Today we had no sad towns to confront, just the Texas plains and the New Mexico scrub, and their glorious skies. 300 miles – a terrific day’s biking. We’re both wrecked – my right leg feels like I’ve rented it – but happy. Nearly 3000 miles completed since we began. We headed north in ABQ, as Albuqerque is known, towards Santa Fe, and found our ‘Kampsite’ without having to ask for directions. We didn’t attempt to seek out a meal at the Cheeecken Brothers, only to find (as we surely would have done) that no enterprising businessman has yet thought to open a Los Pollos Hermanos – the name of the fictitious franchise in Breaking Bad, whose owner peddles not only chicken but crystal meth. Surely someone will be smart enough to do so. (To do both, my daughter Chiara suggested, tongue in cheek, on the phone this evening.) Are there Breaking Bad tours in the ‘Duke City’ yet?… the landscape is horribly familiar to those who have been addicted to the TV serial.

Note that we found our ‘Kampsite’ without having to ask for directions: this is probably why we found our campsite. Neither I nor well-traveled Joe have ever known a place where the natives found it so difficult to direct a person, even to a house 4 buildings away, or to a restaurant in the next street. The number of bum steers we’ve received matches the cattle (not many, admittedly) we saw on the bleak range today. You may remember our attempt to locate a neighborhood in Asheville, asking 8 successive people who proved unaware that the neighborhood we sought was the very one they were in. This is the heart of the American difficulty, which lies less in directing others than in knowing where they themselves are. The old joke about the Irishman who, on being asked for directions, muses awhile before declaring, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here,’ needs modifying to feature an American whose answer would be, ‘Where are we now, exactly?’ 3 weeks ago I came across a friend patiently repeating into his cellphone the words, ‘Where are you?’ – clearly unable to extract an answer. Not ‘Who are you?’ or ‘How are you?’, both of which would have been easier to answer, but ‘Where are you?’ Topography is the American nightmare: since other places do not exist clearly in the mind, neither can the place where you are.

Texas is part Hispanic, but its roots in the Republic of Texas (could we have that nation back, please?) are race-decisive. Just step 10 feet into Nuevo – New Mexico – and you know you’re in New Spain. The different air, the different light, the arroyos… I heard myself singing a refrain I should have kept for California, but it wouldn’t wait: I hear with my heart / What she says with her eyes with / Good evening, Manuel or Manuel, por favor / Or The carriage, Manuel or Manuel, close the door. (The wife of the rancher Don Carlos Cantrel…!) Ah, The Kingston Trio. This really dates me.

There sits Joe, the best, most easygoing traveling companion a chap ever had. Tomorrow we’ll explore a little. ABQ is another place to – forgive me, Albuquerquenos – get out of. Up into the old mining settlements, where 30 years ago I bought a still treasured piece of pottery off the artist herself; or to Sante Fe, to Taos, into the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Our 300 mile ride today has earned us a day’s rest, then I plan the first sidebar of our trip, up to Taos to worship at the presence (her house today enshrined as a B&B) of the one of the great women of American history, Mabel Dodge Luhan, who tried so hard – along with her coterie including Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, and D H Lawrence – to tell and to show America what it could be; to make America understand that it could never locate its soul until it came to terms with its genocidal roots.

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.

South vs. North: Mr Armadillo is to Southern roads as Mr Squirrel is to Northern. Too slow to live, too tough to fry. (Cherokee nation… / Cherokee tribe… – Paul Revere & the Raiders 1971, ‘case you don’t recall – has been in my head all day – our neighbor last night was half German, half Cherokee, a ‘breed like Paul New man in Hombre). Of course, Southerners do eat squirrel. (The prosecution rests.)

As the miles go by I occupy what remains of my brain with dumb routines – inventing radio game show explanations for obscure local place and person names: Orvil Loge, for instance (pronunciation??), a gentleman running for office in some county we rode through. Late eighteenth century France was a time of fertile invention for revolutionary Frenchmen who enjoyed messing with their language. One of these, Citoyen Guy de Nomville, decided to take the French for clock, horloge, and for town, ville, and, as a word for ‘town clock,’ condense horloge de ville into one simple word. Hence the now common ‘orvilloge’ for the dial on a village church tower.

I also put in time on Where Every Stranger, the monster play-series/novel in the making, described in an earlier post. As mentioned there, the book consists of five stories, each set at a different period and in a different topography; in each thread, violent crime and its detection are at the center of the tale; the climactic story takes place on a deep space probe where it appears that one of the crew is a killer. This is not the captain’s only problem. She also has to deal with the ship’s cargo. It has begun to leak – into the ship itself. Not badly; a very tiny leak. Almost imperceptible. But the cargo in question, en route to settle a new planet, is human history memorized in its entirety. The other four stories in the book are what is leaking. And not, it seems, at random.

240 good hard-riding miles today, beautiful Oklahoman pastureland (herons overhead) leading to our first miles on magical Route 66 (when I phoned to book our campsite and mentioned our route, I expected to hear, ‘Route what? Ain’t no such road,’) including a 30-foot stretch of the original brick surface, pronounced ‘horrible’ by Joe, followed by our first glimpses of the vastness of the plains. They brought us, just beyond Oklahoma City, to the Old Indian Trading Post campsite. ‘We bring beads, Great Chief.’ ‘Beads! Anal beads?’ ‘Yes Great Chief.’ ‘Come right in.’ (Your pardon, gentles all. A long day’s riding warps the mind.)

There was no point in trying to sit out the downpour: rain is forecast for the next 2 weeks continuously. We set off in the wet (singalong with Randy, Just a ri-i-der in the rain…), towards the beautiful woods and pastures of northern Arkansas. Dropping on Bobby’s Cafe for breakfast, we’re immediately asked, ‘You boys lost?’. Who else would drop in, except the lost? Anywhere near the rough world of North Little Rock is, inevitably, Boarded-Up America, the one we see a lot of on our trip, dismantled gas stations, houses with plywood for windows, stores closed for a decade or more, and those that are open have barred windows. It’s a landscape fit for a zombie movie: The Living Dead Move In. As I write this, the bikes are parked in the rain – we had a sweet burst of hot sun after crossing the Arkansas river into Oklahoma, then the clouds returned.

Highlight of the day was this Arkansas diner – it had a feeling the photo doesn’t convey (it looks rather posh in the pictures), of the unreconstructed working class diner. Free salsa and chips served as you sit down. The price of southern hospitality: our overworked waitress was getting $3 an hour; we could only hope the locals tipped her as generously as these lost boys did.

2000 miles completed; and yesterday’s ride was the most comfortable of the trip so far – after a day’s rest and a new configuration of seat, backrest and pillow, my back was no longer complaining and my left leg was finally happy at full stretch on the forward foot rest, for long periods (gives better balance when my right foot’s also on its crash bar foot peg – Russian-made). Today the right knee remembered its longstanding duty and gave faint twinges, as 180 miles came up. Very faint; the journey continues astonishingly easeful. And the rain has been a boon – Arkansas and Oklahoma heat can be fierce at this time of year; instead it’s been a pleasant 78 degrees. Aside from the downpour, an unremarkable day: lush greenery, much cattle, and as always in the south, magnificent horses; more raccoon and armadillo roadkill; quiet roads, with the interstate thunder of I-40, sometimes less than half a mile away, very easy to reject.

The day began with a spectacular piece of serendipity: in Oxford I had been feeling coincidence near (and thinking at the same time that this was sheer moonshine) – perhaps an encounter with my former colleague Richard Gray, Faulkner specialist and Oxford Faulkner-conference regular? – instead it was somebody from the same era of my life, somebody I hadn’t seen since I last saw Richard, at Essex University in the UK, where we both taught; and the coincidence arrived inside Rowan Oak itself, of all places – Faulkner’s old home. Visiting at the very same hour were Patrick and Barbara Russell, from the UK. Patrick had been a student in the 20th Century Dramatic Literature class I taught at Essex U., 40 years ago; it was one of the first university classes I taught, and I was horribly anxious, and excited to find that the class took off. They contributed some wonderful insights into Chekhov, which I still pass on to my classes. It was a baptism, unforgettable. ‘This is what I came to university for,’ said one of the students – not, I think, Patrick, although he said he had often spoken of me to his wife. And it was he who recognized me in the lobby of Rowan Oak. What a glorious reunion!

And what a place for a reunion! The university has made the best job I’ve ever come across of maintaining a historic house and introducing it to the visitor through exquisitely staged rooms and exhibits both tactfully placed and comprehensive. That morning, before we went to Rowan Oak, I’d been thinking about Faulkner’s marriage to his much longed-for Estelle – how romantically it began, yet how the marriage fell short of its beginnings (something of this meditation may be what shows up in the tortured expression on my face, outside the house!).

We set out towards Little Rock, Arkansas, as usual on two-lane blacktops where possible; William Least Heat Moon’s book, Blue Highways, was an inspiration to me 30 years ago – today’s back roads are less heartily bizarre, more purely desolate. A few joys nonetheless: a collapsing one-room shack on a low loader, wonderfully odd; an entire field full of old rusty bathtubs; more cemeteries whose every grave sported Memorial Day flowers – clearly, after seeing hundreds of thousands of these bouquets, this is the work of the graveyard managements and not only of pious citizens; some notable roadkill – armadillo, raccoon. An ancient peeling sign declares, “Get ready! Jesus is coming” – the sign so decayed it could have been made in the 1st century, confirming what numerous Americans believe, that Jesus was an American. (How can they believe this? Simple – all great Christians are Americans, and history is bunk.) My favorite roadside church message so far: When You Break God’s Law, You Break God’s Heart. Now that we’re out of Alabama I can stop compulsively singing the chorus of Sweet Home Alabama (and pretending to myself that I don’t know the nauseating words of the verses), and return to shouting my standbys, Gimme a string bean / I’m a hungry man, and JJ Cale’s I’ll come back and haunt you as a / Nother man… When signs to Memphis began, I turned to Marc Cohn’s Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues / In the middle of the pouring rain. Immediately, it began to rain.

The best encounter of our journey yet, as Joe described it, occurred when I took a back road so obscure that it brought us to a different time, a hamlet (the word Faulkner uses) preserved exactly as they appear in Faulkner’s novels. We parked in the tiny forecourt of a long since abandoned structure, once a filling station (sometimes there are non-functioning pumps left, but here there were none). Now – we’re in the South, I said to Joe. At this, a man – Donal Burnett (Donal pronounced Dan-ell) – emerged from the hitherto empty-seeming structure and, as I was apologizing for ignorantly parking on his property, invited us in for coffee. Inside we met his wife Lavorn (I’m pledged to send them our photos, and I have, in Lavorn’s hand, the spelling of the family’s names) and we were greeted like space aliens, which we might as well have been. Daughter Melody was incited to shake hands with the man from Australia, and did so as if Joe was from Jupiter. The gas service is no more; the Burnetts survive selling cups of coffee, and candy, and presumably with the help of welfare. They were wonderful to visit with, as Americans say, and we’d have been happy to stay all day. The tiny, deserted road, a lane almost, that they live on carries the implausible title of Martin Luther King Jr. Highway; hard to tell if this choice of thoroughfare to honor MLK reveals defiant negligence or outright mockery.

Back on the road, we crossed the Mississippi, which was for me – and surely for anyone familiar with American history – a portal of dizzying power; I thought immediately of the miracle made possible when ‘The Wall’ fell: riding a bike under and through the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, once the heavily guarded borderline between East and West – unimaginable to simply cycle through it! – another experience that was like stepping through a door made of mercury. At once the thunderstorm that had been threatening all day (since ‘Walking in Memphis’) broke, in the micro-climate big rivers bring; thunder crashed around us like collapsing buildings; we quickly put on our raingear and that made the weather brighten. Only for a while, though. Locals call it Arkansas weather, and it soon included a brief taste of my second hailstorm while riding. Little Rock arrived in driving rain and traffic jams. The campsite we’d booked (or Kampsite as the KOA proclaim – someone never heard of the Nazi evil-eye of that ‘k’, as in Amerika) promised a drenching before we’d even got our tents up, at the startling price of $35 each. Motel 6 (50 years old and going strong) offered a shower, TV and big comfy bed for $39.99. Slam dunk.