Across the Plains of Texas, Scene 4

“All of this is more than I’ve ever known or seen
Come on and we’ll sing, like we were free
Push the pedal down, watch the world around fly by us”

I’m always first in line to read the riot act to anyone who reveals a deficiency of imagination by moaning about the boredom of a road trip, especially one that is largely undertaken via Interstate. Thus in the name of intellectual honesty I am obligated to sheepishly disclose the hypocrisy that I was feeling rather, well, less than stimulated by the Sooner State. Given the expansive sight lines we were afforded from the perch of Bubble’s high clearance, I further harbored doubts as to whether a departure from the I-40 corridor would have made a significant aesthetic difference.

Maybe I was rashly premature in my judgment. Maybe I was never going to give Oklahoma a fair shake after the veritable variety show we had been exposed to thus far, the bountiful agricultural vitality of the near Midwest, the multifaceted urbanity of St. Louis, the lost-and-found Americana of Route 66, the distinctive charisma of Eureka Springs, and the congenital comeliness of the Ozarks. Maybe it was the instinctive burn of disappointment upon skimming over the confluence of the Canadian River and its North Branch, waterways that were once critical in guiding the intrepid successfully beyond the Great American Desert, now amounting to yet another blobby impoundment. Maybe it was the knot deep in the pit of my stomach that tightened every time we flew past a billboard advertising a gambling den proffered by some particular tribal affiliation. Maybe it was all of these factors, rolled into the mileage that had already compounded into an endeavor the scope of which I had never so much as dreamed of tackling before, even as we had barely reached its midpoint.

I naively held out hope that the weather would finally turn, injecting some sorely needed zest into my session at the helm. Perhaps it would even force us from the infernal highway, under the guise of safety, and into some friendly shitkicker tavern where we could kick our feet up until conditions became less perilous. After all, everything had more or less gone perfectly according to plan, which incurred a small morsel of chagrin, for baked into my conception of an authentic long-distance adventure by car was a requirement for at least one situation that necessitated some form of improvisation to resolve. This credulous fantasy was encouraged by the intermittent congealing of dark swaths of cumulus clouds on the horizon, only for them to scatter like a giggling pack of schoolchildren after tauntingly flicking a countably minimal number of droplets onto the windshield.

Steinbeck might have warned us, had he been splayed across the back seat: “When June was half gone, the big clouds moved up out of Texas and the Gulf, high heavy clouds, rainheads . . . The rainheads dropped a little spattering and hurried on to some other country. Behind them the sky was pale again and the sun flared.” The better part of century later and merely in the throes of a protracted dry spell and not a catastrophic drought, it appeared this was simply the inveterate way of Oklahoma.

Blessedly the hours slipped by in a trance as our chariot churned up the blacktop en route to Oklahoma City, which, for focalizing a metro of nearly 1.3 million people, seemed in many ways half-finished. Its stunted, boxy skyline poked up from the prairie like a feeble, sickly Oz. On a Sunday afternoon we wore the ten-lane freeways like clown shoes, comically outsized, while the original Route 66 lay buried somewhere beneath our tires. An “arts district” that had come recommended was sleepy and scattershot, a “civic center” windswept and desolate.

We wound up in Bricktown, one of those neoteric neighborhoods contrived for folks of means to be fed and entertained. I have conflicting inclinations about such artifices. On one hand, walkable mixed-use areas filled with independent businesses are, in a vacuum, a good thing. Unfortunately, they don’t occur in a vacuum and in reality often serve to propagate de facto segregation along socioeconomic lines (which in turn are closely tied to racial lines).

Bricktown was, if nothing else, executed reasonably well from a planning standpoint, taking advantage of an existing infrastructure of crumbling warehouses where they could be rehabbed and effectively mimicking their masonry style in new construction, the crowning example of which was a Minor League baseball stadium that from the exterior looked a bona fide venue for taking in nine innings. A synthetic canal wiggled past several restaurants and a multiplex cinema to a small park that was drawn up per the turn of the 21st century discrete-angle-hating vogue and oriented around a life-sized diorama commemorating the infamous Land Run of 1889.

That event paved the way to Oklahoma’s statehood by virtue of pouring tens of thousands of white homesteaders into the parcel of the continent that until then had been bequeathed to what was left of the Indians who had been tyrannically driven from their ancestral lands. Bronze horses and wagons were frozen in the act of fording the canal, their quest depicted as brave and heroic. Those settlers who jumped the gun and illegitimately elbowed their way into the Indian Territory ahead of the Land Run are revered all the more for their insolence: these were the “Sooners” from whom the state and its largest public university derive their nickname.

In their machinations I saw a faint echo of my own journey through these same lands, embarked on solely with self in mind and scant concern for greater ramifications. They, at least, could claim—even if only tenuously—survival as a motive, the need to forge a livelihood out of a hardscrabble existence. I had no such excuse.

We supped at a nearby microbrewery, more of a relative novelty in those days before you could find one on practically every corner. I satisfied in a decent burger and a more than decent red ale (former compunctions now expunged). It was fortification for the mental wringer to come, for I would not permit our escape without a visit to the Memorial.

As a child of the nineties, I had reached just the right age for the Oklahoma City Bombing to be the first major newsworthy event that I was capable of following contemporaneously, an experience that endures indelibly in my memory. It, and subsequently Columbine four years later, rocked the foundations of that all too brief window of illusory peace and prosperity following the conclusion of the Cold War. Such self-inflicted cataclysms may have given us a puncher’s chance at laying the groundwork for a better country had our attention not been collectively turned outward after 9/11, a Common Enemy shoved down our throats, one that conveniently didn’t look or sound or act like the accepted definition of “us.” To the extent that we did eventually begin to stir from that hypnosis, bleary eyes opened to the firmly entrenched disingenuousness of the twenty-four hour news cycle. Each fresh horror would be ground into paste and then discarded as the next one erupted to take its place, all to the delight of those snake oil merchants who continued peddling the Common Enemy to distract us from the swindling they were subjecting us to. I was morbidly curious to see whether the event that had violently shaken my complacent preteen world had maintained any of its potent emotional resonance in this desensitized era.

Crafted out of the block where once stood the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that was the target of what remains the deadliest domestic terror attack in the history of the United States, the Memorial was mostly devoid of life, much like the rest of the big, empty-feeling city. Here, though, the solitude was welcome, contributing to an understated, sorrowful poignancy.

We passed through a brooding rectangular black monolith and down some stairs to the very spot that had instantaneously melted beneath Timothy McVeigh’s rented yellow truck. Above us, the time 9:01 was imprinted on the portal’s interior face. Its twin, at the opposite end of a lengthy, becalmed reflecting pool, read “9:03.” That was how little time it had taken on the morning of April 19, 1995 to transform the most ordinary Wednesday rush hour on the most ordinary spring day in the most ordinary city into a living nightmare for the thousands who would be so devastatingly affected by the intervening sixty seconds, roughly how long it takes to walk from one timestamped gateway to the other.

To the left, a gently sloping, grassy berm occupied the footprint of the Murrah Building itself, populated with vacant, oversize chairs symbolizing each of the 168 lives that were stolen by one pathetic, angry man’s paranoid rage, arranged in such a way to represent on which of the tower’s nine floors and in what approximate part of the building they had been at the fateful moment. From a distance, I couldn’t help but think that the bronze seatbacks gruesomely resembled torso-less pairs of legs.

Poised above the lea of remembrance, the plaza abutting the federal offices had been restored to what would have been its condition at dawn on 4-19-95, with the exception of its American flag now permanently being flown at half-staff. This otherwise ugly relic of ‘70s architecture carried a plaintive grace in its pitiably hopeless yearning for things to just go back to The Way They Were, that utopian state that only ever truly exists in the thalamus.

Such forlorn pining directly contrasts with the 9/11 Memorial in Downtown Manhattan, which was not yet completed but which I would thence go on to visit on multiple occasions following its dedication. Surrounded by gleaming, brand new skyscrapers, the aura there is almost that of muted but defiant celebration, an induced reminder that those who were killed on that terrifying day, as inexpressibly tragic as their deaths were, were not merely being consigned to history’s bottomless bin of mourning but were integral participants in the story of the phoenix rising out of the wreckage, ostensibly lifted on an updraft of unity and brotherhood.

So, in light of that comparison, circling back to the question that I struggled to answer then but now can with the benefit of hindsight: The grief of the Oklahoma City Memorial is all the more powerful for its inability to offer any assurance that some semblance of progress—however cosmetic—may have emerged from the rubble.

Before we descended from the plaza, one final, gut-wrenching detail caught my eye: a modest patch of lawn, encircled by a chain link fence and identified only by an unobtrusive plaque. This was the exact location of the playground that had adjoined the Murrah Building’s onsite day-care center; nineteen children and infants were among those who perished in the bombing. Something about the nonchalant presentation of this fact pierced straight to my heart with the ease of an ice pick and left me trembling involuntarily.

At street level again, we approached the crosswalk that would take us to where we had parked Bubble and Bea made the egregious mistake (in my humble estimation) of calling for the pedestrian “walk” signal that would freeze all of the theoretical traffic for thirty seconds even though there was nary a moving vehicle in sight. She then exacerbated matters by starting across the deserted road before the signal had activated. This ought to have been such a microscopic pet peeve that it should not have even registered, but I suppose ruminating on murdered children had put me in such a foul humor that I ridiculously determined it worthy of stridently chastising.

“You know, it’s super inconsiderate to hit the button and then just cross the street anyway . . . "

Bea, who I would hazard was not in the sprightliest of moods, either, halted in the middle of the avenue, as if to prove her ensuing point. “Really? Who cares? There’s no traffic!”

“But what if there was? You’d be making them stop for no reason. Sure, it’s just thirty seconds, but why inconvenience someone at all if there’s no need to do it? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been driving back home at like one in the morning and some idiot hits the four-way walk button and then just immediately crosses the street anyway and then I’m pointlessly sitting there when there’s literally no one else on the road . . . “

As I blathered, Bea made a commensurately exasperated noise and finished her passage to the other side, which only aided in dialing up my stubbornness.

“Fine, well, since you hit the walk button, I’m going to wait for it to cycle through and cross when I’m supposed to, since that’s the point of it.”

“You’re being a child!” Bea admonished before turning in a huff and leaving me to simmer in unmerited self-righteousness. I made good on my pledge, quickstepping across the street once the white stick figure man told me I could, not feeling nearly as clever as I imagined I would have. I caught up to Bea at the car and, rather than putting the issue to bed, I insanely decided it would be a good idea to relitigate it; surely if I could just sway her to see the logic in my argument, she would recognize its universal truth and recant her superfluous button-pushing ways.

Of course, that was not remotely the outcome. Instead, it was a strong tug at the shoddy stitching that was barely holding our badly fraying interrelationship together.

***

We zoomed away from Oklahoma City along a tolled expressway, the western sky still doing its same song and dance, teasing storms and then dissipating them before they reached the horizon, now glowing orange with the close of day.

The sunset framed the silhouettes of pumpjacks, locked in their rhythmic rotation. I found the unceasing circular motion oddly comforting as I pretended they were ancient artifacts scattered by an alien race across the landscape, each Sisyphean revolution adding incrementally towards some great and mysterious end that our feeble brains could never begin to comprehend and that would persist eternally, long after humankind faded from this planet. This science fiction was at least preferable to acknowledging the real, more environmentally destructive purpose of the oil-extracting machines.

We slid over the Red River of the South, the southernmost of the grand tributaries that comprise the Mississippi’s immense watershed and demarcator of the border between Oklahoma and, at last, Texas. It was shallow and muddy, from what we could discern in the twilight. The evening’s destination was more than idiomatically at the end of the road—this extension of I-44, dangling like the appendix from the rest of the Interstate network, vanished into a mishmash of U.S. and state routes in a place called Wichita Falls.

The highway’s terminus was our cue to exit and trudge down an interminable, disturbingly wide boulevard lined with the usual illusion of infinite choice made possible by wastefully land-intensive zoning patterns. We managed to identify the specific parking lot we were aiming for amidst all the countless other parking lots, distinguishable only by the trademarked logos they serviced, and we pulled into a free spot next to a minivan with Wisconsin plates. It was the first evidence that I had seen since we left St. Louis that anything east of the Mississippi existed. We checked into a giant shoebox with windows and, with Bea still actively plotting to avoid any and all interaction with me, I returned to the sea of asphalt.

I assumed that Wichita Falls, as a home to 100,000 people, did possess some degree of cohesive town-like structure hidden somewhere, but even if I could find it I had no means of getting there. It certainly would not have been walkable; very little at all was, judging from an expedition on foot to the limits of the hotel property. Sidewalks were a sparingly deployed concept here. Trying to reach the dime-a-dozen watering hole I’d noticed about a half-mile back, while tempting, was ultimately a more treacherous undertaking than I cared to risk in the dark. I was virtually a prisoner without access to a car. As far as I was concerned, Wichita Falls was nothing more than one giant exurb, stray splatter from the phlegm of sprawl that formed the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex a hundred miles or so to the southeast. My genuinely good-faith effort to seek out any iota of redeeming quality—and I had the bar set charitably low, at a cold, even if mass-produced beer and a ballgame on TV—had been vindictively thwarted, so I slunk up to our room to sleep.

The hot breath of daybreak yielded no substantial improvement. An impotent thatch of gray swaddled the troposphere, casting a further pall over this Gehenna and its inexhaustible options for buying things. Expensive things, cheap things, things you can wear, things you can eat, things that serve no practical purpose but simply must be owned all the same. At my insistence we spared no haste in getting underway.

In the explicit objective of wholly dodging the Metroplex, we stuck to a U.S. Highway that blissfully vacillated between two and three lanes for much of our acquaintanceship with it. As we cruised the vast, lonely North Texas flatlands, I realized I had indeed been severely misguided in my first-blush assessment of this region the previous day.

Naturally, all it took to trigger such an insight was liberation from controlled-access sensory deprivation, and as soon as that happened it was blindingly obvious: the sliver of Oklahoma that I’d encountered over the course of a paltry several hours that I’d been so shamefully quick to disparage, all of it, the painfully homogenous terrain, the minimalist portrait take on an urban setting, the frustrating climate, the sad history as a dumping ground for the cultures who were already here when we arrived, this was precisely the America that I had so impudently raided the wobbliest levels of the Jenga tower of my character for the sake of indulging an insatiable curiosity to investigate, and whether I found it personally agreeable or not was immaterial. This epiphany was all I would require to maintain an open mind going forward, for the remainder of this trip and into the future.

Our headway was periodically enlivened by a succession of towns straight out of The Last Picture Show (in fact, we unknowingly passed within minutes of McMurtry’s birthplace of Archer City, the inspiration for the novel and the shooting location for the film). The most interesting of these speed traps was Mineral Wells, whose orderly gridding, broad streets, and lethargic mien masked a surprisingly shared history with Eureka Springs as a successful spa resort, in spite of the outwardly antipodean differences between the two. Mineral Wells, however, did not possess the ancillary attributes that would enable it to cope when a good soak began losing out to the prescriptions of modern medicine.

Driving through it today, one would never think to guess at such a fruitful origin were it not for the startlingly titanic shape of the fourteen-story Baker Hotel, dominating the field of vision up and down the main drags. Defunct since the early ‘70s, it continued to turn heads on the basis of its handsomeness as well as its size, opulent elements that once audaciously bucked the financial woes of the Great Depression shining through dilapidation.

They say all good things must come to an end, and so too it was for this most eminently relaxing segment of our odyssey, scarce traffic and extended straightaways combining in impeccable harmony with the leisure of eschewing the Interstate. Our advance was stymied by suburbia and we conceded to I-35, which whisked us on towards San Antonio.

Across the Plains of Texas, Scene 3

“Water in the lamplight danced along this shared night
Singing with the star shine, until the morning sun blind”

Fifteen minutes into the Natural State and my heart was positively aching. No, not a residual consequence of the pork tenderloin topped with bacon and lathered in bleu cheese sauce that I’d wolfed down for dinner back in Baxter Springs, but rather because we’d spontaneously pulled off U.S. Highway 62 into the parking patch for an antique shop that called itself “Inspiration Point.”

The rationale behind this sobriquet was immediately and abundantly clear in the vista of one of the rare non-impounded portions of the White River within a several-hundred mile stretch that is comprised mainly of human-engineered corpulence. Between Goshen and Bull Shoals, the vast majority of the river has been inflated into sequences of fat appendages whose principal uses today cater to people with disposable income and idle time, a far cry from the original hydroelectric power and flood control rationales for god-playing.

At this spot, however, those lakified waters were out of sight, leaving a panorama that cut to the very core of my being. The day’s color had been nearly swallowed by the horizon and what obstinate pastels were winning their struggle to seep into the twilight sky painted the unbroken verdure of the undulant terrain in sharp relief. This, at the risk of swooning into embellished sentimentality, looked like home, a dead ringer for my native northern Appalachia. Had I slept through the previous thirty-six hours of driving, I could have easily been fooled into believing we were somewhere in, say, West Virginia.

It is theorized that the Ozarks and Appalachians were once neighbors in the great chain of mountains that constituted the spine of the supercontinent Pangaea and were eventually driven apart by the post-volcanic rift that created the Cenozoic Mississppi Valley. Though that is a gross oversimplification related by someone with far less than an expert’s grasp on geologic history, I would not have been convinced of any more logical an explanation as I gazed upon the uplifted plateau’s dissected landscape.

Bea patiently indulged my wistful trance, broken only by twilight’s inevitable superiority. Then we resumed our progress down Route 62 and soon bore witness to a pageant of increasingly gimmicky services: a Tudor-style, pitched-roof Bavarian restaurant, a roadside shack renting out exuberantly-neoned kayaks, a cluster of cottages raised up to resemble treehouses.

We pulled into our shelter for the night, a spartan, no-frills motor lodge that now flew the flag of some banal brand with “Inn” in its title in a feeble attempt, tricking absolutely no one, to invoke some caliber of bygone charm. This corporatization did not appear to have tangibly manifested in much in the way of upgrades from what likely would have been the motel’s original state, which suited me just fine in my unjaded desire to experience a road trip even fractionally befitting of Twain, the Beats, Least Heat-Moon, et al.

We were welcomed by the patter of little feet slapping against baked concrete, followed by the robust splash of a cannonball into an unguarded pool. Ah, the unbridled potential of summer vacation! Condensed into such a simple act, it bolstered my mood amply to prod Bea into an evening stroll to survey our new habitat.

Main Street snaked off of 62 right around the corner from the motel and we descended its substantial grade, passing a sprawling roadhouse with a legion of motorcycles deposited haphazardly out front, music and laughter wafting from open windows and patios. Before long, the road became populated with colorful wooden Victorians intermingling with rectangular structures hewn from rough cut blocks of locally quarried gray limestone or brown sandstone.

Eureka Springs, we quickly discovered, was akin to a real-life Chutes and Ladders game board, the whole town constructed in symbiosis with its uneven footing rather than in rebellion against it. Streets branched away seemingly under the command of pure whimsy, rising or falling as the topography dictated, like a family of streams. Crooked staircases whistled seductively from the shadows, soliciting passersby with the promise of unseen shortcuts. In a number of instances the unwitting could enter a building on one story and exit via another should they suffer so much as a momentary lapse in bearing. To me, conqueror of many a severely sloped neighborhood back home, it was positively delightful to the extent that I temporarily cast aside my misguided ascetics at the sight of a grand old hotel, rising up above a Y-junction that posed a choice between both horizontal and vertical planes, its rooftop almost level with the steep forested ridge behind it. It boasted a balcony encircling its second floor, upon which happy-looking patrons were contentedly passing time over pub grub and beverages.

“Let’s stop in there,” I was suddenly compelled to demand.

”I . . . didn’t bring my wallet,” Bea confessed, more sheepishly than she ought to have considering my bipolar notions of what constituted acceptable behavior.

”I can pay!” I countered, so resolutely was I digging the vibe of this unusual town.

”But my ID, what if they card us . . . ”

And there went the wind from my sails. It was the path of least resistance to churlishly let out an unwarranted harrumph as opposed to suggesting we make the roughly one-mile round trip to and from our abode to retrieve Bea’s license, only to have trod up the hill yet again when we were finished. Instead we completed a brief foray further up the lower street outside the hotel before doubling back for the march up Main Street.

No sooner had we crossed the exterior-facing threshold of our motel room than the sheer length of our day rose to club us over the head. The thought that it had barely been twelve hours prior that we’d been perched atop the Gateway Arch was a beguiling and exhausting one. I sunk into bed—a real bed, all to myself, a fact I was not going to take for granted no matter how shabby our current lodging was on the surface in comparison with our somewhat more bourgeois accommodations in St. Louis. With the steady drone of the wall-mounted air conditioning unit providing a somnolent white noise, I was unconscious in an instant.

***

Morning brought with it the revelation that Eureka Springs was every bit as enchanting by day as it had been alluring under the light of a nearly full moon. After breakfast in a pleasant subterranean cafe, we allowed ourselves some time to explore, taking advantage of the myriad mischievous stairways and narrow, fiercely slanted avenues that slithered up from the strange, sunken downtown. The bright, polychromatic painted ladies clashed boldly with the earthy hues of stone-laid edifices, much to the benefit of both.

Eureka Springs rose to prominence thanks to the alleged healing effects of the mineral waters beneath its bedrock and, more importantly, having the right boosters; a former governor of the state and an esteemed judge, for two, were instrumental in marketing the town sufficiently to wrangle a railway, which spurred such rampant growth that for a brief period near the end of the 19th century, Eureka Springs was one of the largest incorporated places in Arkansas. It rode this wave of popularity into the prohibition era, during which it was reputedly a getaway spot for high-ranking members of certain Chicago-based organized crime syndicates. While the curative properties of the natural spas may never have exactly been couched in a scientifically sound thesis, plenty of folks still find a restorative quality in the quirky, artsy undercurrent that has taken root over the previous century, aided by the innately winsome ambience of the Ozarkian setting.

The creative class and those who appreciate its output tend to err on the side of open-mindedness, which has fomented a fascinating juxtaposition in Eureka Springs, given its location in the bosom of the Bible Belt. Christianity could not be ignored or dismissed here. On the contrary, religiosity has a very heavy hand in the town’s economy. Its most popular attraction by far is a play, performed all summer long and attended by tens of thousands annually, about Christ’s final days. The upshot is a place whose chintzy tourist-oriented stores proudly display t-shirts in their windows that say things like “What has two thumbs and is loved by Jesus . . . THIS GUY!” but also whose civic leaders would go on to legalize same-sex marriage and enact anti-discrimination ordinances to protect LGBT rights in open insurgency against a deeply conservative state legislature.

We were not immune to the ecclesiastical snare, for something I insisted on seeing before we skipped town happened to be, well, a church. My interest in this house of worship, however, was on account of its architectural, not ecumenical, significance: The Thorncrown Chapel was designed by a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1980, an extraordinary construction of cross-hatched wood beams with floor-to-vaulted-ceiling windows that conjured an illusion of open air amidst a grove of trees. Dismayingly, upon arrival we saw that we had to self-impose a denial of our own entry into the chapel, for in my atheistic eagerness to gawk I’d completely forgotten that it was Sunday morning, and even with my glitching ethical compass I knew better than to barge into an ongoing liturgy. Instead we loitered awkwardly for a few minutes, trying to maintain a polite perimeter while still gleaning what we could of the structure’s remarkable attributes through the leafy halo of canopies engulfing it. I was able to derive some enjoyment, too, out of the diminutive administrative shack burrowed into a hillside adjacent to the parking lot, for with a wink and a nod it evinced elements of Wright’s trademark Prairie Style, low-slung and flat-roofed, with a cantilevered oaken awning.

Then we were eastbound on 62 once more, heading in the opposite direction of our ultimate destination, the kind of action that so embodied my narcissistic treachery. We paused to climb a fire tower-esque contraption that existed primarily as a ruse to lure travelers into a gift shop stocked to the gills with all the requisite Arkansas-emblazoned tchotchkes. Upon reaching the observation platform at the top we found ourselves out of breath from both the arduous ascent and the 360 degrees’ worth of endless green, the lush domain simultaneously amorphous and fractally intricate. Again it was profoundly evocative of the region of my genesis, the views standing in bewitchingly for those of Mount Davis, Pipestem Tower, Cooper’s Rock, Thayerville Lookout, to fondly recall just a few.

On again, past the Ozark Mountain Hoe-Down Theater and then a monstrous Walmart which seemed even more smug in its immensity, more defiant of its cancerous character here, in the lands that birthed it. In Berryville we dipped south on Arkansas Highway 21, otherwise known (in part) as the Ozark Highlands Scenic Byway. To be sure, the road confidently lived up to this billing, taking on a mind of its own as it swaggered into the emerald hollows.

Even the most inarguable beauty, though, can conceal insidious ugliness, a fact of which I was unpleasantly reminded after being sucker punched by the disconcerting realization that we’d totally ignored the gas tank needle for some length of time, during which it had been persistently sneaking towards the “E” side of the gauge.

The next gas station we happened upon was on the outskirts of a dusty mote of a crossroads. Two older men in sun-faded and dirt-browned denim eyed us warily from their roost on a sagging bench outside the associated travel mart as we sidled up to a pump. Bea went inside to procure a bottle of water. I refueled, then followed her in for a jolt of caffeine. When I entered, Bea was already at the cash register, getting rung up. Two boys in their mid-to-late teens were flanking her, leaning against the counter, their posture leaving them oddly close to her. I thought little of it—presumably they were just hanging out there to ward off mutual listlessness with the employee, a pal of theirs—and moseyed on back to the cooler for my own drink. Nor did I think much of the resident yahoos parting and shuffling off to the magazine rack when I approached the clerk.

Returning to Bubble’s safe confines, even with my limited perceptive abilities I could tell that Bea was visibly rattled.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Did you not see those guys?” she seethed. “Elevator eyes, as soon as I walked in. Like, aggressively. Just . . . gross. And then when I went to pay, instead of moving out of the way, they got closer. For a second I seriously thought they were going to touch me.”

“They were probably harmless,” my prodigious talent for saying the worst possible thing in a given scenario vomited. “Just kids with nothing better to do.”

“They made me really . . . really uncomfortable.”

I took the shovel in a firm, two-handed grip and continued digging with abandon. “I’d guess they don’t see too many girls, uh, who look . . . like you.” As if the novelty of a young mocha-skinned woman was a valid justification for leering intimidation, let alone when it occurs within the orbit of a racial environment like that of Harrison, Arkansas. Just thirty-and-change miles up the road, billboards would be erected there in the not too distant future that would, verbatim, equate diversity with “white genocide.”

Bea could only sit in incredulous silence at my flagrant dereliction of sensitivity. All I managed to come up with to help rectify the situation was to lamely offer to take a shift behind the wheel. She would not relinquish control of the car, however, reasoning that focusing on the drive would help settle her frazzled nerves.

It was indeed a ride that required concentration, plunging us into the well-defined valley of the miraculously undammed (by Congressional edict) Buffalo National River and then up into the Boston Mountains, home to the highest elevations in the entire Ozark physiography. The curves became both tighter and more plentiful, a dizzying combination. Miles passed without any sign of humanity other than the occasional ramshackle barn or solo motorcyclist. Being enveloped in the conviviality of June’s verdant foliage helped Bea wash down the bitterness of her encounter, the season’s indefatigable optimism prevailing when perhaps it ought not to have been permitted to do so.

A return to the fringes of civilization was marked by sporadic commercial enterprises rearing their heads: public campgrounds, a post office, even a burger shack. One last hairpin bend swung us around and deposited us in the basin of the Arkansas River outside Clarksville, a modestly sized, generic town of no great import that felt to us like a teeming metropolis after the country we had just come through.

Bea arrowed into one of the angled parking spaces surrounding an archetypical county town square at the hub of the spartan, unadorned business district, anchored by a suitably dignified, if visually unexceptional courthouse. This humdrum backdrop was an omen of the distance ahead, across less inherently remarkable territory.

“Your turn,” decreed my companion, a penance to which I assented willingly.

Across the Plains of Texas, Scene 2

“Leave for the country let the day begin
I carry my share of original sin . . .
And I wanna be
like Mercury, with the wind blowing through my hair”

A jackknifed tractor trailer delayed our egress from St. Louis by turning I-44 into the parking situation at Woodstock. After an hour or so of creeping along in this controlled-access limbo, we found ourselves in what surely was the purest distillation of the mythical “Middle America” this coastal elite could have imagined. Land of the fast food letter board advertising fifty-piece chicken nuggets and home of the ability to purchase high-proof liquor at any gas station.

Weighing heavy on my mind was the trajectory of our slog, roughly echoing the direction of—but keeping us tauntingly at arm’s length from—the most legendary American road of them all: the erstwhile U.S. Highway 66, more commonly known in the colloquial lexicon, of course, simply as “Route 66.”

Of all the numbered routes crisscrossing the continent that were cleverly devised during the 1920s, exactly how and why it was 66 that would uniquely rise to become such a cultural icon is a question that is dissected still today by historians, hobbyists, and wide-eyed twentysomethings venturing overland into The West for the first time alike. It wasn’t the longest of the original 1926 U.S. Highways, nor the most important from a commercial standpoint, nor even especially scenic in the light of comparison with some of its brethren. And yet it was this piecemeal collection of thoroughfares that, after molding into a cohesive entity by way of getting pincushioned with signposts brandishing one consistent number, swelled into the zeitgeist of multiple generations.

Steinbeck helped to elevate “Highway 66” into our national consciousness, breathing a character’s life into the inanimate asphalt as he coined the “Mother Road” moniker. That only partially explains, though, the hit blues song (the composer of which purportedly settled on 66 as his subject primarily because his wife liked the way the rhyme worked with “get your kicks”), the fifty-state gas station chain, or the ‘60s television show. The program actually had little to do with its titular namesake, but such was the gravitas of Route 66 that the very phrase itself brazenly presumed to capture and bottle the essence of this country’s ethos, that intrinsically American compulsion to pick up and go.

Then there is the fact of Route 66’s demise. It is far from the only long-distance two-lane route to be mostly or even wholly superseded by the concrete leviathans, but it is one of the only ones that was deemed to have been rendered so comprehensively superfluous that the government opted to decommission the entire thing, stripping it of its federally appointed, unifying number. Ironically, this fate seems to have galvanized historical, sociological, and above all, nostalgic fascination with the road with a fervor that other renowned byways have not managed to replicate.

When Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act into law in 1956 and with it, the Interstate Highway System, the first construction contract handed out under its power was for Missouri’s Route 66 corridor, the same miles that Bea and I were rumbling along now. What better place than there to dip our toes into the deep well of the 66 legacy? As if I needed an authoritative rationale for an extended foray away from the Interstate, anyway.

We bid adieu to I-44 at Joplin, only to immediately come face to face with the harsh reality of the fringes of a small rural city, an incessant cortege of every chain eatery, hotel, big box store you could think of, progress made fitful by the humongous intersections every half-mile whose array of stoplights were responsible for orchestrating the sixteen lanes of traffic that funneled into each one.

In eleven months, an F5 tornado would utterly devastate this strip towards which I was exhibiting such distaste, taking with it more souls than any other twister outbreak in over sixty years. On we crawled, past the Pizza Hut where, with sirens wailing and a waking nightmare bearing down at unfathomable speed, the manager would usher customers and employees into a walk-in freezer, then fasten a bungee cord to his arm and attempt to pull the door shut. It was a battle that would ultimately cost him his life, but he will have defied the unforgiving ferocity of nature just long enough to keep his wards from its clutches.

Emerging from Joplin at the western edge of town, we swatted away another agglomeration of vacuous hyper-consumerism and before we knew it we were crossing the state line into Kansas. Route 66’s idiosyncratic, eleven-mile tiptoe through a slender, unassuming corner of the Sunflower State lent my obsessive-compulsive need to catalogue experiences into neat checklists an excuse to mark off another new conquest.

We skipped alongside almost imperceptibly wavy farmland that could have been just about anywhere in the Midwest and soon we hit our first real indication of 66’s outsize proportions in the form of a general store, innocuous-looking enough from the outside, with a jumble of detritus in its front yard that suspiciously hid the faintest tincture of organization in its messiness: a rusted wagon with Old Glory affixed, colorfully occupied flower pots haphazardly strewn about, a few plastic lawn flamingos for good measure.

Inside the store, dim and cool, the necessities could be procured, but they were dwarfed by the sheer volume of anything and everything conceivable with that magic number plastered on it. It was all rather hypnotizing, the t-shirts and hoodies and trucker hats and postcards and commemorative stamps and bumper stickers and fridge magnets and coffee mugs and keychains and lighters and ballpoint pens and calendars and stuffed animals and yo-yos and umbrellas and . . .

With armloads of swag and no recollection of how any of it came to be in our possession, we beat a hasty retreat. As we exited, a bemused young German couple ducked into the store, their eyes beginning to glaze over as ours had.

We returned to the Mother Road, nimbly darting across the swift current of an artery whose purpose was to shuttle traffic through the area as expeditiously as possible, that which had been silly enough to stray from I-44 for whatever reason in the first place. One of the many delights of Route 66 is that its extinct alignments often conceal even older, long ago bypassed segments; after a short distance we veered onto one such chunk, which I suppose could be termed a “Grandmother Road.” One-way and unlined, it curved towards what, frankly, ought to have been one of the less remarkable bridges I’ve encountered.

A simple concrete arch spanning the most docile of creeks, this was the “Rainbow Bridge”—naturally, painted stark white, at least where incoherent graffiti wasn’t scarring it. Somehow its superficially mundane countenance was dramatically overcome merely by its participation in this road. It was a relic of car culture’s embryonic stage, supplanted by latter-day Old Route 66, which was in turn supplanted by the tag team of the Interstate and the super-two-laner. It was the minuscule but rewarding prize at the center of a Russian nesting doll of vehicular progress, cresting on the wave of our American obsession with efficiency. Bea’s 21st-century Bubble trundled across in no different a manner than would have a southwesterly-bound traveler eighty years prior.

The faded yellow passing zone dashes of Old 66 hooked up with the newer conduit and together they constituted the main drag through Baxter Springs, Kansas. It was a town that had never fully managed to wrestle free from the intractable reality of an existence that is contingent upon people starting somewhere else and going somewhere else.

As early as the 1830s, a trading post had been established in the vicinity for the indigenous Osage, the forcibly migrated Cherokee, and European-American settlers beginning their avaricious westward creep. Following the Civil War, cattlemen driving their herds from Texas to the railyards of Kansas City and the promise of profitable eastern markets found the Springs an ideal stopping-over point, giving rise to, for the time being, the state’s first “cow town,” up until the Iron Horse reached its tendrils further south to more conveniently service the ranchers. The advent of Route 66 again propped up the transient economy, but that too receded with the road’s diminished importance.

What was left was a mostly forgotten town in that buffer zone, shifting ever eastward, between the fertile and arid halves of the contiguous states. To me, it presented as an almost cartoonishly perfect facsimile of such a town, right down to the pockmarked Trailways bus morosely moping in the street athwart a building that had probably housed a department store or the like in more prosperous days, as suggested by a faux-marble facade and the C-shaped, peeling metal apparatus hanging above, though whatever insignia it had once borne was dissolved into illegibility. A bulbous analog clock face protruding from the bottom of the sign was more or less in agreement with my own watch. Time hadn’t yet come to a complete stop in Baxter Springs, even if retail largely had.

I harbored hope that the Route 66 revival was filtering a little bit of cash into local wallets, and there were indeed a number of establishments that appeared to cater to such a possibility. Upon further investigation virtually none were open for business, a rather alarming implication, I thought, for a late Saturday afternoon during what ought to have been the summer high season. A visitor’s center within a refurbished Phillips 66 filling station (now sans pumps) lay dormant. Even more strange was the 1950s-style soda fountain whose big glass doors, albeit locked to a darkened interior, permitted enough natural light to pass to allow us a gander at a setup so meticulously arranged that it may well have been frozen for all eternity at the very instant that Ike sicced the FAHA on communities like Baxter Springs.

Fortunately for us, at least the diner was accepting customers, a wonderful greasy spoon cafe in a corner red brick edifice (formerly a bank that Jesse James is said to have robbed) where we ordered hot dishes from a veritable novella reproduced on slightly yellowed newsprint. As we polished off our meals, a din rose from the street and we perked our heads up to see through the windows a fleet of motorcycles casually making its way down Old 66. We hurried outside to catch the end of the impromptu parade, and I noticed that the German couple from earlier had caught up to us and were on the sidewalk, wearing the dopiest of grins, the man capturing everything on a hand-held video recorder. One by one, the bikers circled back and parked their choppers in an orderly row, perpendicular to the curb in front of the restaurant, beneath the Stars and Stripes hanging flaccid in the stagnant heat.

I insisted on a post-dinner stroll to aid with digestion. Under the shingled awning of an antiques shop, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a dilapidated vending machine, austerely announcing COLD DRINKS. It looked as though it could claim membership in the first batch of such contraptions ever to roll off an assembly line, labels illustrating the brand selection shriveled and curling, output tray turned to rust. A low hum emanating from within suggested that despite its visage, this machine was allegedly functioning.

Now, I’ll have you know that number one with a bullet on my holy list of this mortal realm’s small joys is a chilled can of Dr. Pepper on an incalescent day, so you can picture my euphoria as I clinked the required coinage into the slot (a meager four bits!) and pounded the appropriate plastic-sheathed button, then waited a few Mississippis with bated breath for the satisfying thud of a twelve-ounce pop dispensing into the corroded basket. I palmed the container, immediately shedding beads of moisture due to the radical change in ambient temperature, and the symphony continued with the timeless hiss-CRACK of the tab being depressed and carbonation escaping its imprisonment. Twenty-four flavors—twenty-three as per the drink’s slogan, plus that tinny trace of aluminum that always adds a certain je ne sais quoi to any canned beverage—streamed down my gullet, manna from the gods. My borderline maniacal ebullience in this moment surely would have had Bea second- and third-guessing the life choices that had led her to this point had my overall comportment not already long done so.

Onwards, holding hands with the Mother Road, Kansas disappeared into our rear view mirrors as rapidly as it had arrived. Into Oklahoma, where on that early evening it was hardly the wind sweeping down the plain, but languid puffs of stifling air. Commerce, one of those places with such an ironic name that it has to be in on the joke, being laughed with, not at, had its downtown hidden from today’s designated Route 66 path, so we went looking for it. What we found was nearly bereft of a pulse. Sidewalks were in the shade of corrugated steel roofing affixed by struts to the faces of comatose structures, which, together with the extra-wide street to provide room for diagonal pull-in parking, lent an apt Wild West feeling to this veritable ghost town. Presiding over the foot of the deserted business district was a lonely soft serve ice cream stand.

Looping back towards 66, we passed a nondescript, off-kilter, one-story shack that was molting its coat of white paint en masse. This was the childhood home of one Mickey Charles Mantle, one of the most preternaturally talented men ever to swing a baseball bat in anger. His career records, sterling as they are, leave open the unanswerable question of how they might yet have been constrained by a litany of injuries and the deleterious effects of alcoholism. The “Commerce Comet” was lauded endlessly and deservedly for his gifts on the diamond while succumbing to addictions to the bottle and to women off of it. In some ways, this made him an unlikely metaphor for the country as a whole and, in microcosm, his own hometown, as they whistled past the graveyards of industrial collapse and social rupture along fault lines of wealth and race.

Next came Miami, its name a somber reminder of the state’s origins as essentially a free-range purgatory for Native Americans. It was especially poignant to us, having paralleled the Great Miami River for some distance, way back in Ohio. The compulsory march of the Miami people from there to here, a journey that took us about ten hours in elapsed drive time, was protracted enough that various place names in Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas are all owed to the Miamis’ passage. (The more famous Florida city and its river are derived from an altogether different Indian people and language.)

The town itself offered a third variety of Route 66 hamlet, after the dozy, worn at the edges but still just-about-ticking nostalgia of Baxter Springs and the largely defunct and forsaken Commerce. Miami was a county seat, plugging away with all of the responsibilities and amenities that entailed: a hospital, a community college, a half-dozen(!) casinos, a multi-screen cinema, and a sizable municipal park fronting the Neosho River, in addition to the standard glob of shopping centers and lodging out by the Turnpike. It was of ample size that the north-south thoroughfare on which we were being carried divided into a one-way pair as it cut through the heart of the town. Route 66, however, split the difference, forging straight ahead as Main Street. It was there that a totally unexpected treasure lurked.

Miami had at one point classified as a boom town, reaping the benefits of a lead and zinc extraction crush during the early decades of the 20th century. This injection of prosperity, now come and gone, did leave behind at least one tangible marker in the form of an ostentatious performing arts venue, the Coleman Theater, so called after the mining magnate who bankrolled it in the 1920s. Its exquisite Mission Revival exterior would put it at home in, say, some tony Los Angeles neighborhood, but here, in northeastern Oklahoma, it was downright preposterous. Always a sucker for beautiful architecture in surprising places, I had us pull over to take a closer look. We approached the small glass box office booth to inquire about the possibility of peeking our heads inside.

“Are you here for the Playboys?” the woman on the other side quizzed.

“Sorry?” we stammered, flummoxed, to which the woman pointed at a nearby poster advertising Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, whose tour was stopping in Miami that very night.

“Oh, no,” I returned, “the building is just marvelous.”

Examining us skeptically for a beat, the woman generously relented. “You missed the last tour, but go ahead and look around, just don’t go into the theater. And be out in fifteen minutes, doors open for the show then.”

Aesthetically, the interior represented a wild departure, decorated in the vein of French royalty, gold everywhere, multi-tiered chandeliers, finely carved wooden columns flaring out into detailed frescoes. Sculptures of the tastefully nude female form hoisted candelabras skyward from the newel posts at the bottoms of a double staircase leading up to the balcony level. We crept up and, disobeying the request of our patroness, creaked open the door to the performing hall, which was no less impressive than the rest of the venue.

“There are big city orchestras that don’t play somewhere this nice,” I whispered. Below us on the stage, a couple of the Playboys were tuning their instruments. A sound technician looked like he was about to take a keen interest in our presence, so we quickly ducked out. Already a steady trickle of concert-goers was making its way into the theater, all, it seemed, of sufficient age to have birthed my parents. Stumbling back outside, squinting against our reacquaintance with the sun’s glare, we could see a line of geriatrics was extending halfway down the block.

Vaguely dredging up something I’d read at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville some years past, I rhetorically mused to no one in particular, “Didn’t Bob Wills die a long time ago?” It certainly didn’t matter to these folks; the entire AARP-eligible population of the surrounding fifty-mile radius must have been queuing up in front of the Coleman to get a dose of the King of Western Swing’s ongoing legacy. Also present were our new friends from Deutschland, snapping photos of the theater’s ornate design.

“We can go inside?” they asked us, having seen our exit. We disclosed that we’d barely gotten in and out with our lives and it was likely too late for them, unless they wanted to purchase a ticket and spend an evening rocking and rolling with the Greatest Generation.

“Honestly, it might be a fun time. It’s probably the most America you’ll get on your trip, which I’m sure is saying something,” I contributed. It was an intriguing idea, but they were due in Tulsa that night and didn’t like driving The Route after dark, for that defeated the purpose of their adventure. Conversing a bit more—Bea was thrilled to dust off her latent but serviceable German, having lived in Düsseldorf for several years as a kid—we learned that they’d started in Chicago and were planning to ride the entirety of the Mother Road to its terminus in Santa Monica, a two-week expedition, their excitement palpable. We then rattled off our itinerary, in which something was evidently lost in translation because it incurred them to ask, “You are getting married?” We practically raced each other to awkwardly rebut that notion with strained, high-pitched titters.

It was time to go our separate ways; even the lingering daylight that is afforded to those undertaking a long-haul sojourn in proximity to the estival solstice was beginning to taper. As it turned out, they’d parked their rented convertible (now that’s how to cruise Route 66 in style) directly in front of Bubble, so we trailed them for the final few blocks of Main Street. At a red light we bid safe travels out the window. They turned right, into the setting sun. We turned left, slipping back into Missouri thanks to the arbitrary disposition of imperialist boundary drawing: The border between what would be regarded as North and South in the western territories had been set at half a degree of latitude (approximately thirty-five miles) higher than the slavery/free division that had been determined as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which itself was an extension of an imaginary line that had been plopped down dating back to 17th-century colonial charters.

Our drive was predominantly in silence as we briefly submitted to an expressway to squeeze what we could out of the sun’s waning beneficence. Perhaps the fatigue of what had developed into quite a distended day was starting to take its toll, though I surmised that Bea’s reticence might have also had a little bit to do with the Germans’ presumption of the quality of our relationship, exhuming intentionally suppressed thoughts and emotions and memories as if by the raging current of the Mississippi gushing over levees and sandbags.

We drifted south and east, the landscape transforming in front of our eyes. Hillocks, lacquered in velvety green, thrust up from the earth as open space shrank. The highway created its own contours in places, blasting through unwilling topography. We ditched the fast road once again. The new road wriggled and writhed, like the scrunched-up paper covering for a straw that’s been exposed to droplets of water in an attempt to entertain an impatient five-year-old at a restaurant. One-room churches and one-room schoolhouses, sometimes one and the same, would materialize and then get left behind in the gloaming. I could feel something seductive beneath the soil here. Without warning, a blue and white sign emerged out of the dusk, imploring us to BUCKLE UP FOR SAFETY but also, more importantly, inviting us into Arkansas.

Across the Plains of Texas, Scene 1

“I was carried
to Ohio in a swarm of bees”

Kentucky welcomed visitors by immediately laying claim to a piece of Abraham Lincoln. The Bluegrass State possesses Honest Abe's birthplace, the signs at its borders will have you know, but even in staying on the Interstate it occurred to me there was no need for such appropriation of history; simply the change in topography made for enough of a selling point after the roteness of the diagonal track we'd just cut across Ohio. The landscape now roiled around us, lush green knobs burbling to the Earth's surface whenever the highway couldn’t be bothered to acquiesce to the terrain, exposing limestone innards that had been crushed into their stratified patterns over hundreds of millions of years.

Louisville came and went, the Ohio River feeling as important as ever in its wide, lazy flow, punctuated with barges and the trusses of bridge spans. Southern Indiana invited us in with stretches of uninterrupted forest, which in turn began to fade into the stereotypical image of the agricultural Midwest. Finally relenting to Lincoln-mania, we hopped off the Interstate in search of Indiana's slice of the Lincoln pie: the farmstead on which he had spent his formative years. In our way was a town called Santa Claus, a name innocently decided upon in the 1850s, only for subsequent generations to predictably pounce on the potential for runaway capitalism.

Today, seemingly every business is adorned with a life-sized statue of jolly old Saint Nick himself, all the more disconsonant with summer in full swing, the faint shrieks of roller coaster riders echoing between the spires of waterslides at a nearby holiday-themed amusement park. Even the fast food sandwich chain was guarded over by Kris Kringle's cherubic, dead-eyed gaze. I couldn't imagine a better encapsulation of the unabashed tackiness of the country that was once saved from irrevocable cannibalism by a man who'd grown up not five miles down the road.

In the early 60s, Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial was placed under the custodianship of the National Park Service, who, as usual, had done an admirable job of patching together a worthwhile exhibit. A pleasantly manicured courtyard was anchored by a tableau of sculpted wall carvings depicting Lincoln in all of those places that assert ownership over some phase of his life: his birth in Kentucky, adolescence in Indiana, nascent political career in Illinois, and presidency in Washington. Then there was the centerpiece of the display, portraying a haloed Lincoln hovering grandiosely above genuflecting slaves whose manacles have been broken, in a disquietingly Christ-like representation.

A trail led first to the grave of Abe's mom, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who succumbed to illness two years after the family migrated north of the Ohio, then to what remains of the foundation of the log cabin that was actually inhabited by the Lincolns, and finished at a working replica of an 1820s farm, conducted by park rangers in contemporary garb demonstrating early-19th-century subsistence skills such as tanning and blacksmithing, while a smattering of cows, sheep, and chickens milled about in the background. In this attempt to fashion a window onto life as it would have been at that very spot nearly two hundred years ago, I sensed a certain humility that was conspicuously missing from the Lincoln-as-white-savior engraving at the front of the memorial.

Onwards we glided into Illinois, state number four on this lengthening day (five for me, if I’m allowed to count my point of origin in Pennsylvania), the earth growing ever more fertile, endless fields of corn stalks already appreciably beyond knee-height, still over a week ahead of the Fourth of July. Eventually development returned with a vengeance, the pastoral setting replaced by prairie of the urban variety, an indication of the difficulties that had been facing greater St. Louis for decades. Entire blocks occupied mostly by unruly grass dotted with the occasional sad edifice served as a paradoxical frontispiece to the iconic Gateway Arch, distinct and impressive against the backlight of the late afternoon western sky, its inverted U shape like a magnet, drawing us in.

Downtown St. Louis felt fleshed out and consequential, hearkening back to an era that had spanned over a century, during which it had been one of the ten biggest cities in the nation. Currently it was noticeably lacking the abundant surface parking lots that had so marred the once-dense cores of other metropoles whose primes had also come and gone. The practical drawback to this was the warren of one-way canyons intertwined around a raised freeway (an “urban renewal” trick to which St. Louis had not managed to remain impervious) that stood between us and our hotel, though my melodramatic struggle with an unfamiliar street grid elicited little sympathy from Bea, who adjudged it to be merely worthy of an eye roll.

A major component of the rationalization I’d cycled through in the run-up to our departure was deluding myself into believing that if I could drape a robotically platonic veneer over this journey, it would somehow assuage any and all prior transgressions and keep the nausea of guilt at arm’s length for just long enough to complete my mission. This wildly sophomoric notion was immediately put to the test upon checking in at the hotel, whereupon we were informed that they were sold out of two-bed rooms and could only offer us an accommodation equipped with a single king bed. The bemused clerk must have thought I was some kind of evangelical zealot, such was the inordinate shrillness of my reaction to the prospect of having to share a bed. She pledged to have a folding bunk rolled up to our room by the time we returned from dinner so that my recently puritanical conscience could rest easy, and so we were off to explore the city for the remainder of the evening.

From the inception of this harebrained scheme, St. Louis was a target I’d been particularly intrigued by. Habitually dumped on by the media and other purveyors of conventional wisdom, I had an inkling I might feel some extent of kinship with the Gateway to the West. After all, St. Louis was Rust Belt in spirit, if not in definition; the rate at which it had shed industrial jobs during the second half of the 20th century was comparable to that of Detroit or Cleveland. Furthermore, it was a bona fide river city whose geographic situation meant that it had developed earlier and a little more organically and compactly than virtually every other Midwestern or Great Plains population center.

We took the train—an honest-to-goodness light rail system!—out to a neighborhood that could have been plucked from any erudite locale back in the Northeast, home to a prestigious university and its renowned medical apparatus, at the edge of a grand park that owed much of its design and landscape to having hosted the 1904 World’s Fair.

The business district was lined with shops and restaurants that were not chains for the most part, though they may as well have been for how generic they appeared to be.

Sidewalks were crammed with tables and chairs so that the doctors and attorneys and bankers and aspirants to those lucrative professions could gorge themselves al fresco on a warm Friday night.

A congenially sterile plaza showed off dancing fountains, synchronized with pulsating light effects.

Splendorous mansions, some dating back to the Gilded Age, lurked down semiprivate side streets defended by ornate, vestigial gates.

These were all the hallmarks of the milquetoast, affluent urbanity I’d come to know and content in.

Lacking creative inspiration after our first wearying day on the road, we dined at a bland but adequate Irish pub. Absurdly, I felt weird selecting a beer to pair with my dinner, as if such an innocuous act would somehow tip the badly calibrated moral scales of my quest to maintain a detached, monastic veil into something more pernicious: Young Man and Young Woman Enjoy Food and Libation Together. We hopped the MetroLink back Downtown, where my cot awaited me.

***

One of a great many weaknesses that has been known to saddle me is a tendency, when left to my own devices, to sleep until an unhealthily tardy hour. On the first morning of any momentous trip, however, I inevitably burst awake, aided only by dopamine, at the crack of dawn. That Saturday in St. Louis, possibly assisted by the flimsiness of my sleeping arrangement, was no exception. My theoretical plan was for us to knock out a couple of quintessential tourist must-sees before hitting the asphalt: ascending to the top of the Gateway Arch before embarking on an old-fashioned riverboat jaunt on the Mighty Mississippi. Now roused, I figured I could wander Downtown on foot to kill time until the Arch’s public operating hours began. Bea, a naturally early riser, stirred into life despite my efforts to keep my puttering about the room at an imperceptible decibel and volunteered to join me on my hike.

Off we traipsed, past the Old Courthouse, the very building where Dred Scott—and by extension, all who looked like him—had been repeatedly dehumanized by the bureaucratic levers of power that were established as key to our self-anointed Model of Just Democracy. The sun’s apparent sluggishness to clamber above the imposing silhouette of the Gateway Arch was deceiving; it was evident in the rapid fleeing of whatever mercy had been massaged into the air overnight that the yellow orb was soon going to exact its asperity on this part of the world, much as it had been doing for the bulk of June. By the end of the month, all of the territory that we were meant to traverse would be officially labeled “abnormally dry,” if not slapped with a full-on drought.

We followed the Gateway Mall, that rare example of a relatively worthwhile outcome of the willful destruction of urban fabric. Its one-block-wide swath of deliberately composed green space, accentuated frequently by monuments, sculptures, fountains, and handsome civic institutions, felt more like an appropriate aesthetic respite from the city center’s bejeweled towers and flow of street-level activity than a jarring intrusion to them, as can all too easily wind up the result of such projects.

Here, too, were reminders of the manifold problems continuing to afflict St. Louis as they do so many cities, in the forms of prostrate bodies slumped awkwardly onto benches that were intentionally designed with the goal of making it maximally uncomfortable to do precisely that, begging troubling local questions of inequality and race well before they were thrust into the national spotlight via the flashpoint of Ferguson. Suddenly the mildly sore neck induced by my lumpy trundle wasn’t so bothersome.

Amidst it all, a larger-than-life bronze Pinocchio stood, arms outstretched, head inclined towards the eastern sky, optimistically greeting the rising sun with the requisite naivete of a marionette whose singularly consuming purpose was to become a human being. Even if he were to win whatever cosmic lottery it is that bulwarks a person against the slide into desperation that curling up for the night out in the open on a miserable pew entails, he’d still be liable to fall prey to the rest of life’s hilarious little predicaments. I stole a glance at Bea, busy inspecting a miniature iron boatman adorning a nearby water feature. You don’t actually want this, kid, was all the wisdom I could muster to impart.

***

Putting aside momentarily that it’s a de facto celebration of some of the more heinous episodes of American history, it does need to be said that the Gateway Arch is a remarkable piece of structural engineering. This had been fairly lost on me until I found myself standing almost directly underneath its stainless steel swoop, delicate in its simplicity yet robust in the staggering grandiosity of its scale, demonstrated by the comparatively ant-like dots frolicking around one of its hulking legs that were, it turned out, a family of fellow tourists. Conceived by the Finnish-American Eero Saarinen in those heady, imperious years following Allied victory in the Second World War, by the time it was finally constructed in the 1960s it still must have seemed a work of total science fiction.

We descended below the grass lawn to the Arch Visitor Center, administered by the National Park Service, where we purchased tickets to ride what I thought was rather quizzically referred to as a “tram” to the observation deck at the structure’s apex. Our beat-the-rush gambit was nullified somewhat by the incontrovertible facts of a summer weekend, meaning we had to wait about thirty minutes for our designated tram departure. This gave us the chance to quickly browse the Museum of Westward Expansion encompassed by the Visitor Center, which I found engaging and informative on par with the lofty standards the NPS has set for itself, albeit disheartening in its glorification of a mindset that led to the marginalization—if not outright eradication—of entire cultures, among other deeply tragic ramifications.

Though it’s impossible to look past the terrible domino effect that was set into motion by Manifest Destiny, I couldn’t help but instinctively unearth a hint of romance in any number of the finer-grain, individual stories of pioneers from that era. I flattered myself to imagine the emotional forces that would have been at play for someone to uproot themselves and strike out for an uncertain future in a barely sketched out land were not all that dissimilar to those compelling me to get in a car and drive thousands of miles at the risk of indelibly scarring relationships with people I purported to care about. Of course, I was blessed with a McDonald’s every half-dozen miles or so to suit my soft-bodied modern sensibilities and ensure that I didn’t have to go out and shoot live animals to survive on my trek west.

Our slot to climb to the top of the Arch rolled around and we gathered outside the tram, which was really a series of eight cylindrical, windowless five-seat compartments that more closely resembled a 1950s conception of the industrial tumble dryer of the future than anything intended to convey humans. Upwards we smoothly chugged, a four-minute transit that offered glimpses of the behemoth’s metallic entrails through narrow, vertical plexiglass panes in the capsule’s door. Slowing to a halt, we were deposited in the parabola’s zenith, approximately 620 dizzying feet from the ground below. A carpeted hallway gently sloped to follow the curve of the monument’s design and was lined with squat, recessed horizontal apertures that evoked the gun ports of a wooden schooner and were not nearly at eye height, necessitating one to crook their torso at a 45-degree angle to be able to peer out and take in the views.

We duly obliged, first sliding along the western side overlooking Downtown and the sprawl of the city beyond, then circling back to set our gaze east, from whence we’d come. I scanned the Illinois horizon in vain for the protruding shape of Cahokia, the preserved remnants of perhaps the most extraordinary example of an American Indian metropolis. It flourished between the 11th and 14th centuries and at its peak is believed to have been larger in population than contemporaneous London. Alas, its massive mounds were invisible in the fossil fuel-aided haze. White man’s suffocation of all others in pursuit of technological advancement persists unabated a millennium later.

We rappelled down the opposite stanchion and set off for the riverside to catch our paddle-wheel tour. As we approached the water’s edge, we could tell something was amiss. For one thing, there was no riverboat dock . . . because it was submerged under a drastically engorged Mississippi. As lethargic and harmless as it had appeared from the safety of the Gateway Arch’s crow’s nest, Old Man River was, in fact, angry and swollen, riding well over its artificial banks. The inundation, spurred by conditions over a thousand miles further west, presented a perplexing contradiction during those desiccated weeks. A hastily erected sign brusquely announced the cancellation of all leisure cruises on the river for the foreseeable future.

The question this posed to us was what to do with the two hours that had been unceremoniously shoved back into our pockets. One option was to get an early start on the day’s tire tread—usually not a wrong choice—but I felt something was gnawingly missing from my experience of St. Louis, something a little more authentic than the tourist traps or the hyper-hygienic environs from the night before.

Bea didn’t require much convincing, so we hoofed it south down Broadway, past the ballpark and through a no-man’s land of parking lots and messy concrete highway interchange flyovers. Just when we might have been beginning to wonder what on earth the aim here was, we came upon a long, skinny, low-set, wall-less structure lined with stalls from which vendors were dispensing all manner of fruits, vegetables, meats, and other goods to a sizable throng.

This was the Soulard Market, in operation since 1779 according to a faded sign atop its pitched roof. The exterior porticos led to an H-shaped, renaissance-style brown brick grand hall where we bought chicken and dumplings from an old lady with a toothless grin and reveled in a staple of everyday St. Louis life. A brief foray into the eponymous neighborhood made me even more glad we’d bothered to investigate. Soulard was one of the oldest residential areas in the city, a melting pot for the Europeans of varying backgrounds—French, Spanish, German—who had arrived at this point near the confluences of great rivers.

As we perused the leafy rows of brick-clad attached houses, no cohesive business district materialized. Rather, it was the corner units that tended to carry the commercial weight, often occupied by some independent entity, frequently a bar or saloon advertising live blues and jazz. I regretted not being able to spend the rest of the weekend hanging out in Soulard, but there were too many miles yet to cover—a quandary that, I’ve since learned, will never cease to be the case.

Across the Plains of Texas, Prelude

A 2,000-mile road trip with a lover scorned . . .

. . . what could possibly go right?

“Two people are alley cats; we have an unhappy cat
He is restless, needs attention, loses patience, seeks affection”

A drive from northeastern Ohio to El Paso, Texas, through nearly two thousand miles of nothing but the results of the American experiment, marinating in its vast petri dish for going on two and a half centuries. Such an effort ought not to be left to one person to endure on their own, I had told myself.

That dubious chivalry was all I needed to decide it would somehow be anything other than a shockingly inappropriate idea to undertake a cross-country road trip alone with a girl who I'd met just weeks earlier, when doing so meant willfully waving aside the distress such a decision would rightfully cause in my relationship with my significant other, who had remained back at home while I completed my undergraduate degree a few hours away.

There was substantial overlap in our respective circles of friends and acquaintances. Over a span of three years, Bea and I had attended a number of the same social gatherings—on two different continents, in fact—and we figured out later on that we had even been in the same room at the same moment on multiple occasions. Yet somehow, we had never knowingly crossed paths. Then, in that mischievous streak bordering on sadism that it so loves to flaunt, fate intervened to correct the fluke of our avoidance two months before we were slated to leave Ohio for good.

In the all too brief period between my pledge to act as copilot for her return home to West Texas and our designated departure date, we accidentally grew dangerously close, developing an intimacy that any decent person in my position would have have consciously acted to head off. A kiss, stolen in a doorway at a fuzzy, mostly forgotten apartment party snowballed in short order into flimsy excuses for staying out late and clandestine predawn escapes so as not to arouse suspicions from inquisitive roommates.

I knew, deep down, that the charade would eventually have to come to an end. I gutlessly chose to wait and use what I figured—or, more accurately, what I desperately hoped would be the natural parachute that the culmination of our journey would provide. In spite of an escalating series of confrontations with the Girl Back Home, I defiantly and cruelly decreed that I would still be going forward with the trip. I submitted as my justification solely that it would be wrong to desert someone to execute a colossal task without crucial assistance that had been promised.

My most honest rationale, however, arose from far more egocentric roots than this grotesquely twisted altruism, or even the genuine affection that I had undeniably come to feel for Bea. At its crux, my motivation was purely self-serving: I just desperately wanted the adventure. Hell, I'd convinced myself that I needed it.

The unquantifiable privilege of having gotten to live for four months in the foothills of the Swiss Alps the previous spring had injected a daily dose of wanderlust directly into my veins. Since returning stateside, the ennui of my little corner of the globe had once again descended upon me like an allergenic blanket of pollen.

A final academic year spent trapped in an unremarkable college town in the hinterland of several asphyxiated Rust Belt cities. A summer job in the low-wage morass of a local amusement park, night after night of accepting soggy dollar bills tugged from the nether regions of bathing suits and bras and dishing out sweatshop-produced stuffed animals if some inane feat of menial skill was successfully achieved. A relationship, initially born of a newfound confidence the likes of which had eluded me for so much of my young adulthood, but perpetuated a year on out of comfort and concern that its dissolution would reverse what I feared had been fragile gains in self-esteem.

The way I saw it, this Groundhog Day existence lay like a pit of mud under the tread of the vehicle whose engine had been immutably revved by my once-in-a-lifetime experience overseas. I was finding it impossible to accelerate away; any attempt resulted in a whining skid that yielded nothing more than the acrid stench of overtaxed rubber. In this potential odyssey with Bea I saw the winch that would haul me from my bog of tedium.

Never before had I been presented with the opportunity to roam between the Mississippi and the Rockies. An entire third of the country, empty pages in the gazetteer of my mind, waiting to be filled in with scribbled observations and anecdotes. It was a drive that could feasibly have taken as little as two and a half days, but in my single-mindedness I commandeered the planning process and devised a much more leisurely itinerary that would span a full five days and four nights.

Meanwhile, the weather turned, summer's stifling air bringing with it a deep-seated inkling that this was a season of infinite possibility. It welled up from the depths of childhood nostalgia for those carefree years when with the heat and humidity tagged along what seemed, to an unjaded boy, like unparalleled liberty. This feeling only further primed my heart with aching anticipation for my forthcoming quest.

And so I counted down to my flight, whittling away the seemingly interminable procession of sticky nights at the park, Lee Greenwood's cloying jingoism emanating from loudspeakers and washing over the concourses strewn with powdered sugar pared from overloaded funnel cakes. And then, at last, one morning towards the close of June I was gone, Buckeye State bound, with the sun at my back.

Bea's car, a blue crossover that she had christened "Bubble," was ready and waiting, every available inch of space occupied by compression bags crammed with most of her earthly possessions. A cargo pod strapped precariously to the roof handled the remainder. She had by then correctly sussed me out as a selfish coward and now viewed my presence through sideways eyes as a necessary evil for splitting the daunting number of hours behind the wheel to come and certainly not as a worthy companion for the ensuing week.

She drove first. Rather anti-climactically—not to mention rudely—I abandoned her to Ohio's monotony and slept most of the way to Cincinnati.

How not to do the PCH

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The sea lions were the first domino to fall; I simply had to see them. Seven and a half years previously, I'd spent literally hours marveling at the the pinnipeds that call the floating docks at the end of Pier 39 home, naively joyous in their comical, limb-less mannerisms and cartoonish interactions with one another. Presently, after the better part of three days in San Francisco, I couldn't forgive myself if I left without beholding them once again. Not long ago the entire herd had abruptly and mysteriously vanished, but they had been gradually trickling back, and even the relative skeleton crew that was hanging out on an overcast late December morning made for an entertaining scene.

Despite a laudably early start to this excursion, I didn't get back to the hostel until a bit after nine, by which point the chain reaction of tardiness had been set irrevocably in motion. The ladies, to their credit, were mostly ready to go; it was Chuck, without me physically there to nag at him, who was a bit more dilatory. Then we all took turns remembering something crucial (phone chargers, passports, etc.) that we'd left in our bunks and before we knew it, it was the other side of ten when we at last began the march down to the BART station.

The train ran smoothly enough, but at the airport we fell victim to the golden rule of renting a car (a close relative to the Law of Bank Teller Queues): You'll inevitably get in line just seconds after someone who knows precisely how to occupy an inordinate amount of the clerk's time. Adding insult to injury, the rental company ran out of appropriately human-scale cars and oh so generously handed me a "free upgrade" to a Chevy Malibu, which had to be one of the worst U.S.-manufactured models to materialize from the period immediately post-auto industry bailout. Armed with this unwieldy metal box, we finally emerged from SFO's rental car garage at about noon, officially bound for the City of Angels.

Even in an ideally balmy climate such as coastal California's, the escalating latitude means that winter still rears its ugly head, most tangibly oppressive in the stinginess with which it permits the sun's rays to grace the surface of the Earth. At midday the clock was already ticking, conceding about five hours of natural light to cover a drive that, if done right, requires closer to twice that. I had envisioned a leisurely meander along the Pacific, with stops at any number of rewarding attractions on the way: the famous boardwalk in Santa Cruz; Steinbeck's Monterey with its historic Cannery Row and renowned aquarium; short hikes to breathtaking vistas dotting the Big Sur; the Hearst Mansion, arguably the most extravagant residence ever built in this country; the string of 18th-century Spanish missions scattered down the coast; Solvang, a Danish village plopped in the middle of Southern California; the funky fusion of college town and beach town that is Santa Barbara. Including breaks for lunch and dinner, such a plan, if executed properly, would have seen us into L.A. around ten that night.

Of course, that was all predicated on my original pipe dream of having been locked and loaded in the rental car by ten in the morning. Instead, given the inescapability of Murphy's Law when traveling in a small group, with a pre-root canal level of dread I was now confronting the notion of scrapping the Pacific Coast Highway altogether. It was a miserable thought, one that I mentally cudgeled into oblivion almost instantaneously. Driving the PCH was the essential crux of this trip. You can't be a card-carrying American Road Tripper until you've done it. The primary alternative, though appreciably less time-consuming, would have mandated imprisonment on Interstate 5, hundreds of miles of a hermetically sealed, hyper-speed conveyor belt through the desolate, sun-stroked Central Valley.

Not a chance in hell.

***

That autumn had been a time of transition for me. Earlier in the year I’d fallen out of the only serious, long-term romantic relationship I’d ever been involved in up to that point in my life, and being single for the first time since I’d finished school and become gainfully employed brought me to an intersection of free time, money, and restlessness that allowed me to be footloose and fancy-free in a way that I never previously could.

I celebrated by squirting lighter fluid onto the smoldering kindling beneath my latently itchy feet. A summer of living peripatetically whenever the opportunity presented itself metastasized into more October and November nights spent resting my head on pillows in far-off beds than in my own. Cleveland. The Finger Lakes. Washington, D.C. Nashville. Toronto. Santa Fe. New York City. Portland, Oregon. Chicago. This degree of itinerancy only served to exacerbate the burn; as the holidays approached, I began to formulate plans for something more ambitious. The winner I settled on was a jaunt down California State Route 1, from the Bay to L.A.

The cherry on top was arranging for my younger brother, Chuck, to join me. It wasn't that I'm averse to traveling solo—that couldn't be further from the truth—but rather, the nagging realization that I hadn't spent much quality time with Chuck recently. We'd had a pretty close childhood despite being nearly four years apart in age, but as we grew up, we discovered that we were about as fundamentally different people as siblings can be.

Chuck was the extrovert, the popular one, the partier, a garrulous fish in water when immersed in a crowd. I was the introvert, impatient with and drained by extensive interaction with most humans save for a small, exclusive inner circle of friends. Chuck: Quick to get his hackles up and fight back in the face of any perceived slight. Me: Laissez-faire to a fault, always preferring to err on the side of letting things roll off my back, not infrequently to my own detriment.

College years heightened already-diverging paths and personalities with significant gaps in time and geography, and deep down I feared how hard it might be to reverse an ever-increasing distance in my relationship with my only sibling. With Chuck on board for this trip, I felt things were aligning to make it one hell of an adventure, the kind whose exuberant designs are only exceeded by the reality of it.

In order to maximize our time on the West Coast, we departed on Saturday morning, Christmas Eve, dodging questions of how we could be so soulless as to feel no overwhelming sentimentality about not spending the holidays with our kin. It was a new low for the grandsons of a pastor. My retort, and I earnestly thought it was a fair one, was that 25 family Christmases out of the 26 for which I'd been alive wasn't a bad record.

I had convinced myself that wasn't such a callous way to look at it, but then that Christmas took on a whole different perspective to our family. No sooner had we landed at SFO than Chuck and I received the extremely sobering news that Uncle Roger, our Dad's brother-in-law, had lost his battle with pancreatic cancer while we'd been in transit. Cancer of the pancreas is one of those most grim varieties to begin with, but the swiftness with which it had overtaken him stunned us all. Having been diagnosed not even three months earlier, he took a turn for the worse around Thanksgiving and then another towards the close of Advent. A prognosis that had given him months to cling to was, on the night before Christmas, brusquely shrunk to mere hours.

As we lugged our backpacks to the airport BART station, my mind ran the gamut of loss-related emotions: grief, that someone who we had always taken for granted as being part of our lives was simply not going to be there anymore; anger, that his two college-aged kids, our cousins, were all of a sudden not going to have a father and all of the innumerable and irreplaceable things that a father provides for his children no matter how old they are, but especially at such a critical stage in their ascent to adulthood; gratitude, that we had been fortunate to call family such an intelligent, conscientious, and principled man (even if we didn't exactly see eye to eye on a number of particular principles); and guilt, that we had selfishly insisted on being apart from our family during what should be a season of togetherness.

On that last count, I was assuaged a tiny bit by the knowledge that Uncle Roger was something of an adventurer himself, having sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, among other exploits. For as little as it could possibly mean to anyone, I wanted to believe that this trip was dedicated to him in a way, with its almost unscriptably perfect weather from start to finish and an inimitable cast of characters that included old friends and serendipitous new entries to our lives, loved ones we'd talk to every day for the foreseeable future and passing acquaintances we'd probably never hear from again. Not to mention the endless reel of highlights, surprises around every corner, and, to borrow a phrase from our late uncle, plain old memorable moments.

From the point where my conscious memory starts trickling into existence up until I finished high school, my parents, my brother, and I, like so many landlocked Keystone Staters, would spend a midsummer week at the Jersey Shore with Uncle Roger and his family. Every single evening, without fail, we would not be permitted to abscond from the dinner table until we had revealed, at Uncle Roger's behest, what the "most memorable moment" of our day had been. Sometimes the group assembled around the table would contain various interlopers, family friends or fellow beach-going vacationers from down the block, but absolutely no one was granted amnesty from this nightly ritual. It was a terrific way to remind us all to keep our eyes open and to appreciate the beauty each day inevitably bestowed on us fortuitous fools.

It was clear, then, that the very least I could do to honor Uncle Roger’s memory was to make damn sure this would be a journey so superb that, when it was all said and done, there would be no shortage of moments that could plead a case for “most memorable.”

***

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Roadfaring at last, our initial stop was to be in Half Moon Bay, where Chuck had arranged to meet a guy with whom he had studied in Barcelona the previous spring. This should have been the simplest of tasks, an easy thirty-minute cruise from the airport, except it was Chuck's job to relay our specific rendezvous spot, and the odd, zero-sum trait distribution between us had gifted me with a hundred percent of the "map wonk" attribute. Trying to extract comprehensible directions from him could often be the equivalent of asking a blind man to describe a Van Gogh. When his lack of innate navigational nous gets compounded by the fact that he's trying to disseminate information from a third party, things are liable to happen like accidentally winding up in the driveway of the Ritz-Carlton and getting accosted by a whole procession of valets and bellhops, while feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the idea that anyone could need this many people attending to them when they travel.

When we finally did locate Chuck's friend, the reunion dragged on into the early afternoon, but as one who is intimately familiar with the bonds that can be forged over the shared experience of living in a foreign country with someone, I couldn't in good conscience pull him away. The ladies, for their part, patiently smoked a couple of cigarettes to pass the time without complaint on this windy bluff overlooking the Pacific. It helped that Half Moon Bay was quite easy on the eye, beaches tucked at the bottom of cliffs, providing a sense of seclusion for those who pick their way down to them. The vibrant red and green asserted by the mantle of wild paintbrush flowers added a festive comportment to the scene.

At Santa Cruz the road drifted away from the sea and became a freeway, rendering the subsequent forty-some miles distinctly unexceptional. It's possible to fly past Monterey and Carmel without ever knowing they're there, which is what we did, eliciting a twinge of regret. Alas, we were already staring down the barrel of having to make up far too much distance after dark. Right when the lull of mundanity was threatening to overcome us, the expressway ended and the ground suddenly sloped off to unveil the verdant Carmel Valley. It was the first unequivocally inimitable moment of the ride, the moment that fully hammered home that I was rolling down the world-famous Pacific Coast Highway. Shortly thereafter, the road reduced to two lanes in preparation for the following hundred miles of dizzying, coast-hugging glory.

The one upside to having gotten a late start was that the fog that treacherously clings to the shore through most mornings had retreated to a thin layer of haze in the afternoon sky by the time we flitted in, leaving us with an unobstructed view of the starkly defined shoreline and the sheer drops to the boundless expanse of the sparkling ocean. Windows were slid down in celebration, all the better to facilitate the dual sensory thrill of basking in the oblique warmth of the winter sun while sucking into our lungs the refreshing chill wafting up from the water below.

The PCH is so omnipresent amongst the superlatives doled out by Those Who Know, the compilers of travel guides and the composers of Internet listicles, it would have almost been forgivable for this drive to even marginally fail to live up to the massive hype that precedes it. Yet no apology was necessary. Instead, it was us who were indebted to this deity of asphalt and yellow paint. Twenty miles went by, simultaneously feeling like they took hours to traverse but still like they disappeared all too quickly, the magic mark of a truly worthwhile drive.

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***

I'll stop myself just short of falling into the clichéd trap of professing that "I left my heart in San Francisco." Rather, I'll suggest the analogy that San Francisco was my first lover, the older, more experienced lady who seduced me as an impressionable, wide-eyed teenager and made me see the world in an entirely new light from then on. She tapped into a lust I didn't even know I possessed, a lust for this planet and every place on it.

The summer before I turned seventeen, a cousin was getting married in Oregon and my parents decided to craft a whole West Coast trip out of it. I was in the throes of my nastiest bout with adolescent angst. Everything my parents wanted me to do was, by default, an intentional torment inflicted upon me. This included family vacations, on which a disproportionate share of our disposable income was spent. I could try to blame this dearth of curiosity and gratitude on those dangerously proliferating hormones, making me pine only for being at home where I could wait for social invitations that rarely came and desperately try to set up dates that routinely fell through. The truth, though, is that I had pretty much always been an unappreciative little shit.

Then, during those few, brisk August days in San Francisco, it was like a switch had flipped. Everything about her completely mesmerized me. The climbs, the views, the fog, the urbanity, the ethereal undercurrent humming below the ground, discernible only to those who seek it out, of a city that has seen a little bit of everything, triumph and tragedy alike, crammed into a history spanning less than two centuries. For the first time, the total package of a place came together for me in a way that would leave my mind forever yearning.

It was with no small measure of trepidation that I returned in my mid-twenties, now far more seasoned and world-weary than I had been as a teen. Would she look the same to me? Would I summon undue disappointment by noticing blemishes and scars that I didn't before, when I had been so caught up in the heady exhilaration of giving myself over to her ministrations? Or perhaps she herself may have changed, grown more cynical and less romantic to keep pace in this constantly and violently evolving epoch of greed and self-interest. The next sixty-odd hours would answer these questions; whether the answers would prove satisfying or not was another riddle altogether.

I did receive a promising hint almost immediately upon entering the city, as we hoofed it up California Street from the BART station, following the streetcar tracks. We hooked a right and in short order arrived at the five-way intersection at the terminus of Columbus Avenue, where we were summarily greeted by the iconic Transamerica Pyramid rising into the dusky sky, offering itself to us for the first of what would be countless times. At this point I was worn out, both physically, from all-day plane travel, and emotionally, from the awful news that had been awaiting us upon landing. I've found, though, that there's invariably a singular moment near the beginning of any journey, a moment where debilitating exhaustion totally melts away and is replaced with nothing but excitement and anticipation. On this trip, that sight was such a watershed for me.

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I've always loved the Transamerica Pyramid. In all honesty, it's one of my favorite buildings in the world. The turn of the twentieth century gifted us its sumptuous neo-Gothic towers, followed by the handsome Art Deco masterpieces of the 1920s and 30s, while the modern era has bestowed upon us its gleaming, curvy, glassy behemoths. I have a soft spot, though, for the skyscraper that manages to acquit itself well despite coming out of the architecturally forgettable middle decades of the 20th century, which spewed out aesthetically numbing concrete and steel boxes by the dozen. What the Pyramid does with notable effect is tickle my fetish for structures that act as "beacons" in that they are visible from practically anywhere in their surrounding vicinity and thus can act as a North Star of sorts for the directionally (or sobrietally) challenged wayfarer.

This affection started during my short-lived fling with Boston, where I was living a brief walk from the hulking Prudential Center. "The Pru," not to mince words, is an unattractive edifice by just about any standard, but damned if it can't be picked out from seemingly everywhere within a five-mile radius. From Cambridge to Chinatown, from Somerville to Southie, it served as a remarkably handy navigational aide for many a drunken sojourn back to the dorms in those dark ages before the prevalence of smart phones. San Francisco's famous topography keeps the Transamerica Pyramid from being quite as ubiquitous, but the random nature with which it will suddenly pop up after rounding a corner or ascending a flight of stairs contributes an additional sheen of charm and mystique.

Coming upon the Transamerica Pyramid had given me a visceral charge, but it was seeing Kearny Street launch into a sharp grade on the other side of Broadway on its way up Telegraph Hill, so steep that staircases aligned the road in lieu of sidewalks, that caused me to positively well up with giddiness. After the better part of a decade, I was back in the city that first cracked open my passion for roaming, and I had two precious days to do nothing but wander it to my heart's content.

Uncle Roger, accomplished mariner that he had been, must have pulled some strings with Neptune up there, for we awoke on Christmas morning to an absolute San Francisco treat (and I'm not talking about Rice-a-Roni). If there had been any of the requisite morning fog, it had already been burned away by the time we rolled out of bed, and the sun was beating down on all corners of the city. On Boxing Day the miasma lingered only a bit longer. To luck into such idyllic weather was nothing short of divine.

We took full advantage, traipsing upwards of 23 miles on foot, by my count, during the extent of our visit. We tried to strike a balance between the touristy: ascending the "most winding" portion of Lombard Street, courting the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square, record shopping in Haight-Ashbury, a few too many exorbitantly priced scotches on the rocks, washed down with bottles of Anchor Steam, at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill (later expelled, in Chuck's case, on the topiaries in front of the building's grand, embassy-esque facade)—and the somewhat less touristy: an afternoon nap in Alta Plaza Park, perusing the beguiling curves and unheralded vantage points of Forest Hill (a place so painfully monied that the neighborhood association's annual big-to-do was a chamber music concert), guzzling foul cocktails in Chinatown dives.

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What I discovered on both sides of that coin, even if I wasn’t fully cognizant of it at the time, was a city teetering on the brink of selling its soul. Take, for instance, Hayes Valley. The rare, mid-90s vintage walking map of San Francisco that I had been toting around with me despite its obsolescence because it was so excellently and expertly designed barely even recognized Hayes Valley as an extant place. This was residual from the era of the Central Freeway, which had cut straight through the heart of Hayes Valley and brought with it the blight and decay that tends to follow when large chunks of urban fabric are wiped away in favor of giant concrete slabs. This map would have been printed just several years removed from the demolition of the Central Freeway after it was severely damaged in the October 1989 Prieta Loma earthquake, before much development could have risen to replace it.

And so the cartographers could be absolved for their lack of foresight in not prognosticating that two decades beyond the publication of their map, Hayes Valley would be a shining example of a neighborhood revived, almost literally from the ashes . . . for better or for worse. After all, to whom go the spoils? We strolled down Hayes Street, eyes bulging at the rows of unique eateries and shops that had sprung up, mostly within the prior decade. We were wooed by a finely manicured, every-detail-meticulously-planned green space occupying the former footprint of the freeway. It was here that we ought to have palpably felt the looming specter of the impending takeover by an unapologetically capitalist, technology-fueled dominion.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious to recognize the tendrils of the New San Francisco snaking in to grab hold of undervalued real estate, for soon there would no longer be such a thing. Community stalwarts forced from homes they could no longer afford to live in despite having occupied them for a veritable lifetime. The private buses offered by corporations to whisk their elite-educated, upwardly mobile employees off to sheltered campuses miles down the peninsula. Schoolkids chased from neighborhood parks by packs of twentysomethings armed with writs from the municipal powers that be. Gorgeous and stately old Victorians subdivided again and again so that they could be uncomfortably crammed with single-minded young strivers—in some cases, sleeping in closets and storage spaces, putting a grotesque twist on what Steinbeck affectionately referred to as his “attic days” in San Francisco, a now-seemingly fictional time when the city willingly accepted the tired and poor.

Across town in Haight-Ashbury, a similarly grimace-inducing tale was being spun. Once a genuine hotbed of countercultural revolution, Haight-Ashbury had become a shadow of itself. Taken in a vacuum, it's still a pretty darn cool and interesting neighborhood; Haight Street was lined with a wildly varied assortment of independent commercial ventures behind attention-demandingly colorful storefronts. But what remained of its once-organic funkiness felt largely artificial, intently designed to lure the patronage of preteen-escorting Gen-Xers. There’s no small amount of irony in the probability that some percentage of these grew up in households where “those long-haired queers” were relentlessly mocked, the very same ones without whom Haight-Ashbury would not have achieved the symbolic prominence that it bears to this day.

Sadly, we found that historic resonance was obfuscated by a neighborhood that had incorrigibly devolved into a gimmicky honeypot. One particularly egregious illustration of this phenomenon was the model of a long-necked dinosaur, painted bright orange with round black spots, placed outside of a shop—apropos of absolutely nothing, it must be said, considering the portal it guarded was that of a high-end designer shoe store. Maybe my skepticism here is over the top, but it struck me as a desperate attempt to exude the grooviness for which Haight-Ashbury became so deservedly renowned during its heyday. A polka-dotted dinosaur! So random and classic! Now please fork over hundreds of dollars for footwear.

Even the hippies themselves seemed to have transformed into cold-blooded cronies of capitalism; everyone that remotely looked as though they may have been an honest-to-god survivor of the Summer of Love ended up trying to sell us drugs, sometimes in a vaguely menacing manner. It was unavoidably disheartening to see a place that holds such deep meaning and social significance dissolve into such a tryhard caricature of itself.

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And they even have the gall to insist people not sit on it.

And yet we were guilty of hardly putting up any resistance to the thrall of extreme gentrification, as we savored our hearty Christmas dinner of artisanal pot pie and craft beer where once a monstrous highway blotted out the sky. Despite the ominous presence of these myriad warning signs, I remained under the spell of the proud lady, deeply entranced by her siren’s song.

Her essence was embodied in the delightfully normal, boring, everyday activity of the Inner Sunset’s Irving Street business district, in sharp contrast with Downtown’s tourist-packed chain shopping, the upscale boutique-lined boulevards of Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights, the nouveau hipness of the reconstituted Hayes Valley, or the contrived nostalgia of latter-day Haight-Ashbury; in the surreal serenity of Washington Square on Christmas night, exuding more Yuletide peace than any elaborate light display or coating of snow could; in the tranquility of a Russian Hill overlook at dawn as I watched the sun embark on its daily struggle to defeat the thick, woolen blanket of clouds nestled snugly over the Bay; and in the winking of the Transamerica Pyramid’s luminescent crown, performing its beaconly duties in guiding us as we stumbled home to our bunks. Most importantly, she was providing a platform for the opportunity to break bread and enjoy some adult libations with my kid brother. Everything she had shared with me, I could now share with him.

And, it turned out, she had one more trick up her sleeve. As if she knew we would soon have to part ways once again and that this time it would be done so with creeping doubt about what feelings I would hold for her in the future, her gift to us was to play matchmaker, coaxing me out of my shell and introducing us to two of our fellow holiday refugees at the hostel. Emma was a vivacious Aussie on her way to spend a semester in Mexico and Tesh was an infectiously upbeat college student who hailed from South Africa. They had serendipitously linked up and become impromptu traveling companions and were now trying to figure out how they would make it to Los Angeles in the next few days.

This was my cue to swoop in and reveal that Chuck and I would be renting a car for the express purpose of driving to L.A. It was a chance to spontaneously come to the aid of fellow wanderers in need, the kind of act that most genuinely exemplifies the the true rambler and his craft, something I constantly aspire to. Surprising even myself, without hesitation I offered them the option of hitching a ride with us. A road trip in the company of total strangers! Who said the spirit of the highway was dead?

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***

Past the Point Sur Lighthouse, cutting a lonely figure on its spit of land jutting into the ocean, the road bent inland and ascended up into the Big Sur itself. The name was ascribed by Spanish colonial explorers to the wild region of the Santa Lucia Mountains that thrust precipitously out of the water and lend this segment of the PCH its unique beauty. Not that the spectacular, to-and-fro seaside route was getting dull by any means, but the pine-forested respite of the Big Sur's interior yielded a temporary, albeit enjoyable change of scenery.

By this point, my hostages were beginning to get a bit restless as the result of a tyrannical decree upon leaving Half Moon Bay that we would not stop to eat until we'd seen some portion of the acclaimed coastal terrain before we ran out of daylight. Now that we had checked that off, I was finding it increasingly harder to ignore my own hunger pangs, so at the first little cluster of shops/galleries/eateries that we passed after climbing into the Big Sur uplands, I relented and pulled in.

California 1 was interspersed dismayingly frequently with these outcroppings of yuppie comfort all through the Big Sur. Chow down on an overpriced, mediocre burger! Chase it with a generic frozen yogurt cone! Buy a bumper sticker to boast to all the world that you (like tens of millions of others) have blessed this road with your own rubber-wheeled benediction! All of these we were unable to refuse, of course, capitulating with a resigned smile. Our money was helping to propagate the prosperity of these ersatz environs that were straining to convey an atmosphere of quaint, rustic, log-cabin charm, even as they furtively reached a palm out to collect $200 for a bed for the night. Kerouac must be spinning in his grave. At least Tesh got to go and find a redwood tree to hug, a long-standing goal of hers.

Underwhelmed but reasonably sated after a hot meal, we departed as the light was already starting to fade from the eastern sky. Within ten minutes we had emerged from the woods into the rapidly advancing twilight as the road twisted back towards the coast. Then we rounded a bend and suddenly had the air forced from our lungs by a sunset so stunning I was compelled to veer onto a five-foot-wide dirt shoulder with only a chicken wire fence separating the Malibu from a disastrous insurance liability claim, just so we could soak it up.

It wasn't that the colors were exceptionally vivid or varied, it was simply the sheer scale of the tableau that made it so awe-inspiring. Watching the sun sink over something as infinite as the Pacific Ocean and seeing nothing but those pastels on the horizon made it seem, for an ephemeral spell, like the planet was stuck this way and that we would be perched on the very border between day and night for all eternity. Alas, the Earth did indeed continue to rotate us away from the giver of light, and we pressed on into the darkness.

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***

Gertrude Stein was referring to her childhood home of Oakland, California when she made her famous lament of "there is no there there," but I had theorized that it more aptly generalized modern Los Angeles, the poster child for uninhibited car-centric urban growth, whose precedent and success had paved the way for grotesqueries such as Houston and Phoenix to flourish.

I had been to Los Angeles once previously, a business trip at the opposite end of that same year. Taken as evidence together with this visit, I came to admit that the Stein-ism that had so succinctly captured my sneering preconceived notion of this megapolis was not entirely accurate. Although huge swaths of the region do suffer from a rash of deplorable placelessness, there are an ever-increasing number of worthwhile theres, wonderful havens of urbanity, scattered amongst greater L.A.'s incomprehensible maze of cities-within-cities.

The caveat is that many of those theres remain self-contained oases in the asphalt desert, realistically able to be reached only by two-ton, metal, pollution-vomiting camels. To its credit, L.A. has been trying to improve its situation; a few years prior, Angelenos had voted themselves a half-cent increase in sales tax largely for the explicit purpose of boosting public transportation. No matter how extensive the transit network becomes, though, it will still be hamstrung by the sheer distance between everything. Even the "express" bus from Santa Monica to Downtown Los Angeles takes upwards of an hour each way, and the subway line that's been carved to Santa Monica only shaves about fifteen minutes off of that.

Sadly, this all means that driving is left as the most practical and often the sole viable option for getting around. It's a process so ingrained in the culture of the metro that it has morphed into its own language, comprised of numerical sequences that represent the highways that need to be taken to reach a given destination: "the 5 to the 110 to the 105 to the 710," for example.

Fortunately, Chuck and I were lucky to have a hook-up in one of those theres, perhaps the most fun one of them all. An actor cousin happened to live right at the core of Venice Beach and had generously given us permission to crash at his place for the brief duration of our stay even though he'd be out of town. Venice, stocked with every desirable amenity within a foot-accessible radius, the added bonus of, you know, a huge beach, along with its inherent eccentricity, diversity, and all-around weirdness, was a Los Angeles there that I could actually fantasize about living in, myself.

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And so, twenty-four hours after witnessing that heartrendingly immense nightfall on the PCH, I was gazing at that same sun as it dipped behind the Santa Monica Mountains from the veranda of a cafe fronting the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Our passengers from the day before, Tesh and Emma, had joined us. On a lark I also extended an invitation to the elder brother of a good high school friend. Though I'd only met this sibling, who I'll call Ned, on maybe two other occasions, he enthusiastically rushed over to Venice with his girlfriend to complete the entourage.

The six of us were seated around a table on an open-air patio, plying ourselves with beer and burgers named for cultural luminaries (mine was called the “Timothy Leary,” presumably on account of the heap of sautéed mushrooms, albeit of a non-psychotropic variety, that adorned it) as the day's temperature gradually succumbed to starlight's cooler breeze floating in from the water. I made sure to consciously revel in the bliss of the ability to comfortably indulge in such an al fresco milieu on a winter evening, very much a novelty for me, given my Northeast-oriented life.

It was then that Ned revealed that he'd brought with him a certain type of digestif. The gang excitedly hustled to Ned's car, where the cannabis-infused Rice Krispies Treats were distributed surreptitiously, as California hadn't yet universally legalized the herb in those medieval days. I had more than dabbled in weed once upon a time, but up until that night I hadn't touched it in any form in years. This made me the group's resident square and thus the recipient of a well-intended warning from Ned: "Just so you know, this stuff packs a punch."

Gosh, I hadn't rolled over so easily in the face of peer pressure since I was a college freshman, but buoyed by the verve of the whole experience so far, I decided I wasn't going to not partake. Observing the others to gauge how much they were ingesting, I was quite careful to break off a sticky chunk not even half as big as each of theirs had been.

The first thing I noticed was that my beer tasted funny. We had moved on to the next bar, where I'd ordered one of my all-time favorites, a seasonal NorCal brew called Winter Solstice, and it seemed off somehow, flat and flavorless. I passed my pint glass to Ned to corroborate and after testing it he regarded me quizzically. All of a sudden I didn't want to be inside anymore. I felt claustrophobic and flushed, so I rushed back out onto the Boardwalk, where the bracing air was nothing short of holy on my prickling skin.

After sundown, the Venice Beach Boardwalk undergoes a demographic transition of sorts. Formal society migrates a few blocks inland to Main Street bars or tonier Santa Monica nightclubs, while the Boardwalk becomes populated with the assorted drifters, indigents, and other down-on-their-luckers who use the beach as an overnight campground. This was happening as I watched, now officially stoned.

"Joker!" called a man fashioning a bed of newspaper in the doorway of a kitsch purveyor, under one of the few Palladian arches remaining from Abbot Kinney's original turn-of-the-20th-century vision for his Venice of America resort.

"What!" came the response from some unseen warren hidden in the shadows cast by the palm trees across the Boardwalk.

"Hey, Joker!"

"Whaddya want!"

"You got a cigarette?"

A lumpy couple trudged past, wardrobes borrowed from Bedrock. Their gait was so labored I could not help but conceive, with my chemically-addled imagination, that they were being weighed down by heavy, ungainly tails. As they passed, snippets of their conversation reached my ears, but their voices, cracked and blistered, rendered it unintelligible to me in all but syntax, a new "Jabberwocky." This pseudo-alien language frightened me into realizing that this was not My World anymore, it was theirs. The privilege that comes with being a young, white, more or less financially secure American male handed every other time and place to me on a platter, cooked to order. But here I was just a voyeuristic interloper. The THC took hold of my conscience like a marionette and wagged its finger in admonishment: There but for the grace of god go I.

The others found me, stewing in my guilt, understandably mistaking it for the reticence of a fierce high. They attempted to formulate our next move. Another bar? Or perhaps some food? But I desperately did not want to go back indoors. An ambitious plan to hoof it to the Santa Monica Pier, whose technicolor lights blinked and gyred enticingly, was scrapped. Then a trepidatious mission across the sand to reach the edge of the shore was aborted in its nascent stages. Finally, Ned and the girls exhausted their patience with me and bailed to seek out a diner.

Chuck, bless him, hung with me long enough to make sure I wasn’t liable to do anything too foolish. He even procured a mug of water for me from our cousin’s apartment in a building called the Ellison, where an erstwhile UCLA film student and self-fancied poet named Jim purportedly used to sleep on the roof before fame and fortune opened their Doors and whirled him away on their raging currents. Left to my own devices, I stalked off down the “walk-street” that the Ellison adjoined. Venice possesses a series of narrow alleyways that are nominally streets in the eyes of the Postal Service but are free from motorized traffic, and in this moment I found their umbral enclosure strangely reassuring. Time could not keep track of me as I wandered this orthogonal labyrinth, idly wondering if Joker’s pal had managed to rustle up a smoke.

Daringly I followed one walk-street to its intersection with the nearest vehicular thoroughfare, Pacific Avenue. The road seemed to stretch on forever in an effect akin to a funhouse mirror trick. The glow emanated by the street lamps was a sinister lure, like one of those terrifying fish that dwell in the deepest ocean trenches, trying to bait me into getting too close to the cars that were flying by at a thousand miles an hour. It represented the return to My World, and approaching this precipice filled me with anxiety and dread. I turned back, retreating into the soothing darkness and seclusion of the walk-streets.

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***

The leisurely drive that had been so gratifying during the day became tedious without the ability to see any of the extraordinary landscape. The PCH's numerous hairpin curves, many of which carried vehicles to within mere inches of long vertical drops to rocky outcroppings in the frothing sea below, made it impossible to just accelerate away. The going was made even slower now and again by catching up to another car, weirdly usually some junky relic from decades ago, like an Oldsmobile Cutlass, say, whose operator was evidently adamant about maintaining a speed of 15 miles per hour or so below the posted maximum. Sometimes these unhurried drivers would have the courtesy to use the nearest pullout to let us pass. Sometimes they wouldn't, and the minutes began to pile up into the night.

As we progressed down the coast, the next item on the agenda was finding gas, as the Malibu, irritatingly inefficient for an automobile of its class, crept closer to empty. This bucolic region was not exactly a hotbed for gas stations, but we managed to stumble upon an outpost before the situation grew too dire. The relief was immediately nullified, however, when I rolled up and saw the astonishing price-per-gallon for regular: $4.99⁹⁹.

Unfortunately, I had no choice but to patronize these racketeers, since I had no idea when a further opportunity to refuel would come along, a fact that the proprietors had clearly succeeded at taking advantage of. Glowering, I thrust a cool Jackson into the clerk's palm, hoping that would buy us enough time to get to a place with more civilized gas prices.

South of the Big Sur, the PCH alternately detaches from, then returns to the coast as it runs towards its concurrence with U.S. 101 at San Luis Obispo. When I started to lose my accomplices to slumber, to entertain myself I invented the game of trying to guess whether the pitch-black void to my right was the ocean, or a field. As the car’s digital clock display ascended in the direction of midnight, I could only muster an apathetic ounce of disappointment upon realizing that I had completely missed the PCH’s re-divergence from 101.

For company, I did also have the assortment of CDs we'd acquired during San Francisco record store forays. The selection had been deliberately curated to represent what we felt would entail a quintessential West Coast road trip soundtrack. Chuck sang along to "40 Oz. to Freedom" while sucking on a tall boy of Pabst before eventually nodding off, leaving me in the quite capable hands of Messrs. Morrison, Nowell, Tweedy, and Q-Tip, to name a few.

The desertion of the others allowed me the solitude to ponder this inflection point in my own life. I had long struggled with the sensation of never being on top of things, never being out in front. Deep down I could acknowledge that no one my age had their shit together no matter how impressive of a veneer they may put on, but man, at twenty-five it was hard to escape frequently feeling like I was fifteen, perpetually guaranteed to do the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

Cataclysmic periods and events along the way had at least gifted me the self-awareness to recognize that it was an ongoing metamorphosis, even if it was an arduous, often nonlinear and even painful one. The person I wanted to be was an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, and it was a matter of finding the pieces and figuring out how they fit together, except far too often some pieces had slipped off the table and under the couch. Invariably the breakthroughs would come only when I stopped actively seeking them. Then the missing piece would reveal itself to have been right there on the rug, in plain sight the whole time.

I had sensed the tail end of that year building to one of those landmarks. The gathering snowball was present in all of the places and spaces I'd been over the preceding months. It was in the seductive shadows of Georgetown mews and Adams Morgan's neon rays late at night. It was in the crystalline cascades of Watkins Glen's ancient, divine geology. It was in the glass floor of the CN Tower, humanity's attempt at a pneumatic tube to heaven above, halted at its height, I prefer to think, not because of the limits of structural physics but because what would a correspondence with god impart that an unimpeded hundred-mile view cannot? It was in the storm clouds massing over Pedernal mesa, muse to Georgia O'Keeffe, keeping a watchful vigil over the Chama. And it was certainly culminating in this California romp.

The final leg of this journey would be set out in the West Texas town of El Paso, where I'd fallen in love with a Mexican girl. Time would tell, as it is in the habit of doing, but at long last it felt as though all of the pieces were clicking into place, for once the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

Oh, god knows, I'm not going back . . .

I was snapped from my reverie by one last surprise, one of those Blue Highway Specials that rewards the intrepid for freeing themselves from the shackles of the Interstate. Using California 154 as a shortcut to Santa Barbara, I had not been expecting to shoot a curve and instantly find the lights of the community spread below us, twinkling to the edge of the continent. Then the road fell into a ravine as it made its descent into the seaside college town, and the sight was gone just as quickly as it had appeared, though it took much longer to fade from my mind’s eye. The next time I found myself at the dinner table with Uncle Roger, I could contentedly regale him about stumbling upon the San Marcos Pass.

This little slice of serendipity, mollifying my regret at having misplaced a chunk of the PCH, was enough to leave me freshly reenergized. After stopping to fill the tank (at normal California prices, which is to say merely cringeworthy as opposed to the apocalyptic gouging we were subjected to in the Big Sur), we zoomed off at breakneck speed through the endless sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, the 101 to the 405 to the 10, first freeway to the right and straight on 'til Venice.

Photo by Cory Cullington

Autumn Blues on the Northern Tier

i . November

November always gets me the worst. It's wandering season's last-gasp clearance sale, Everything Must Go, before winter consumes this latitude in her vindictive clutches. Once the calendar flips into December and beyond, even when local appearances might seem to favor a day-long joyride, there is often great deception. Entrapped by mountains on one side and the Snow Belt on another, a difference of so much as thirty minutes or thirty miles can incur dramatic changes in temperature and precipitation. But in November the weather is still cooperative regularly enough and the fear hangs over my head that any mild weekend surely will be the Last Good Weekend and thus it would be a criminal waste not to take advantage of that likelihood for explorative purposes.

It’s also this part of the year during which the passing of time is most flagrant. Throughout the natural world things are dying or going into hiding, an immutable reminder of the cold facts of this mortal coil. Only humanity is taxed with the capacity to consciously recognize and dwell on the finite span of its own being, and thus suffer the negative emotions, like regret, that tend to breed from such knowledge of the forbidden fruit. In the road I find solace from inescapable truths, a means of somehow pausing the unstoppable march.

This is how I find myself on an arbitrary Sunday between Election Day and Thanksgiving, taking the 62nd Street Bridge across the Allegheny River, my companion preoccupied with a greasy gas station breakfast sandwich. We've decided to escape from the city on Pennsylvania Route 8, just to do something that isn't the old standby of PA 28 or, worse, the listless tedium of I-79's state trooper-infested waters.

Route 8 isn't so bad, it turns out, passing first through Etna, a compact and surprisingly intact old industrial borough wedged into a nook off the Allegheny Valley hewn by the prehistoric ancestor of the trickle that today is Pine Creek. Beyond Etna, development along Route 8 is hemmed in by the hollow of the creek. When suburban-style commercialism does try to break out, the results are restrained: a stunted strip mall here, an undersized big box store there. It's practically demure, a far cry from the Boschian hellscape that has spawned up and down the parallel McKnight Road corridor just a few kilometers to the west.

In Hampton Township the road diverges from the creek, which presents the opportunity for suburbia to more fruitfully take root. Soon the sprawl gives way to Butler County, a transition marked by the appearance of feed stores and advertisements for gun bashes. Suddenly the city of Butler is upon us, first evidenced by the steel mill on the opposing bank of Conoquenessing Creek. Butler is Rust Belt disguised as rural county town. Pullman-Standard used to make rail cars here; the Pullman-Standard plant is underneath a parking lot now.

The courthouse is impressive, Main Street fairly filled in and extensive, but I am not drawn in. It's a well-preserved example of Small Town USA, just not a markedly captivating one to me at this moment. Perhaps I'll be back to give it a closer look, but for now, I'm sufficed with simply making a wrong turn and having to navigate a warren of alleyways behind churches right as Sunday morning services are letting out. Eventually we find our way to Jefferson Street and jet into the countryside.

ii . Cereal

The oppressive granite tent of morning has given way and the day has evolved into one of those whose crisp beauty only deep fall can conjure. Plump, hale two-tone clouds litter the sky. Their tops are blindingly white, their bottoms a heavy charcoal, as if they had been left on the heavenly Brinkmann a bit too long by an absentminded Saint Peter, neglecting his duties as divine grillmaster to mingle with those recently admitted through the pearly gates. In sharp contrast, the space in between is unerringly blue and bright.

We meet up with the Allegheny again at an emphatically twisty section known as Brady's Bend, where the waterway nearly curves fully back on itself as it carves its course through the ancient plateau. A bridge carries us over to the hamlet of East Brady. In short order PA 68 ascends to the spiny ridge atop the strange world here, where the same river runs on both sides of us, to the left and to the right, an anomaly of geography. Clarion County dissolves beneath our tire tread. We spit on I-80 when it imposes its presence, trying to trick us into submitting to its poisonous charms as it cuts across our path.

In Fryburg, lorded over by the regal parish church up on a hill, we come upon an open-topped truck casually lumbering up the road in front of us, transporting some kind of grain. Wind shears fine layers of popcorn kernel-sized pellets from the bed, which skitter along the asphalt and bounce up into my windshield in a cacophony of unnervingly loud clicks and clacks.

It’s as though we are being belligerently bombarded by that most innocent and nostalgia-inducing of American culinary inventions, sugary cereal. My companion recites the catchphrase for one such brand in perfect deadpan—“Gotta have my Pops”—as the onslaught continues relentlessly. The absurdity of the scene becomes too much to stifle, and muffled chortles cascade into uncontrollable, hysterical fits of laughter in that unashamedly effervescent way afforded by the pseudo-privacy of a car. Squinting through the tears, I just about manage to keep from careening into adjacent farm fields.

iii . Numbers

Finally we ditch the cereal truck and Forest County announces itself with exactly that, stands of droopy-leafed, skeletal trees flanking the road, escorting us to another reunion with the Allegheny River at Tionesta. It’s one of the state’s puniest county towns, but an important jumping-off point for the Allegheny National Forest, “Land of Many Uses,” as the U.S. Forest Service likes to bill its wards. Here the river is fat and slow, easy to accompany northerly, contraflow.

This is U.S. Highway 62 now, one of my favorites for the haphazard manner in which it slices diagonally across the country from Niagara Falls to West Texas, aggressively bucking the typically orderly grid of the U.S. Highway system while passing near very little of consequence during its ten-state journey. In fact, between Columbus and Northwest Arkansas, the route does not traverse a single town of appreciably more than 30,000 residents, and it doesn't get a whole lot busier from there: further west from NWA (105th), only Oklahoma City (41st) and Lubbock (159th) stand amongst the nation's 200 most populous metropolitan areas until it reaches its terminus at the border with Mexico in El Paso (68th).

Despite this idiosyncratic aversion to urbanity for such an ostensibly significant route (clocking in as the 11th-longest U.S. Highway), it still seems to pop up everywhere I go. When my better half moved home to El Paso after we finished school in northeastern Ohio, I always extracted some degree of comfort from simply knowing that I could get on a road twenty minutes or so from where we had met and follow one solitary number all the way to her. On this November midday, however, we are heading in the opposite direction, away from Texas.

Not far along comes the intersection with the questionably-numbered PA Route 666. Many states have been careful about handing out this number given the regularity with which route markers go missing (highways assigned 69 and 420 are also reputed to have this problem, oddly enough), but evidently PennDOT is not overly concerned. Perhaps the opportunistic general store near this T-crossroads helps in that regard; after all, who needs to steal an unwieldy two-foot by two-foot metal sign when you can instead buy a beer stein bearing the slogan, "Route 666 It's a HELL of a ride!"

In a way, the devilish number does lend a certain mysteriousness to the road, which permeates deep into the occult heart of the National Forest. Maybe Hansel and Gretel are in there, trying to escape a gruesome fate in the oven of die hexe. There are modern frights, too: the last time I had ventured onto Route 666, I witnessed a convoy of trucks wielding what looked suspiciously like fracking fluid right through the woods, taking the Land of Many Uses to the logical, tragic conclusion the moniker euphemizes. This road is not in our purview today, though. Not even the crude handmade sign roughly hammered into the ground and pointing down Route 666 with promises of "Old Fashioned Ring Bologna" can tempt us, probably for the best. It could very well be the work of a present-day sorceress, hoping to lure the hungry, unwary traveler into her den. Instead we continue to hug the river until we reach U.S. 6, the primary thoroughfare across Pennsylvania's Northern Tier.

iv . Raincoat

Born of dirt logging roads, Route 6 was once a crucial east-west transversal of the state in the decades before Interstate 80. Nowadays it's much more sparsely trafficked, frequented chiefly by the big rigs involved in the commercial trades of the region and the occasional inquisitive, loose-footed soul.

In tandem, 6 and 62 convey us upstream to the town of Warren, Pennsylvania. Rounding a bend in the Allegheny, Warren bursts forth with a flash of color and the fleeting sight of a modest eight-story skyscraper poking up behind the copper-roofed clock steeple of a handsome, wedge-shaped flatiron building. I immediately take a shine to the town, far more so than I had to Butler. It feels like an opportune moment to stop for a stretch.

A small triangular plaza with a fountain whose base is bedecked with sculptures of stoic, proud-looking bucks anchors the main business district, which is encrusted with a rainbow array of mostly-occupied brick storefronts. Many are not accepting patronage at this time—Sunday is still revered in these parts—but a foray away from the river into the surrounding blocks reveals more clues into the heartbeat of this little burg.

Warren soared above its status as a run-of-the-mill timber outpost because of oil, unearthed in this region during the 1870s and kicking off a boom that saw the town prosper far beyond what its own imagination would have dreamed possible. This newfound wealth erected the varicolored Victorians and roomy Foursquares populating the tree-lined streets encircling the august county courthouse, unusually removed from downtown in a quiet residential neighborhood (to a rather pleasant effect, it should be noted).

Around the corner is another gift from the thriving late 19th-century economy, the Struthers Library Theater, an artifact that has been lovingly restored and currently hosts local stage performances, classic film screenings, and the like. It's not a mission that smacks of a town with two feet already in the coffin. Indeed, at least on the surface, Warren seems to possess more vim and vigor than many of its "bitter-clingin'" brethren throughout the Commonwealth, the decaying coal towns, rail towns, mill towns that are the resigned fodder for chin-stroking New York Times longreads, disaster porn photographers, and undistinguished amateur blog writers. It's still the black gold that's priming the pumps of Warren's aortic valve, the crude being pulled from the ground and refined right there in north-central Pennsylvania by the United Refining Company, better known by its nom de guerre, Kwik-Fill.

One additional piece of the puzzle is presented during the walk back towards the main street in the form of a large, low-lying brick building finished with Art Deco flourishes, inhabiting the vast majority of the square block on which it sits. A curious fixture on the corner of 3rd and Hickory explains everything. It's a four-sided analog clock, boxy and metallic, an early-20th century take on how everyday things might look in the nebulous future. In lieu of numbers, the characters N E W ` P R O C E S S ` are arranged around the face.

In 1910, a man named John Leo Blair took up an offer to sell raincoats on behalf of a classmate who had recently inherited a raincoat factory. He had the rather odd epiphany to invent a stylish black raincoat for undertakers and sell them across the land by mail. These slickers became such a smash hit with a much wider clientele, Blair was able to expand his company, which he named the New Process Rubber Company, into a full mail-order retail enterprise that grew into one of the most successful such operations in the country. Having weathered some bumps in the road owing to the rise of the Internet, the company—now called the Blair corporation after its founder—remains Warren County’s largest employer and is still headquartered in this complex.

v . Renege

Bidding an amiable adieu to Warren, we recommence our progress eastward. U.S. 6 meanders down into the federal forestland, but we opt to keep traipsing after the Allegheny. After a few miles a concrete slab appears, the Kinzua Dam. Past it, the river swells into a languid body of water: an artificial lake whose creation necessitated the drowning of 10,000 acres of land that had legally belonged to the Seneca people since 1794, according to a treaty signed by Chief Cornplanter and none other than George Washington himself.

In turns out, to no great shock, that the signature of the Father Of Our Country, as deified as he is, would come to mean very little to the subsequent generations of the colonizers’ government that he had done so much to nurture in its nascent stages. Initially contrived in the late 1930s as a flood control measure, part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ public works blitzkrieg under the New Deal, the construction of Kinzua Dam wasn’t actually ready to begin until 1960. By that point, Seneca Nation had organized an intelligent and fervent resistance to the project, but their cries fell on deaf Congressional and even Presidential ears. The saga would be immortally lamented by Johnny Cash in the ballad “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow.”

The confluence of the Allegheny River and Kinzua Creek would be indistinguishable in the obesity of the waters but for the unsightly bridge across the mouth of the creek that transports oblivious motorists, eager only to reach their destination, neither knowing nor caring that they're rumbling over what was once the focus of an entire culture, now submerged, sacrosanct burial grounds desecrated by the induced inundation.

Cornplanter, can you swim?

vi . Playground

We rendezvous again with U.S. 6 in time to pursue it through Mount Jewett, a speck of a village that rests between the headwaters of three different stream systems: the Kinzua, the Clarion, and the Potato. Each arises in almost perfect cardinal opposition to the others, yet all three eventually pour into the Allegheny, further evidence of the eccentric properties claimed by the earth here.

A piecemeal Main Street wastes no effort in informing passersby of the area’s Swedish heritage; the yellow Nordic Cross on cyan background features prominently at every opportunity. These displays are made to seem downright monochrome by an incongruously Technicolor mural plastered to the next cluster of dilapidated buildings. This is my cue to keep my eyes peeled for Bridge Street, the back road that will wind us to the day’s primary goal.

Kinzua Creek, while today not much more than an inoffensive gurgle, managed to dig an appreciable gorge over the course of its geologic history. This gorge was deep enough that the construction of a railroad bridge spanning it in 1882 would be the highest such bridge in the world at the time and, as such, was hailed as a unique feat of engineering. The designer of the viaduct, the superbly named Frenchman Octave Chanute, would turn his passion and intellect to aviation in his advanced years, going on to act as a mentor of sorts to a pair of erstwhile bicycle mechanics from Ohio, brothers called Wilbur and Orville.

Meanwhile, after an all-steel reboot at the turn of the century, Kinzua Bridge remained in the service of the railroad through the 1950s, until consolidation of the big rail companies rendered the route incorporating the bridge redundant. It was sold to the government of Pennsylvania in 1963 and preserved as the centerpiece of a State Park that would later run excursion trains across the trestle. It was an amply popular attraction that the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources chose to put money aside to strengthen the bridge. Work on these upgrades began in 2002, requiring a temporary closure—or so it was assumed.

One muggy July afternoon in 2003, a freak storm system roared through northern Pennsylvania, bringing with it conditions ripe for the formation of tornadoes, one of which touched down in the valley of Kinzua Creek. Though a mere F1, it was able to wholly ravage the bridge, ripping half of its mighty stanchions from their concrete moorings and tossing them to the floor of the glen.

It would have cost tens of millions of dollars to rebuild the bridge, money the state didn’t have. So, much to their credit, instead of throwing their hands up in self-pity, the folks at the PADCNR decided to squeeze fresh lemonade out of the calamity and made the ruins themselves the new selling point of the park. It was an intriguing premise, and Kinzua Bridge was one of those things that had long been on my radar that I had just never gotten around to checking out until this autumn expedition.

When we drop in a fancy new parking lot and visitor center facility are in the works, but their current form is that of a pile of rubble decked in yellow ribbons of CAUTION tape fluttering in the steady breeze. For now visitors are directed to park in a muddy patch of gravel that requires a brief hike to the bridge itself. The endeavor is rewarded far past even my optimistic preconceptions.

The standing half of the bridge, anchored to the south slope of the valley from whence we’ve arrived, has been reinforced and converted into a wooden skywalk. permitting those free from the grip of acrophobia to venture out until they’re suspended nearly three hundred feet above the ground. The extra-brave can walk along the tracks themselves, nervously hopscotching the disquietingly wide gaps between ties.

Reaching the end of the walkway yields the first full glimpse of the wreckage strewn about the valley floor, an awesome bird’s-eye view of the fury of nature’s reckoning. Looking at the crumpled and twisted steel bones, slapped aside so effortlessly, I try to picture what it must have been like to actually witness such destruction taking place. The only frames of reference I have are the controlled demolitions of sports stadiums, or grainy memories of watching in horror on television as the World Trade Center collapsed. It’s even more chilling when you eliminate human agency, though, leaving you at the mercy of a violently untamable, unsympathetic act of god.

Already the Kinzua Bridge has lived up to the hype I’d prematurely bestowed upon it, well worth the detour, but it turns out the fun is just beginning, for the blustery amble back to solid ground reveals what looks like a primitive trail snaking down into the hollow. Curiosity piqued, an investigation is in order.

A manicured path leads to another wooden observation deck, complete with quarter-operated binocular device, granting an impressive side-angled view of the bridge, both the intact and the devastated portions in concert. Branching off to the left is the trace of dirt that descends into the valley. A coil of switchbacks through the thick but denuded woods suddenly deposits us breathtakingly within feet of the colossal structure. The trail now is nothing more than a track of tamped-down grass, with only a small sign acknowledging that people are intended to tread any further.

We pitch forward down the hill in the shadow of the rusting hulk, close enough to climb onto the concrete blocks holding the legs in place if we so desired. At one point the marked trail veers off to the right, back into the forest to continue its slalom down to the creek, but there is no explicit warning not to keep picking through the ruins if you'd prefer. In fact, I am struck by the lack of formal regulations posted anywhere here. Nothing is fenced off or otherwise physically prohibited from access. Emboldened by this, I forge on, slinking between the last pair of erect trusses and a graffitied beam nearly as tall as I am even in its horizontal slumber.

I emerge on the other side of the bridge, still expecting to be ambushed by the PADCNR Stasi at any second.  But all is quiet as I trek deeper into the valley, the no-longer-burdened blocks resembling little ancient temples as I pass. And then I am face to face with the heaps of gnarled steel, somehow more inconceivably monstrous than they had seemed from above, the red tint of oxidation flaring into a rich copper hue whenever the sun peeks out from behind the quilt of clouds.

My progress through this magnificently terrible wonderland is halted only by the barrier posed by Kinzua Creek. It looks easily fordable, but not in November, without backup footwear. I’m satisfied just to hang out amidst the rotting latticework and marvel at the fact that I am allowed to be doing so at all.

I recall all of the wacky playground apparatus I loved as a kid—those rope spider web-like contraptions, intricate wooden pirate ships, etc.—that have since been dismantled on account of being “too dangerous” in the wake of the national pastime known as litigiousness and uniformly replaced with pre-fabricated, unimaginative jungle gyms over a spongy rubber surface. Kinzua Bridge is, at long last, my childhood’s revenge.

I could spend hours meditating in the shade of these warped, otherworldly arbors, but the shortening afternoon wants those hours, too, and that’s a tug-of-war battle I’ll never win.

vii . Mogul

Grudgingly we return to the blacktop, eastbound on Route 6 once again, through a sequence of towns that contain “Port” in their names—Smethport, Port Allegany, Coudersport—in open defiance of their landlocked status (though the Allegheny graces the latter two, having reemerged from a brief sojourn into New York). All three are adorned with elegant Victorian homes in varying conditions of upkeep or disrepair, but their commodious sizes harken back to the well-heeled days when lumber was king and this part of the globe possessed a virtually inexhaustible supply of it.

In Coudersport, however, it’s not the ornate painted ladies that represent the most visually striking architectural feature. That honor belongs to the veritable palace looming ludicrously over Main Street, a neo-Georgian behemoth in gauche red brick against building-high reflective windows and two fat, purple marble columns astride the front entrance. Such a beguiling exhibit of tacky opulence is jarringly out of place in this humble logging camp, but the ultimately Icarusian story behind it is, in my book, one of the most apt apologues of the advanced-stage capitalism unleashed on the world by the monolithic United States of the late twentieth century.

John Rigas arrived in Coudersport in the early 1950s as postwar American exceptionalism was getting into full swing, fresh off combat duty in France and dreaming of something more than his family's hot dog shop in Wellsville, New York, just on the other side of the state line, or his shift at the Sylvania electronics plant down the road in Emporium, Pennsylvania.

Rigas' first venture, a one-screen movie house, was not as profitable an endeavor as he had hoped, so, as the story goes, he overdrew his bank account to buy the local cable service for $300. It was this antenna on a nearby hillock that would sprout over the ensuing decades into the giant called Adelphia that at its zenith was the sixth-largest cable provider in the country. Rigas found monumental success filling in the gaps between major media markets and was later joined in the business by his three sons as the empire's coverage expanded to thirty states.

While Adelphia exploded into a household name, Rigas opted to maintain the company’s base of operations right there in tiny Coudersport, much to the befuddlement of the power brokers and money men in New York City and Philadelphia. Potter County had been mostly a spectator of every economic boom that the Keystone State enjoyed, but Rigas was now putting it on the map in unmissable bold type and size 24 font. His beneficence in the community was the stuff of legend: a job found for anyone who asked, favors dished out unremuneratively.

Photo: Nyttend, via Wikimedia Commons

Rigas had a critical weakness, though, and that was his brazenly cavalier attitude towards money. Aggressive spending and borrowing had enabled him to grow his dominion so robustly, but as the century came to a close, it emerged that Rigas and his sons had essentially been using the company as their own piggy bank, unbeknownst to most of the board members and other stakeholders. Countless personal expenditures, even those as whopping as the purchase of a National Hockey League franchise (the Buffalo Sabres), were financed with Adelphia money.

Not only was this highly illegal, but the book-cooking required to keep partners and shareholders none the wiser meant that the company was racking up obscene stacks of debt without anyone cognizant enough to sound an alarm. Adelphia declared bankruptcy in 2002, and after protracted litigation, in 2005 a fifteen-year prison sentence was handed down to an octogenarian John Rigas. (He only wound up serving 9 of those years, as he developed bladder cancer and, facing a prognosis of months to live, was granted compassionate release in 2015. As of early 2018 he is still alive, aged 93.)

That empty, palatial chateau out on Main Street in Coudersport? That was to be Adelphia's new corporate headquarters; its completion just beat the Chapter XI buzzer. Potter County receded once again into the state of perpetual stagnation that it had known for most of its existence, a much crueler fate now that the sweet nectar of prosperity had passed its lips. Meanwhile, the little cinema, John Rigas' original entrepreneurial enterprise, still boasts a lit marquee, touting a second-run blockbuster.

viii . Nowhere

With the angle of the sun’s rays diminishing, it’s time to formulate an exit strategy from these northlands. The most readily available course south mandates traversing a province geologists refer to simply as the “Deep Valleys” for the sharp lacerations myriad streams have gashed into the plateau atop the Allegheny Front over dozens of millennia. In some places the floor of a hollow lies a full thousand feet below the ridges of the surrounding bluffs, adding to the feeling of entrapment already lent by the region’s foreboding name. The terrain casts an inescapable prison of shadows, but the amber hilltops in the distance dangle a teasing promise.

This is the remotest area in the entire Commonwealth. The most significant thoroughfare spanning it, Pennsylvania Route 120, stakes a legitimate claim to being Pennsylvania's "loneliest road," but surprisingly, it wasn't always quite so forlorn.

The history of navigation through the Deep Valleys traces a fairly logical progression. Indian trails followed the natural paths provided by the West Branch of the Susquehanna River and the Sinnemahoning family of creeks as a means of portaging between the Susquehanna and Allegheny watersheds. Then, when the white man became consumed by his iron horse craze, the most direct overland link between Pennsylvania’s two biggest water ports ran through these gorges. And so here was laid down the trunk line of the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad in the period around the American Civil War.

The rise of the automobile created new demand for paved roads, and when the U.S. Highway System was being drawn up, it was thought that a route alongside the P&E (which had long since been gobbled up by the Pennsylvania Railroad) would have similar value as a vital connection between two consequential cities. Thus this route was handed its own federal designation: U.S. 120.

As road engineering improved practically by the week, it quickly became apparent that it was not ideal to bestow any modicum of import to any road through such difficult backwoods territory. U.S. 120 found itself superseded by corridors that skirted the Deep Valleys, subsequently truncated multiple times, and eventually decommissioned and handed over to state care, which is where things stand now: a mostly forgotten highway to nowhere, still braided around the old P&E tracks and the antediluvian waterways.

Nowhere, in this particular case, was once somewhere, and that somewhere was Renovo, what passed for the Deep Valleys’ major metropolis. Renovo exists solely because its spot was approximately the halfway point between Philadelphia and Erie when the P&E was built through. The company put a railyard and maintenance shops there, propping up enough of an economy to healthily sustain a permanent population in the several thousands.

For a century “the shops” were plenty sufficient to foster archetypical small town America, schools and churches and stores and taverns, up until the PRR ceased operations there in the late ‘60s. Renovo was thus forsaken to face the obscure, reclusive station its geographic situation surely would have dictated all along had it not been for the interloping presence of the railroad. Now the town is so isolated and irrelevant that the thousand and change hardy souls that continue to call it home did not have cellular phone service of any kind until 2011. One business sticks out as we fly past: a restaurant named “Yesterday’s.”

ix . Levee

Golden hour chases us from this peculiar domain’s crevices and crannies, the Susquehanna riding shotgun all the while. Something about this ancient river never fails to enrapture me. Maybe it's just the fact that it, amazingly, predates these mountains, which heaved upwards around its uncompromising flow hundreds of millions of years ago. It's earned my veneration as a sporadic, but loyal sidekick on my meanders through the Mid-Atlantic; I'm always thrilled to see it.

We are deposited in Lock Haven, one of those otherwise nondescript burgs that’s kept buoyant by the residence of a four-year university. It’s a phenomenon I’ve come to greatly appreciate and look out for in my travels, for such institutions lend a certain youthful energy to their environs. The school doesn't have to be especially big or prestigious for that vitality to be readily palpable and infectious to the random wanderer.

There is a bated stillness to the light’s last hurrah, as if Earth has lost a fragile belonging in a crowded room and shouted for nobody to move. The season extracts a melancholy chill from the air as soon as the sun disappears. It is one of my favorite time of day and time of year combinations—paradoxically, it must be said, for someone who is writing about a hobby that is defeated by both night and winter. But to me it signifies a sort of weary optimism, a primal instinct to plow ahead through life's hurdles and pitfalls just as the spring will assuredly break through again. To soak it up I clamber to the top of the levee overlooking the old river. I allow myself a few minutes of contemplative solitude, alone with the twin chess-bishop steeples of the Clinton County Courthouse and the tranquil water below, and then we must proceed onwards.

x . Dark

The drawing of the curtains on the day instills a different type of mentality into a drive. No longer is leisure in control of the wheel. We can sneak into Nittany Valley through a crack in the invisible Bald Eagle Mountain and acquiesce to the convenience of the Interstate without any illumination to betray our sin. I-80 powers up the Allegheny Front, eschewing the serpentine curves of the older roads that had to surrender to the topography of the escarpment.

Empty stomachs plead for mollification, so a stop is made in Clearfield to eat at a wonderful pub that has the misfortune of sharing its name with a certain ubiquitous mediocre diner chain. “Denny’s Beer Barrel” is a very much independent entity that is infamous for its challenges involving multi-pound cheeseburgers, the Everest among them a 96-ounce gargantuan that must be polished off completely within a three hour time limit. With considerable distance yet to plod in the dark, we settle for one of the creative half-pound offerings from the standard menu. Even that sits heavy as we waddle back out into the night, now verging on frosty. Pennsylvania’s sole ethanol plant silently chugs away over the tavern’s shoulder, its smoky exhalations camouflaged against the inky sky.

Sated nearly to the point of discomfort, we aim for a rough hypotenuse across the wrinkled landscape, penance for our earlier abandonment of the Blue Highways, brief though it may have been. We're almost precisely echoing the Great Shamokin Path to Kittanning; the Lenape had a pretty good idea of what they were doing, so naturally our roads are merely imitations of theirs.

The Amish arrived and were permitted to stay, unlike the indigenous peoples whom they usurped as the wardens of these fertile dales. Thus our journey is stuttered by the occasional apparition from the gathering gloom of incandescent orange reflectors hovering in midair. In reality they are affixed to the rear of a dawdling carriage, unapologetic for the sluggishness with which it moseys along. A silver lining is that the buggies outnumber other motor vehicles, which makes it easier to maneuver around them, straining my ears to catch the metronomic clip-clop of horse hooves at each pass.

Punxsutawney (“Town of the Mosquitos” in Unami, a Lenape tongue) lies dormant, the only sign of life evident in the faded red, white, and blue emanating from neon displays promoting name brand domestic beers, tacked to a pair of saloons engaged in a sad standoff of sorts down a dingy side street. The drab setting can be forgiven of a place whose biggest (and only, if we’re being honest) renown not only revolves around a rodent, but is most widely disseminated via a movie that was filmed eight hundred miles away in Illinois; Punxsy wasn’t regarded as pretty or charming enough to star in its own biopic.

Human-sized groundhog totems lurch out of the darkness to leer at us as we zoom by. Phil’s wood-carved brethren taunt us with the vow of a cold, nasty winter, as if the whole season is borne by a universal punishment for their hamlet’s languishing. Sure enough, we're no more than a few minutes beyond Punxsy when the heavy air finally caves in and the snow begins to tumble copiously from the heavens.

Kittanning beckons to us with a return to a fortified major expressway, an ostensibly merciful gesture that is actually more of a mixed blessing, if even that. An eighteen-wheeler sashays wildly to and fro across the lanes ahead of us, nothing more than a blur in the swirling blizzard.

We creep forward trepidatiously, distances unintelligible in the maelstrom but for the counting of bridges. One, then another, then another. One of them is the one we need, but in my mind, addled by these mounting hours behind the wheel, it will be the Kinzua Bridge, shredded and torn asunder. This fear is, of course, proven silly, and we safely leap the Allegheny one more time to slide down the hastily salted city streets that will lead us home.

The Drive Home, Part VI: The Fade

It’s not the more famous entrée into the city; no, that would be the dizzying burst out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel following the lull of the Parkway West, slinking in between unseen office parks and shopping centers, then suddenly finding yourself face-to-face with a sparkling array of skyscrapers, like stumbling upon a modern day El Dorado hidden amongst the hills. With unique panache it greets the unsuspecting visitor arriving from the airport and it winks knowingly at the old hand who doesn’t need to waste so much as a glance at the green aluminum welcome mats offering a four-second crash course on the jumble of lane configurations.

In some ways, though, the less heralded procession through the Liberty Tubes is just as grand. For one thing, there's no overhead truss to contend with, allowing for a more unobstructed view of the skyline. There are also no fewer than five other bridges immediately visible spanning the Monongahela to the left and right, each of a different style and vintage—this is the City of Bridges, after all. We've got more of them than Venice, so it is claimed.

There's also an eminently analgesic effect after the protracted slog up Route 51's torturous rack of traffic lights, skimming past characterless municipalities that owe an overwhelming share of their tax base to an opportunistic history of white flight. After trawling through such oppressive generica, emerging from the tunnel will forever feel like coming home. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, despite my feet-dragging all this while.

But what does it actually mean to come home? All told, it's about a five-hour drive to get here from Washington via the National Road, Cumberland, Pennsylvania Route 160, Berlin, the Glades Pike, the Mon Valley, and Century III Mall, yet somehow it feels like it's taken me years. Perhaps that's largely because, regardless of how much truth there is behind Thomas Wolfe's adage regarding the impossibility of going home again, I certainly buy that it's at least difficult to talk cogently and poignantly about it (though that doesn't stop me from feebly trying).

In my experience, virtually no one has a neutral opinion of the places in which they’ve spent the most years, especially earlier in life. People tend to come down strongly on their hometown at one end of the spectrum or another and it’s only normal for that bias to creep into any attempt to ascribe meaning. My own forays into transcribing ruminations about Pittsburgh onto paper have frequently veered, albeit unintentionally, into the realm of advertisement, and I’ve found myself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to turn off that spigot. I’ve had too much of a personal stake in the subject I was trying to document.

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Over the past century, Pittsburgh has endured a transformation in stages from flourishing but filthy (“hell with the lid off”), to broken and rudderless in the wake of fleeing industry, to well-kept secret as a pioneer of how to escape the Rust Belt quagmire, to today’s wider renown for gaining a reputation as something of an “It” city, a place that the best and brightest actually want to be.

I grew up right on the inflection point between those second and third stages. By the time I hit high school, it still wasn’t hip to appreciate Pittsburgh. “There’s nothing going on here. I can’t wait to get out,” were common refrains in the cafeteria or study hall or gym class. I saw through this myopia all along. For me, it was a good place long before the outside world started to sit up and take notice, so much so that I had no major qualms about returning home after college. I was not in any rush to scurry away, satisfied enough to drift through my twenties in familiar surroundings.

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Many others in my cohort have joined me, even a number of those who cast the most aspersions as teenagers. Stage four now perilously teeters on the brink of what comes next: an overload of desirability, sickly sweet. Buzzwords get carelessly flung about to measure a city’s success in modern terms, with scant thought allotted to the concerns of how much soul is worth sloughing off and who gets left behind.

It’s far too easy to get caught up in the hype machine, too easy to unearth and sink my hands into the superficial reasons for Pittsburgh’s ascendancy. I could fill pages waxing eulogistic about all of the factors that make it so—the walkable neighborhoods, the universities that foster the curious breed of person that helps to keep a place interesting, the thousands of acres of urban parkland, the cost of living relative to other hot metros, the burgeoning foodie scene, the natural beauty afforded by the rippled terrain that is almost unrivaled among American cities.

But that’s everyone’s Pittsburgh. At the risk of falling into a deep well of solipsism, my Pittsburgh, three decades’ worth, is not so much in the magazine rankings and puff pieces published for the benefit of nationwide audiences. It’s in the age-old question of what it is to be from a place. It’s in all that which has been earned and discovered, not merely taught or read about and then swooped upon.

My home is in the alleys, shortcuts, lost worlds, in the tangled paths through forested glens, in the overgrown basketball courts that have claimed and kept the blood from the sacrificial ritual or countless scraped knees and elbows. It’s in the rusted, sagging bridges that will be reconstructed in a year or two to be slick and anesthetized, and the derelict towers that will soon house luxuries the likes of which have never graced their community before, catering to people who would never have considered setting foot in that community before.

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It’s in the innumerable views—yes, the endlessly reproduced, infinitely Instagrammed ones I’ll still never take for granted—but even more so in the secret views you can’t get to without knowing how, through gaps in the branches of a wooded hilltop or perched in a crumbling, forgotten cemetery, and in the views that unexpectedly leap out from behind the corner of a tilted, crooked street to steal the air from your lungs.

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It’s in my thoughtful spots, a sycamore’s shade on the tiny hillside college campus sandwiched between two bustling neighborhoods but at the same time tucked quietly away from it all, or on the woefully underused benches in front of the flagship library, flanked by architectural wonders at the city’s intellectual heart, or posted at the end of the bar in one of the city’s quintessential but increasingly harder-to-find dives, masked by neon beer logos, watching life pass outside the window in that quirky double-time manner of an early film reel.

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It’s in things as routine as the cycling of the days and the churning of the seasons, in the cool serenity of Sunday morning’s slanted shadows before high noon arrives and erupts into a midsummer broiler; in the nostalgic snare of a crisp autumn afternoon on a leafy lane where the entire world has taken on the earthy palette; in the delicate stillness after snowfall on a one-way, one-block street, when it seems like so much as a deep breath might irrevocably disturb the whole tableau; and in the titanic battle of a frosty spring dawn, the sun’s exhalations hovering over the ground in their quest to defeat the previous night’s chill.

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It’s present in the energy of a watercolor neighborhood scene on an unseasonably warm evening so idyllic the whole citizenry is collectively inspired to be out and about.

It’s present in the electric excitement of an impending storm, the ominous shelf cloud staring you down, daring you to blink, but the prospect of conceding and finding a refuge in which to hole up and watch its fury in safety and comfort is a noble one.

It’s present when vibrancy drains from the urban canyons of Downtown in the wee hours, leaving the glittering towers frozen in dormancy above the deserted streets, like exquisitely carved gargoyles waiting to reanimate again.

And it’s present in the rarely spectacular sunset preceding a crystal clear winter’s nightfall, compelling you to wrap it up and stash it in your pocket for gray times. There it will join all of these snapshots of the city that raised me, reminders that it will always be my city, no matter what upheavals the future holds.

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I write this having reversed the commute and taken up residence full time in our nation's capital, for over half a decade now. The buffer of time and distance gradually accumulates and coagulates as it does so into another dimension of perspective. My hope is that this new layer will one day be able to look eye-to-eye with the ground level view that is all I'd previously known and shake hands. Not necessarily as an equal, for thirty years is a mighty head start, but at the minimum as a respected peer.

In the meantime, I'll continue to navigate the alien realm where home isn't the same home anymore and new home still isn't fully home yet, either—and may well never truly be. It's a different sort of adventure, what I like to call the adventure of the mundane, cracking open a habitat like a book fresh off the shelf. The everyday intricacies and nuances of each street, each block are waiting to waft off the pages, all the more stimulating for being shared with someone you love.

I know, though, that there will still be days when I'll wake up to a tantalizingly azure sky, coaxing me outside to get behind the wheel of my car and set off, whether for destinations heretofore unknown or for those I keep coming back to, time and time again.

I know that at the end of those days it will still be hard for me to drive home.

The Drive Home, Part V: The Scar

On October 13, 1962, John F. Kennedy stood in the parking lot of the A&P Supermarket at Donner Avenue and 6th Street in Monessen, Pennsylvania and stumped for his fellow Democrats who were running in that year’s mid-term elections. All of Monessen turned out to see JFK, it seemed—actually rather more than that, if the quoted number of 25,000 is to be believed, packing themselves like sardines into the streets of the mill town that could claim roughly 18,000 residents at the time.

For almost a century, a perfect convergence of natural resources, innovative minds, and American exceptionalism had made this region into the nation's industrial powerhouse, effortlessly spawning secure middle-class careers and the relative financial comfort they provided. But even during that fairly prosperous era in the history of Monessen and the nation at large, JFK's speech hinted presciently at troubles looming on the horizon as he spoke of "towns which have been hit hard by all of the technological and industrial changes that have come in this country."

President Kennedy, as we know, would not live long enough to see just what a grave harbinger his words really were. Most of the population of Monessen, on the other hand, would have to suffer through three decades of cutbacks and layoffs as heavy industry gradually packed up and left. The mortal blow was dealt in 1986, when Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, the town's largest employer, finally terminated nearly all of its operations there. A solitary coke works is all that remains, run by a skeleton crew of under 200 employees. It still belches its vaporous refuse into the sky, a more incongruous visage today against a much bluer backdrop than could be seen a half-century ago in this part of the world.

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Photo from John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

It's the same tale that was writ all up and down the valley of the Monongahela River as it slithers through southwestern Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh to Point Marion. Plants and factories shuttered like dominoes, the phenomenon that led to the coining of the "Rust Belt." Driving through Monessen or much of the Mon Valley today can be an anguishing experience, especially since there's no obvious answer to the question of where ample recovery might be found.

Colloquial definitions of the Mon Valley vary somewhat, but a reasonable amalgamation begins just upstream from Pittsburgh in the brownfield boroughs of Homestead or Braddock. The latter served as an experiment in attempting to resuscitate a forgotten, moribund town when a self-styled celebrity mayor attracted a gimmicky restaurant, a nationally televised blue jeans ad, and a handful of starving artists. He could not manage to attract much in the way of viable long-term economic opportunity, however, and eventually moved on to bigger and brighter things for himself.

Nor have larger-scale policy and infrastructure measures been able to concoct a winning formula. A new tolled highway was supposed to facilitate economic progress, but instead—it seems to me whenever I find myself on it—it's just helping motorists move through the area even more quickly and with even more of a force field between themselves and the disintegrating municipalities they're flying past.

At any rate, I prefer to traverse the Mon Valley at ground level, as a reminder of the affection I have for the region, warts and all, for I spent four collegiate summers working at an amusement park down there. My fellow low-wage hostages covered a diverse spectrum of people, most of whom I would never have had reason to cross paths with, let alone forge enduring friendships with, were it not for the coincidence of our shared servitude in that oasis of mirth within these troubled environs. Many of them hailed from the immediate vicinity, and I'd be lying if I tried to pretend that those dog day nights roaming the Mon Valley, often in their company, didn't leave an indelible impression on me.

Catching the back half of a double feature at the Brownsville Drive-In off the Old National Road. Emerging bruised and bloodied, yet invigorated, from pickup games of parking lot street hockey. Backyard bonfires down the endless cul-de-sacs of milquetoast 1960s ranch-style subdivisions. Ghost hunting among the ruins of once-regal McKeesport mansions, now making last stands against the advance of urban prairie. Three a.m. pancakes at defiantly shabby round-the-clock diners. Crossing the train tracks to Dravosburg, getting lost in Charleroi, stranded by a flood in Glassport. It was the ennui of an uncertain future juxtaposed against the heady immortality of the present moment, never failing to summon a second wind even after a thirteen-hour shift at the park.

And then there’s the green—oh, the green! The Rust Belt conjures an image of soot and gray, but in truth it’s the verdancy that is the most loyal of compatriots while winding from crest to gully, along decrepit Main Streets and betwixt hulking industrial apparatus. From the springtime soak through the return of autumn's benign reign, it is limitless in its abundance. Every conceivable shade is on display, even as brand new ones are tirelessly being invented, awaiting discovery the next time I'm swallowed in this world that tries to hide its unkindness behind such soft, plush velour.

The new, usually empty highway be damned, Pennsylvania Route 51 is the true vehicular spine through the Mon Valley. You know it's a real road because it still carries names for most of its course, names that whimsically change every few miles as invisible municipal boundaries exact their authority (though, naturally, the locals will only ever refer to it as "51").

For an extended period of my life, I routinely had to interact with the portion known as Clairton Boulevard. Circumstance and distance have since dwindled that ritual down to scarcely an annual one, but here it is, a late Saturday afternoon as summer teeters on the brink, and I find myself in the clutches of Clairton Boulevard once again.

I'm not sure what compels me to do it, but I suddenly veer off 51 and into the maze of service roads that leads to the sad husk of Century III Mall. In its heyday it was a true monument to runaway consumerism and the industrial behemoth that made it all possible—literally, for it was built on top of a U.S. Steel slag heap. Upon completion in the late '70s, hubristically stealing its moniker from the passing of our country's bicentennial, Century III was purportedly the third-largest enclosed shopping center in the world.

It's a staggering notion to consider now as I navigate the moonscape-like driveways, barely fit for an ATV, and pass by a crumbling two-story parking deck that has been completely barricaded off. No repetitive spiral around the lot required; vacant spaces can be found within spitting distance of any entrance.

I am of the right age for mall culture to have been a major plank of my formative years, but I happened to mostly avoid it by virtue of a predominantly urban youth. My childhood relationship with malls is largely restricted to hazy but fond memories of my grandparents escorting me and my brother to a nearby one whenever we were foisted on them as kids. Grandpa would host trivia as we gorged on oily offerings from the Potato Patch, fattening a prize pot in single-dollar increments as we answered what he believed to be increasingly difficult quizzes. Our winnings would invariably and immediately be spent on whatever off-brand action figures caught our eye at the on-premises Dollar Tree.

And yet those meager, long-ago anecdotes must be sufficient to explain the pang of what could only be described as nostalgia as I stroll into Century III’s air-conditioned confines on this late summer evening. That involuntary emotional reaction quickly drifts in the direction of sorrow when I see how forlorn the place is.

Storefronts sit unoccupied, an unsettling number of them. Depressingly desperate “FOR LEASE” posters plaster the wall-to-wall windows, behind which reside nothing but blank ecru drywall and dusty beige carpeting. One whole wing of the mall has been blocked off to public access by a row of unused kiosks that in a past life would have hawked cheap jewelry and sunglasses.

I can do a full 360-degree turn from the middle of a second-floor mezzanine and see virtually nobody else. One young mother and the toddler she grips by the hand are my sole accompaniment in this veritable George Romero homage, apart from the Steely Dan tune that wafts from hidden speakers and reverberates through the empty space:

I've seen your picture / Your name in lights above it / This is your big debut / It's like a dream come true

The track is randomly pulled from some pre-packaged yacht rock Internet radio station, but the accidental metaphor is not lost on me. It's a cheery, upbeat ditty that upon deeper lyrical examination is actually a cynical commentary on the sinisterly spurious optimism of the entertainment industry. Like the fate that is implied to predictably befall “Peg,” the song’s eponymous starlet, the mall was unceremoniously kicked aside when the vogues dictating what passed for the vaunted American lifestyle kept on mutating.

On some primordial level, the suburban enclosed shopping mall was designed to emulate the traditional Main Street shopping experience and then, theoretically, perfect it by adding ample parking, protection from the elements, and its own police force. But then strip malls and big boxes became the craze. A wider variety of products could be aggregated into fewer but larger stores, necessitating shuttling from errand to errand in the bio-hazard suit of a private vehicle, drastically reducing the chances of any interpersonal interaction.

Though the very idea of the indoor mall is antithetical to concepts I hold dear such as urbanity, environmentalism, and independent business, from their inception malls were at the very least trying to foster a quasi-social setting. The man credited with their invention, Austrian architect Victor Gruen, was a self-professed socialist who considered cars "[a] threat to human life and health just as great as an open sewer." He saw his groundbreaking theory of enclosed shopping centers as a Trojan horse with which he could sneak “the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life” into the contemporary planning trends that he felt were growing ever more inhumane.

Gruen would come to bitterly rue the unintended (to him, at least) consequences of his creation, as malls ended up aiding and abetting the dominance of sprawl and the decimation of downtowns, but perhaps the spirit behind his original dream is still contributing to my perverse sympathy for this terminally ill mecca of excess. Reflexively I search—ultimately in vain—for the little coffee shop that was an obligatory stop when visiting this mall with an ex-girlfriend of the ancient past, or the pop culture store where we would buy Japanese candy, and it occurs to me that the mall, too, comprises a thread in my tapestry of plaintive fondness for this land of obsolescence.

In fact, after completing a lap around the deserted concourse, I can count on one hand the number of still-functioning commercial enterprises. A couple of them, like the well-stocked comic book and hobby shop still plugging away on the lower level, fill a niche unique enough to make them destinations in and of themselves; they would probably be viable wherever they happened to set up.

A generic athletic wear outlet, on the other hand, is hardly staffed and thoroughly picked over, as if it were simply counting down to the last item leaving the shelf before closing its doors for good. I feel strangely obligated to purchase something, as if the fifteen dollars I fork over for a pair of gym shorts might make a material difference in arresting the mall’s march towards extinction.

While I may very well have been initially coerced inside by morbid pity, a hollow rumble in my stomach reminds me that I can also plead hunger as a more rational excuse for my presence in this living mausoleum. One of my guiltiest culinary pleasures is cheap mall or airport-caliber Chinese food. I am constitutionally incapable of turning it down when presented with the option, and my recollection—albeit possibly apocryphal—is that Century III boasted a version that could hang with the very best of them.

So imagine my dismay to find the food court darkened, with most of the stalls abandoned—including, tragically, the once-irrepressible Chinese takeaway counter. A lone custodian is engrossed in the tedious process of overturning each chair and balancing it atop the nearest table, one by one. He cuts a doleful figure that belongs in its own “Eleanor Rigby” verse, considering how few of those chairs had likely been utilized over the course of the day.

I've seen enough. Overwhelmed by the seemingly inescapable reality facing this ignored corner of the nation, I begin to beat a hasty retreat so that I can return to my current safe, comfortable life in a relevant city with no danger of fading into nullity anytime soon. Though I can't know it with a hundred percent certainty in the moment, the writing is unmistakably on the wall; it's the last time I will ever set foot inside Century III Mall.

As I depart, the music floating through the cavernous hall is now Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen.” Again, it's somehow perfectly fitting: a song about death.

The Drive Home, Part IV: The Scab

In the late 1750s, British General John Forbes led an expedition to capture the French Fort Duquesne, located at a strategically critical confluence of three rivers in western Pennsylvania. Forbes' effort, employing a more northerly route, succeeded where General Braddock's doomed party had spectacularly failed. On top of securing what would become Pittsburgh for the English, forever changing the trajectory of European rule over the North American continent, their course also had the byproduct of opening an area known as "The Glades" to white settlement.

The Glades consisted of a high plateau of rolling hills between the Allegheny Front and the final barrier to The West posed by the twin ridges of Laurel and Chestnut. Within these few hundred square miles arise the headwaters to a multitude of streams and creeks, flowing forth to join four major river systems—the Allegheny, the Monongahela, the Potomac, and the Susquehanna—and thence into both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. It must have truly felt like the top of the world to those early homesteaders, and they would not have been entirely wrong; our friend Berlin, for example, can boast of being Pennsylvania's highest incorporated place with over 100 permanent residents.

By the close of the 18th century, the County of Somerset had been officially demarcated (borrowing the name of an English shire despite Germans comprising the largest influx to the region, to say nothing of the Iroquois and Lenape peoples who had already long been occupying these lands).

Due to its relative inaccessibility, it managed to avoid the most acute manifestations of the industrial frenzy that swept the nation for a century-plus, with the exception of sporadic coal mines that pock hillsides across the county. It even weathered the shale-drilling craze of the 21st-century: Fracking wells are comparatively few and far between within the borders of the county, even as they have spread like locusts throughout the rest of southwestern Pennsylvania.

The result is a place that never really boomed, but also never had to cope with a subsequent bust, continuing to subsist on mining, farming, and the latter-day supplement of tourism in the form of two ski resorts and a state park atop Laurel Ridge. The county's population holds steady in the mid seventy thousands, down only slightly from its 1940s peak of roughly 85,000.

One gets the impression Somerset County is content to slumber on in relative obscurity, though two successive 21st-century tragedies briefly thrust it into the international spotlight. United Flight 93 crashed in a Somerset field on September 11, 2001, the site now occupied by a somber and moving memorial. Eleven months later, the harrowing plight of nine coal miners who found themselves trapped in the flooding Quecreek Mine and their against-all-odds rescue became headline news.

The eponymous Borough is a prototypical sleepy rural county seat, crowned by the impressive Classical Revival courthouse on a rise in the middle of town. Its copper dome is visible from most directions, including mine as I trundle in from Berlin. The sight is my cue to cut over to the proliferation of brand-name travel services that has cropped up like a bad rash surrounding Somerset County's only interchange with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Then I can strap in and crush the 50-odd miles of tolled novocaine between here and home.

Or . . .

Or, I'm still not ready to be home. Even with the sky now a navy blue velvet blanket draped over the land, there is more distance to be driven on oxygenated roads where leisure is the only capital I need to breathe in the night air. Almost as if by natural magnetic repulsion, I'm pushed away from the fluorescent oases of McDonald's and Holiday Inn and up into downtown Somerset, locked in quiet repose on a Sunday evening.

Then it's on down Main Street, lined with trees and early-20th-century houses which give way to the standard small town outskirt flotsam and jetsam of used car lots and miniature strip malls. The two lanes then open up to dictionary-perfect rolling farmland, sporadically interspersed with an old-timey inn, tavern, or country store. Soon the forest wall closes in, commencing the ascent up and over Laurel Ridge toward the hamlet of Donegal, twenty miles to the west.

The road initially established by the Forbes expedition bore the General’s name and would go on to form part of the Lincoln Highway, one of the first coast-to-coast automobile trails (and, later, U.S. Route 30). A decade or so after Forbes’ march, a more direct route through the Somerset highlands was hewed, a bit further south. This was christened the Glades Pike, and today it makes up part of Pennsylvania Route 31. It is my most brazen affront to the Turnpike, for it closely parallels the tolled highway for a sixty-mile stretch. In some spots it passes near enough the Turnpike to be able to see the whites of the eyes of the poor souls hurtling along it, and I count myself blessed that I am not among them.

The Glades Pike has yet to let me down as a respite from the cattle call of the Interstate. There was the time a ferocious storm crawled across the area just as I was reaching Somerset on my usual trek home from the Capital. From the distant heights of PA 160 and Berlin I could see the malevolent anvil hanging ominously in the sky and the bombflashes of lightning dancing within. It was going to be rough, and at this juncture there was no way around it.

Sitting at the red light beyond which beckoned the entrance to the Turnpike, it occurred to me that I had no faith in the ability of the Turnpike—or, more accurately, the ability of any of the people who mindlessly drive on it—to handle a severe thunderstorm. On the other hand, as silly as it sounds, I’ve always trusted the Glades Pike, older, smaller and ostensibly more time-consuming though it may be. Even the very name of the road lends me peace: To my mind, the word "glade" is an ineffably pleasant marriage of "glen" and "shade."

The tempest hit, fierce gusts rocking my car to brag about the dismembered branches and downed trunks left in its wake. It was intense sledding for a while, but sure enough, I felt confident moving at a safe, consistent speed on Route 31. Meanwhile, the navigation app on my phone relayed notice of aggravating slowdowns on the Turnpike westbound from Somerset. In the end, I may have actually saved myself time by opting for the “slower” road. Even if I didn’t, avoiding the stop-start stress of being swallowed in the Turnpike’s sea of brake lights made the detour well worth it.

Presently there are no storms. The air has cooled sufficiently to proceed with windows down, left arm extended, idly buffeting on the breeze. Donegal materializes, home to the next Turnpike exit to the west and with it, another small flowering of commercialization that your run of the mill modern-day American traveler would evidently be lost without: Subway, Days Inn, Dairy Queen.

Fortunately, Donegal passes quickly and within a few minutes the road climbs to the top of Chestnut Ridge. It marks the ultimate hurdle presented by the Appalachian orogeny before the continent opens up to over 1,300 miles of relatively easy footing until the Rockies rise imperially from the Great Plains.

Cresting the ridge, for a few moments the western horizon sprawls out into infinity, the day’s last gasps of Technicolor straining to flee the black hole at the edge of the earth. Amazingly, from this spot, still nearly forty miles from Pittsburgh as the crow flies, the crowning towers of the city’s skyline are distinctly visible when conditions are clear. It’s another reminder of how close to home I am.

The gravity-aided glide down the mountain is halted only by a rare traffic signal at a lonely crossroads. It’s nighttime now. The gauzy glow from the off-brand gas station just about infiltrates my car, casting abstract, Escherian layers of shadows upon shadows. I switch the radio off, instead choosing to be serenaded by the comforting chorus of nocturnal insects. Their timeless sound never fails to make me think fondly of childhood summers coming to a close.

My wistfulness is exacerbated by the turn-off that leads to an old Mennonite retreat center. Throughout my single-digit years I often spent an October weekend there with my family, always when the reds, oranges, and yellows were at their most vivid and the apple cider at its sweetest. I would return as a teen for a different sort of formative experience, a gathering of co-ed youth groups during those muddy lost days between fall and winter. The road there is ringed with trees, their canopies creating a tunnel effect that for all I know may constitute a wormhole to the past; I dare not enter. The acknowledgment that my southwestern Pennsylvania roots run inexorably deep is enough for tonight.

This ephemeral reverie buoys me as I pass through Mount Pleasant, if nothing else visually memorable for the doughboy statue situated squarely in the middle of the town’s focal intersection. Usually this is where I finally succumb to the pneumatic tube of the freeway, whooshing past the massive plant where Volkswagens were once assembled, then Sony televisions. Since Sony's pullout in the late aughts, enterprising folks have sub-divided the facility and attracted the kind of smaller-scale manufacturing that can still be found stateside: envelopes, bar codes, acid-free batteries. It's a fortunate band-aid in an epoch of misfortune.

However, if I want it, there is still one more alternative to the Turnpike, an option that requires confronting head-on the post-industrial malaise that is readily apparent in this part of the country.

Onwards it is, then. At this hour the knobby no-man’s land takes on a presence of its own, watching my every move, muttering its concern, voyeuristic titters it thinks I can’t hear. The descent comes suddenly, a spectral parade of mid-century bungalows, clapboard Victorians, squat brick domiciles from even earlier generations. They usher me down the funnel into a worn business district, rudely bisected by the train tracks that some time ago would have been the lifeblood here, now just a conspicuous gash in the street wall. I am greeted only by the restive spirits of faded-out advertisements astride hollow buildings.

“This stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace . . . It looked at you with a vengeful aspect,” Joseph Conrad wrote of a nefarious jungle river, though it very well could have been penned to describe this sluggish waterway and the dilapidated burg skulking around its banks well over a hundred years later, in this land of milk and honey.

Before there was a bridge here there was first a crude ferry, proffered by a man named Simeral. Tonight he’s nowhere to be found, scarcely remembered, drowned in history’s excess. In his place it may as well be Charon escorting me across the Youghiogheny, further into our own, self-wrought heart of darkness.