You'll Never Make It to Memphis, Part 1

A road trip across the heartland.

From Colorado to Virginia, the journey began and ended with wind and fire. In between were long-anticipated visits with family and friends, a perfect dinner counterbalanced by a salmonella salad, and an unplanned night in Arkansas after a clash with a tire gator.

Road trips are never what you expect; that’s the adventure and charm of them, the exhilarating sense of possibility. Driving across the Midwest and Central South, the main challenge is to stay alert for whatever might jump out at you on long highways through nowhere. Luckily, I had company and driving help. I was driving home the zippy hybrid Honda that my brother had decided to part with as part of a paring-down effort, and he drove with me part of the way. A friend on spring break from teaching joined me for the next stretch. The intersection point was a weekend at an Airbnb in Oklahoma City with my sister and another old friend.

Because this trip followed the editing of a lesson on figurative language, I had another sort of company, too: a sense of the power of words to shape our understanding of the world, either in service to or defiance of reality. We latch onto a vivid simile like a tire tread around a metal plate at 70mph.

Demon Kitty Rag across the Dust Bowl

Crossing Kansas in a car, I discovered, is nothing like flying over it. I’ve looked out plane windows and thought, “Oh, it looks like a bunch of dirt-colored quilt squares.” On the ground, driving through those flat stretches of prairie is more like steering a land rover over the surface of the moon, if the moon had tumbleweeds. 100 miles or more may pass between outposts of civilization, so you’d better not run out of gas, water, or music.

Dust Bowl. Dust Bowl. The term took on new meaning for me, less metaphor than literal description. I could almost taste it.

In the 1930s, apocalyptic dust clouds throughout the south central U.S. were inseparable from the Great Depression. They resulted mainly from abandonment of soil conservation practices as grain prices plummeted. Desperate farmers plowed over vast tracts of prairie grass and overgrazed their cattle.

Winds whipped across the plains, raising billowing clouds of dust. The sky could darken for days, and even well-sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on the furniture. In some places, the dust drifted like snow, covering farm buildings and houses. Nineteen states in the heartland of the United States became a vast dust bowl. With no chance of making a living, farm families abandoned their homes and land, fleeing westward to become migrant laborers.
—Library of Congress, The Dust Bowl

Up close, it was easy to see how it had happened. On the prairies there’s almost nothing holding the dirt in place and nothing to stop the wind from howling across it.

Tumbleweeds weren’t the only things that blew across our path. Through Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, the winds were so high that semi-trucks fell onto their sides like wounded buffalo and slid across the highway. We passed one that had landed on the roadside facing the wrong way. Moreover, conditions have been so dry throughout the region that fire is a constant threat: the terrifying speed at which it travels means my brother and his family have “go bags” packed at all times in case their neighborhood is engulfed. Wind-driven brush fires were breaking out all over Oklahoma just ahead of us.

Still, most of the time, things didn’t feel apocalyptic. It was a fun drive. The car sped along 70 East as Greg helped me get the hang of its automated features and conveniences. Reluctantly—I value what shreds of privacy I have left—I’d enabled Google Assistant on my phone for hands-free maps, music, and audiobooks.

“Hey Google, play Agent to the Stars on Audible.”

Here’s the cover blurb from John Scalzi’s novel:

The space-faring Yherajk people have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish. Gaining humanity's trust isn't easy when you look like a B-movie terror. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal.

In other words, they need a crack PR agent. To make things worse, the Yherajk communicate in smells, and the ones we associate with passing gas are considered “high speech.” It was the perfect silly thing to keep us awake.

We’d left Greg’s house after he finished work, and the sun set long before we made it to our motel that first night. Nestled in our climate-controlled cocoon with its low profile, we scarcely noticed the wind pick up until we got out at a rest stop and almost blew away like Dorothy. A little farther along, traffic backed up for half an hour as another toppled truck got cleared off the road. One remote stretch that I drove through the dark scared the hell out of me, partly because fools in trucks and SUVs behind us wanted to speed. Didn’t they see that felled metal beast a ways back? Did they think they were special?

I can imagine a honking, tobacco-chawing truck driver thinking like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nope, I can’t die, not me.

All his life the syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic—Julius Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal—had always seemed to him to be true only when it applied to Caesar, certainly not to him…he had always been a special being, totally different from all others, he had been Vanya with his mama and his papa, with Vitya and Volodya, with his toys, and the carriage-driver, then little Katya, with all the delights, sorrows and rapture of childhood, boyhood and youth. Did Caesar have anything to do with the smell of that little striped leather ball that Vanya had loved so much? Was it Caesar who had kissed his mother’s hand like that, and was it for Caesar that the silken folds of his mother’s dress had rustled the way they did? Was he the one who had rebelled at law school over the provision of snacks? Had Caesar been in love like him? Could Caesar chair a session like him? Yes, Caesar is mortal and it’s all right for him to die, but not me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts—it’s different for me.

—Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

The soundtrack for that leg appropriately included “Demon Kitty Rag” by Katzenjammer.

The Starlite Motel

While Greg drove, I called ahead to the tiny motel to make sure either mom or pop would be there to let us in. Pickings were slim in southeastern Colorado on our route, but the Yelp reviews of this place had seemed decent enough. Their tone was mostly…amused.

The motel was ancient and spartan but clean as advertised. Our room had one, er, amenity that we were relieved not to need.

Despite the flimsiness of the lock, I slept like a log at the Starlite Motel.

After breakfast at hell’s kitchen, we were on our way to Oklahoma City.

To be continued…