I'm up early. I walk down to the lobby and blearily pour coffee from a loudly gurgling spigot into a Styrofoam cup. Beside the coffee maker is a line of hot breakfast fare and condiments - pats of butter, tiny plastic containers of half-and-half, maple syrup and raspberry jam - fresh out of cold storage and as-yet untouched. It's 5:57 a.m., and still dark outside. Complimentary breakfast has just begun in Flagstaff, Arizona.
"You sleep well?" the man behind the front desk asks. He was there five hours earlier when we checked in.
"Yes, thank you," I respond. "Do you know how far we are from Nevada?"
He's settling an electronic credit card machine, closing out another graveyard shift, fingers poised to rip off a long strip of receipt when it is done coiling out of the top. "Bout two, three hours."
"What's the altitude of Flagstaff?"
He has a quick answer, as though he's been asked before.
"7,000 feet."
I grin. "Give or take a few toes, right?"
He doesn't get this, or doesn't think it's funny (really, how could he not get it?); seems to have trouble affording me even the charitable chuckle I feel the remark deserves. But he does say something interesting (part of his rote response to the question he's been asked so many times):
"We're higher than Denver."
Gotta say, I would never have thought it, but it explains the crispness in the air when I walked out to the car to retrieve my cell phone ten minutes earlier, and the dusting of snow across the top of the vehicle, which made the pre-dawn feel much more northern, geographically, than I know us to be.
It also explains the vertigo I got last night racing west along Interstate 40 toward the City of Seven Wonders, the feeling we were in the midst of a long ascent that could not be confirmed because it was pitch black. Out in that darkness I knew the Grand Canyon was somewhere nearby, and Meteor Crater, Old Route 66, the Four Corners, but we saw none of it. We were doing our best to keep pace last night, pushing 80 miles per hour most of the way and making pretty good time.
Just not good enough to make it all the way.
I acknowledge his factoid with an appreciative nod, hasten to claim a table and fix myself some breakfast while Steinbeck's hour of the pearl is still mine to cherish in solitude.
You don't see it much lately (at least I haven't in a while), but 'Complimentary' breakfast at hotels used to be called 'Continental' breakfast; an allusion to the lighter European breakfast that not only (doubtless) sounded fancy-schmancy to folks, but enabled the motels to get away with setting out a pile of day-old donuts, over-ripe fruit, from-concentrate OJ and bad coffee and calling it good.
Nowadays, breakfast is more complimentary than Continental; that is, more in line with the artery-hardening fare Americans are accustomed to starting their day with. Guests at even the economy lines generally can count on something hot: usually heating tins full of scrambled eggs and sausage, sometimes an omelet bar, and almost always a do-it-yourself waffle iron with a time beeper so loud and piercing it could easily be used to herald the imminent detonation of a thermo-nuclear device in any movie and have the audience on the edge of its seat.
I don't know what changed this. Probably our service-oriented society's desire for options, maybe the need to distance ourselves from anything 'Continental', reaffirm our American-ness, in the post-9/11 age, or maybe just technology having made small-batch cooking more practical. But I like emerging from my room to a hot breakfast I don't have to pay for. When I was a kid traveling with my ever-frugal parents, we routinely availed ourselves of the Continental breakfast in lieu of eating at a restaurant, and a box of Cheerios with luke-warm milk and a piece of cantaloupe or pithy slice of orange never quite got it done for me.
What I don't like is the fact that everyone in the hotel avails themselves of it these days. It often holds its own with anything being served at a restaurant, and being free makes it a no-brainer. The main problem is limited space and seating. If you're staying at a hotel with a lot of other guests you either have to get up at the crack of dawn, as I have, or wait until 9:55, when it's about to be taken down, to ensure yourself a) a seat, b) a tolerable wait in line.
But in addition, and this is just me being priggish, there's something unappetizing about breakfast buffets in hotels, families coming down unshowered, more or less still in their pajamas. There's something unwholesome about a heavily used waffle iron with other people's unseen fingerprints all over it, their leftover batter splotches on the counter, sausage links and bits of scrambled egg fallen on the floor, ground into the industrial carpet beneath the sneakers of kids being allowed to serve themselves with fingers that routinely find their way into unpleasant places. Oddly, I don't have this hang-up at other buffets, for other meals...just hotels, and just breakfast. I prefer to be the first if I can get up early enough, or I just go out and find a restaurant.
Though who the hell knows where any cook's fingers have been...
Daylight appears in the sky through the lobby window as I pick at my waffle, sip coffee, and watch the TV in the corner of the room. MSNBC is on, mounting its busy coverage of the shooting that took place the previous day in Tucson, a few hours south of us. I ponder the implications of assassination in the current political climate as an older gentleman comes in from the parking lot with a meek-looking dachshund on a leash. He leads the bedraggled hot dog slowly to a table directly beside me, where it flops down underneath and proceeds to sniff and lick my shoe. The gentleman secures himself a bagel, a pat of butter and a cup of coffee from the food line and sits down. As he prepares his bagel, he gazes at the TV, intermittently tossing a piece down to his dog, who momentarily forsakes my shoe to scarf it up with a tiny snarl and belch.
The gentleman's gaze on the television is heavy and uninterrupted. I wait for him to say something about the tragedy to me, some garden-variety lament about the state of things, what will happen now. The look on his face suggests it's coming, and God knows I wouldn't mind saying something about it myself. But words never come, and he doesn't remove his eyes from the screen, even when MSNBC cuts to a Cadillac commercial. I come to the unsettling realizatio he's not even watching the TV, just staring at it blankly. His eyes might have remained just as fixed on an episode of Saved By the Bell.
Then sure enough, other guests start pouring into the room from the hallway all at once, as though they've coordinated their arrival: a middle age couple with a sulky pre-teen son wearing a Korn tee shirt; a single twenty-something male fingering his cell phone intently, a moment later what's presumably his wife or girlfriend, also fingering away on an electronic device. Around this parade, a diminutive hotel worker picks her way, making sure all's well and stocked on the food line. A second couple with a toddler and an infant arrive, and they choose the table on the other side of me, the mother hoisting the car safety seat she's carrying up onto the table with a groan. The interior is slightly above my sight line, but I hear the unmistakable twitter and gurgle of a little one inside. The toddler, a girl, stays close to her daddy in the food line, bleating incessantly that she wants cereal, wants cereal, can she have cereal, daddy, can she have cereal...
*Sigh.* All of a sudden there's a din in the hotel lobby. The hour of the pearl has perished. I knew it couldn't last. Morning is young love...but no matter. I'm in the corner, back against the wall, safely impervious to any invasion of space, if not peace and quiet. And what the hell do I have to gripe about anyway? I'm in Flagstaff. I'm not in Tucson.
The Art of Travel
We expected to be in Nevada by now, but last night learned a critical lesson, one that I really should know, but always have to re-learn whenever I drive anywhere: it's dangerous business to plan a road trip solely by looking at a map and trying to fold miles into speed. A mile, being some 5,200 feet, has a way of stretching like taffy when enough of them come all at once.
We established it was 800 miles from Amarillo, Texas to our Nevada destination - 11.5 hours of travel time, according to MapQuest, which figures a traveling speed of 70 or 75 miles per hour. We left Amarillo at two in the afternoon and expected to arrive in Nevada at one or two in the morning. It would be late, but we could do it if we pressed on hard enough; we could check in to a hotel and be up the next morning on time.
But MapQuest does not take into consideration variables. It only calculates distance divided by speed, with the speed being figured as constant. Needless to say, this doesn't hold true in even the best of scenarios. As it turned out, it took 11 hours just to get to Flagstaff, leaving us two or three hours longer to travel.
Realizing we'd grossly underestimated, we came to the hard-battled decision that a short stay-over in Flagstaff at 1 a.m. was more advantageous than pressing on and arriving in Nevada at 4 a.m., when checking into a hotel would hardly make sense and we'd probably just have to sleep in the car.
I think it was the right call. I feel more refreshed on those five hours than I did yesterday back in Kansas, when I was dead to the world for sixteen.
Mostly though, I think we all really just wanted to get off the road. The novelty of the trip has worn off a bit. Not the overall enjoyment, but that initial excitement that makes hellacious highway runs possible. We've turned road weary in a short period of time, are just searching for our destination now, knowing we need to be somewhere at a specific time and growing a little anxious for the difficulty we're having. Most of last night's drive unfolded not only in darkness but silence, interrupted only occasionally by the groanful sighting of a huge green mileage sign, on the face of which distance to Flagstaff seemed to be forever expressed in triple digits.
There was one exception: a protracted discussion about my smart phone.
I just picked it up in November and I think it has proven an invaluable tool on this trip. The accuracy of its GPS, which I never had a reason to use until now, is astonishing. It pinpoints our location and provides real-time, accurate directions to any location on the planet. Apps like Yelp! make finding exactly what we need at any given moment easy. I don't even have to type anything in, just speak quietly into my phone and get exactly the response I'm expecting. I booked our rooms in Flagstaff in five minutes while speeding down the highway at 80 miles an hour, and got a stellar rate to boot. This phone is one of those empowering technologies that quickly makes you wonder if there ever really was a time you carried on without it.
That's my feeling anyway, but not everyone in the car shares my enthusiasm. The point was made that such technology, while admittedly convenient, kills the art of travel, in the way digital cameras have killed the art of photography (or Photoshop has killed its truth); the way sailors no longer rely on the stars to guide them but rather on unerring GPS navigation (that could prove not so unerring at any moment); the way fishermen don't rely on knowledge of habit or habitat to catch fish these days, because there are fish finders that tell them exactly what they're floating over at any given moment. The way texting has killed the art of conversation. The way Wikipedia has killed fact checking.
From this discussion, a debate arose: is technology systematically extinguishing certain once-necessary skill sets? Is that a good or bad thing, or does it even matter anymore?
Once again, it's a source of ambivalence for me. Something organic is lost, certainly, with the advent of any technology. But it's important to not romanticize the past. It's all too easy to start viewing something like asking for directions as some skill attendant to the 'art' of travel, particularly road travel.
When in fact, the truth is, what asking for directions was in those mysterious dark days prior to all this technology (you know, way back in 1999!) was a pain in the ass. Any and all tension on any trip I've ever taken - whether with my parents as a kid, or in my young adulthood - arose from being lost somewhere, having to ask for directions, squabbling about whether we missed a turn-off, whether the guy at the convenience store knew what he was talking about when he told us to take a left at the second set of lights (or was it the third?), and whether we should backtrack (something that, for deeply psychological reasons I don't fully understand, I hate doing).
My phone eliminates the need for all of that. I see no problem with availing myself of technology, provided I maintain the basic skills needed to survive were the technology suddenly taken away, and I think I have. I know how to locate stars in the sky. I know how to read street signs. I know how to read a printed map. I can find any state on a U.S. map, and for that matter, any country on a world map in two seconds or less. I know how to hoist my ass out of the driver's seat, walk into a convenience store and ask where the nearest diner or hotel is. If I don't have to do that, and at any given moment don't want to, why should I? Being able to talk to my phone does not make me reluctant or unable to talk to people. Just gives me the option. (The specter of 'them' knowing where I am at any given time; that is, my location being accessible to some burgeoning Corporate-controlled government bent on tracking my every move, purchase and bodily function for deleterious purposes is another discussion all together, perhaps, but remains for me, at least for now, an abstraction.)
We volleyed back and forth about this for a while, but at some point the discussion reached an impasse and we fell silent, took to watching the miles dissolve in the darkness, the big green mileage signs telling us we were getting nowhere fast (enough). I can't say we argued about it exactly, but certainly it was a debate with no wiggle room, two fundamentally different opinions. And it would come up again and again over the course of our trip.
Close Encounter
Our mood (or my mood, actually) wasn't helped much by the fact that we nearly died last night:
I-40 is the third longest interstate in the country, running from Cali to Carolina. It is overwhelmingly big rigs on this road at any hour of the day or night, and as big rigs are wont to do, most of them race 10 or 20 miles faster than the speed limit, often in large convoys. It's unsettling to get surrounded by three of them in a car that, comparatively, has the constitution of an aluminum can.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against truckers. Most of them are aware and courteous. But they're all in a hurry, and there have been a few on this trip who have played dangerously fast and loose with common sense as they attempt to weave in and out of traffic like they're on a crotch rocket. I'm not a bad driver, certainly not a reckless one, and I've been pretty good at anticipating what the truckers will do...an imperative at 80 miles an hour, when distraction for even a fraction of a second can lead to tragedy.
But at sunset, right at the switch-over from twilight to dusk, one Peterbilt-driving jackass came up behind me with his bright lights on, and in an instant decided I was going too slow (though I was maintaining 80 miles an hour). Wrenching hard on his steering wheel and tromping on his accelerator, his 18 wheeler appeared to leap into the left lane in a burst of angry impatience. It roared past us, and before even half of his trailer had cleared the front of our car, he flipped on his blinker and began to veer back into the right lane.
Everything really does slow down in a moment like that. In the span of two seconds I became aware that he was veering way too early, went through my disbelief and fear, my own angry burst (of helplessness), and had started to execute my only possible move to avoid being crushed, which was to veer right myself, toward the guard rail (on the other side of which a declivity tumbled its way down to a valley floor), and lay on the horn with my lights flashing.
Luckily this got his attention, and he lurched back into the left lane and cleared our car before continuing with his (still hasty) lane change. But his trailer had come within inches of our vehicle, and if I'd failed to wake him up, we would have been pinned right up against the guard rail, the front end of our car crinkled like tinfoil, and that would have been the end to our trip and potentially a lot more.
The American Southwest
Before our argument about technology, before our brush with death, before the sun set, there were a few magnificent things to see in the American Southwest:
I will never forget the change-over from 'Midwest' to 'Southwest' terrain, as though the land had undergone a sea change. It happened not an hour out of Amarillo. I'm not sure if we were still in Texas, but suddenly - seemingly in an instant - the land around us was fully barren and rocky, punctuated only by cactus-looking vegetation. Suddenly the horizon appeared to have numerous layers that recessed in color and starkness as they fell back from our position. Suddenly there were monolithic mesas rising out of deep basins. Suddenly the severity of the landscape served as a static reminder of the violence with which our Earth formed billions of years ago.
I've never driven this way before, but I have been to the southwest in the past, and I love it. As much as I cherish the solemn, verdant beauty of the northwoods in which I grew up, I think I find the rugged color of this 'painted landscape' just a bit more appealing. I can see myself living here one day. It's not even that I want to, really, just that I can see it, see myself being happy. And I understand why the region is so popular with retirees...it's a mild climate, as easy on the skin and the bones as it is on the eyes. Hot in the summer, but lacking the humidity that makes heat so unbearable. It was a sad state of affairs when the sun went down; I had just started to take pictures, and there seemed to always be a new vista more stunning than the last.
We stopped in San Jon, New Mexico, population 306. There isn't much in San Jon anymore. It was once a bustling Route 66 community that Highway 40 has since allowed the world to start passing by. And so it has.
But we stopped for gas, to stretch a little, and a couple things caught my eye.
First, across from the gas station, what looked to be an abandoned cafe, with a plain white 'Eat' sign.
When I was a kid there was a place that had one of these laconic signs. I remember having lunch there with my parents just once, when I was very young, but the cafe/tavern didn't last long, and for most of my childhood it sat abandoned, allowing winter after winter to claim another stake in that sign: either fortifying a new layer of rust in its metalwork, or periodically taking down a portion of one of the letters, sometimes an entire letter all at once, until by the time I graduated high school it was little more than a crumbling steel frame sporting half a jagged 'T' on just one side. The building was finally razed when I was in my twenties, but on account of the slow burn to which I bore witness, the 'Eat' sign has remained a symbol of decay for me, and of the past. It strikes me as a leftover from the pre-corporate world, the days before logos and slogans strewn everywhere scrambled to manipulate the decisions we made; when all you needed to know was whether or not an establishment served food. Nothing subliminal - or not subliminal enough - going on, no hungry man platters or kids eat free on Thursdays, no 5-pounds of toppings, top-heavy waitresses or beers from all over the world to lure you in.
"Are you hungry? You can eat here."
That's all an 'Eat' sign said. And there was a time when that was all it needed to say, a time when people didn't eat out as much, it was a special thing, and not touted as the most important decision of the week.
I don't think I've ever seen one hanging at a place that's actually been open, come to think of it. I could be wrong, of course; I haven't been everywhere.
And that fact could not have been more aptly illustrated than by the second thing in San Jon, New Mexico that captures my attention, taped to the door leading into the convenience store:
Maybe it shouldn't have, but this shocked me when I first read it. Who knew cattle rustling was still an issue in modern day America? But I guess...why wouldn't it be? People still ranch, cattle are still a commodity, possibly more valuable per head than the car we're driving in, and therefore as alluring a contraband as anything else. Someone can, conceivably, get the animal slaughtered and cut up and into their freezer fairly quickly.
It's just not something I've ever seen where I come from. And so another puzzle piece falls into place.
Yes, I really needed this trip.
My companions join me in the Flagstaff hotel lobby, and after they've cobbled together breakfast for themselves, we are underway before 7 a.m., on the last leg of our journey to Nevada.
As we pull out of the hotel parking lot, daylight reveals that our hotel sits in the shadow of an enormous mountain, which, if I'm not mistaken is Mars Hill, home of the Lowell Observatory, where the (dwarf) planet Pluto, amongst other heavenly bodies, was discovered in 1930. I groan a little to myself upon this realization. Were I on my my own and drifting about with nowhere to be, I would have taken the time to check it out.
But that's okay. The terrain we're heading into is kind of liking traveling on the moon anyway.
