Day Eight... Cross States
There was a sign that said ‘No Swimming. No Wading.’ I ignored it. Nolin Lake was tranquil and clean and not even cold. I swam laps and stretched out in the water before any boats were out while Sadie paced the shore, guarding my life. We slept last night under the first real darkness, the first solid black night of the trip. Cloud cover concealed the stars, yet again, but the neighborless, city-less, light-less dark was exquisite.
We packed up and wound around the Nolin Lake Dam through Bluegrass Country, home of the Blue Moon of Kentucky. Nothing but farmlands, vegetable patches, horses and cows and trailers and I got to thinking about the red barns, all these worn out flaking chipping red barns and how the reason the barns are red is because that was the cheapest color of paint. Which is something I learned from an episode of the 90s ABC sitcom Head of the Class when Howard Hesseman held an impromptu quiz bowl between his city geniuses and the locals when their bus broke down in a small town. He wanted to show the city kids how much country folks knew about stuff they had no idea. It always stuck with me. City kids in the country learning things always stuck with me.
The next destination on my Mission List is Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, but I have not plotted out how to get there. As we get up a head of steam, I know, I believe, today, today we’re leaving Kentucky. I end up on a Parkway after stopping during the first drops of rain at a general store in Rosine where I meet a guy named Mike who used to be in the management program at Wal Mart. He came back home to be closer to his family a few years back. He’s not married. Likes it there. Runs the strangest little store I’ve ever been into. I get a can of RC and a tin of sardines in hot sauce before working my way North and West all day, going 70mph up and down hills, flying Dumbo in the rain until I end up in the City of Owensboro.
Owensboro initially looks like an industrial town full of grain silos and ugly construction work, what immediately jumps out is that there’s work to be done and suddenly there are black people everywhere doing the work. Haven’t really seen too many black people recently. I accidentally drive down by the riverfront to the old town where the storefronts look refurbished and great. I stop to let the dog have a walk and I buy a hot brown from the first hot girl I’ve seen all week. A blonde in tight jeans working in a steakhouse all by herself pretty much. Me and Sadie sit down by an ornate park with picture book plastic trees to climb on and a water feature right by the river, the Ohio River. Sadie plays ambassador to the kids playing, earning a pet from a tubby black kid and his younger sister who he holds in his arms. I see an Asian toddler’s eyes light up from his stroller and his Mom directs him closer to touch Sadie’s nose. Although I’ve been assured that there are others, these are the first Asian people I’ve met in Kentucky.
The rains come again and chase us back into the van and across the bridge over the Ohio, ceremoniously out of The Commonwealth of Kentucky and into Rockport, Indiana where apparently they love fireworks. Nothing but fireworks stores the whole road into town. When the traffic piles up behind me, we pull over onto a dirt road up a corn field which presents a good opportunity for a photo. And an actual ceremony. I should explain. There’s another passenger in the van. My dog Saza. Sadie’s dog Saza. I always imagined that I’d be taking trips like this with him, he loved the road, he liked snow, he liked found water he could stand in. He lived a spectacular life, practically regal in bearing, 105 pounds of pitbull and Rhodesian Ridgeback muscle. He had a beautiful death, last year, just shy of his 15th birthday, the day before Valentine’s Day, surrounded by people who’d fallen in love with him, women wailing in the bed beside him when he finally finished his journey, utterly without fear. So his ashes come with us, in a blue canvas bag that says ‘jesse’ on it that I used to carry around art supplies or lunch when I was a kid. Every new state we touch, we pause for a ceremony, preferably near water, I hold some of him in my hands, I talk to him a little, I listen to him, I usually cry, sometimes laugh, then I scatter a handful. We’ll probably keep going until the bag is empty. At the intersection of three dirt roads in a cornfield, by a tree in the rain in Rockport, Indiana, that’s Saza’s 25th state.
We turn west on Indiana Route 66 hoping to ride it all the way to Illinois, but Indiana refuses to let me avoid the Interstate. There’s no other way, I check. It doesn’t seem so bad at first, I-64 to be specific, two lanes either direction, grass median, oceans of green on either side, cornfields as far as the eye can see, trees and billboard urging you to help protect the unborn and to read the Bible. A lot of Baptist churches, it seems, ready to go to war. We touch Warrick and Brandenburg Counties before the red sets in. No sooner am I on an Interstate do I hit the first red streak on my map. 13 and a half miles of road construction in the rain reducing it to a single lane stacking it up at least 5 and a half miles before I can get off of this thing, unfortunately onto another Interstate, 69 going West. Indiana, I’m not sure I have any business with you.
It leave me nothing but time to think about the stop I had yesterday just before I hit the left turn in Wax heading up to the lake. I gassed up, Super Premium of course, and had a conversation with a guy at the next pump named Dudley with a lazy eye, crooked leg, dirty jeans and greasy hands. And a nice face. Dudley was driving a van, not a camper, but a van, he stopped to tell me he liked mine and wanted to buy it. I told him I just bought it myself and we got to talking about places to go. I was asking him where to get something to eat, hoping to catch something before I got up to the lake, he gave me a bunch of directions to a bunch of different places that might have a deli open. I was kinda curious to see what would pass for a deli, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it, basically a glass case in a gas station. There’s lunch meat in it. Dudley told me the area had at least 500 Amish families. Two different groups, one much stricter than the other, the other’s got three boys he picks up in his van to drive to see their girlfriends so I guess they’re ok with cars as long as they’re not driving. I kept seeing signs, yellow road signs, with the shape of a horse and buggy on it, I didn’t think that was for Mennonites like the ones who’d sold me the banana bread that got me through the morning. My brother married a Mennonite from Northern Indiana. Someday I’ll have to ask her to show me this state, because clearly isn’t the way to do it.
Even after the traffic releases, my un-civilized city anger swells…
64 West. The Interstate is so un-interesting. It is completely lacking in nuance. It has one purpose and that is to convey vehicles as quickly as possible from one point to the next without stopping. It wants you to move at top speed. It doesn’t want you to slow down. It doesn’t want you to look around. It doesn’t want you to shop. It doesn’t want you to encounter strangers. Everything about the Interstate is anathema to The Road. It has no personality. It is a place of business. It should belong exclusively to the truckers. And perhaps emergency landings from airplanes should domestic war ever break out. The purpose Eisenhower claimed it would serve giving mile-long stretches, straightaways every five to ten miles so that he could claim it was a project necessary to the defense of America. The same stupid rationale that’s going to get us the most ugly wall imagined in history along our Southern border. Another domestic project without nuance or beauty whose function is completely business.
It’s 152 miles to St. Louis. I could stay on this thing the entire way. I could cross the whole midsection of the state of Illinois which I haven’t even entered yet. It’s sapping my will to be awake. The signs by the side of the road are so cloying… please… pleeeeaaase visit this state park or this gas station or this theme restaurant. It’s not so much that there are flyover states, it’s that there are drive-by portions of every state. Nothing has destroyed the fabric of America more than ripping it apart with these conduits that were meant to connect. You don’t drive through these towns anymore, you drive over them. They’re under a bridge someplace. You can’t see any signs of life, you just see silos and barns and fields.
Never forget for one second that this is a garden. And we all live in it. The entire place nurtures us, feeds us, grows with us, around us, sometimes for us, sometimes against us. This is our garden. And the Interstate does not serve it. And it really doesn’t serve us either. Designed to move us, it’s so unmoving. And so flat. All the curves and the undulations and the rises and falls of Kentucky and West Virginia and their small roads, they’re all gone. You get an occasional updrifting downdrifting long stretch of grey asphalt under grey skies. Scattered showers have finally scattered, but there’s still this thick dusty cloud coverage. I don’t even realize it, but I’ve got the pedal to the floor and I’m pushing 80 on a downhill.
130 miles from the border of Illinois all the way to St. Louis. You could cross it without seeing anything more interesting than a port-a-potty stood up in the center median. You could cross it penning an essay, “On the depression of roadkill, butterflies in the grill and a bug-spattered windshield.” You could cross it without meeting it.
I’m not gonna let that happen.
