Small Town Commerce

From the highway, a road trip is a blur of sameness. The same rest stops, the same chain restaurants, the same mile after mile of pavement. While this is the fastest way to get from “A” to “B”, it’s certainly not the most satisfying.

John Steinbeck noted this frequently in his landmark road trip book Travels with Charlie. Published in 1961, one year before Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature; it was his most commercially successful work. It chronicled a long road trip taken with his dog, Charlie, a standard poodle. They traveled in a converted pickup reminiscent of a small camper today. This book was very important in the planning of our trip because many of Steinbeck’s observations ring true today.

Steinbeck hated the highway, always choosing the slower, more local routes on his trip when possible. He ruminated on the loss of region dialect noted as he passed from town to town. He suggested that the highways and their accommodation of ready migration from place to place were homogenizing the American regional speech into a national language. I’m not sure that this has come to fruition, but I do think our commerce is a sea of sameness.

Every waypoint along the interstate is the same: McDonald’s, Exxon, Starbucks, etc. In developed areas, these exits often nestle up against suburbs, which again exude a sameness of commerce: Bed, Bath & Beyond next to Target next to Petco. It’s not a bad thing to have this convenient, consistent supply of goods that are in demand. But, it sure is boring. This becomes much more clear when we leave the highway and take the smaller routes through the smaller towns.

In Oklahoma, we leave the highway to track down an automotive-themed roadside oddity called the Spider Bug. In a field next to a local auto business, the Spider Bug is a 30-foot tall – the body of which is a VW Beetle. We snap a few pictures. Then head back to the highway through one of the most picturesque small towns in America, Purcell, OK.

The town is one wide avenue with angle parking on both sides and down the middle. The traffic splits one way on either side of the central parking median. Turn of the century buildings in beautiful condition flank the road on both sides for what seems like half a mile. It’s beautiful and it’s filled with local, small businesses. A small café is hear a barber just up from the post office. We stop to send postcards and are greeted by friendly locals who enthusiastically help us locate a restaurant for lunch. Not a Blockbuster in sight. No homogenized commerce.

We go through a few more towns like this, many not as lovely as Purcell. But, we do notice the lack of chain stores and a certain density of car-related commerce. Many small used car lots, tire stores, auto parts, windshield repair, etc. seem to thrive in small towns and outnumber other types of businesses. Ford seems to be the only brand of any stature in these towns and the lots are filled with trucks. Is this because auto repair is the one thing you can’t drive very far to get? You could certainly drive the 30 miles or so to Wal-Mart if you needed a particular type of laundry soap, but if your car doesn’t run, you can drive it to get it repaired, right? That’s my theory. Let me know what you think.

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Your Name in Lights

Driving through the Mojave Desert you can feel your lips chap. And, that’s in an air conditioned automobile. We slip along in relative comfort on the Interstate, while just a few feet to our right the crumbled remains of Route 66 tag along for a few miles before veering off out of sight. I think about the people who did this before air conditioning, before roads, before Chapstick. Between us and the ramshackle highway is sand and mounds of small black stones, lava flow from a long-dormant volcano. Every so often these stones are set in patterns on the sand, clearly by human hands.

Upon closer inspection we can read the signs. Graffiti in the desert. There are no large rocks to spray paint your name on, so people arrange stones to leave their mark. Of course, the minute we notice this, pandemonium breaks out in the back seat to go leave a mark of our own. We pass a few more and the noise from the back is unbearable, so we finally pull over, leaving a huge dust plume as we pull onto the gravel shoulder. We aren’t even to a complete stop before the kids are yanking the door handles to scramble out.

We take one look at the spot we’ve chosen and we’re speechless. Mouths drop open. Everyone points. Someone has spelled out “Kelly & Stephen” and a big heart. I am NOT kidding.

“Should we fix the spelling?” Steve said with a crooked smile, observing that the “e” is missing from my name. What are the odds? I once saw a sign on a highway ramp in the middle of the summer that said “ice possible.” I remember laughing to myself that while it may be possible, it wasn’t likely and that maybe the Highway Department had a sense of humor I wasn’t aware of. Now, I see the value in that sign. It’s to remind us that anything is possible. Of all the roads in America, all the miles we’ve traveled, and all the places we could stop to mark our existence, we stop here and it’s already done. Out of respect, we did not change the spelling.

The kids take about 20 minutes to build their names and pose for a picture. It’s over 100 degrees and they’re pretty red faced and sluggish when they get back to the car. Steve and I are cooling out in the shade from the rear hatch of the because someone has already left our names and pledge of love in the sand.

The Hunger

Americans have a hunger they can never quite satisfy: a hunger for the road.

Perhaps it is our history as a nation of people transplanted and transported from other lands. Or, maybe it’s the nature of living in a vast, open land mass with freedom to move over it at will. It could be related to a need for speed – stemming from our human ancestry as slow, easy prey, where speed could save your life! But, I think we drive because it’s fun.

Why else would kids so quickly gravitate toward cars large and small, vrooming them around the kitchen floor, chirping the tires and tearing up linoleum roadways virtually from birth? This early sense of the joy behind the wheel, imaginary at that age at best, connects to a teenage need for freedom as we become young drivers in reality. Teens drive when they can because they can, even when they have no where in particular to go other than “away” – from parents, home, school, or anything the binds them to one spot for longer than ten minutes. Over time, our practical concerns mitigate the fun and we as adults need to get to specific places at specific times to do specific things that we can’t even remember right after we did them. Parents become taxis – servants to the wheel as they transfer kid cargo to school, sports, events, ice cream, etc. That can really suck the fun out of driving.

Still, even as fragmented and harried as daily driving can be, there are still moments when your favorite song comes on the radio, the breeze blows your hair back and you belt out time-worn lyrics mashing the gas harder to go faster, faster, heart-racing, losing yourself to the linoleum dreams and becoming the car, skimming the road in pure, crazy joy. It may only last until you get to the grocery store, but the fun of driving is still there. You knew it all along. You just needed a moment to find it.