Road trip 8 -- Limon, Colorado to Austin, Minnesota

 Road Trip 8 – Limon, Colorado to Austin, Minnesota

Freeway: 5:55 a.m.

Radio signals broadcast across immense distances.  Cattlemen are selling sires in Montana: the stud bulls are called “True Grit” and “Bold Move.”  In Leota, Kansas, another Angus sire is available for stud service or purchase: “The Man in Black”.  There’s a trade show for cattle ranchers in Wyoming: “Conception to Carcass Production Show”.

Green high plains, draws with eroded rims, black cattle like pawns in a chess set scattered across the crumpled terrain.  No signs of the blizzard that passed through here only two days ago.  The sky is foreboding.  Another blizzard is racing northeast, nipping at the heels of previous storm.  

I expect the freeway will cross the border into Nebraska but, to my surprise, I-70 enters Kansas.  This is disorienting.  I don’t know exactly where I’m located.  This is the risk of navigating solely by maps on my cell-phone – I have no concept as to how the states are jigsawed together.  

“Hire Mexican Dan in the Red Van – he’ll fix your floors.”  Another ad for the Montana stock show: I don’t understand the slogan – “Makin’ em better without makin’ em bigger.”  What does that mean?  Signals from remote places wax and wane.  I pick up High Plains Radio broadcasting from Amarillo, an eclectic public radio mix of songs on a show called “High Plains Morning.”  A vee of geese flying raggedly to the East overhead.  Empty land stretching out to the flat horizons in all directions.  On “High Plains Radio”, the opera singer Maria Callas consents to sing “One Fine Day” from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  The recording is old, twitchy with static, a commercial appearance that sounds like it was recorded in the showroom of a car dealership or in the parking lot at a grocery opening.  The announcer has the voice of TV pitchman; with an audible sneer, he asks Miss Callas “Would you like to sing something?”  “Yes,” she says announcing her selection.  The announcer prompts her as if prodding a reluctant child to dive into the deep end of the pool: “Well go ahead now,” he says.  It’s not high-fidelity but AM radio quality, high notes sizzling in a hot bacon grease of interference.   

Thirty miles after crossing into Kansas, the map displayed on my console sends me stair-stepping up a long diagonal route between I-70 and I-80.  It’s like a calculus exercise: how many right angle turns at what interval will approximate a smooth diagonal course between the freeways?  Each eastern leg of the route, runs fifteen or twenty miles, reaching an intersection is some small godforsaken village where the route, then, turns straight north for another fifteen miles to the next jog east and so on, a ziggurat mapped onto the empty landscape.  On the Interstate, you are a vector of force and motion, a physics experiment that proceeds according to rational, cold and logical principles of direction and velocity.  But this detour through northwestern Kansas and, then, south Nebraska up to I-80 follows different principles.  I have to adjust my speed for the small towns, the speed traps, the periodic encounters with slow-moving trucks also making this short-cut between the freeways or, in the alternative, yielding as the faster, speeding trucks roar past me, traveling way too fast for the conditions., In the villages: no manned gas stations, just coop tanks standing exposed to the merciless grey skies, only one well-kept building in the hamlet (even the churches are in ruins) and that is a nursing home built with brown brick walls amidst a few storm-shattered shade trees, black fallen boughs on the lawn, tuck-pointed masonry, down a spur road six or seven commercial buildings that are abandoned and the little cube of a defunct bank sculpted out of a tallow yellow block of limestone.  There are lots of trucks hustling along this route, which is not well-suited to truck traffic.  

I hit I-80 a little to the west of Kearney, Nebraska, passing under the big museum of Manifest Destiny built over the freeway in a big grandiose span that is flanked by sculptural effigies of screaming eagles. The swamps and wetlands along the Platte River are lightless, a scatter of little manmade lakes that is an artifact of the high water table here, the Nebraska aquifer and craters cut into the river bottom to excavate gravel and sand for the construction of the freeway.  About ninety miles west of Lincoln, I begin to encounter signs of the blizzard that swept through her 35 hours earlier – a burned-out truck is resting with wheels pointed to the grey sky.  (This reminds me of the Ford F150 burning on the forest road under Mount Elden in Flagstaff, the orange and red flame the only color in a monochrome landscape of black tree trunks and shadows cast by the evergreens – no, there’s another burst of color, come to think of it, the spinning cherry on top of the police squad car with the cop motionlessly watching the fire roll through the pick-up.)  Another three miles down the road, another semi-truck hopelessly jacknifed in the ditch and, then, in the parking lot of the Love’s Truck Stop, piles of empty window defroster fluid boxes, big chunks of grey ice fallen from fenders melting on the asphalt.  Twenty miles west of Lincoln, another semi-tractor-trailer lying on its side in the median, two busy frontloaders laboring to scoop up big piles of fruit fallen out of the smashed truck – oranges, apples, melons pushed into heaps by the machines, bruised citrus in puddles of water.  More wrecked trucks, another mangled in the median with a snarl of fencing under its fenders.  Public radio playing Wagner’s overture from Christopher Columbus – what is this?

I planned to stop at Omaha to see an exhibition of engravings by Karl Bodmer at the Joslyn Museum.  But a storm is at my back following too close for comfort and, so, I decide to not pause in Omaha but to keep driving home.  I have a room rented in that town but these reservations are non-refundable so I accept the fact that I’m going to lose a hundred dollars on the transaction.

I’m in Iowa at 2:35.  I’ve crossed out of Mountain Time to CST and its an hour later.  I pause at a rest stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  A big burly trucker with a shaved head and black goatee is blocking he door to the men’s toilet.  I wait for a moment for him to step aside.  He obliges reluctantly, glaring at me as if I were his sworn enemy.  His eyes are red from weeping.  “You fucking bitch!” he screams, “You fucking asshole.  You’re a fucking bitch.”  Perhaps, he is wearing a blue-tooth is his ear and talking to someone on the phone.  But I don’t see anyone to whom he is directing his screams of outrage.  Maybe, he’s shrieking at me.  

Eleven wrecked trucks between Council Bluffs and Des Moines, seven smashed cars awaiting tow in ditch and median.  Eight-inch high veins of snow lacing up the hillsides.  Water is draining everywhere and the gas station potholes are full of tar-black fluid and there are long, serpentine pools of water flanking the freeway in the ditches.  

North of Ames, Iowa, I pull into the I-35 rest stop at Dows (the off ramp is at mile-marker 159).  It’s 6:15 pm.  Headlights zoom by on the freeway.  The air feels wet and cold.  This is a peculiar rest stop, dedicated to the 44 men from this area who died in the Civil War.  Franklin County had the highest rate of enlistment in Iowa – about 169 men left their families and farms to fight in the War and this patriotic sacrifice is commemorated at the toilet complex west of the freeway. Iron bollards flank a sidewalk that leads from the parking area to the restrooms.  The bollards look like the heads of vast, black asparagus poking up out of the rich Iowa soil and they are decorated with cast bas relief emblems.  I think the bollards which are about four feet tall and spherical are supposed to represent Civil War cannon balls adorned with military patterns.  Terra cotta panels, also bearing symbols cast in low relief, are embedded in the exterior walls to the rest room complex.  The panels are marked with hands clasping one another, military insignia, cotton gins and slave manacles and mortars and muskets.  A short outside walkway leads to what seems to be a graveyard but with only three cemetery markers protected by drooping iron chains.  In fact, these markers are slabs onto which words from letters written by soldiers are inscribed.  Above the corridor between the men and women’s toilets, a huge chain binds the north and south elevations of the building together.  The architectural imagery is ambiguous and puzzling.  The chain that fetters north to south is supposed to represent unity, but, also, signifies slavery.  And the elements of the symbolic republic that are latched together by this over-sized chain are, in fact, latrines, that is, the north and south here are toilets.  The landscape with the sprouting iron bollards, the gravestones inscribed with letters, the terra cotta plaques and chain and, further, a screaming eagle mosaic installed on the floor in the rest room hallway all seem surreal, a roadside hallucination.  

The sliding doors to the toilets are out of commission.  On the fountains in the corridor, there are signs that read Don’t Drink the Water!!  Inexplicable puddles bar entrance to the Men’s room.  Splashing through the water, I enter the restroom.  Within a stall, I glimpse pink flesh.  Is someone naked behind the metal door?  A sweater or a pullover is draped over the stall door, like a limp military banner.  An odd hissing and rattling comes from within the locked stall.  The man in the toilet is playing with his pet rattlesnake, teasing it, perhaps, tempting the thing to strike.  The hissing gets louder and louder and I am in haste to escape this place.

About 90 minutes from Dows to Austin.  Lights blinking far out on the dark prairie.  A forest of wind turbines reduced by night to red constellations that flicker on and off.  12 ½ hours on the road.  Then, home again.