Emmylou Harris, “Together Again”

Made it.  Eight days, two time zones and 3,191 miles after leaving Oakland, California, here we are, Stella and I, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

People who know us and may have been following along or checking in on this cross-country journey may be curious as to the whereabouts of Lovely Leigh, tlw (the little woman) to use her self-description.

Why didn’t she come along?  Did she send me packing? Tell me to hit the road and not come back, Jack?

Perish the thought. She simply opted to go on ahead in one of those airplane things. It way my crazy idea to do the road trip, take the dog, have an adventure, come what may.

There she was, of course, outside her folks’ place here in Wintson-Salem. Waiting arms. Together again. It’s true what they say, by the way, about homecoming being the best part of a long trip.

Although this one went really well. Interesting sights and stop-overs, friendly encounters, plenty of time to putter and ponder. And no car trouble or rough weather, no getting lost (except on purpose), no untoward or unsettling incidents.

Once on the road (only once, surprisingly) I was asked for a handout. A brother-can-you-spare-a-dime scene at a filling station in Deming, New Mexico. A gaunt guy with tied-back long hair and no visible teeth, looking older than he probably was, rolled up to the pumps in a battered camper van and politely asked for a couple of bucks to help buy gas. Called himself a freelancer and said he’d never seen times this bad, meaning the lack of odd jobs to be had. Handout received.

About Winston-Salem:

A group of Pennsylvania Moravians settled the area in the mid-1700s. The settlement prospered and became a trading and crafts center.  In 1766 Salem (from Shalom, Hebrew for “peace”) was established nearby as the Moravians’ permanent settlement.  The Moravian religion, a welcoming and pleasing offshoot of Catholicism, is practiced commonly here today and Old Salem has been preserved  and restored as a local attraction

Winston, founded in 1849, grew rapidly due to the success of the textile and tobacco industries.  The two towns consolidated in 1913, forming Winston-Salem, whose current population numbers about 186,000.

Tobacco is still harvested and produced near here, but not like the boom days, and buildings, streets and landmarks bear the name of tobacco baron R.J. Reynolds. The company is headquartered in Winston-Salem and once provided a major source of employment for generations. Also based here, and another economic resource, is the Hanes company, the underwear people. An outlet in town is always worth a visit.

Another notable economic (or gastronomic) force is, or was, Krispy Kreme. The donut empire was founded in Old Salem around the 1920s by Vernon Rudolph; Leigh’s dad Jack remembers delivering  the morning paper to the Reynolds home. The company is based here and the first chain outlet does a brisk business, but overall Krispy Kreme has fallen on hard times, what with competition, stock losses and the shenanigans  – in the news just last week — of company execs.

A rich academic environment here. Winston-Salem is home to Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem State University — which was founded in 1892 and was the first African-American institution in the country to award degrees in elementary education — and Salem College, founded in 1772 and still operating in Old Salem. Lots of green and open space here, too — the city has 75 park with 16 miles of greenways for walking, jogging and cycling.

In closing, let’s not overlook that Winston-Salem is the stronghold of the Trivette family, Leigh’s people, and the place of her birth. They’re quite a group, these Trivettes, as told in other tales on these pages. You’d be hard pressed to find a family so large that gets along so well. Never a cross word and always an open door, usually the one at Jack and Treva’s house here on Lullington Drive.

Together again.

Stellament at the Trivettes'

Snowfall after arrival

Dashing through the...

First Krispy Kreme outlet

Signs can say a lot about people and places, a country. Here, offered without further comment and with a few corroborating photos below, is an assortment of signs seen on (and off) some of the nation’s interstate highways:

Dental Fun Zone

– Strip mall building visible from I-10, San Bernardino, California

Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson.  Character.  Pass it on.

– Message board depicting baseball great Jackie Robinson, I-10, Indio, California

State Prison Ahead

Do Not Stop for Hitchhikers

– Leaving California, I-10

Forethought Insurance and Pre-need Planning

– Outside Carrino’s Mortuary, downtown Tucson

Hillary Meechan – Running for Her Life

– Campaign poster in office window, downtown Tucson

Crop Circle Wine Tasting

– I-10, Arizona

EAT BEEF

Klump Ranches

– Billboard on I-10, approaching Lordsburg, MN or AZ?

Severe Dust Storms May Exist

Zero Visibility Possible

– After entering New Mexico, I-10

Rodeo Next Right

– New Mexico, I-10

American Owned and Operated — Deming Motel

– I-10, approaching Deming, NM

The Real Jesus Says Every Promise of God Shall Come True

– Between Deming and Las Cruses, I-10, New Mexico

Jesus Christ Is Lord

Not a Swear Word

– On full length, both sides and back gate of big-rig truck, outside Van Horn, Texas,1-20

La Nortena

World Famous Tamales

Drive Thru

– Downtown Pecos, Texas

Cathy’s Barbeque.  Real Texas Flavor.

– I-20, outside Odessa, Texas

Trux-N-Parts

– Business sign, Odessa, Texas

Western Drugs

Liquor, Beer, Wine

– On side of store, Odessa, Texas

Pee Wee Dalton’s Boots

– Outside frontage road store, Midland, Texas

Terry M. Tubbs, MD

– On lawn outside medical office, Midland, Texas

Becky’s Dixie Burger

– Outside drive-in cafe, Midland, Texas

Mesquite Cooked Food – The Way It Should Be

– Outside diner off I-20, approaching Abilene, Texas

What Would Jesus Eat?

– Billboard for restaurant offering Holy Land food, Abilene, Texas

Harley’s Hub Lounge.  Adult Day Care.

– Outside bar, frontage road, I-20, near Shreveport, Louisiana

For Honor. For Country.

– Billboard for Marine Corps, I-20, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

We’re Glad Georgia’s On Your Mind

– Welcome sign, I-20, Georgia/Alabama border

My Son Is Fighting for Your Freedom

– Bumper Sticker on RV, motel parking lot, off I-85, Gwinnett, Georgia

Café Risque

TOPLESS TOPLESS

24-Hour Café – EXIT NOW

– Billboard, I-85, Lavonia, Georgia

Dad’s Restaurant

Best Burgers – 100% Cow

– Billboard, I-85, Lavonia, Georgia

Crazy Steve’s

Billions and Billions of Fireworks

– Billboard, I-85, Georgia/South Carolina state line

Whacky Zack’s Fireworks

– Billboard, I-85, South Carolina

The South Carolina Military Museum

Honoring South Carolina’s Heroes

– Billboard, I-85, outside Greenville, South Carolina

IN GOD WE TRUST, UNITED WE STAND

– Message board, I-85, Williamston, South Carolina

iwantanewmarriage.com

– Billboard on I-85, outside Greenville, South Carolina

Chow-Chow Relish

A Southern Favorite

– Billboard on I-85, Spartanburg, South Carolina

HIS-Radio 97.3FM

Uplifting and Encouraging

– Billboard, I-85, Gastonia, North Carolina

AMen Radio 830

–  Billboard, I-40, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Little Richard’s Lexington BBQ

Eat Mo Pig

– Country Club Road, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Krispy Kreme

Support Center

–  Building sign, outside Krispy Kreme corporate headquarters, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Thought for the Week

(blank)

– Message board outside church, U.S. 17, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina

Some poor PR guy worked hard on this

Didn't get to try one of those babies

For people who love donuts too much?

My kinda place

Sign of the times?

Dwight Yoakam singing, “Excuse me, I think I’ve got a heartache.”

A lucky find

Unaware of the impending weather, I made tracks after leaving Texas because my final destination was the South anyway, the Carolinas, where I’d stay for a good, long spell, and would have plenty to see and tell about once there. Besides, the Lovely Leigh (LeeLee, as the grandkids call her) was waiting in Winston-Salem, where we’d spend a few days with her family before going on to South Carolina. The kids and their parents would be waiting for us at in Mt. Pleasant, outside Charleston.

The interstates that carried me through the South may not be always pretty, but they’re efficient and fast, especially if you manage to avoid traffic at peak times through the population centers. In my case, it was the 35, 20, 85, 77 and then a short stretch of the mighty 40 that took me down from north-central Texas and across Louisiana and Mississippi, through Alabama and Georgia and a piece of South Carolina, and up to Winston-Salem.

Back to Atlanta for a minute.

A stroke of luck and a spot of late afternoon traffic coaxed me off I-84 just north of the city at the suburb of Gwinnett. That night, my last on the long road, I’d decide to splurge and stay at a La Quinta Inn. A pleasant and more comfortable diversion – for Stella, too — from the Motel 6 routine.

Where's that frosty cone?

The luck came in finding, down the road from the La Quinta at the entrance to an office-industrial park, what has be one of the largest Asian supermarket and shopping center complexes this side of L.A.

I browsed happily through the Hong Kong Market, with its large American flag hoisted out front, picked up some food items and cooking supplies for the stay in South Carolina (Asian cuisine not being one of that state’s finer points) and grabbed a hearty take-out dinner plate at the supermarket’s food court.

A young Latino clerk working the aisles, whose name tag said Oscar, told me the market was fairly new and served a substantial Asian population, largely Korean and Vietnamese. Business was good, Oscar said, and the market’s stock was growing steadily. It carried an assortment of Latino goods as well, Latinos comprising another large portion of the Atlanta-area population, according to Oscar, who seemed pleased and proud to walk the aisles with me and show me around.

After seven days away from the Bay Area, you tend to miss aspects of our cultural diversity offered by a place like the Hong Kong Supermarket and its surrounding stores and shops. So we lingered a bit, Stella and I. This was the home stretch, after all.

And lingering with me would be images and impressions from that steady march through the South:

• The casino signs, and casinos, that spring up as soon as Texas turns into Louisiana, announcing that this is a different kind of state. At a roadside food and service station complex just inside Louisiana, a high McDonald’s golden arches sign has below it, in large, red electronic letters: SOUTHERN. The miles of woods that border I-20 through Louisiana, with their tall, lean trees, bare from winder, and the swamps.
• For just a few minutes, like a wisp of smoke in the night, the station that comes over the car radio – big WSN out of Nashville, Tennessee, with DJ Eddie Stubbs – long enough to play a country swing song or two and then fades away.
• Crossing the Mississippi River – a spectacular but serene sight — over an arched, iron bridge at Vicksburg, a famed Civil War battlefield site.
• The massive metal-sided buildings with fireworks for sale and the mix of billboards for “spas” and stores offering adult merchandise, cigarette outlets, and Christian radio stations. “After the game this Sunday, let’s eat at my house,” one billboard message reads. It’s signed “God.”
• The sprawling, gleaming white Mercedes Benz plant in the low, green hills outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and an even larger, sparkling BMW plant near Spartanburg, South Carolina. “Proud to Call South Carolina Home,” a billboard says in sedate lettering.
• The huge, modern structures that house churches and fellowships, and the multi-acre lots of RV dealerships. Who’s buying them?
• The sign, at Gastonia, North Carolina, for New Hope Road.

There you go: Hope and change on (and off) the interstate.

Not far now to Winston-Salem and the end of the trail.

Italian saying, meaning,  ”Always forward, without fear”

What? Leaving so soon?

It takes two days of driving to get through Texas, no matter how you cut it. Unless you’re a trucker on NoDoz (or something stiffer), and even then it’s got to be a long haul.

At a rest stop a trucker – short and squat with a black handlebar mustache, black ball cap, white T-shirt and shorts – tells me they’re allowed under federal regulations to drive only 11 hours a days. Only 11 hours. He’d just had an hour’s “power nap,” as he called it, and was ready to move toward his day’s quota.

As I bid farewell to the Lone Star State, I’ll admit to something that may offend some readers (of the two or three who are following these reports), but so be it: Stella and I visited the George W. Bush childhood home. Yes we did.

It was back in Midland, after leaving Pecos on I-20 and passing through the inner business route of the flat and scrappy oil town of Odessa. So named by Russian railroad laborers in the 1880s, Odessa had become one of the world’s largest inland petroleum centers by World War II, owning to the discovery of oil there in 1926.

George Herbert Walker Bush came to Odessa in 1948 to work in the oil fields. He brought with him his wife and 2-year-old son George W – or Shrub and Dub-ya, to quote, if memory serves, the late Texas newspaper columnist Mollie Ivins. The family lived in the Odessa-Midland area for 11 years.

The Presidential Museum and Leadership Library is here in Odessa, picnicking permitted. I opt to pass on that, but for some reason the sign up the interstate at nearby Midland catches my eye and strikes my interest. It beckons passersby to the George W. Bush Childhood Home.

At Midland’s modern and well-stocked Visitor Center alongside the interstate, where I’m the sole visitor, I ask a welcoming, white-haired host if the Bush home is very far away.

“Nothin’s very far in Midland,” he says.

While I’m here, I say, I may as well take a look.

“Might as well,” he says.

His name is Bob Walker, retired from the oil business and a Midland booster, who lived and worked in other oil areas before settling here.

“We’re pretty much Republican around here,” Bob says in answer to a question about the mood of things in Midland these days. Enough said.

Before directing me to the Bush home, he adds: “We’re pretty proud here to be the home of two former presidents and a former governor. Not many towns can say that.”

On her best behavior

Midland is the hometown of a former first lady, too: Laura Bush is from here and worked here as a librarian.

The Bush childhood home is simple and cottage-like, 1,665 square feet, wood-sided, painted light gray with white trim. Inside it’s fully restored in early 1950s style, when the family lived here.

No other visitors as yet today. A next-door neighbor looks out her screened front door to see who’s passing by. There’s no visible security. The street is wide and quiet, typical for Midland, it seems. Houses are plain, with large front yards, everything in order and well kept.

The same day I’m here, news reports tell of the Bushes moving to their new home in Dallas. It’s a far cry from this one in Midland, although the 1959 vintage is similar. The Dallas home is on a cul-de-sac in a wealthy neighborhood. It has 8,500 square feet, four bedrooms, four-and-a-half bathrooms and property records place the value at $2.1 million.

The Bush childhood home, by the way, is on the corner of West Ohio Avenue and Illinois Street. To get there from downtown Midland, you turn on Illinois Street. Illinois – home state of the current residents of the White House.

“Other than curiosity, there’s no particular reason for these travels – just the old desire to be on the move. My destination is also my route, my motive only an interest in having the nomad in me survive a little longer.”

Larry McMurtry, from his book “Roads: Driving America’s Greatest Highways”

Off to Archer City, in search of Larry McMurtry, to my mind one of our greatest writers.

Now 72, he has produced since the early 1960s a prodigious and satisfying array of work: 27 novels and several non-fiction books, numerous essays and commentaries, more than 30 screenplays, three memoirs.  This includes, of course, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove,” and its prequel and sequels, the saga of Texas rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call (played perfectly in the TV miniseries by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones). McMurtry and writing partner Diana Ossana won an Oscar in 2005 for their screenplay adaptation of the Annie Proulx short story “Brokeback Mountain.”

McMurtry’s work about the Old West, for those who may not know, is no run-of-the-mill cowboy-and-Indian fare. It’s literature. Taken with his writing about contemporary times, its weaves a tapestry connecting people and experiences, past and present and, as one reviewer put it, present as yet unrealized.

One of McMurtry’s novels is “Anything for Billy,” about Billy the Kid and from which I’ve drawn the title of this trifle of mine (with apologies). And his travel book “Roads” partly inspired this road-writing project (apologies again), though the idea took hold before I’d only recently discovered the McMurtry book.  Attracted by the open road, he occasionally – or did do this when he wrote “Roads” 10 years ago – picks highways and interstates that strike his interest and travels them, often their full length, driving many hours at a time, alone.

McMurtry lives in Archer City in north-central Texas, 20 miles south of Wichita Falls. He was born there to a ranching family and would set much of his work, fashioning characters from people who were part of his life, in and around Archer City – the movies “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms of Endearment,” for example.

In addition to writing books, McMurtry collects them. Lots of books. He is a noted collector and dealer of rare books and has turned Archer City into the world’s largest used bookstore.  In four or five buildings around town he has amassed and carefully stocked more than 500,000 books. He calls his store, or set of stores, Booked Up.  They’re open almost every day for browsing and buying.

At the outset of my journey I said I had no particular sights to see, things to do, people to meet.  I’d just take it as it came, on and off the interstate.  I’ll admit now that seeing Archer City and hoping to run across McMurtry was one thing I wanted to try to do, conditions and temperament permitting.

They did. McMurtry, however, didn’t cooperate; he wasn’t in town, the young woman attendant at Booked Up #1 told me.  She invited me to look around, which I did, and advised that if I wanted something to eat I’d better get to the Wild Cat Café across the street because it was 1:30 and it closed at 2.

When I asked about buying a hardback copy of “Lonesome Dove” – I’d given mine years ago to a cowboy friend – she explained there was none to be had.  McMurtry doesn’t stock his own books – too busy taking care of others and too many people seeking autographs and inscriptions.

Too many people?  In and through Archer City? It’s not exactly on a highly traveled route. At the junction of two highways, the 79 and 25, Archer City is a couple of hours from Abilene, where I’d put in the night before, along two other lonely roads, State Route 351 and U.S. 283, from Abilene.

It was well worth the ride, even without catching McMurtry. The roads were wide open and the scenery matched – hazy sky with an endless horizon, not a person in sight except for those the few passing cars and pickups, no 18-wheelers for a change, plenty of sagebrush and cattle, including Texas longhorns.

Albany, maybe a third of the way to Archer City, is a little jewel of about 1,900 residents.  It was a supply point on the Western Trail to Dodge City and the town merits as stroll, if only for a close look at the vintage 1883 courthouse, the oldest still in use in all of Texas.

Archer City shows more signs of wear than Albany and seems smaller, even though the 2000 census puts its population as just over 1,800. Could be fewer people now. Times are hard.  An oil company has left town, a Sonic drive-in just closed and business is slow. I learn this from a friendly server at the Wild Cat Café – I made it in just before 2.  It’s one big room with Formica tables and metal chairs.  Plain and simple, same as the food.

My friendly server, some tableside conversation reveals, is the father-in-law of the Wild Cat’s owner and Archer City’s retired city manager. He couldn’t sit still after retiring and decided to help out at the café.  He starts at 5 in the morning – “We open early here” – takes a mid-morning break and gets home around 3.

“We’re feeling it, yeah” he says of the economic downturn. Barrel-chested with trim chin whiskers, he wears a ball cap and an apron over a T-shirt and jeans.  “It’s slower, definitely.”

Even so, he says, people here, or most of them, are Republican. “I remember when everybody around here was Democrat,” he says. “And I mean everybody. Not now. But it was a different Democratic Party back then.”

Across the street, in the window of a vacant store next to the old Start Hotel, a sign says in red spray-painted lettering: “Say no to bail out.”

No need to leave town the same way I came, he advises, and gives me directions along back roads to join up with I-20 again.

“You leave now, you’ll be to Forth Worth or beyond in two, three hours,” he says. “It’s not far.”

Texas.  It never ends.

Roadside art, Texas style

"The Last Picture Show" -- the real place

“I’ll keep rolling along; deep in my heart is a song. Here on the range I belong, drifting along with a tumbling tumbleweed.”

 “Tumbling Tumbleweed,” as performed by Texas’ own Quebe Sisters 

This is more like it.  Pecos, Texas, population 9,501.  A sleepy Sunday morning, dry and clear. 

The bigger towns and cities back along the I-10 – Phoenix, Tucson, Las Cruces, El Paso – have their history and sights and character – but places like Pecos, 2,500 feet on the west-central Texas plain…this is the stuff of legend and lore. The real West begins here.  Feels that way, at least.

A 435-mile haul to get here from Tucson, after a look at the historic part of town, a New Mexican lunch in Deming and a stop in sprawling El Paso at the one-acre “world headquarters” of a Southwestern décor and gear emporium, or empire, called El Paso Saddleblanket. Quite an experience.

For miles along I-10, billboards scream out the Saddleblanket’s existence.  Presiding over it is Dusty Henson, who looks like one of the Bridges brothers, the actors.  Tall and big, with straight and long sandy-colored hair, thick hands, kind eyes and a salesman’s easy smile.  He wore black boots, blue jeans and a wool windbreaker emblazoned with the Saddleblanket logo. A self-described wheeler-dealer but a nice, no-hard-sell guy.

We talked about dogs (they’re welcome inside the Saddleblanket), books and writing – Kinky Friedman is a bud of  Dusty’s;  had a book-signing here for Kinky when he made his independent run for Texas governor – traveling and the road, and a little politics.  “This is still a liberal stronghold,” Dusty said of El Paso. “You won’t find that in most of the rest of Texas.”

Dusty  gave me a copy of a book of his own:  “Rugs to Riches: The Amazing Story of the El Paso Saddleblanket Company.”  He inscribed it, too – “To Rick, Happy Trails…Dusty, 2009.”

Back to Pecos. You don’t get the glitter here. It’s a quiet town, knows its place, about three hours from El Paso after I-20, at the start or the end of this mid-south highway, depending on how you see it, cuts off the 10 and carries you to the Texas high country.

Pecos, in one of its claims to fame, is the birthplace of the western rodeo as we know it.  Says so on a big cutout sign with a cowboy riding a bucking bronc at the rodeo grounds on the main road to the center of town.

History has it that sometime in June 1883, after a dispute outside Red Newell’s saloon, cowhands from three or four ranches – this is ranch country still – had a contest on the Fourth of July to decide which spread had the best ropers and riders.  Roughly  1,000 people gathered near the courthouse to watch the cowboys compete for $40 in prize money in what, years later, would be called a rodeo.

If it weren’t closed Sunday I’d be poking through the West of the Pecos Museum housed in the restored 1896 Orient Hotel and Saloon on First Street, across from the Texas Rodeo Hall of Fame, also a good bet for a visit but also closed today.

It’s a one-street town, Pecos, not really one that beckons visitors.  Come if you want, take a look, but the town’s not going out of its way for you, not on Sunday anyway.  No honky-tonk, faux Western stuff here.  A few ordinary shops and stores for the goods and services townspeople need, some empty storefronts, and that’s it.

Two donut shops, both closed today. One, Ma Wilson’s — Texas Sized Donuts, Best West of the Pecos – looks like the one to try.  The other, nearby, in a big white-on-red banner boasts the coming of Internet access.  Change comes to the Wild West.

At the only place open for breakfast, a Mexican café called La Familia, as soon as you take a table you get tortilla chips and homemade salsa.  It’s warm inside.  There’s menudo today.  For $6.95 the “Mexican Plate” special gets you a bean chalupa and cheese enchilada,  rice, beans and tortillas on the side.  A breakfast like that could almost get you to Dallas.  I take the chilaquiles, a treat, with an endless mug of coffee.  Plain, simple, real coffee.

One thing about small towns like this, some of them at least, people are polite. They call you  “sir” and offer a “yes, sir,” “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”  Ask a question or directions and you’re likely to get a nod and a “you bet” after expressing thanks.

This morning, on downtown’s main street, with not a single person to be seen and barely a passing car or pickup, Stella and I are standing on a corner, just taking in the scene.  A faded sedan comes along the side street.  The woman driver comes to a stop, letting us cross.  She has no stoplight, no stop sign; we’re not in the crosswalk, we’re showing no motion to cross; there’s no other vehicle as far as the eye can see.

She could go right on by. But she stops, as natural as can be.  It’s the right thing to do in Pecos.  Polite.

 *  *  *

A few Pecos snapshots…

Hitched up for donuts

Rodeo Hall of Fame

“One cup of coffee, waitress, ain’t quite enough. Tonight I need a donut and a dream.”

Lyric from The Mills Brothers song “A Donut and A Dream.”

It’s morning in Tucson, and I’m waking up – before sunup, thanks to Stella – thinking something dangerous and daring.  How about allowing myself…a donut? Or two?

Hell, this is still America, isn’t it? A traveling man can down a donut if he’s a mind to, can’t he? Or two.

What we need back in the Bay Area, if you ask me, is more donut shops.  Places called Chick’s and Dollie’s that make, right there on the premises, real, old-fashioned, old-time honest-to-goodness donuts.  Not franchise places.

We had shops like that when I was a kid.  And Saturday morning – this is Saturday morning, by the way – was the best time for donuts.

These days it’s an organic, whole grain- multi-grain-gluten-free-free-range-Whole Foods-how’s-your-mantra, Starbucks-overpriced-coffee-make-mine-a-decaf-low-fat latte-with-muffins-at-two-bucks-a-pop world.

Not the kind of change I care to believe in, thank you.

Here in Tucson – I spotted the lit-up red-on-yellow sign last night as I curled off I-10 headed for Motel 6 – you find places like The Donut Wheel.

Actually, it was smart and helpful of that dog Stella to have rustled me up at the crack of dawn, around 5 o’clock.  I’m glad she did it.  Reminded me how beautiful mornings can be in the Southwest; I miss that part of traveling to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and, Los Alamos and points north for work in days of yore.

Today, even from the Motel 6 parking lot alongside the interstate, morning is a pretty sight, a treat for the senses: a scallop of moon in a cobalt sky; cloud strokes of dusty rose at the horizon; a freight train’s reedy whistle slicing through the silence; that desert air – clean, crisp, a touch of sage or pine – biting the inside your nostrils, burning the rim of your eyes.

It feels good, healthy in way, even if we’re headed across a gravel road in search of donuts.

Get a load-a dem donuts

The red neon sign outside The Donut Wheel announces it’s open.  Inside it’s quiet, warm, the fresh-baked aroma inviting you to stay, have look, have a donut.  Or two. Couple of old birds are at a table by the window, before the Saturday morning rush. And the counter is a donut devotee’s delight – little gems of all varieties and types, with toppings galore; bars and twists and fritters, too.  The price is right – 75 cents for a donut, a bit more for the specialty items.

A young Asian man is at the counter. A few Chinese-style lanterns hang from the ceiling — they’re made of paper printed with red, white and blue, stars and stripes. His family runs the place, he says, bought it about 12 years ago. Everything you see here, they make, fresh every day. Business is good, he says, smiling, better on Saturday.  It’s an American Dream thing. A donut and a dream.

The drive here on I-10 from San Bernardino – 429 miles – is memorable mostly only for it sameness, and a thicket of  Friday afetrnoon traffic through Phoenix.  Otherwise, it’s long, straight road; some climbing; lots of big-rig trucks; light car traffic; a smattering of motor homes and camping trailers; singles and couples, no kids, older friends riding together.  At rest areas we stop and nod or chat.  Stella’s a topic of friendly conversation.  Did everybody have a Springer at one time in their life or what?

We rock

A couple of observations: Avoid following for any length of time trucks hauling cattle.  The West has many pleasant and evocative scents.  This is not one of them. And beware of big rigs bearing down on you from behind. Not a comforting sight from the rear-view, especially when one has a cab painted bright yellow with blue flames licking out from the grille. Remember the movie “Duel”?

And a tip:  Do try to have a listen to that Mills Brothers tune, “A Donut and A Dream.”  It’s an obscure one but a delight, well worth the effort.  Like going for donuts on a Tucson morning.

Onward…

Handyman at Motel 6 in San Berdoo, when I tell him I’m headed east

Two for the road

Travel stats

Departure date:  February 19, 2009

Starting point:  Oakland, California.

Destination:  Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.

What’s there: Grandkids, in-laws, home away from home.

Schedule/timetable/itinerary:  None.

Vehicle: 2004 Honda Element, burnt orange, AKA “The Stellament” (see below). Ideal for this kind of ride. Rear window sticker:  “Colombo Club, Oakland,California, showing twin Italian and U.S. flags. Rear side window: Transparent U.S. flag sticker (transparency being operative word these days of hope and change). 

Traveling companion: Stella the Springer Spaniel. Nine years old, liver and white. Spoiled but sweet.  A happy traveler and patient listener.

Today’s route: Interstate 5 south, Interstate 10 east.

Miles logged: 438

Road notes and fun finds

Weather and conditions:  Clear skies, cool to moderate temps, light traffic.

Over the Grapevine

Road music:  Quebe Sisters (great new find); Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt (together); Dwight Yoakam singing Buck Owens (what else do you need or want through Bakersfield and the Tehachapi Mountains?)

Notable signs: Pleasant Valley State Prison. (huh?)

Issues, concerns:  Saddle sores. Bladder capacity (mine).

Radio waves: Heard a news report that Bank of America stock dropped — again.  I own some.  It’s change all right, downward, but why am I not feeling hopeful?

Memorable sites & scenery: The Central Valley’s tufted, rolling hills, blanketed with velvety green from last week’s rains; grazing cattle with thick and roughened winter hides; snow-crested Sierra to the east of I-5; long, straight furrows of rich, moist soil ready for sowing; fruit and nut trees, pruned and topped to uniform height, sprouting blooms of pink and white; sagebrush, furry, dry, dark brown; a yellow-and-black SmartCar darting by on the opposite side of I-5 – little car, lotta road; traversing the Grapevine and the craggy, snow-ribbed Tehachapi; ticky-tacky housing tracts of Castaic – civilization again.

Pleasant surprise: Motel 6.  Don’t believe I’ve ever stayed in one, but what a deal — clean and basic room, AARP rate (I’m a card-carrying member), WiFi, and dogs stay FREE.

Key observation:  Say what you will about its problems, quirks and faults, California is still one, big, beautiful and amazing place.  (Maybe there’s hope yet for it.)

Gene Autry: Inscription reads, 'Back in the Saddle Again'

Main event: Visiting the Autry National Center of the American West along I-5 in Glendale, outside L.A. Magnificent collection of American and Western painting, sculpture, clothing, artifacts, memorabilia.  Tribute exhibits to the American Indian, Mexican settlers of California and the American cowboy. Original costuming and fancy firearms used by Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill Cody.  Lots of Western movie and TV memorabilia and original garb worn by Gene Autry, John Wayne, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, others.  Trivia:  Kevin Costner, in his role as Wyatt Earp in the 1994 movie, used a rubber pistol.  It’s there on display.  The whimp.

Time to saddle up…

Leon Frick

Cowboy, poet, rancher, cook, storyteller

The road trip, the hope-and-change thing, doesn’t start here, not physically. What takes root and starts to take shape here is the concept, the open-road call to start somewhere, somehow, with no particular plan in mind and keep on going, in this case west to east, along the Interstates.

Something about Elko brings that out in a person …

Outside town a piece, against the Ruby Mountains

Straddling Interstate 80 in northwestern Nevada, well beyond Reno and on the way to Salt Lake City, Elko is a well-traveled place.  Its main drag, Idaho Street, is peppered with hotels and motels, but still, at its heart, Elko is still a small, frontier town.  Rawboned in its own way, and rugged — a couple of old-time casinos downtown, the Stockman’s and the Commercial, a few Basque restaurants, and home to the Western Folklife Center.  The non-profit organization sponsors the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and does a fine and important job of  it. 

We came here by train from the Bay Area for the Gathering, the second time in the past three years.  I’d first learned of it in a newspaper feature story, maybe 20 years ago, felt the pull and promised myself to get here one day.  Took me this long.  Life got in the way, I guess; it does that.

The Elko Gathering is the first and largest in the country, and there are plenty of others these days.  But this one, given the “national” designation by an act of Congress in 2000, goes by just a lone one-word label to those in the know:  Elko. 

Thousands of people come here for the Gathering each year, more this year, probably, since it’s the silver anniversary.  They come from all over — I’ve met people from Hawaii, the East Coast, Canada and, this year, Australia.  Sure, it attracts city folks and some dudes and dudettes playing dress-up, but mostly you see the real deal, plain folks and locals and people who care about the Gathering and its core purpose — to tell about, and celebrate through song, verse, music, storytelling, move-making, stage productions and more, the West, its history and place in the national fabric, and its people and their way of life.  

Being a cowboy-related thing, it does have its share of fun and frolic — at the casinos, on dance floors, in the old Pioneer Saloon downtown whose building serves as headquarters for the folklife center organization.  All in all, it’s a good place to be, sincere and genuine, a welcome departure from “real life,” let’s call it.

‘Course, you do hear, or overhear, talk around here of the trappings of modern life.   “That Internet thing…” one old boy said to another, “You can do all kinds of things — download, upload, delete things, move things around.  All that stuff.”

The Quebe Sisters Band--fabulous fiddlers

And Elko — news flash — isn’t without a Starbucks.  It’s at the Red Lion Inn, Elko’s biggest place to stay, its flashing road sign and marquee a beacon to Interstate travelers.

“Mild or bold?” the woman counter clerk asked. Saying “give it to me mild” somehow doesn’t feel right, not here. Only one way to go — bold.  And if it were cowboy coffee, brewed from grounds thrown in a pot of water set to boil over an open fire, you’d have a rusty nail it — “get your daily dose of iron that way,” a old cowboy once told me, having some fun. But that’s another story.

No noticeable talk, oddly enough, about politics up here, even though this year’s Gathering came on the heels of the Obama inauguration.  You get the feeling that people here and out West know all about hope and change: Changing weather, changing fortures, changing horses;  hoping the bottom won’t fall out one year to the next, hoping there’s a friend about the next bend, hoping there’s never a place better to be than the back of a horse.

They  know, too, about things like personal responsibility, self-reliance, community and family, adversity and endurance.

Those were some of the themes of keynote speaker Sandra Day O’Connor.  The retired Supreme Court Justice, speaking to big crowd in Elko’s high school gym, talked mostly of growing up on her family’s Arizona ranch, the Lazy B.  

“I learned a lot from cowboys,” she said, recalling one “drinking cowboy” on the ranch who ran for area judge to avoid landing in the hoosegow so often — and he won.  ”He refused to perform weddings,” O’Connor said.  ”He said it constituted cruel and unusual punishment.”

Skirting politics, except to note the “insular” nature of living in Washington, DC, she tied her talk instead to the tenets and teachings of ranch life — instilling in young people, for example, values of “honesty, dependability, confidence and good humor.”

Young people in urban areas of the country need to know more about “chores and responsibility” and the reward of hard work, O’Connor said, suggesting a nationwide public works program as a way to address some of the problems and failings of urban life.

“These things are not instilled by everyday urban life,” she said and noted that 80 percent of Americans today live in urban areas.

“I think urban people get an exaggerated sense of their own importance,” she told the audience to loud applause.  ”Don’t you?”

The Gathering happens in late January, early February.  It’s cold in Elko then and often snowing, hard to get around at times, hard to get here. I like to think there’s a reason for the setting and the time of year: Keeps the tinhorns away.

Onward…

Whew. The cross-country road trip – just me and Stella the Springer spaniel in our Honda Element, or the “Stellament” – is over. “Hope and change on (and off) the interstate,” I called it — a modest, mostly impromptu, come-what-may look at people and places along the route at this dawning of a new, or at least different, day in the USA.

We arrived safe and only a little worse for wear at destination No. 1, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Next, on to Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, for a few weeks and then back to California. Read about the west-east part by scrolling and clicking through these past dispatches.  More recent reports offer reflections and ruminations about goings-on here in the Carolinas, with maybe a few to be added about the drive back.

Have a look, leave a comment…