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Date:         Fri, 9 Feb 2007 15:43:29 -0600
Reply-To:     joel walker <jwalker17@EARTHLINK.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         joel walker <jwalker17@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject:      Frydaye Phollies: a bigger long road trip - Part 2 :)
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The Heartland Highway .... continued ...

Back up to 50. The route cuts briskly across to Kansas City, which has gone largely undiscovered by hoi polloi; this accounts for its lively shopping districts, interesting, landscaping, nice neighborhoods, and Nelson Art Gallery, where you can partake of world-class art all week and a scrumptious brunch on Sundays. U.S. 50 slices southwest from K.C. to the Great Plains. A detour home to southeastern Kansas for Mother's Day weekend makes me a hero to my mother. A sultry lady friend from Michigan flies in for a visit, thus giving you-know-who a one-to-zip lead in the Great Cross-Country Romantic Encounter Contest. Jones accuses me of cheating.

The term "Continental Divide" refers to the nation's drainage. The true break between east and west is actually here in Kansas, hundreds of miles east. West of Wichita, the "western look" means more than how you wear your jeans, and how many gallons your hat will hold. Steely praying mantises rock in steady cadence, sucking oil from Mother Nature's flat breast. The temperature has stabilized at 74, and there is not a cloud in the sky. Beyond Hutchinson, as we park at the Dutch Kitchen, a truck pulls out and kicks up a big billow of dust, reminding us that we're in the heart of what was the Dust Bowl fifty years ago. The Dutch Kitchen turns out to be staffed by genuine Pennsylvania Dutch girls in bonnets and long print dresses with deliciously incongruous bikini panties underneath. Three huge hamburgers, two sizable orders of french fries, a large Coca-Cola, a large lemonade, two generous slices of pie, and a small glass of milk, plus tax, total $9.80.

Kansans favor enormous grain elevators. In an environment where the horizon skims so flatly, the elevators look like cities unto themselves. There are no fences beside the road, just two strips of dirt and the first of thousands of even rows of greening wheat. These are your amber waves of grain in the making.

A gent at the Offerle Co-Op Grain and Supply Company Elevators says the "small" towers hold 25,000 bushels apiece, the bigger ones 31,000. There are 32 of the big mothers here and a dozen of the little mammas. And they fill them about one and half times every year. That's about two million bushels.

For those who plan to enter Dodge City in a convertible, we offer this advice: drive in with the top up, the A/C set on recirc, and a clothespin on your nose. The feedlots and the slaughterhouses are fiercely smelly. The cows think they're coming to town for a good time, but the joke's on them. They come in dumb as dirt, tie on the old feed bag, and go out as steaks and roasts. And they do it in large numbers. We're talking cosmic stink, people. Breathe it and weep. Jones and I arrive with our noses in working order and the top down. This is suicide. Autopsies will indicate we've died of gross oxygen deprivation and helpless laughter. We ask a gas-station attendant if the smell is always this bad, and he says, "What smell?" The guy is nose-dead.

Too spent to flee, we rent a room, crank up the A/C, and pack the gaps around the windows and doors with last week's socks, fighting fire with fire.

Not far west of Dodge, on a low bluff above the lacy cottonwood trees along the Arkansas River, is a weathered marker honoring the Santa Fe Trail, the best way west from 1822 to 1872. Then becomes Now in an open-air time capsule: the rust of the Santa Fe Trail. You can step through a turnstile and pass through an age to walk along the ruts yourself. Feel the loneliness of the place. Over a rise appear two stolid walkers, like throwbacks, the wife in a simple print dress, her hair flirting with the breeze from beneath a visor that protects her face from the sun. Her figure is set square by middle age, but her legs are up to the task and striding along in step with history. Scatterings of wildflowers speckle the ruts. The buds could not have taken roots in the pioneer days beneath the constant punishment of feet, hooves, and banded wheels. The footprints you see today are from running shoes, and they rarely go far.

Yuccas, puckerbushes, and deep-cut arroyos point the way to the flats of eastern Colorado, where the clouds look like cotton balls against the deep-blue sky. At a quarter to four, the Rocky Mountains heave into view, snowcaps first.

Exxon super unleaded in Pueblo hasn't enough octane to fee the 911. In Canon City, we find sufficient octane at a Chevron personed by a pneumatic blonde in a pink-mesh tank top. Custom license plates above the register advise, "Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself."

We come upon a side road signed for the Royal Gorge Bridge but know little about it. The world's highest suspension bridge, its thinly twined cables carry the weight of the span between two gleaming towers. At 7:15, the sun still streams through the canyon's winding aperture at a vigorous slant. You can walk the bridge or drive across, stopping if you dare by the sign that says the Arkansas lies 1053 feet straight down. Looking down through the gaps in the wooden slats that carry your weight, the white water looks like no more than a rivulet in a narrow funnel. High above, you feel the sway of the span in the wind. Little more than a catwalk in the sky, the spindly structure strikes you as no more than a tiny and merely temporary punctuation mark in the midst of a sentence as long as a book.

Signs of amenities back on Route 50 are few. Finally, splashes of neon announce Salida. The Best Western Lodge is built of red cedar of a beautiful hue. This is the russet color I covet for my house on the lake. I remember Tracy Kidder's eloquent case for the stuff in his wonderful book, House, which traces the conception, design, and carpentering of a fine home in the Massachusetts countryside: "Red cedar comes from the forest of the northwest. It contains the loveliest of smells. It is the Chateaux Margaux of woods. It resists rot and is far less prone to warp and check than clapboards made of pine or spruce. Timber thieves favor it."

Early a.m. Altitude illness has plunged daggers into Jones's sinuses. The climb is on. The asphalt wears a cold, wet-textured shine that would do a dog's nose proud.

At the Monarch Pass Summit, the Porsche straddles the Continental Divide at 11,312 feet. We lick snowflakes out of the thin air. By the time we descend to dry pavement, we're out in the valley, and 50 stretches for good measure as the 911 kicks out the kinks.

Between Gunnison and Montrose, traffic plugs up while a handful of cowboys drive a herd of cattle across. The wranglers' chaps shine from use, and their hats have been hit hard by the sun. The calves feel rambunctious in the chill, so the riders have their work cut out.

On the whole we've been delighted by the 911's happy status as a cabriolet. There is something about the top-down mode that makes almost any speed you care to run more satisfying. At Grand Junction, where 50 joins I-70 for the sprint into Utah, the early clouds peels back, pulling the covers off the day.

West of Green River, Utah, nature gives a geology lesson. Slices of rock stack in jumbles, baring a slice of American groundwork that was laid millions of years ago. Tremendous mesas and bluffs and box canyons and standing waves of hardcore desert form up all around us. The cowering imagination tells you there MUST be gods of the primeval wilds. You expect to look up and see dinosaurs come crawling out of the buff-colored canyons.

The scenery is so rich with color after a late shower that we have the feeling God must be telling our eyes a lie: Utah CAN'T be this gorgeous. But it is. We had the green-turning-to-amber waves of grain in Kansas; now Utah gives us the purple mountain majesty.

Winding down, we settle in at the Safari Motel in Salina, halfway across the state, only to wake up at dawn to the sound of the motel's mini-menagerie. A stunning French-Canadian girl in the room next to ours comes flying out in her nightie, launching various missiles at the roosters and cussing them in French. Just dozing off again, we hear sirens ... coming here! A couple's Ford wagon began smoldering on the road but made it here. Unfortunately, flames gutted it before the fire department could respond. The couple's belongings are piled up by a gas pump.

I-70 ends at Salina, kicking 50 out on its own again. Law enforcement seems like a thing of the past, civilization a thing of the future. The pavement is so straight that it appears simply to stop twenty miles out, at the limit of the eye's ability to resolve it.

Nevada hits U.S. 50 like a sneak attack. Ruggedness overrides everything. We leave the desert floor to scale the rise of the Humboldt National Forest. The surface stutters with washboard left by hot summers and hard winters. Deciding on some western duds, Jones tells a salesgirl in Ely that he takes a 42-long-and-fat.

In the 142 miles between Ely and Austin, you see one town. But for the flowers, this is oblivion. Austin, however, packs so much character that you quickly forget the vastness all around. The buildings are relics of brick and wood whose preservation is aided by the cool altitude and the aridity of the desert below. We haven't been out of sight of a snowcapped peak since entering Nevada. The Pony Express crossed this area in 1860 and '61, near the lines of the original transcontinental telegraph, which helped kill it.

After a night in Carson City, we slip up to Reno to see Porsche's American HQ and public-relations rep Martha McKinley, who arranged our Cabrio. Porsche set up shop in Nevada because of its business climate, which takes less tax off the top than New Jersey and California, where most car importers do business.

On the final brilliant day of our drive, Route 50 wraps around lower Lake Tahoe, then climbs the Sierra Nevada, the last of the mountain ranges that make up the corduroy of America on this route.

We tumble into California's skiing-and-gold-rush country in a twirling descent toward San Francisco. The reeling swirls pump us up for a grand finale that will schuss us all the way to the Pacific. Except it doesn't. We look up in Sacramento's hubbub to see U.S. 50 dies in its tracks, 100 miles from the Golden Gate.

Somebody in government should do whatever it takes to plant a final string of U.S. 50 signs all the way to the ocean.

But don't let that stop you. Once again, spring is busting out all over, and that's reason enough to point yourself from Maryland to California on the Heartland Highway. Or anywhere at all. Put a grand tour on your calendar as a must, and call it Plan A, for "America."


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