Of course, we made it. You already figured that out. I myself brought back an especially vicious illness that’s left me sidelined for a week. Thanks to Stephen for holding it down here while I’ve been passed out. This post is just to wrap up some loose cultural ends from our holiday roadtrip.
Not for the first time, I noticed that this country is obsessed with memorializing things. Every town between New Mexico and Alabama seems to have at least one, if not six museums, often advertised with hand-lettered signs. If we had stopped at all of the ones we passed, we never would have made it back in time. We missed (but took note of) Erick, Oklahoma, home of Roger Miller and the Roger Miller Museum. Also in Oklahoma, our interest was piqued bythe sign for Shamrock, Texas, the birthplace of Bill Mack, the “Satellite Cowboy.” No museum that we could see, but an interesting story to look up on the Internets after the fact. This is one of the benefits of an addiction to writing stuff down. You look in your little notebook a few days later and realize: “Oh yes! I definitely wanted to know what was up with the Infant Jesus of Prague National Shrine” (what a strange thing to see on a freeway sign in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma). Also worth noting: Oklahoma has the best rest stops in the nation. At least at the border with Texas. The one we stopped at had a fenced-in dog area and bathrooms that were on par with what you might find in a four-star hotel.
The 40 (there’s that Southern California affectation for you) is perilously long, and the 1,000 miles we logged on it last week were magical, bizarre, and exhausting. We saw some wonderful sunsets, listened to some great music, and even learned a few things. We didn’t stop as much on this leg of the trip (enough to satisfy the dog, of course), though we did spend New Years Eve in Morrilton, Arkansas (give the Scottish Inn a miss if you’re there …. trust us). And no, we didn’t see Orel there. I hadn’t heard of that show until we stayed in Morrilton. The country is beautiful. It’s wonderful to watch the scenery change as you go from region to region. But the scenery’s not all that changes. We knew we were almost to Alabama when a waitress asked us those three magic words at the Old Sawmill Inn: “Sweet or unsweet?”
One of our more memorable stops was the Big Texan Steak Ranch. A good old-fashioned tourist trap, this place really has everything: novelty slot machines, live and deep-fried rattlesnake, one of those Six Flags type things where you shoot targets and freaky mannequins come to life hooting and shuddering, a fleet of limos with cow horns on them, creepy zombie photos on the way to the bathroom, an in-house psychic, and its own book. We almost bought the book. We were not similarly tempted to try the place’s main attraction, is a 72-ounce steak dinner that, if you can finish it in an hour, is free.
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- On Route 66, there’s no escaping the signs for this thing
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- Also, there’s a hotel attached?
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- See! The Six Flags ghoul-shooting gallery thing!
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- The steak. On ice. With the dinner. You have to eat it all in an hour. Gross.
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- Presumably it was carved off one of these
Yes, it’s tempting to rail against this place and the gluttony it represents – even competitive eating has fallen on hard times these days, and what could represent the gross, primitive justice of the racist global economy more than the spectacle of the 72-ounce steak, but that kind of talk would really miss the point here, I think. The Big Texan survives, a vanishing breed and a monument to a time when this sort of thing really impressed people – before BASE jumping and Bernie Madoff, before Dancing With the Stars and the X-Prize – a kind of proto-entrepreneurship, the nurturing point of a peculiarly American kind of genius that requires several pounds of grass-fed meat to get going.
That last paragraph reminds me of something foucault wrote about the dangers of nostalgia… When things seem bad today, we often reminisce for better, “simpler” times, causing us to paint things from the past that we might ordinarily consider destructive with a sort of rustic charm.
The first paragraph reminds me of something I once heard about London, that they really have no such thing as “historic preservation,” as the city has always been a series of tearing down and building something new on top. Americans go over and are horrified to see a 200-year building torn down, as we’re so obsessed with preserving anything that’s more than 40 years old.
Somehow, these two concepts seem related…
The Simpsons writers must’ve been to that steak ranch, “Homer, don’t fill up on bread!” Great episode.
And Jamie, you know you’re right in my wheelhouse with your comment. Americans tend to be sensitive about older buildings for a lot of reasons, but mostly because when they are torn down they are invariably replaced with godforsaken shit. That is unless you’re fortunate enough to live in a community with progressive zoning codes that demand good design, which you really only find in cities, and then it’s usually only in certain parts of the city.
Anyway, cool post. I’m very interested in these types of memorials and nostalgia traps, competing versions of the past, etc.
oh and jamie, as for seeing the past through rose-colored glasses you need look no further than the pike county museum. the billboard outside town claims that you “step back into a simpler time” there.
yes, perhaps they should amend that to “a simpler, and more prone to bacterial infection, starvation, and slavery time”
May your blog post more pictures of you with guns and cows, or other suitable props. Reminds me of the two cross-country trips I made moving out to California. Never made the return trip, nice to read that perspective.
Seeing as you were headed back to the Bible Belt, did you encounter any religious signs worth noting? My favorites are still the ones on I-35 through Kansas that read “Accept Jesus, or Regret It Forever”.