From the top

Nov. 21 – Great Falls, MT

When we left Casper the sun had not yet risen. Day broke over the Sand Hills and Teapot Rock in northern Natrona County, but the morning remained gloomy until all at once the Bighorn Mountains emerged sunlit from above the low hung clouds, as if through a bedroom window as we drew the quilt from our waking eyes. By the time we reached Buffalo and Interstate 90, the morning was clear and bright and alpine.

Big Sky Country: The surface of Montana takes many forms, but its overhead remains always true to the appellation, and seems to pull the land inexorably toward it. Just north of the Wyoming line, the Wolf Mountains rolled endlessly across the Crow Reservation like peals of snowcapped thunder, and we wound with the Little Bighorn River among them. Past Billings we climbed the face of an escarpment and struck out over the pervasive highlands. At Judith Gap, north of Harlowton, ninety stark new turbines looked like nothing so much as a baleful army of cyclops as they marched toward the ridge crest, drinking the wind from the constant sky. To reach Great Falls, we were again drawn heavenward, rising out of a valley onto a plateau from which we did not descend, a surprising topographical situation for a city built on the banks of the Missouri River. Then again, how could there be a great falls except from such a pronounced height?


Because of moderately icy roads, we'd left earlier than planned, leaving us with extra time to kill when we arrived in Great Falls. This chronocide was carried out at the Holiday Village Mall, which is to shopping centers as Great Falls is to American metropolises. Here the Big Sky was a thing more felt than seen, for if Casper had sent the wind in icy daggers, then Great Falls carried a lance; I'd never before seen coffee frozen solid. We played a modest municipal auditorium in the Civic Building, with an entire convention hall for our backstage, down the corridor from where you'd obtain a Flood Plain Permit if you needed to. That, combined with a vague nighttime awareness of its attractive riparian setting and a fortuitous after-hours fast food stop, was all we ever knew of Great Falls.

Shortly before midnight, having driven nine hours already from Casper, we piled back onto our bus for another six hour trip, a cost-saving venture to the tune of about two hundred dollars a head, to the Spokane airport where the celestial boarding call would finally be answered. The moon was full enough to show that we traversed the most beautiful scenery of our entire odyssey by night in the mountains north of Helena. I saw it again a few hours later, from the other side of the clouds and thirty thousand feet farther away, and I would take one more on-the-road meal in Denver before boarding my last flight.

That day I departed one Washington and arrived in another, and while the new time zone was three hours ahead, the late eastern autumn still in force seemed to set me back two months from the winter I'd just left, almost as though I had never been away.

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A ghostly friend

Nov. 20 – Casper, WY

As cities go, it's right up there with Miami and St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. It's on par with Nashville, San Diego, San Antonio, and New Orleans. In fact, the city of Casper, Wyoming actually outranks San Francisco, Cincinnati and Dallas. New York City beats it, of course, but then so do Fargo, North Dakota and Burlington, Vermont. Also Kansas City, Missouri (but not Kansas City, Kansas). And, of course, bustling Cheyenne, which we'd passed on our way up Interstate 25.

Reading the names of those first eight cities, you probably doubt that Casper could hold court in any way with these great American destinations. But it's statistically true, for each, like Casper, is the second-largest city in its respective state. (That's according to United States Census population estimates for July 1, 2006, in case you're feeling defensive of, say, Nashville's supremacy: sorry, but Memphis has you beat. And New Orleans only makes the list because of the displacement by flood of so many thousands of people.)

With that distinction, naturally, the similarities end.

Our visit to this second city was marked by several firsts: first snow and first frigid temperatures—the day before, Denver had been in the 70s—and first performance in an arena-style venue. An over-confident SUV spun itself around on the exit ramp in front of our hotel, probably the first weather-related traffic mishap for the season (or perhaps just a Bronco as untamed as the one forever bucking its lone rider on Wyoming's state emblem). And first impressions: Casper was frozen shards of wind through every seam and buttonhole in my coat, snow swirling frictionless across asphalt, as if the pavement itself were ice. Brakes creaked and metal groaned as boxcars were shunted, and a skyline of two or three boxcar-like buildings shivered behind a gunmetal gauze of falling snow and twilight against an industrial gray drop cloth of a sky. Night fell cold, sharp and hard like an icicle, and morning in Casper I never saw.

In the lobby of the Parkway Plaza Hotel, Christmas decorations were going up, though Thanksgiving was still two days away, and although Casper was a frozen outpost on the remote windswept plain, both a full-service restaurant and a fully functioning bar were at our disposal. The latter was a tired, time-worn saloon with brick above rough-hewn wood paneling accented by faux Italian frescoes, imitation brass sconces and wrought iron filigree; a faded red-and-white awning hung over the bar itself. The carpeting and upholstery were from sundry generations, none of them current, and the clientele equally anachronistic, as you'd only expect to see in a film about people more miserable than yourself. As for me, I thought it the coziest place I'd been in a long time.

Our surroundings were as desolate as they had ever been, and the months and miles had accumulated like the snowdrifts now forming, but two days later I'd be at the Thanksgiving table and home for the holidays. So, in a Wyoming winter amongst Christmas decorations, the warm glow of ambulance lights, and that desperate dive in the second-largest city of the emptiest state, I felt snug in insular comfort by the peculiar familiarity of where I was and the welcome knowledge of where I would soon be going. It was eminently fine.

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Postscript:

As it happened, the bar denizens were true to their mien: while civil at first, after unsuccessfully offering to buy drinks for the ladies of our group they were thrown out on their staggering butts into the snow. We were told this was because they intended to avenge being jilted by administering a 55-gallon drum of whoop-ass onto us fellers. The bronco forever untamed. Yee-haw!

Just another Mile High Monday

Nov. 19 – Denver, CO

If the American West had a capital, it would surely be Denver. Like Washington, D.C. in miniature, the Colorado State Capitol sits at the eastern end of an axial landscaped mall, with the City and County Building (for Denver is both at once) at the opposite end. Surrounding the mall, in much the same Beaux-Arts style as is found along the Potomac, are memorials, museums, the public library, and the United States Mint, one of many federal agencies having their western offices in Denver. But stretching northwest from the Capitol, a different kind of mall leads to a different kind of style, for fifteen blocks and seven Starbucks away, down the 16th Street Pedestrian Mall, Art Deco is alive and well in LoDo.

"LoDo" stands for Lower Downtown, and it's a neighborhood of groovy people and places anchored by Union Station, another name shared by Washington, D.C. (and dozens of other North American cities). While this edifice, too, is in the Beaux-Arts style, it's emblazoned in red neon with the encouragement "Travel by Train", as you might well have seen on the cover of a railway timetable circa 1933. And while we're in that year, the Cruise Room Bar at the nearby Oxford Hotel is bathed in red and blue neon and festooned with original Deco bas-reliefs (except for one featuring Hitler, which did not outlive his popularity in America and was not restored).

At the fringe of Lower Downtown is El Chapultepec, which sounds like a greasy taquería across the border from Harlingen, Texas, but is actually one of the best-loved jazz clubs in Denver. Here a quartet played, looking about as unassuming as the venue itself. I can't say they rivaled Austin or Bourbon Street, but then again it was a Monday. Outside the club, I tried deftly to evade the swarm of panhandlers that made Little Rock seem like a millionaire's convention by comparison. Still, as we headed back down 16th Street, this time in one of the fleet of free buses that are the only motorized traffic allowed on the mall, I marveled at what a livable place Denver seemed, and we had not even ventured out of the center city.

Because we had the evening off, several from our group had gone to a Broncos game (they played the Tennessee Titans, the home team for many in our company). My friend from Buffalo, who has seen his share of Bills games, was astounded by the cleanliness of the stadium and the civility of the fans in their celebration of the Broncos' win. I said it must have to do with an awareness of one's environment that comes with living in Denver. One of the great American metropolises, Denver lies at the intersection of mountain and plain, of drought and blizzard, of Beaux-Arts grandeur and Art Deco whimsy. With concerns ranging from urban blight and poverty to the management of land and water resources, combined with the majestic cityscape and natural setting, I think that a respect for one's surroundings must be unavoidable here, and that respect extends to city, land and people alike. Coloradans live in a world they cannot ignore, and that world is not only physical, but also human.

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Postscript:

I couldn't decide on an acceptable plural for "Starbucks"; apparently I'm not alone. I leave the question unsolved for your rumination.

A hundred years Sooner

Nov. 16 – Tulsa, OK

Like Lubbock, Tulsa was in a state of ongoing refurbishment, city and hotel alike. We suffered through a week at the Crowne Plaza, where jackhammers would be tearing up concrete in the lobby during the morning and afternoon, as they were likewise tearing up the downtown streets, permitting no escape from the din. Elevators, if working, had a habit of going in the wrong direction and stopping at the wrong floor, or not at all. It became a regular occurrence to be awakened by the maid telephoning your room to inquire about the Do Not Disturb sign on your door. As lemon juice for these lacerations, a tidy package of sleep aids and a CD of soothing sounds was provided with each room, a gesture made doubly ironic in a city that gave little cause to be awake at all during daylight hours.

Tulsa may be the only town I've visited where more goes on downtown after dark than during the day. Restaurants and delis in the city center shut their doors at two in the afternoon, while taverns and coffee shops don't open at all until four or five. But once night fell, we were within walking distance of two distinct entertainment districts.

The first, a short walk across any of a number of bridges over the Santa Fe railroad (whose presence was betrayed loudly by air horn for five minutes at a time, at intervals of approximately five minutes), was known as the Brady Arts District. It might better be called the Shipping and Receiving District, for interspersed between loading docks and warehouses are funky boutiques, cafés and a few taverns—intercity commerce meets la vie bohème.

More thorough whistle-wetting (of dubious necessity if the passing locomotives are any indication) can be had in the Blue Dome neighborhood on the eastern edge of downtown. The Blue Dome itself surmounts what was once a filling station, and in fact remains one, since a wing of the edifice is occupied by Arnie's Bar, an unpretentious self-styled dive with a shuffleboard table and the occasional Irish band playing. Around the corner is McNellie's, another Celtic-themed watering hole and a sister venture to the Mexican restaurant across the street. Such unlikely cross-branding seems apropos to the agressively upswinging economy of the district, where even I, with no interest whatever in the real estate market, could read "Buy! Buy! Buy!" in each shuttered window of every unrenovated brick façade.

Tulsa rivals its big brother Oklahoma City in urbanity, if not in population, for its city center has a compactness and venerability that suggests a genuine purpose for being (historically the oil industry), as opposed to the bigger city's somewhat arbitrary designation as the state capital. Landmarks such as the Blue Dome, the Union Depot and the Philtower Building recall the boom years of Art Deco, seeming to root the city more firmly into the American fabric than can be said of the capital.

During my week in Tulsa, I hated the noise and construction because I had to live in it; would jackhammers and chain-link fence be any more welcome in your living room than in my lobby? Yet hammer and fence were darning the fabric of this part of America, and for that week, despite or because of the tribulations, I nevertheless did live in it.

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Missouri loves company

Nov. 11 – Columbia, MO

Autumn is the only time to hang out in a college town. Brick, ivy and neo-classical masonry have a way of harmonizing with the color of the leaves and sky, and if it's Veteran's Day and the temperature gets into the 70s for no discernible reason, you have a bonus.

"College town" is a misnomer; we'd been to college towns: those that have no apparent function other than as the seat of their institutions (see Cleveland, Mississippi). Columbia, of course, is a university town: the University of Missouri. And just as Mizzou's various disciplines and departments amass into an amalgam of learning, the admixture of students, teachers, professionals and entrepreneurs makes the University Town a community of living.

I knew this about Columbia on Election Day in 2004. I knew I would be driving that day, home from Colorado, and wanted a stop-over point that I knew would be friendly to my side, where I could sit among peers and watch the results roll in. I chose Columbia, but for some reason I didn't find my peers that night. I ended up watching the debacle from the lounge of my truck-stop motel next to Interstate 70—suffice to say, it was the wrong crowd.

Three years and a week later, redemption came. This time I knew where I was going for food, drink and conversation, because William Least Heat-Moon, in River-Horse, writes that the Flat Branch brew pub "is a place of excellent ales and pilseners, with a dictionary and world almanac behind the bar to settle wagers." Be that endorsement as it may, for me it was also a comfortable place with a patio, open until midnight on a Sunday. And as "Will" (with whom our waiter plays softball) also writes, it was probably also "a direct contributor…to my social health" since the dozen-and-a-half people I dragged with me had the majority of a good time, saving me from the ignominy of a poor suggestion.

We closed the city down that night, with no sign of the college crowd (the University Town stays open, crowd or no), but the Eastside Tavern's owner was happy to see us anyway. With his well-reasoned yet liberally disseminated views on how Things Ought To Be Around Here, it was no surprise to read later (in MU's student rag The Maneater) that he's running for city council [proof]. That's one election night outcome I might be happy about.

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Decaf, please, it's after six-thirty…

Nov. 9 – Fayetteville, AR

For some reason we had Friday night off, so we did Fayetteville. Anchored by the University of Arkansas, there's a surprisingly robust strip of nightlife in this compact downtown. For a good four blocks along Dickson Street we found every kind of nightclub, bar, music joint and eatery, something to suit every style—as long as you're still in college. The truth is, while we enjoyed having a scene to immerse ourselves in, I kept wondering where it was that the old farts liked to hang out. There's a mellowness lost when Having a Great Time, through the exuberance of youth, becomes an end in itself.

Still, we made a valiant effort to absorb the experience, and I found a wide selection of Different-Looking People to enjoy watching. Fayetteville is situated on some pretty substantial hills, and there's something about being on a slope that makes an urban area seem more vital, with deep layers of architecture brought into one focal plane, as if viewed through a telephoto lens. So while the overall vibe may not have been my cup of tea, it was nice to feel enveloped within a locality rather than feeling always on the edge of it, overlooking some flat plain of humanity as if from on high.

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It'll do in a pinch

Nov. 8 – Salina, KS

Our first day in Kansas was spent on the fringe of Salina, in a surprisingly vast patch of asphalt retail on the south side of this small city. Although nothing would entice you to leave your room and venture into such wilderness, this was okay because for the first time we were enjoying living in suites. More accurately, these were single rooms with kitchenettes, but still our best appointed lodging so far. There was a pantry across the hall from which I could take groceries back to my room, paying through a slot on the honor system. And with free laundry, it doesn't get much better!

The second day, we got to see the town. I'd been through Salina once before and remember it as small, out of date, somewhat dilapidated. This time, it was bigger, busier, more alive. I don't know what changed other than perception, but there were lights, traffic, activity downtown. I thought perhaps we'd mistakenly landed in Canada, for there were people walking, of all things. (That might have to do with strategic placement of parking lots, actually.) The Stiefel Theatre was somewhat cramped inside, better decorated than the Waco Hippodrome but not much roomier. Outside, its marquee had genuine incandescent flashing lights; it gave me a bit of a headache, but at least it was authentic. It was a little like looking at those black-and-white photographs inside delicatessens, showing you how much more happening your downtown used to be. This one still looked similar to the photographs; I wonder what Salina knows that Abilene doesn't?

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Closed

Nov. 6 – Abilene, TX

Some cities are boring because they're unremarkable. Abilene was remarkable for being boring. The city is square buildings on square blocks formed by streets with square names like Walnut, Pine and Hickory. The civic center auditorium looked like an overturned shoe. We'd been told the hotel lounge would be closed for renovations, but not to worry, since there was a new place open nearby that was the only game in town. Well, it was, and it turned out to have closed after lunchtime. Just as well, perhaps, since it looked more like an insurance agent's office than a cool hangout. But that was the end of the line; there was nowhere else to eat, nowhere to drink, nowhere to hear music in downtown Abilene after sunset. So we ordered pizza, I found some beers that I had left over from New Orleans, and we played our own music. The only instrument I could find for myself was my empty beer bottle, which worked as well as any.

In reaching Abilene we had completed our survey of Texas, both geographically and culturally. En route from McAllen we'd crossed that odd mixture of desert and coastal wetland that is South Texas. We had traversed the fabled Hill Country, gold dusted from the early November. We breezed through San Antonio, which tantalized us with intrigue. We saw Fredericksburg, Texas' answer to a quaint New England resort town, a good place for antiquing and a light lunch with your tea (though we forwent it at our lunch stop in favor of some place called Brady). We landed in the so-called Big Country, where Abilene lies far enough from the major population centers to register as a cipher, though not so remote as to engender an identity of its own, as in the Panhandle.

We had seen trendy Austin, sultry Harlingen, motley El Paso, and ambrosial Orange; the inimitable Waco and the epiphanous Palo Duro Canyon; Lubbock rising and oh, Amarillo. We had touched the five points of the Lone Star State, by its very expansiveness both arresting and compelling, like a dramatic pause.

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Meanwhile, not far away…

Nov. 5 – McAllen, TX

McAllen is only about 35 miles from Harlingen, where we'd played just two nights prior, and from all I saw of both cities, it's essentially the same. There we were in the La Quinta Inn beside Highway 83. There was the Denny's right next door, and the IHOP a few doors down across the freeway. There was the same muggy weather, and the same municipal auditorium from a generation ago that still houses touring companies.

The difference, I suppose, was that McAllen was a little nicer, a little more comfortable, a little more convenient. There were no throngs of people at the McAllen hotel, and no bugs that I saw. The Denny's was even closer to the hotel, in fact less than ten feet away, plus it had a bar inside (I didn't go). And while there was the IHOP, there were also a handful of other choices for lunch, so it didn't have to be a half-mile walk. The muggy weather was tempered in the evening by a soothing breeze, and the auditorium was neat and quirky instead of simply old and tired; what's more, I'm told a new arts facility is planned for the town.

There was grass in McAllen, and trees. Even the freeway overpasses seemed newer. And most striking of all, my ears were unassaulted by the complaints of the Iridescent Squawking Bird. Maybe he'd stayed behind in Harlingen. Or maybe he had followed, and in so doing found nothing further to complain about.

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Postscript:

The city of Pharr is right next to McAllen, which allows for some fun with puns. For example, Q: "Are we in McAllen yet?" A: "No; it's not Pharr."

Q: "Which side of McAllen do you live on?" A: "The Pharr side."

I saw a sign from the freeway for a bridge to Mexico. I wonder if across the border there's a sign for "A bridge to Pharr"?

And of course, who among us has never fallen into a burning Ring of Pharr?

Okay, I think I've gone to Pharr.

My body lies over the ocean

Nov. 4 – Corpus Christi, TX

Corpus Christi is nice for a seaside town, perhaps because it's also a city in its own right and not just an excuse to build incongruously tall buildings along the sand. There is a pirate ship there, an aircraft carrier, and a majestic bridge across the harbor. And despite the lack of nearby trees and shade (or probably because of it), there was an infestation of bats inside the Selena Auditorium, which anchors, if you will, the harbor district. One of them we found sleeping, clung to the white concrete block wall of the stairwell; we named him Oscar.

When work was through, all I wanted was a quick bite to eat. I went to what looked like the more casual of the two hotel restaurants, the Republic of Texas Bar and Grill. Casual it was not. The first thing I was obliged to choose was my water: sparkling, spring or tap. Anything but sea, please, just get on with it. The menu was littered with expensive-sounding "A" words like aioli, asiago and ahi. After Harlingen, I just wanted to sit comfortably in my room, browse the working internet and watch television. It was the swankiest hotel to date, so this should have been easy enough. Unfortunately, I was in a four-star steak restaurant with prices in the dozens of dollars, and my TV show started in forty-five minutes: this was not going to go well. I ordered an appetizer and a side dish, and after twenty minutes with only bread, beer and a carefully selected glass of tap water, asked for the food to be brought to my room.

I went there and switched on the tube, whose speakers erupted into paroxysms of static every time something white came on the screen. All the while I was assaulted with text messages received in triplicate regarding the time and location of an informal birthday celebration for one of our company. I'm always up for a couple of rounds at the hotel bar, so I joined the party, which had largely broken up soon after it started. I learned then that there was a balcony in my room, from which I would later hear a cacophony of birds blathering away in the middle of the night (apparently the Iridescent Squawking Bird was just the opening act). At least they drowned out the street sweeper, which from the look of the town was run every twenty minutes daily.

It really was a very fine place to stay, with beds like clouds and staff who would put your food anywhere you asked them to. The breeze came in off the ocean at night, and the internet did work. But after a day of Polish help desks, overcrowded greasy spoons, and the Unfortunate Sidewalk Incident, I was in culture shock from too much refinement too soon. Perhaps as an unconscious display of my appreciation, I woke up the next morning, promptly overflowed the toilet, and checked out. We drove away from the most morbidly-named American city since Horseheads, and steered south toward exactly where we'd come from, the Rio Grande Valley.

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Some days on the road are like this one.

Nov. 4 – Harlingen, TX

From Austin, we arrived at our hotel in Harlingen at a quarter past three, about on schedule after a lunch stop in Bishop (where I first encountered the Iridescent Squawking Bird of southern Texas). Unfortunately, the staff had not been apprised of our arrival and keys were not yet made for our eleven rooms. That left us waiting about thirty minutes, which is valuable time lost for unpacking, napping, eating dinner and, more often than not, rearranging room assignments because they are double-booked or have not enough beds. I tried to connect to the wireless network, but it wouldn't have me. After half an hour on the phone with the help desk in Poland, I had gotten nowhere and it was time to leave for the venue. After work I tried again, and despite another half hour with Poland and an adapter from the front desk, I finally had to make the technological regression to television.

We'd been thrilled to find there was a Denny's immediately next to the hotel. Often, if there is any late night dining in the neighborhood, it's a considerable walk away across windswept suburban plains, so being able to have dinner before bed was a bonus. But breakfast would be another matter.

Our hotel was overrun by some kind of church outing group, and I think also a wedding party. At three in the morning a handful of people were causing some kind of ruckus, probably taking advantage of the hour gained back from daylight savings. (Why Harlingen needs to be saving daylight I don't know; the sidewalks are plenty bright already.) I'm sure it was one of these people who threw up on the sidewalk outside my room. Twice. Despite waking up to this sight, I had an appetite for breakfast. Yay, Denny's!

Nope. It was Sunday morning, and the neighborhood was even further overrun by Mexican shopping excursions celebrating the Day of the Dead, and some other crowd of folks wearing quasi-military uniforms, not to mention the AARP. All these various groups beat me to the punch and there was a forty-minute wait at Denny's by 10:00. That wouldn't do, since we were loading the bus at 10:45 to leave at 11:15 for Corpus Christi. I looked in the hotel lobby for the continental breakfast. If it had ever been there, it didn't look like anything I wanted any part of. Never mind; there was an IHOP three doors down, although since the first door was a Wal-Mart, the distance was about half a mile. Well, that was even worse: the crowd at Denny's probably comprised the overflow from IHOP. I guess McDonald's it is. And so it was. I ate a McMuffin. A bird squawked.

I made the walk back toward the hotel along the glaring pavement, overdressed for the sub-tropical humidity but thinking ahead to the bus air conditioning. I was accompanied by a carpet of fire ants and a din of Iridescent Squawking Birds, wishing I'd had more time at the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown Austin. Goodbye, Harlingen.

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It's Hip To Be Wac(k)o

Nov. 2 – Austin, TX

Austin was a happy accident. The hotel in Waco canceled our reservation, and with no other rooms available in town, our lodging was moved to the capital city. After work we made the hundred-mile drive, arriving in Austin by midnight and leaving a couple of hours to experience the scene there.

Our day, of course, had been spent in Waco (anagram for "a cow": coincidence?) and we had known in advance that it would be, yes, a little wacko. The Waco Hippodrome was far smaller than any venue we'd yet played—how they ever managed to fit equestrian sports in there I'll never know. We had prepared a version of the show with no moving pieces, and played it against the black rear wall of the theatre. Instruments, equipment and even some costumes were set up in the back alley, which you could step to almost directly from the stage. Wardrobe, offices, even our beloved coffee were located in the building next door.

Still, it was fun to perform there. It was the kind of house that made us feel we were playing the local Saturday night opry rather than some slick Broadway thing. (You could almost smell the horse shit in the air; maybe that's why it's called the Hippodrome.) Or perhaps we were an old Vaudeville act: in the close quarters of our dressing room I could easily imagine that crowd of 1920s chorus girls scurrying to dress for the next number. But maybe that's just an image that comes more readily to some of us than to others.

At any rate, in Austin that night we checked out Sixth Street, which stakes a credible claim as the live music capital of the world. Austin's a hip city, at least as hip as the opry or Vaudeville, and displays a greater number of young, hip people than we'd yet seen outside of captivity. There was only time to check out one place, so we chose an Irish pub with a blues quartet (talk about hip) where coeds and thirty-something singles alike were tearing up the dance floor (naturally with a lot of swinging of hips). It was a cool place to be, and that was refreshing.

Austinites have a slogan: "Keep Austin Weird." I hope that just being a great place to hang out in what's otherwise known as Texas is not what they have in mind as being weird. But if it is, I'll take it anyway. It ain't the Waco Hippodrome, but it's still pretty damn hip.

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The cuisine of the Sabine women

Nov. 1 – Orange, TX

We found Orange to be a warm, welcoming town. It's clean and tidy; the lawns are manicured and the fences in good repair (which is only fitting for a town that got its start as a lumbering center). Not many buildings seem to be vacant, and those that are are having prompt attention paid to them. Our hotel welcomed us with bags of peanuts, bottles of water, and cookies. We were greeted at our venue with a home-cooked dinner of tossed salad, gumbo, oriental cole slaw (!), fruit salad and garlic bread. The audience was about as receptive as any so far. Even the weather was accommodating: sunny and warm, in the 80s. It was a good evening in Orange, TX.

Orange has a couple of claims to fame: it survived Hurricane Rita in 2005, and it is home to the highest exit number in North America. That's Exit 880 on Interstate 10 by the Sabine River at the Louisiana state line. It's been almost three weeks since I passed by Exit 0 on the same highway, way over on the New Mexico border, on my way to El Paso. The east and west borders of Texas are closer to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans than they are to each other, and comparing the bayous and gumbo of Orange to the chaparral and mariachis of El Paso, I'm not the least surprised.

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Delta Seven Sharp Eleven

Oct. 31 – New Orleans, LA

My first impression of the Crescent City was that it's like the Bronx, only French. It's a remarkable city, thick and gritty and massive, the first place we'd been that felt truly urban. The architecture is solid, ornamental, cosmopolitan, and dingy. And yes, there is that lingering smell in the French Quarter of a never-ending "morning after". Most structures in the city (other than the buildings themselves, for some reason) are elevated, and in a region where dozens of miles of freeway are built hovering above swamp, bayou and open lake, the tangle of flyovers that web the sky in the downtown area seems like just another day's work for the highway engineers.


We walked through the Quarter, past Jackson Square to a cafe near the river. There I ate gumbo, and a man played the keyboard and sang, sounding like a cross between Satchmo and Bob Dylan, with the occasional one-handed trumpet solo thrown in. At the riverbank, we watched an upstream tow of barges being steered around the bend and under the Crescent City Connection bridges. Dinner was by the fire fountain in the courtyard (really the combined backyards of an entire city block) at the famous Pat O'Brien's, home of the Hurricane drink. I had everything else Cajun: jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, red beans and rice. It was Halloween and we had the night off, so we took in Bourbon Street (along with some of the other things that go with it). After dodging the costumed revelers in the street, trying not to spill our legally carried open containers (hooray for street beer!), we finally ended at a jazz club to see what the deal really is with New Orleans music.

The bandleader, a trumpeter, was a round, bald, goateed man with brusque eyebrows, who resembled nothing so much as an inflatable boxing doll. On the bass was a diminutive, withered old cat who probably could have slept inside his fiddle, and looked ancient enough to have invented it. The drummer sat stock still and bolt upright most of the time, his paunch preventing him from collapsing forward. He twitched his right stick around distractedly, hitting his traps at odd angles and seemingly at random, and yet somehow sounding remarkably tasty. On piano was a slightly intense-looking slender fellow whom they called "the Professor", and who occasionally seemed unsure how he'd come to be sitting at this instrument. And the sax player was a clean-cut chap who looked as if he could be from the Marsalis clan; when he blew his clarinet the wind flowed with such dexterity I thought it must be greased. This hodgepodge of characters somehow imagined all of the same notes and took turns playing them, with a result so concordant you couldn't imagine it had come from this drawer of mismatched socks.

We walked back toward the hotel, grabbed a late-night bite to eat, endured the aroma a little longer, and then I took of my beads and went to bed. In the morning, we were headed back to Texas.

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Things you see in the South

Oct. 31 – Cleveland, MS

I saw my first real live cotton plants today. Most of the crop has already been harvested and collected into modules that look like huge white Styrofoam bricks, but some fields remain in bloom. You could knit hundreds of sweaters from the cotton litter along the side of Highway 49 through Marvell, Arkansas. Uncollected bolls have been mashed into the dark mud of the bottomland, giving the entire landscape an unwashed appearance. The very countryside seems built by the river, as well it might, since the land here is an ever-changing accumulation of sediment deposited in floods and at river bends, which have become open farmland as the Mississippi meanders like a sidewinder across the face of the South. The sidewinder's tracks are seen in scores of oxbows in various stages of regression to dry earth: lake, swamp, muddy scar, fertile cotton pasture.

The city of Cleveland, Mississippi is small, but then again all cities in Mississippi are small. I can't say what goes on there, as I haven't really seen the town, but there is Delta State University and a double-wide downtown main street. And Wal-Mart. There is always a Wal-Mart. The city is located in the Greater Delta region of Mississippi, a name that actually refers to the inland alluvial landscape and not the deposition of sediment into the ocean. Cleveland is home to almost 14,000 people and at least one small obstreperous bird, who flew in circles above our hotel tonight, looking for somebody to annoy.

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Withstanding the siege

Oct. 30 – Fort Smith, AR

Fort Smith is a plucky little city located on a bend in the Arkansas River. It was founded in 1817 as a military outpost on the border of the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). That is to say, its original function was to keep exiled Indians from taking back any of their land. Just this evening, somebody told me I could walk across the bridge into Oklahoma, but don't get caught there.

There's a main drag, Garrison Street, lined with old brick building fronts. Literally. At least two of the façades I saw were nothing more than that: mere faces of buildings held up artificially while something else was being built behind them. And of the intact buildings, few were still being used for their original purposes. The historic downtown district is compact, and the blocks immediately beyond give an appearance that alternates between demilitarized zone and Mexico (the neighborhood buildings of Fort Smith look more authentically Mexican than any I saw in El Paso).

Yet somehow, the city's heritage is not lost with the re-use of old structures or, for that matter, the blocks of new large-scale development elsewhere downtown. And at the same time, it's not retained solely because of organized historic preservation, although this is also taking place. For some reason, history permeates the town of its own accord.

There's a difference between a place that has rekindled or reconstructed its past, and one that, despite decades of decline, never got around to dismantling its history in the first place. Fort Smith is the latter type. Its burnt-out appearance notwithstanding, the city has abided, with no apparent break in its historical continuum. While today there is (arguably) no need for Arkansas to defend its border with Oklahoma, Fort Smith is clearly the descendant of its foundling self, a town that, accounting for nearly two hundred years of aging, looks very much as it would have when new. At least from the front.

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65804

Oct. 29 – Springfield, MO

Springfield's GO magazine, the local out-and-about freeweekly (a paltry slim thing for Missouri's third largest city), is running a feature this week about local Sexy Singles, with photos and banal survey-style write-ups. The first thing I noticed was that they never mention which sex is of interest to these Singles, so we know it's not that kind of magazine. The second thing was that these are sixteen of the most unremarkable, uncompelling people you can imagine. "Romantic dinners at home with wine." "A guy who makes me laugh." And so forth. So we gather that normalcy is self-perpetuating here, as made evident by the city's media-sponsored breeding program.

There's also something fishy going on with beer. I asked two bartenders and a waitress at the hotel bar (actually the self-styled local sports hangout, only grudgingly affiliated with the attached hotel) what they could offer in a bottled beer. After ensuring that I did not, in fact, have lobsters coming out of my ears, I ultimately had to file a Freedom of Information request to get even a partial answer. Perhaps I was viewed as subversive for expecting any kind of departure from the Standard American Beer Menu.

Even Missouri State University has deleted "Southwest" from its name, disavowing any specific identity with its location, so as to make it relevant throughout the middlemost state in America. I couldn't find a Springfield entry into my collection of lapel pins. I've dined at both T.G.I. Friday's and Panera, and Starbucks held an employee conference at our hotel. It may well be that distinctiveness is strictly taboo in Springfield. Perhaps that's why the city shares its name with the fictional hometown of the Simpsons. It really is Anytown, U.S.A.

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Little ways to Rock the Establishment

Oct. 24 – Little Rock, AR

Downtown Little Rock is trying hard to be Open For Business, with here and there a successful result. On Main Street, festive tree lighting and the presence of one the best-respected professional theatre companies in the U.S. belie the fact that most storefronts are vacant, even boarded up. On the other hand, at least the majority of storefronts are still extant at all, and those few businesses that operate are the kind that thrive in beleaguered mid-size business districts: wig shops, tattoo parlors, stamp and coin dealers.

On adjacent downtown blocks, any historic building stock that might have existed has been replaced with more recent urban renewal. Then again, it's been replaced pretty thoroughly, and these blocks retain the urban feel of uninterrupted architecture, with few injections of bare, open asphalt. These are the blocks of banking, service industries and the obligatory state and county government agencies. Employees of this district, largely unseen during daylight hours, are issued forth in quick umbrella-laden spurts at lunch breaks and at the daily close of business. There are a handful of delicatessens and at least one bar that cater primarily to this lunch crowd.

Nearby there are some spot attractions: the old State House, the River Market shopping development, and things having to do with President Clinton. And a vintage trolley, which someone other than its riders is clearly paying for. But between these locations and those times of day, most of the people seen out and about seem there by accident or circumstance. In the spacious concrete plaza in front of one bank building, four people milled about without purpose, one confined to a wheelchair. Others in the neighborhood were conducting matters of random business at county offices. Some were union members on smoke breaks. And some were panhandlers.

(I will never understand panhandlers. Why they ply their trade in areas where so few of the people have much to give, and where there is so much competition from other members of the industry, is beyond me. But I suppose if these folks could invent a more successful business model, they wouldn't be panhandling.)

Nevertheless, there is a pocket culture in this city. One corner cafe draws a modest crowd of Hip Young People, the kind who enjoy things like the arts, alternative newsweeklies, and Being Different. The piano bar, a humble sole proprietorship, seems to be doing as good a business as anything in Little Rock has a right to. And various establishments sport "Best Of" stickers, with a cartoon Bill Clinton pointing out somebody's picks for defiant undermining of the Big Box commercial mentality. Never mind that the Urban Non-Conformity Lifestyle seems poised to be a multi-billion-dollar industry in its own right. In a city of two hundred thousand, with "Best Of" stickers, panhandlers and a piano bar, I feel as much at home as just about anywhere.

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The land we belong to

Oct. 19 – Oklahoma City, OK

I was eating lunch at Madison's Pancake House and eavesdropping on two women having a lunch meeting. I was trying to guess from their conversation what line of work they were in. All I could gather was that they deal with vendors and contractors, that they spend advertising dollars, and that they needed to set deadlines for the selection of committees. Not once did they mention anything that might betray the nature of their profession. It made me wonder if they themselves had any idea what their job is. That doesn't surprise me, since the neighborhood I'm staying in reflects much the same character.

Oklahoma City, by area, is enormous, more than half the size of Rhode Island. The lack of local governments below the county level (townships, villages etc.) in Western states means that cities can annex land freely, in a way that's impossible on the East Coast. So once you cross the city limits of Oklahoma City, you've got ten minutes of farmland to traverse before you start to see suburbs, and another ten minutes before you get to the urbanized area.


Once you enter the inner ring of neighborhoods, you get the impression that you're seeing the city only from its back side. The buildings don't make much effort to put their best face forward, and the blocks alternate pretty quickly between the residential and the used-bus-scrapyard zoning types. To be sure, this part of town has more than its share of specialized businesses, such as lawnmower repair shops, picture framing concerns and vacuum cleaner emporia. And bars that look like outbuildings to which the primary edifice has long since been torn down.

Downtown proper is a healthy cluster of bank headquarters and government buildings, fitting for a Midwestern city of half a million people and a state capital. During the day there are convenience stores and lunch counters, and after six o'clock the streets are much emptier. But there's Bricktown, the requisite warehouse-turned- entertainment district on the upswing, with an unexplained canal flowing through it. (I can think of another city with a very well-explained canal flowing through it that hasn't done a damn thing about it.) And there's the WPA-era Civic Center Music Hall, with over 11,000 season ticket holders coming to see Broadway shows on Wednesday evenings. So it's a pretty average city with the added bonus of something actually going on here and about.

Then there's our neighborhood, which is located stalwartly in the suburbs, despite being inside the city limits. (If your street address is 2945 Northwest Expressway, face it, you're not part of a community. You're C-17 on the shopping mall directory of America.) It may technically be Oklahoma City, but it's also Amarillo. It's Albuquerque. To those of you reading this, it's Greece, it's Middlesex Township, it's northern Virginia. It's vendors, contractors and advertising committees. Instead of two people who have no idea what their business is, it's business that hasn't a clue who the people are.

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A noisy interlude

Oct. 14 – Ruidoso, NM

After two days of travel in the state, I was beginning to think there was no part of New Mexico that isn't desert scrub and barren hills. I wondered what the appeal was for retirees and artists who seem to speak so highly of the Land of Enchantment. The towns we had seen were dusty, run-down places where the inhabitants seemed to live not by choice, only by circumstance. These towns had an Old Western feel, but that was because they had scarcely progressed since that time.

Seven thousand feet up in the mountains of Lincoln County is Ruidoso, which is unflappably Cute. It's full of Cute stores with Cute names selling Cute items with Cute slogans on them. (One questionable shop name was "Michelle's Double D Ranch".) There are Cute restaurants serving Cute fare with Cute things plastered on the walls. (One bar advertised beer, wine, live music, and skateboards.) I ate some Cute jambalaya in a Cute pizzeria with Cute antique cell phones nailed to the ceiling. Our hotel was the archetype of Cute. (Make your own waffles at breakfast? C'mon!) Clearly this was the Grandma's Attic of Southwestern towns.

Before we reached our performance venue, we had read some pretty high-falutin' write-ups about it. In the neighboring hamlet of Alto, somebody had donated many millions of dollars to build the Spencer Theater, a supposed jewel of architecture on a high plateau, but likely a blemish in the eyes of many long-time residents. For myself, I was undecided, but our first comparisons on seeing it were to (A) a doorstop, and (B) the Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars.

But we played our night there, and it was comfortable. Really comfortable. And so was our hotel (the aptly-named Comfort Inn), and so was Ruidoso. The night was chilly, the first real taste of autumn I'd had after a long summer. I craved hot cider. I wanted to sit on a couch by the artificial fireplace with a faux bearskin rug. But I had to go to bed, because the next morning at five-thirty we were due to drag our sorry selves back across the desert toward Oklahoma City.

I watched the sun rise over Roswell and blot out the morning star. We stopped for lunch in Amarillo, not far from Cadillac Ranch. Later, I did a Wikipedia search for "center pivot irrigation". I'm still looking for hot cider.

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The day after Columbus

Oct. 13 – El Paso, TX

Some people in this country believe Americans should not have to "press '1' to continue in English". These people ought not visit El Paso.

Walking down El Paso Street, past pawn shops selling pneumatic guns, accordions and life-sized novelty statues, past shops selling clothes para niños y niñas, past mercados that spill over into the sidewalk to promote browsing and haggling, you could be in any Mexican city. With one exception, that is: the proportion of Mexican people is much higher here.

For all the spaciousness of Texas, El Paso seems uniquely crowded, and not merely from the throngs of cross-border shoppers on El Paso Street. The city spreads out in three wings where it can find space between the Franklin Mountains, Fort Bliss Military Reservation (a vast tract of mostly vacant desert that must be worth thousands of income tax returns per acre) and the Rio Grande. At the hub of these wings, freeways and the railroad jockey for position, not always with a clear winner emerging. Trying to edge into the fray, already bursting at its own seams, is Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Urban revitalization has claimed only a small pocket of downtown El Paso. Pioneer Plaza is the locus of an arts and cultural district that includes the Plaza Theatre, marvelously restored in the Mission style with stars in the auditorium ceiling and a mild summer breeze blowing across the seats. Across the street is the elegant, old-fashioned Camino Real hotel, whose cocktail lounge boasts a 25-foot cut glass Tiffany dome and live cover bands. And I heard that around the corner is a great low-down dive with a six-piece mariachi combo and home-cooked Mexican grub. Wish I'd gone there: press "2" to continue in American.

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A Tale of Four Corners

Oct. 12 – Farmington, NM

Not much to say about Farmington. You cross more than 150 miles of desert to get there from Albuquerque, and in mid-October there's a splash of autumn color on the deciduous trees along the Animas River. Farmington and its neighbor city Bloomington seem to be optimiscally named, as any signs of successful agri- and horticulture are scarce (however, there is a preponderance of scrap yards, motels and battered trailers in dusty lots).

Our hotel had a wigwam out front (Farmington borders the Navajo Indian Reservation), and the auditorium at the Civic Center was so small that half of our scenic elements had to be eliminated. Back at the hotel later, there was a five dollar cover charge at the lounge for karaoke, but I had a headache and so went straight to bed. I heard later that a woman was beaten by her boyfriend in our parking lot during the night. I guess in the Land of Enchantment a few people are genuinely touched.

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Turning over a new...cheek?

Oct. 11 – Lubbock, TX

I knew something funny was going on when I first looked at Lubbock on Google Maps. Between Texas Tech University and Avenue Q, from Broadway Street to 4th Street, the aerial view clearly showed that some 49 city blocks had recently been razed to the ground. Throughout this area, new construction is popping up with incredible alacrity. A Wal-Mart across the street from our hotel (actually two blocks away across a vast, windswept plain of a parking lot) is so new that it doesn't yet appear on the map. And the walls of a new pharmacy were erected between the time I went to bed and the end of my breakfast the next morning.

I wondered why such a huge swath of land had undergone so complete and concerted a transformation. I assumed there had been existing development that had suffered some calamity and had to be condemned. I imagined a huge fire, industrial accident or, quite possibly, a tornado.

As it turns out, there was a tornado here, on May 11, 1970. It struck North Overton, a neighborhood once comfortably average but by then already on the decline. The tornado was probably not the reason for North Overton's fate, but it certainly shattered whatever hope may have existed for the neighborhood's rehabilitation. By the end of the twentieth century, North Overton had become notoriously destitute and degenerate, boasting only two per cent of the city's population but more than a quarter of its crime. It was dubbed the "Tech Ghetto", and university students were warned not to cross University Avenue into this dangerous area.

A local real estate mogul by the name of McDougal therefore decided to purchase, demolish and redevelop the entire Godforsaken place, and after nearly a decade of title searching, tenant relocation, asbestos abatement and demolition, new blocks of planned residential and retail development are finally starting to appear. North Overton is now Overton Park.

And who knows, in another forty, fifty or hundred years, the faux-wrought iron lampposts, terra-cotta Spanish roofs and brick-lain sidewalks may represent such an abomination upon the flat face of Lubbock that some benevolent patron will see fit to wipe them off the map altogether. Or, quite possibly, a tornado will do the job instead. And Google will be there taking pictures.

Much of the information I learned about Overton Park is contained in this thorough, if biased, article.
(http://tinyurl.com/2knuzk)


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Two postcripts:

1) Apparently they weren't satisfied with anything in Lubbock and decided to remodel it all at once. 4th Street is being turned into a freeway at the moment. And our hotel, a clean and comfortable Clarion, is being revamped aggressively and entirely into a clean and comfortable Radisson. North Overton becomes Overton Park.

2) I can't ever see or hear the name "Lubbock" without thinking "buttock". I'm just saying.

Another opening

Oct. 4, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

At Palo Duro Canyon, an old Panhandle cowboy told me his life was perfect.

His place sits on the canyon rim, about ready to tumble in. It's a brace of wooden buildings, ostensibly a town square of the Old West, and a handful of trailers and pickup trucks. There are horse corrals, no grass, and a cat on one of the roofs. Half a dozen dogs play fetch with scraps of milled lumber, since there are no trees large enough to drop twigs. His business is horseback canyon tours, and his shop counter is a stump in the dirt out front.

Palo Duro Canyon, like many of the Panhandle's landmarks, is unexpected. The plain could not be flatter, more featureless, than when it opens dramatically and without warning into the country's most sprawling canyon complex after the Grand Canyon itself. It could not be more surprising if it were ten garishly painted Cadillacs nose-diving into a wheat field. (It's been said that the American West hides more through sheer spaciousness than any dense East Coast metropolis.)

My horse was Caliente. In Spanish, caliente means "hot", although this adjective described neither his temperament nor his inclination toward forward motion. He was gentle and sure-footed, a rich rusty-colored companion, and he carried me through a landscape approaching desert austerity, but with enough shade and flowing water to seem habitable. He showed me another collection of Old Western storefronts, part of a disused attraction called Six Gun City. Amidst this tableau our guides, the cowboy's son and his bride, were building themselves a cabin.

Past wildflowers and junipers, past crisscrossing stream beds that seemed merely part of the network of trails, past campsites empty yet fully equipped, past the old wooden outhouse, Caliente and I traced a path down and back through the canyon. I saw a kind of life there. Not from Nature, not from adventure, but from my horse, my guides, the cats, the outhouse, the river. From a sense that there was nothing more to know than what you could see with your eyes. From the imperative abruptness of the canyon. From the old cowboy.


In his ageless Texan monotone, with a voice that seemed more mustache than man, the cowboy had said to me, "I love my children, my wife, my horses and my job. I've got nothing to be sorry about."

The nebulous plain

Sept. 29, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

The clouds in Amarillo do really strange things. Here's what they do:

Sometimes the sky will be peppered with your Average Cumulus Cloud. But due to some kind of high-altitude prevailing wind, they'll all be uniformly skewed in one direction, like Hershey's Kisses that have melted slightly. They unfailingly point away, in every direction but here.

Sometimes they're layered, and the late afternoon sun will brightly illuminate the lower layer, casting a shadow on the upper so that there appears to be a storm brewing high above while we're sheltered in a buffer of fair weather at the surface. And on some days, columned palisades rise in vapor overhead, as they do in rock from the canyon floor.

Thunderstorms can be seen for miles across the high plains, and in an otherwise clear evening sky there will be a brooding patch of rust lofting ominously into the telltale anvil-top of a thunderhead. After nightfall, the unbroken horizon shows lightning supporting the very sky on crooked stilts.

Once it was overcast, and below the shroud of nimbostratus the setting sun hazed through a yellowed curtain of distant rain that immured the entire plain. Yet only a few degrees above the margin of clouds, a window of pure crystal blue opened, through which one might imagine launching oneself in flight along the one certain path toward freedom.

A fair sky promises calm, but without a cloud it gives no direction.

66 Degrees of Separation

Sept. 23, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

It kind of surprises me that so much is made of Amarillo's pedigree as a Route 66 town.

Route 66 was, in its day, one of the better-known components of the US highway system, the web of numbered two-lane intercity roads conceived in 1926 and still used today. The Mother Road was by no means unique in the way it spawned a new breed of traveler-based businesses and attractions—motels, diners, truck stops, giant balls of twine—that today have become icons of nostalgia. But well before it was officially taken off the books in 1985, Route 66 became known as the trunk line of on-the-road Americana, and its decertification coincided with a regression in the American mindset to the glory days of automobile travel in the United States. A fascination with roadside America was born.

Amarillo, the only large Texas city along the line of Route 66, certainly has its share of waysides. In 1974, some guys buried ten Cadillacs in a field west of town. And about ten years before that, a restaurateur on the other end of the city began offering free 72-ounce steaks to anybody who could consume one within an hour. These were destinations along Route 66 as they are still along Interstate 40. They are enlightening places to visit, but they are just quirks.

In Amarillo, as in much of the American West, roadside America is more than quirks: it is an entire fabric. Roads and addresses are carefully portioned into impersonal cadastral grids; freeway interchanges are methodically numbered according to a scale of miles from the state line. Frontage roads allow the Interstate itself to be an address (72-ounce steaks: exit 75; half-buried Cadillacs: between exits 60 and 62). The majority of the city seems to be a wash of internally lit brand names and franchise logos, no different than the days of Burma Shave and Phillips 66.

Souvenir shoppers visit the Route 66 Historic District and the offbeat destinations to revisit a forgotten piece of roadside America in Amarillo. But what they're remembering has never gone away. They need only look around: Amarillo is roadside America.

A city overrun with Panhandlers

Sept. 9, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

It's as if they built the city by spilling out a box of dominoes onto a coffee table and calling it a day. The town is scattered loosely about the plain, without regard to zoning or the need to cluster into anything resembling a community. Dropped casually upon the gridiron of roads is a repetitive array of convenience stores, weather-beaten homes, light industrial concerns, and taco stands. Downtown is two pairs of one-way, high-speed arterial streets sprinkled with commercial buildings—some attaining high-rise stature—at an average density of one per city block. (The remainder of each block is an expanse of asphalt or gravel or general uncategorized vacancy.) The resulting rarefaction is heralded as "Center City" along its approaches. Indeed.

Elsewhere, the city stretches out along Interstate 40, with the usual clutch of motels and fast food restaurants at each milepost-numbered interchange. Whatever nostalgic charm was brought by Old Route 66 is tough to spot here today. Or maybe it shows as plainly as the rain on the plain, how the Mother Road helped build this part of America.

Amarillo, the Spanish word, is pronounced "ah-ma-REE-joe" (more or less, according to dialect) and means "yellow". But the name of this northern Texas city is pronounced more closely to "armadillo" and so, I assume, transliterates more accurately in the Panhandle idiom to "yaller".

Welcome to Texas, the space bar on the keyboard of America.


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