Trip Notes: Madison to ABQ Jan 2018

[jesse_the_k]

Our Burnished Traveling Skills

• “bankers hours”: on the road at 9:30 am and arrive by 4:00
• Stop every 90 minutes to walk, stretch, attend to personal & canine needs
• Copious snackage prevents most dismal meals and keeps the spirits high: nuts, carrots, apples, lettuce, protein (my tofu or beef jerky and cheese, MyGuy’s salami and ham)
• This is the first road trip we’ve had a smartphone. The ability to research mysterious items in the passing landscape is miraculous. The remaining blue signs with icons of a bed, gas pump, and telephone receiver are going fast.

Things Worth Noting

• “Wiggly Park” is a dog exercise area in Oregon Illinois. We groaned but did not stop. (non-Midwesterners: Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field)
• Third year in a row we’ve stopped at Lakeland Mall in Bloomington IL. Each year empty shops increase by 40%. May not be there next year.
• IL DOT rest area in Coalfields features a life-sized portrait of Mother Jones.
• BANDANA’s is a delicious southern midwestern chain. Sauces are served separately, increasing order safety. I had smoked turkey that was actually moist and tasty.
• St Louis Federal Reserve tries outreach, yet we resisted the urge to go: Inside the Economy Museum at the Federal Reserve¹
• Smoked turkey is even better for breakfast
• MyGuy is a serious paper-maps and dead-reckoning traveler, but the niftiest paper map doesn’t track restaurants, rest stops, and other vital destinations. I had been using a Garmin Nuvi 65. Although I updated to 2018 maps just before we set out, it showed signs of dementia. Instead of taking the main road, it’s telling us to drive in circles. It directed us to many establishments that have gone out of business. Unplugged from power source on day 3.
• Tulsa has beautifully decorated sound barriers (but not in the poorer side of town). They’re in a deco style, tan with repeating russet verticals

Remarkable Road Signs We Encountered

• In Oklahoma: STATE LAW DO NOT IMPEDE LEFT LANE
  • Therefore, if you’re zipping along at the 75mph speed limit pull to the slow lane for that 4-door truck going 90MPH
• Just over the border to Texas: HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES
  • Around two miles further down, we pass two men walking in the shoulder, opposite travel direction. They have black plastic bags fashioned into backpacks and one was walking a bicycle. There’s a story prompt.
• Near Sawyer TX, variable text road construction lightbulb display proclaims VARIOUS LANES CLOSED
• Near Edgewood NMDot: GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST

Dwelling on the Landscape

Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, where land use continually surprises me.

• Businesses, dwellings, machinery, outbuildings, vehicles are are abandoned and left to rust, rot, and burn. Even when someone builds on the same land. I saw many going concerns in nicely-painted structure right next to see-through barns and hollowed-out cars.
• There were as many abandoned roadside stops–gas, convenience store, mechanic–as those in business. Here’s where the smartphone was truly vital: we couldn’t rely on the blue “what’s up this exit” signs.
• In Britten TX the water tower is leaning over. Half mile down the road there’s a long-dead auto empire. The plastic has blown out of their signs: all that’s left is the thin metal frames that held them. Atop this outline of a tower is a miniature, leaning water tower also labeled Britten TX. Meta-abandonment.
• That’s cotton dust in the ditch, not snow. Also lots of cotton tightly rolled into enormous tarp-packed cylinders just ready to load on a semi-trailer. Acres of cotton to the horizon. Now machines mind it, but so many humans gave their life to this lovely and horrible crop.
• Past a half-mile long CAFO². At least ten thousand cattle inside a fence standing on manure. Quite smelly. There were three “steers of the mountain” each standing on 30 foot mounds of their own shit.
• Many wind farms. When we’re lined up just right, all the poles merge into one, with the scores of turbine blades turning at different rates transforming into a lazy combine. (The same thrill as the momentary glance all the way down the lines of corn.)
• The New Mexico landscape is very subtle: gray-green, green-gray, tan, brown, watched over by almost-infinite sharp blue sky. I love this visual counterpart to ambient New Age music. Some merchants see this as monotony perfect to decorate with scores of billboards, an enticement for every person in the car:
  • BEAUTIFUL CROSSES
  • TOYS
  • GIRL STUFF
  • KNIVES
  • SNAKE STUFF SLITHER ON IN AND SEE

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1. https://www.stlouisfed.org/inside-the-economy-museum ↩︎

2. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plantsanimals/livestock/afo/ ↩︎

Comments

[sasha_feather]

Neat! Thanks for sharing your journey.

[jesse_the_k]

You're welcome. I feel like I'm tweeting in a notebook.

[wohali]

Really, the blue signs are vanishing? That's terrifying. As a motorcyclist I can't take my hands off the handlebars to search a smartphone with any level of safety. Lodging, Gas, Food are how I survive.

Guess I'll have to start planning even more carefully in advance when I travel through the US. Poo. (In Canada those signs are alive and well, at least on the 400-series highways, our equivalent of the Interstate system.)

[brainwane]

I think what jesse_the_k was saying was that the blue signs are still there but sometimes the gas, lodging, and food establishments they refer to are defunct.

The abandonment, rust, and rot sound so desolate and despair-inducing. I tremble to think what they portend.

[jesse_the_k]

There are also some blue signs with no handy business names, as well as truly missing ones.

Exactly on the near-future landscape: I felt like I was in Butler's Parable books.

[jesse_the_k]

Some of them have straight-up vanished--mainly in urban areas where the huge monument signs for the fast food and lodging are even more visible.

Some of them are blank: the blue sign says "GAS - FOOD" and nothing else.

And some, like brainwane intuited, are inaccurate: they list business that are shuttered or boarded up.

[wohali]

So the last two sound like very bad things for society in general, and the prevalence of the former + the second makes it sound like the national priority on the signs is lower than usual. That's Not Good.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep this in mind for my next road trip.

[wild_irises]

So many cool things here; thank you!

What comes to mind are two favorite signs.

I don't know if it's still there, but back in the day, when you drove up Loveland Pass (the highest mountain pass in the continental United States), through switchbacks and steep cliffs, and nailbiting moments, when you got to within 100 feet of the crest, there was a diamond-shaped yellow sign that said "Hill."

And off the highway in Berkeley, for many years there was a sign on business property that said "No trespassing except on business," which we interpreted to mean that burglars were welcome.

[wild_irises]

Oh, and that cotton dust? It could also be pesticides. I'm blanking right now on the name of the very popular pesticide that leaves a white residue (an acquaintance of mine who grew up in Alabama used to play in it like snow--he's my age and fine, but who knows why?).

Glad it's readable.

[jesse_the_k]

HA! Burglary business is supposed to be booming here in ABQ.

I certainly see a lot of homeless folks on the street.

[oracne]

I would like to visit New Mexico one day.

[jesse_the_k]

I'm enjoying it a lot! Feels like an entirely different culture. BRIGHT BLUE SKIES!

I hope my notes may prove useful some day.

[raino]

Cotton dusted ditches... wow. But I understand there has to be a lot of it growing, so much it gathers in ditches. Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of it, every year, everywhere.

This post is giving me a bad case of travel fever!

[jesse_the_k]

Where is the next place you want to go?

[raino]

Somewhere I can see stars. I really wanna see stars. There's so much light pollution blocking my skyview. I'm imagining a trek across Patagonia but will happily settle for Lapland!

[toft]

Lovely descriptions.