Notes from the Road - Day 1

1/30/04 10:55pm Amarillo, TX

Today I set off on a journey through the Western states of the USA, leaving my Bedford, TX, apartment behind to spend a month on some of the many roads I have not yet traveled. A month ago, I was laid off from my job in accounting, which I had held for the past four and a half years. As compensation for my time, I was given a generous severance package including wages and benefits. This was amenable to me, as I had grown sedentary in my comfortable lifestyle. Here was a chance to start something new, and beginnings are the best part of pretty much any experience.

After spending the holidays at home with friends and family in Indiana, I decided I would use some of my new freedom and the time before the lease on my apartment was up to get in a car and drive. At first, I considered driving all over the country, perhaps for a couple of months, but reality eventually set in, as it pretty much always does. When I was passed over for a promotion to a position at work that I was already successfully, if unofficially, filling, the writing was on the wall. So, I began saving money for the inevitable. I had already paid off my car, and I had been flirting off and on for a couple of years with simply quitting and moving to Austin, a city I love, having spent many weekends there visiting my friend Phil. The predicament I found myself in was far preferable. Instead of quitting my job and forgoing all of its benefits, I got to keep the benefits for months, along with a perfect excuse to leave town.

I had to limit the length of time I spent on the road, and a month seemed like a good amount of time for several reasons. I would be back in time to pay my bills without penalty. I would be able to travel a large part of the country in that time, without being rushed (hopefully). And rental car companies have monthly rates. I had decided to rent a vehicle for the trip on the advice of several friends, which ranged from “You’re going to be driving on icy roads,” to “You can beat the hell out of it.” I had to admit that the month of February was not the best month to be gallivanting across mountain ranges, but this was the time I had to work with.

A few months prior, I saw a special on PBS about the first man to drive from coast to coast in the early 1900’s. This probably planted the seed for my idea to embark on this adventure, although I won’t be going coast to coast. Instead, I’ll be traveling through the American West, parts of which are well known to me, parts of which I’ve only been briefly acquainted with, and much of which I have yet to discover. I’m quite looking forward to it.

As I write this, I have just completed my first day’s travel. As it happens, I’ve only encountered two states so far, Texas and Oklahoma. With Texas, I got what I expected; Oklahoma was a different story. I had ridden in the back of my parents’ car through Oklahoma many years ago on our way to Albuquerque, NM, but I had no real memory of it. When I asked my dad about it, he told me he remembered it was flat like Kansas and eastern Texas, farmland you can see for miles in any direction. For the most part, he was right. But traveling north on I-35 towards Oklahoma City, I saw a sign for a scenic overlook of some kind. I had noticed the countryside getting hillier, more like the land outside of Austin, with some places where they had blasted through to construct the road. Such places are common in the Ohio Valley, but down here it’s pretty rare because of the flatness of the land, so I pulled over to have a look. All I saw was the same scrubland that had surrounded me for miles, with a few trees sprinkled about, and a sign.

The sign explained that the hills I was passing through and the rocks that were barely visible through the grass were the remains of America’s oldest mountain range, the Arbuckles. Most people are familiar with the Appalachian Mountains, which include the Smokies, and the Rocky Mountains, which stretch all the way from Canada to Mexico, but I had never heard of the Arbuckles. I found out a bit later that they are the oldest mountains in America, which is why they are of particular geological value. All that’s left of them is the stone roots, buried for millions of years until wind, water, and time wore the peaks down to nothing. In school, I remember learning that the Appalachians are much older than the Rockies despite being much smaller, and that is the reason why. Like the Arbuckles, they have been around longer for Nature to slowly but surely whittle them away.

A couple of miles down the road, I saw a sign for Turner Falls. A waterfall in Oklahoma? I had to see this. I followed the exit to the right, then crossed the highway and entered the largest group of apparently dead trees I’ve ever seen. None of them were more than twenty feet tall, and they were utterly bare. They seemed to have even been stripped of their bark, leaving only cold gray bones exposed to the chilly air, although this may have been an illusion. Once I’d passed this ghost wood, the land rose to a point, and I could tell there had to be a cliff on the other side. On the left, I saw the Turner Falls visitor center/convenience store. As I pulled into the cracked and pitted parking lot, one thought occurred to me: “This is what the ruins of America will look like in another thousand years.” The nature of its location was undoubtedly part of the problem, but it seemed no effort was made to smooth out the surface when it had been built. Navigating it was like parking on top of a cement cupcake with blacktop icing. The store sat level on the peak, and the parking lot seemed to slide away from it on all sides, as if across the surface of a bubble. There was a metal grate around the Coke machine, and the doors on either side of the shop were covered in the same protection. A sign said the road was built by convicts from 1925 to 1926.

I was pretty skeptical the place was even open, but I hadn’t stopped for the visitor center. There was a scenic overlook at one end of the parking lot, and men’s and women’s restrooms at the other end. I looked over the edge and saw the 77-foot Turner Falls cascading down the cliff face directly opposite the one I was standing on. I also noticed a set of stone steps leading down to a lower level, so I took them. The balcony had a better viewing area for a picture, and it too was seemingly falling apart, or being split from beneath, but it was navigable. Where the steps first left the cliff side and turned right onto the balcony, there was a clear but treacherous path down to the right. A twisted tree had sprung out from the rock face below and formed a small hollow where beer cans and other garbage was visible. I could easily imagine what a popular hangout that would be in warm weather.

Now that I had a better view, in addition to the falls I could see several stone structures, almost castle-like in appearance, on the valley floor below. Where the stairs continued down the cliff side, an overlarge, rusted, piece of chain link fence had been placed to block the way. The sign attached said not to proceed past that point, but I was amused to see the natural rock formation formed another path a few feet below the steps, which was not blocked at all. It should have been, because it was clear that the path and steps continued all the way down, but the steps were falling apart and wildly overgrown. One piece of the graffiti carved into the steps said “Siempre viviramos en mi corazon”, which means “We will always live in my heart” in Spanish.

I took a couple of pictures, then walked up to the restroom. To my pleasant surprise, the water was on, so I walked out and tried the door to the visitor center, which turned out to be more like a convenience store. Inside, the place was clean and tidy. I learned about the Arbuckles, mentioned above, from the woman behind the counter and picked up a couple of brochures on Turner Falls Park, one of which says it is one of only three places that has such an insight into the geological history of our country, the other two being the Grand Canyon and the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The clerk, a middle-aged woman with curly brown hair, told me years ago the park had been free admission, but they closed the steps I’d seen leading into the park when they began charging, and also for safety concerns. She also said many Texans come up to picnic and camp in the park, and I can see why. Today, however, there was almost no one there. The temperatures stayed between the high 30’s and the high 40’s, even when the sun came out.

I hit the road again, leaving the way I came. I was struck again by the denuded trees lining the way, like silent sentinels protecting this ancient landscape’s secrets. I wondered if such a thing could ever bloom in the spring and bear fruit, or if they simply waited for a time when Nature would finish them off, like she had the Arbuckle Mountains.

Such a somber note leads me to my next stop, Oklahoma City. I had asked my friend Lyndon if it was worth seeing for anything aside from the memorial, and he said “There’s not much of anything there.” But there is the memorial, and it is enough. I clearly remember the day of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building. I was a freshman attending Purdue University, and I came back to my dorm room from my 8:30am class to find my roommate plastered to the television. My arrival reminded him he had his own class to attend, but he filled me in on the basics before running out the door. The reporters were freely speculating on who might have done such a thing, and the consensus was Islamic terrorists, probably Osama Bin Laden. His first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in New York City was less than two years past, and the stories were still fresh in everyone’s mind. There was an eerie echo of this on September 11^th, as many reporters immediately assumed Bin Laden had done it, but others were quick to cite the Oklahoma City bombing as evidence of the truth of the old adage about the word “assume.”

Timothy McVeigh’s crime was the worst thing many people in America could ever imagine. Innocent women and children killed by the dozens in an instant, and for what? The only remotely satisfying outcome of that experience for the nation was the national rejection of the militia movement as a legitimate political force. This was necessary, but the cost was impossibly high. The other effect to benefit America was to, however briefly, make terrorism a topic of public conversation. Unfortunately for all of us, the first time didn’t take.

It’s easy to write the above paragraph now, sitting in an Amarillo hotel room, but seeing the site for myself moved me in ways I didn’t expect. There is a field of empty chairs, one for each victim. The names are hard to read with the sun shining in from the west, but they’re not necessary. They represent a part of each of us. I was 18 years old at the time, and it was the first event of my life where I actually felt the pull of history, the depth of the things we know reflected in my own experience. The memorial brings back that feeling.

Despite its appearance, the reflecting pool that stretches between the two memorial walls is only about an inch deep. On each wall, there is a time, the minute before the blast and the minute after. There was a child playing in the water as it ran over the small lip and spilled into the unknown below. Only minutes earlier, I had taken a picture of the playground where the children who were babysat in the building would play. I wondered if he will remember his visit to this hallowed ground. I wondered if he will ever get to see it again. There was some loose change lying on the black slabs beneath the water.

The wall of the building next door that faced the federal building was moved several inches by the blast, causing the roof to collapse. That building now contains a museum documenting the events, but the wall is mostly unchanged from its state after the explosion. The fire escapes are still there, and it looks like an abandoned building from that side. The other survivor is an 80-year-old elm, now called the Survivor Tree. Portions of a chain-link fence line the entrance in front of one of the two walls at street level. Pictures, mementos, and writing cover it from one end to the other. It is an emotional experience.

I traveled west from Oklahoma City on I-40 and came across a sign that said Red Rocks Canyon. Since there was still plenty of sun in the sky, I pulled off and followed the signs to what looked like a driveway. It led back to an extremely steep hill with two different 180-degree switchbacks in about 100 yards. At the bottom was a small park surrounded by red walls. Some were growing lichen, some were covered in vines all the way to the top, but everywhere the color red peeked through. One wall had what looked to be a chimney standing next to it but not quite attached. The shape of that one reminded me of the Titanic, so I took a picture.

In fact, I took a lot of pictures. I went through most of a roll on my first day. This does not bode well for the trip. I’ll need to start buying film in bulk.

Even the dirt in the park was red, not just the rock walls. And just like Indiana dirt, when it’s wet it gets darker. There was one area set up for performances where the wall loomed over the speaker in a semicircular shape, but the aluminum bleachers ruined the effect. There was a rock for the speaker to stand on and orate. Why not rocks for the audience to sit on? I was quite impressed by the range of different landscapes I encountered in Oklahoma.

Shortly before I re-entered Texas, I saw a Route 66 Museum. I’m not sure if this is a chain or the small Oklahoma town has the only one. It had closed about fifteen minutes before I got there, but I could see a red and white ’57 Chevy hardtop inside, and there was an old fire truck outside. I proceeded to cross over into the panhandle of Texas and in the distance saw some towering rock formations to the south. I’m not sure if these were in Oklahoma or Texas, but they wouldn’t have looked out of place in New Mexico.

When night had fallen, somewhere east of Amarillo I drove by a huge white cross, more than fifty feet tall and lit up on both sides with spotlights. There was no church nearby that I could see, and I was too late to snap a picture or I would have.

I actually passed Amarillo and went on to Vega, but turned back around when I heard the prices on motel rooms there. I probably spent more on gas driving around Amarillo looking for a cheap room than I saved. Important lesson: if you want a cheap room, stop in the city.