Three years of driving west and back again
Listen when I tell you we ate very well in Oklahoma.
It rained in the desert on New Year’s Day. We were in Arizona — we were still in Arizona. I stole a few minutes in the gentle light that morning, every morning, because even when clouds are forecast in Phoenix the sun eventually breaks through. I’d tip my face up toward the grey sky and wait. Is it here yet?
On the way west two weeks before, we stopped in Las Cruces for a few hours. The yellow grass was dry and the night air smelled like sweet tea. But when it rained in the desert on New Year’s Day, it smelled like sparks. It smelled like what lies beneath the world we built. It smelled like an idea yearning to be born.
In the daylight hours of New Year’s Eve, I holed up at a bar to write. A sporty elder millennial was already seated nearby, watching the game on a huge flat screen, alone. Even with his back to me I could see his ginger hair getting redder under his dusty baseball cap, beard darkening with drops of domestic beer in the aging afternoon.
A tiny dog sat cheerfully by the man’s feet, watching the servers pass with big, curious eyes and slumping on the legs of his bar stool between plays. Oliver. He was quiet and well-behaved, and before long he ended up in his human’s lap, a ball of eager white fluff cuddled into a caricature of American masculinity. The man scratched Oliver’s butt absent-mindedly, eyes still glued to the screen. They both looked pleased. It seemed a very sweet way to spend the last day of the year.
Later that evening, a couple parked next to me at the bar. They seemed very in love, relaxed, easy in each other’s company. Every time the bartender approached, they turned down a drink for themselves but ordered one for the other. No, no, not for me. No, I’m good. Just for her. One for him. She stepped away to take a phone call from her sister, he had a full glass ready when she came back. He took a few trips to the restroom, she always had a bottle waiting. I think sometimes they did a lap just to get the blood flowing. They spent two hours having just one more.
I’ve seen more of the United States in three years of Christmas cross-country road trips than I have in my entire life. But three humans and two large dogs packed into one truck for ten days is an adventure before we even pull out of the driveway. Plus, I am an irritatingly organized person. I like when everything is in its place. I am learning that’s not possible when you’re not alone. But you’re not alone.
On a trip like this, we stretch our legs and crack our backs at gas stations. We force ourselves into nonsensically shaped hotel gyms in the hours we spend not sleeping or eating or driving. In the back of the truck, I spread out into the available space between a suitcase or a backpack or a dopp kit or a bag of road snacks, a few stacks of largely untouched reading material and a loose hairbrush or two. Every year the trip challenges me to accept a little more mess into my heart.
I still make order where I can. I construct a backseat pillow from a jenga tower of go-bags and silly souvenirs. Neon green alien goodies from the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. A lifetime supply of nuts bagged at Pistachioland in Alamogordo, home of the world’s largest pistachio and also a winery. A bag of beef tallow candles from a small town shop decorated with a handmade Thin Blue Line sign by the front door, a Ranchers for Trump flag on the back wall, and a rack of Charlie Kirk T-shirts available in red, white, and blue.
Are we there yet?
In Oklahoma City, we went back for more Laotian. In all the times we’ve been to Ma Der Lao, we’ve never ordered anything. I don’t think we’ve even looked at a menu. We put ourselves in the hands of those more knowledgeable and buckle up for the ride. We’ve never had a bad bite and it’s one of the meals we talk about about most between trips.
This year, we wrapped up our meal with a few Wet-Naps and a list of beloved eateries handwritten by our server, a born-and-bred OKC local. On the way out of town, we stopped at the family-run roadside Pakistani restaurant he recommended. When I asked our server what we absolutely had to have, he looked me right in the eyes and with a smile that appeared genuine, offered, Butter chicken?
I asked him what he was having for lunch. We ate that.
I don’t know what it was called and I’ll never be able to order it again. It’s a morsel lost to that moment in memory, conjured only as a gentle warming in the center of the tongue. He looked bashful when he brought it out, like he was worried we might not like it. He was thrilled when we did. It was made with peppers his family imported from his hometown. How could we not?
In Tulsa, we ate better New American food sitting at the bar at the last spot open late on a weeknight than anything happening in the morass of new New York City bistros, all identical in practically every way.
In Amarillo, we went out of our way to stop at The Big Texan Steak Ranch Cabins, Wagons & RV Park, home of the “free” 72-oz steak. Finish every last bite of the behemoth slab of meat, plus a shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, roll, and butter in 60 minutes without standing up from the table or puking, or pay for the pleasure. It’s a pre-paid challenge experience, which they refund if you succeed. The house is betting against you and they’re not shy about it. Only 12% win. We’ve only seen a few people try. There is also a shooting gallery on the property, an ice cream and homemade fudge stand, and, of course, a gift shop.
In Tucson, I disappeared into Antigone Books for a spell. I thought of someone I dated fifteen years ago, of how different the desert looked through her questioning eyes. I remembered driving from the airport to her family’s home, stunned at the cartoon of blue sky spread out in front of us. At the flat expanse abutting mountains that could not possibly have been carved by accident. What is this place? I’d never seen a world like it before. She took me to Antigone back then. I thought of how long I’ve loved books, of how long people who love me have been taking me to bookstores.
In Phoenix, I dipped a toe into the heated pool, and then a whole foot, and then two, afraid that the further in I went the more quickly I might discover that the warmth was only relative. I got out a lot so the illusion didn’t have time to fade. I laid down a yellow-and-white striped towel on the concrete pool deck and inched along the edge, dangling my legs in the water, chasing an impatient patch of sun. Now and then, for just a moment, the temperature of the warm pool fell into perfect equilibrium with the frizzling winter air, caressing my calves until it felt like I was floating. Until it felt like there was no water at all.
We stayed in Arizona long enough that the world started moving in slow motion. Or was I the one slowing down? I had successfully unplugged myself from the pace of New York, from the relentless pressure to hurry up everywhere always, don’t fall behind, it’s always too late, there’s never enough time. By the end of the trip, I wanted to see my family, to sleep in my own bed, to drink tap water. But I didn’t want to rush again.
We were running out of time in the west, so we made hay. We spent a day wandering a mostly neglected living history museum that I found charming because I didn’t grow up there, and meaningful because people I love did. They knew it better, brother and sister. They saw all the ways it wasn’t what it used to be. Aside from the impossible mutation that memory makes of everything, it seems it really wasn’t. You can never go home.
With nothing to compare it to, I found it easy to move on from the disappointment of the living history museum’s deadness. I saw the shadows of two childhoods worth of tenderness and adventure rolling around the green valley, hills thriving and alive after a rare wet winter in the desert. Baby embarrassments. Toddler trouble. The right post-rain dirt made into mudcakes, priceless joys poking up through cracks in the ground.
In an unofficial arts district, we stumbled in and out of galleries and workshops with their doors flung open and plenty of wine to share. While museum two-stepping toward an impressively realistic oil painting of some kind of spaniel, I eavesdropped on an artist whispering that rent is too damn high. After turning the hand crank on a historic printing press, T. found himself in possession of the owner’s favorite monkey-themed anti-Trump poster, ink barely dry.
Between the studio buildings, I stopped to visit with a mural. The paint was weathered, capturing the neighborhood’s longevity even as new construction lurked around every corner, sweating in tarp-wrapped stacks of steel beams and sheets of glass.
I see street artists I love getting up in big cities all over the world, but one thing I noticed about Arizona is that there’s art everywhere by no one I’ve ever seen before. Unsanctioned art depicting faces well-baked by the sun, cracked in all the right places, smiling from more than their mouths. Block-long trails of saguaros and cardons and all the cacti whose names I will never learn. Graffiti of a bright purple muscle car, its body streaked with flames, sinking slowly into the memory of water, a wide desert sunset fading in the rearview mirror.