Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [66]
Riding through double gates, I entered a landscaped park with hedge-lined drives that led me to a car park in front of a pink and peach building. Inside was a gift shop the size of bloody Selfridges, and scenes from the Bible depicted by the same little cartoon characters I’d seen on the billboards. Each one conformed to that gooey, soppy, syrupy idea that some Americans have of something good. I wanted to scream.
Leaving the hideous building, I followed more hedge-lined paths that weaved through the little cartoon characters – this time modelled in stone and blowing trumpets, as if they were welcoming us to heaven. Before long, I was walking towards a pink and orange chapel. Clearly inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in Rome, it was highly decorated inside, with the same little dinky-poo characters acting out scenes from the Bible. Moses, for instance, had a wee roundy face and a tear in his eye. It was nightmarish. The climax of the thing was a whole wall, supposedly heaven, featuring hundreds of little boys and girls in togas – all playing basketball or spinning hula hoops. Above, it said: ‘No more tears’.
I was close to vomiting. But some people – usually fat adults in T-shirts – were busy proclaiming how much they loved Jesus, so I kept my mouth shut. The camera crew and Mike, the director, were standing beside me, waiting to shoot something, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m not in the business of taking the mickey out of people, and I’ve got no time for television shows that try to entertain by making fools out of people. I’ve never liked it, and I wasn’t going to start indulging in it now. Far be it from me to kick a person’s faith away from them, no matter how sick it made me.
The funny thing was that Mike and I had entered the place feeling quite jolly, laughing and smiling. But we exited in silence, like we’d been to a funeral. It was very odd. Seeing the extent to which people will twist religion was very weird and kind of scary. It was a side of the Bible Belt that I just didn’t understand. The way they seemed to have removed all of the dignity from religion was really quite creepy.
It would have been all too easy to stick the boot in. But then little grannies and aunties, people who take their religion very seriously and practise it with quiet dignity, would be wounded by someone like me clumsily tearing into their faith. I admit that part of me was desperate to get in there with my big swinging boot, but I was quite proud of myself and the crew for just walking away that day.
After the bizarreness of Precious Moments, I needed something to jerk me into a different mood. A few miles further down Route 66, a sign announced that I was leaving Missouri and entering Kansas. Galena lay ahead, then Tulsa – less than a day away if I rode straight through. But with plenty of places to stop, it was going to take me significantly longer than twenty-four hours.
The Mother Road only clipped the southeastern corner of the Sunflower State. Blink and you’d be in Oklahoma, as the Kansas stretch lasted a mere thirteen miles. However, every mile of it was genuine, historical Route 66 hardtop because Interstate 44 completely bypassed the state of Dorothy and Toto, leaving a perfectly intact section of the old Mother Road.
There isn’t much to say about Galena, a perfectly nice but unremarkable former mining town with an air of its best days being long behind it. Like so many American small towns, nobody was in the street. Not a soul. Riding down Main Street, I spotted the obligatory church and, directly opposite it, a poker house offering Texas hold’em. Apparently Galena had all the bases covered for anyone hoping for redemption from the pressures of the world.
Whereas ‘Missouri’ comes from a Sioux word, ouemessourita, meaning ‘those who have dugout canoes’, and ‘Oklahoma’ is Indian for ‘red people’, the origin of ‘Kansas’ is an Indian word