The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [72]
When I had time I left the highways and took the little two lane roads through towns that showed up on my map as the tiniest of black specks.
Here the billboards were often homemade: “Life is fragile—Handle with prayer.” “Smile! Your Mom chose life!” That one was illustrated with a smiley face. “Got Faith?” That one had a picture of a faucet dripping wine.
These towns usually fit in one of two categories: Perfect, with a strip of narrow buildings like an unfurled red and white ribbon, or Unfortunate, with many churches, many cars in various states of disrepair, and sometimes a lonely-looking dog roaming around, in search of a human. When I passed one of these I would ponder why towns with populations of less than two hundred always have a thrift store. Did the clothes simply rotate through all the inhabitants until they either fell apart or made it back to their original owners?
On the little roads, life unfolded beside me in blurred snippets, and I wrote them down so I wouldn’t forget them. If writing made me drift towards the oncoming lane, it didn’t matter: there was nobody there. I’d take the notes later and type them up, a compendium of Midwestern Things:
An old man in a plaid shirt and a straw hat drives an ancient tractor down the road. The cars behind him slow down, then carefully inch around.
A tiny bird runs across the road as fast as its miniscule legs can carry it, so afraid of the oncoming traffic that it forgets it can fly.
Abandoned railroad tracks parallel to the road. Disused railroad bridges, narrow and rusted and gracefully curved.
A church in a field, just across the street from a store selling guns and ammo.
A plump woman at a gas station strains to remove the large plastic numerals displaying the price of fuel. She hoists a pole to the top of the sign and detaches the numbers one by one, lowering them to the pavement. Then she reaches up again and sticks on the new numbers, and the cost of gas goes up.
Little plumes of flame shoot up by nodding pump jacks.
A girl on a the back of a motorcycle spreads her arms wide into the wind, holding on with just her legs, like she half wants to fall off, to see if she could fly.
I saw other things and doubted that I’d seen them at all: was that really a drive-thru convenience store?
I saw Ohio’s smallest church, painted clean white, in which one or maybe two people could fit. It stood on a patch of grass near a rest stop in Coolville. In an empty parking lot under a bright blue sky I said incredulously into my cell phone, “I’m in Coolville.”
Also in Ohio, I drove past the towns of Fly and Antiquity. In Indiana I stopped at an intersection which offered me a choice between towns named Pleasant and Patriot.
I drove along and let impatient pickup trucks pass me. I listened to traffic reports that originated in cities whose geographic relation to me I could not fathom. With the greatest of urgency, they described road conditions in places I had never heard of. I watched the local news in hotels. The weathermen spoke of viewing areas whose borders I did not recognize and pointed at truncated maps I could not comprehend.
For a long time it seemed like there was only one enormous state between New Jersey and Missouri. Rural Pennsylvania blended into rural Illinois, creating a region with a way of life all its own. Whole towns often appeared to be asleep, or hiding—on weekday mornings or afternoons, on weekends, it didn’t matter. Their houses and cars were there, but they themselves were invisible. I wondered why anyone lived here, or why they stayed. Then I wondered if they had in fact left long ago, but somehow arranged for their towns to be kept exactly the same, like Midwestern Pompeiis.
Between the grass and fields and forests, these towns would pop up at intervals. There were never a lot of houses in one place, but there were so many small concentrations of houses so far apart, that I wondered how there could still be unemployment anywhere—surely everyone in the nation could be put to work as mail carriers or census