June 08, 2009
We hit a Starbucks on the way out of Oklahoma City, and as we watched a sixteen-year-old take an enormous ice-y choclate-covered coffee thing out to his truck, Meggie pointed out that, the world over, one thing is constant: teenage boys LOVE froo-froo drinks from Starbucks.
The other side of Oklahoma featured more Oklahoma as you think of it, like, long flat stretches of land marked with the occasional farmhouse and not much else. At a gas station, Dan asked the woman behind the counter if they had any duct tape. This made her laugh uncontrollably. She insisted that Dan had had a smirk on his face when he made this already apparently ridiculous request and that the whole combination had just been too much for her. We left without any duct tape.
Later, at another gas station, we all came in one or two at a time to use the bathroom and buy snacks and water bottles. The clerk, a guy our age, said not one word to any of us through all the transactions. Fine, dude. Fine.
When I was in Dominic’s car and we’d drop too far behind Dan’s to be in their bubble of FM iPod adapter broadcast, this radio evangelist would break in on the station we were tuned to. He was maybe the least compelling, passionate evangelist of all time, and sounded like he was making up his show as he went along. “Uhm…now for uhm…Bible…Time.” He had a segment called Bible Time. He was not at all prepared for Bible Time, either.
We crossed into Texas and there were occasional sunshowers. We saw what has to be the world’s most bizarre skyline: a leaning, almost-falling-over water tower, and then the World’s Largest Cross. Our walkies lit up as both cars instantly thought the same thing: well we HAVE to stop at the World’s Largest Cross.
I hate to say it, but there’s a great big air of “Why’d we do this?” around the World’s Largest Cross. Statues depicting the Stations of the Cross encircle it and there’s lots of plaques and stuff, but none of them really try to explain why you’d want to build the World’s Largest Cross in the middle of Texas farmland. I think the thinking went something like “Crosses are good. Largeness is good. Tom, your family still own that field right off the 40?”
The World’s Largest Cross is corrugated steel with rivets all over the place, like a big piece of farm equipment. So if the US undergoes a huge counter-reformation and we all become pagans, we can use the World’s Largest Cross to store grain in.
There was a big plaque with the Ten Commandments on it, and across the top of it was written GOD’S TEN COMMANDMENTS. This put me in mind of when Tom Clancy starts a series of books and then hands it off to a lesser-known author or authors, but the series is still called TOM CLANCY’S ARCTIC COMMANDOS or whatever.
I couldn’t help but feel fourteen in the shadow of The World’s Largest Cross, like, the definition of irreverent. I really try not to make easy jokes about very religious people. I really do. But fucking…the World’s Largest Cross. Come on, man. I dunno.
The thing to do in Oklahoma or Texas or New Mexico seems to be to work your little truck stop into a sort of mega-rest-area slash Dairy Queen slash fireworks superstore, the sort of place you can get authentic Indian blankets and a giant stuffed buffalo if the mood strikes. Then the thing to do seems to be to buy up a whole bunch of billboards all along Route 66 advertising each attraction individually, a billboard each for turquoise jewelry and ice cream and hand-made bullwhips, each one with your mega-rest-area’s logo on it, so with each billboard passed, an image is built in the consumer’s mind of an oasis of Western frippery, chili-drenched road food, and trunk-busting fireworks anthologies. Then when that anticipation is at its high and the consumer finally arrives at your palatial mega-rest-area, you pay that bitch off IN SPADES. You have everything you’d said you’d have plus more. If one of your billboards advertised live buffalo, you’ve got ‘em, and if an billboard a mile later advertised buffalo burgers, you’ve got those too, irony be fucked.
And if you are not a major chain truck stop like Flying J, or one of these dynasty mega-rest-areas, the way to drum up business seems to be to appeal to the driver’s love of Jesus and/or America.
By New Mexico, we had passed into the kind of terrain I grew up in, and therefore take for granted a little more. Not really farmland anymore, just scrubby desert. One thing New Mexico seems to have more of than Arizona where I grew up is cool old painted roadside signs advertising service stations a little ways ahead. Not chain gas stations, but like, mechanics’ shops where you feel like you could get the whitewall tires on your solid tank of an American car fixed by a disconcertingly attractive mechanic with brooding, faraway eyes while you drink a bottle of Coke that came out of an icebox an old guy is sitting next to in a rocking chair. The design of these signs is amazing. Somebody’s saving them, right? We’re not just letting them rot away in the desert? Awesome, thanks.
I don’t know if it’s always been this way or if it’s a recession thing or a combination of the two, but the stretch of Route 66 headed into Albuquerque is the place to go if you are into empty, blasted gas stations. We were fooled a couple of times, following signs for gas and ending up at a seemingly recently deserted station. Those were creepy in their own right, and then there were the post-apocalyptic ones you can’t imagine ever functioned, the kind with the glass blown out and tortured rusty car bodies in front. A good place for a showdown.
It’s weird to stand next to your car as it’s being filled with gas and look down the road the way you came and see miles of blank billboards, because they’re all facing away from you, and then look to the other side of the road where the billboards should be facing you and those are blank too. It’s like a highway designed by art students as a statement on commercialism or negative space or something, or miles of drive-in-movie screens. Except it isn’t, it’s just that one or more of these mega-rest-areas got hit really hard by the economic downturn and closed down and took hundreds of billboards’ reason for being away. It’s an empty strange thing to look at.
We got in to Albuquerque kinda late and had vague aspirations of trying an actual local restaurant but since it wasa Sunday night and everything was closing already we said “fuck it” and went to the Chili’s across the parking lot from our hotel. Albuquerque Sheraton: gotta put you on blast for not only charging for wireless, but having a lame Byzantine per-computer structure for charging for that wireless. Our futuristic OKC space hotel (Hyatt Place) made you all look like chumps.
CORRECTION: Apparently, the World's Largest Cross isn't claiming to be the World's Largest Cross. That's my bad: it's claiming to be the Largest Cross In The Western Hemisphere. Where that's fucked up is, apparently there's a larger cross in Illinois. Cheers to commenter Carly for catching this. Jeers to me for completely botching it in the first place.
i hate to say it, but i think texas may have duped you about the world's largest cross thing...i was under the impression this was:
http://www.thecross-photo.com/The_Cross_in_Effingham_Illinois.htm
two seconds worth of googling makes it seem like perhaps the effingham one is taller by 8 feet? but really - i'm not sure. and what's 8 feet in the eyes of the lord?
Posted by: Carlythis is so fun to read since my friend and i drove cross country almost a year ago. we too stopped at the world's largest cross and, although i am a religious person, i'm not particularly moved by giant crosses in the middle of nowhere with little to no artistic value. however, it did seem somehow more majestic than other roadside attractions such as the world's largest rocking chair (somewhere in missouri?)...
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