In the days before iPods and smartphones, I found myself driving through the middle of nowhere, telling a friend about how my entire third grade class crept up under the windows of another room one day and serenaded the students with Alabama’s “Old Flame.” This wasn’t our idea; I’m pretty sure we were being made the pawns of some inside joke between our respective teachers. But it meant getting out of the classroom, so we raised no objections.
My friend had grown up in New England—so with no knowledge of the song, or even the band, she was unable to weigh in on whether I should find this episode disturbing. What to do? I couldn’t play the thing for her, and no Tower Records was likely to pop up in a random field of sorghum or soy. But then I had it: before too long, I saw what I needed, and pulled into one of those massive travel centers that in humbler times was called a truck stop. Within minutes, we were back on the road, a CD of Alabama’s greatest hits carrying us along.
I’m pretty sure my friend was more blown away by my quick acquisition than the story itself. Her childhood vacations involved airplanes taking off from one location and setting the whole family down in their final destination, with only the clouds to look at on the way. My own family trips, on the other hand, involved roaming the continent in a 1984 Suburban, the distance between home and the journey’s end filled with the quirks of one-stoplight towns and diners off desert roadways that were all the more puzzling because you couldn’t begin to guess where all the locals that always filled them came from. The behemoth travel centers didn’t come along all that often; for bathrooms, we had to make do with either the occasional small gas station, the attendant grudgingly giving you the key to the sketchy facilities and making sure you bought something for the privilege; or state-maintained rest stops that popped up every now and then. It was often a toss-up between the two, where hygiene was concerned, and the general rule was just not to touch anything.
For kitsch and crappy souvenirs, there were the odd curiosity shops left over from the heyday of Route 66’s roadside attractions, faded signs along endless highways enticing you to stop in and see The Thing, or dig around and find your own geode. At some point, the big travel centers seem to have grown up around them, taken them over, and stuck their merchandise into a separate aisle, somewhere in the vicinity of the hunting caps and Confederate flags and odd assortment of quack pills and powders for potency or weight loss. So now, instead of a serape made from acrylics in China and sold in a roadside shop with a concrete dinosaur in the parking lot, you could get that serape along with gas, a fast-food breakfast, CDs and DVDs, tacky postcards, hats of all configurations, unicorn figurines, signs to declare your particular cultural and/or political and/or religious positions, and a clean restroom. Just as the roadside attractions had tried to do before the interstates were laid down and essentially wiped them out, the travel centers became destinations in themselves; The Thing now has its own museum, and Texas-centric Buc-ee’s red-capped beaver mascot is available as a plush toy and on everything from oversized sippy cups to t-shirts. South Carolina’s South of the Border, a holdout from the roadside attraction days, is an entire crumbling complex in itself, the whole enterprise still marketed using tired Mexican stereotypes.
The only difference between all the amateurish little spots that used to populate the highways and today’s travel centers may be their sheer size, and the evidence they present that this is now a corporate endeavor, with franchisees probably having to stay on brand with everything they do. Still ugly, but in a larger, more standardized fashion. When walking into one of these places, the only way not to get disheartened about waste, pointless consumption, the death of the environment, and why not, the national soul, is to realize just how much you’re willing to put up with to walk into a toilet stall that doesn’t require a HAZMAT suit.
David Hiser. Public domain image courtesy National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons.
I thought about these monstrosities again not too long ago, when I realized I might have to get from one side of the country to the other in the middle of a pandemic. Better to fly or drive? If the latter, risk staying in a motel, or keep going until I fell asleep and crashed? Drink as little as possible and hope for a bush along the side of the road and no cops to catch me with my pants down; or risk a filthy rest area, perpetually out of soap, or the mask-optional travel-center crowds using high-powered air dryers and spreading viral droplets all over the place?
The conundrum about travel method took me back again to that drive so long ago, during which my friend and I talked about our respective childhood vacations. I confessed to feeling like a complete bumpkin, not having been on an airplane until I was fifteen; she felt like she’d been missing out on a whole world’s worth of oddities, bad cuisine, ghost-town aesthetics, and libertarian culture. She and I had traveled through Europe together on trains—but she’d never taken an Amtrak or a Greyhound or a MegaBus through one tiny American town after another. Wedding receptions where I grew up happened in church basements or the VFW; she watched people exchange their vows at the country club. We ended up laughing at how different our childhoods had been—and that yet, here we were now, good friends somewhere on a heavily wooded highway, happy that we could be ourselves and not worry about what the other thought our class or background, our relatives or our roots, said about us.
I thought back on that drive, and as so many of my compatriots have been doing for quite a while now, got wistful about what would happen if we weren’t all so rigidly separated from each other. Ridiculously enough, I started wondering if any of our average-Amurican-loving politicians have ever spent any time in one of these travel centers, or in the out-of-the-way places you find them. I can picture populists giving speeches in their parking lots while thinking about the spoils of office awaiting them, but can’t picture most politicians, of any stripe, wrangling the lid onto a 64-ounce Styrofoam cup from the drink station and looking remotely natural.
More than anything, my memories of travel centers are just painful reminders of one reason most Democratic politicians end up looking like bumbling panderers: because I’m guessing the most they’ve seen of places like this involve stopping in for a photo op, buying a fried pie and taking the requisite bite with fake enthusiasm, shaking a few hands, and leaving. I’m far from believing much would change, even if they did linger and take an honest look around and actually listen to the locals who stop in at the fast-food counter. After all, right-wing militias won’t disband, and faith in QAnon’s terrifying inanities won’t dissolve, just because Chuck Schumer sits down with the Stammtisch over soggy breakfast tacos. But at least all those well-meaning, if clueless, campaigners would get an idea of why their rhetoric doesn’t work with anyone but the choir, and why their smirking commentary about red America only hardens the resentment against them. (Add to that the shuddering daftness of establishment Democrats in kente cloth or Joe Biden thinking “Despacito” is the key to winning over Latinx voters, and you’re in for a lot of face-smacking.)
As usual, I don’t know what to do about any part of the mess we’re in right now. I don’t know how to convince South of the Border to retire images of a sombrero-clad Pedro slumped against a cactus, or anyone to stop stocking Confederate-themed anything; I don’t know how to convince archconservatives that Black Lives Matter is not trying to take everything you have, or that fascism is bad. Our structures and the assumptions that come along with them seem so immovable, it’s hard to imagine what could transform them, short of a miracle; asking for anything like trust sounds pathetically naive. But if we don’t learn how to talk to each other, and listen to each other first, we’re just not going to make it.
I do remember that I was afraid all those years ago, even with a good friend, to talk about my redneck roots. But the snickering I feared never happened. Instead, we ended up thanking the travel center for letting me correct a mishearing that had been lodged in my brain since the last time I’d heard “Old Flame” sometime in the mid-eighties. A sort of revelation ensued at the line, “it’s been burning longer than any spark I might have started in your eyes.” For the rest of the drive, we discussed the more interesting possibilities that came along with what my nine-year-old self had assumed: that the addressee’s yearning had “been burning longer than any smart guy might have started.”