Gregory M. Franzwa

If you readers tire of our road trips, and would like to see us get back to blasting libral revisionists from California, just let us know. Otherwise, grab your atlas and follow along on our longest book tour yet.

Saturday, May 31, 2003

Spring here is not like spring anywhere else, but this was an ideal morning. What the hell, it was 7:31 when the old Town Car backed out of our garage. By noon it would be pushing 100º. This is Tucson, baby, not Minneapolis.

The cavernous trunk is packed full of books, most of them the 1924 edition of The Complete Official Road Guide to the Lincoln Highway. The projector was loaded with a tray of slides—photographs of the road through Ohio when the Lincoln was only ten years old (the highway, not the car). The back seat held suitcases and two cats, on their way to the cat hotel on the other side of town. Kathy navigating. The odometer registered 283,230 miles. With a reading that low surely nothing can go wrong with the old dear (the car, not the navigator).

After depositing the cats we headed south on Kolb Road to hit I-10 on the southeast edge of Tucson. We turned east into the morning sun, accelerated to eighty miles an hour, clicked on the cruise control and relaxed as the Lincoln just hissed down the concrete slab. Through Benson, then the marvelous Texas Canyon, where the boulders are the size of Ted Kennedy.

We’ll never like the interstates, but sometimes you have to take them to get where you need to go. There was still gas in the car’s tank when we pulled into Deming’s Denny’s Restaurant. We waited fifteen minutes to order a rather simple lunch, and nearly thirty minutes later we left in a snit, still unfed. There was a Burger King next door. No problem there. If you like grease.

We continued east on the super- slab through Deming, and turned onto US 70 east of Las Cruces. We rolled easily over the fabled Rio Grande, then passed the exit for Old Mesilla, a Billy-the-Kid town that once was the capital of Arizona/New Mexico. This highway is a four-laner also, but way less semis than I-10. US 70 winds its way through the city streets, finally heads northeast to cross I-25, following along the west face of the jagged Organ Mountains.

With upwards of 800 pounds behind the rear axle, the Town Car labors up the slope, sometimes kicking out of cruise. The rise was topped at San Agustin Pass, 5,917 feet above sea level. The expansive White Sands Missile Range is far below, in the valley to the right—here the missiles are tested which someday may defend the republic against al Qaeda terrorists, Democrats, librals, and revisionists from California’s Left Coast.

Lessee, where was I? Oh yeah, passing through the White Sands Missile Range. One warm dawn in July 1945 the United States detonated the first of its three atomic bombs in the desert about seventy miles north of here. The blast broke windows as far away as El Paso, and the flash was seen by a teen-aged Sandra Day (O’Connor) as she looked out the kitchen window on her family’s ranch, near Lordsburg. We visited the Trinity site in October 2003, and plan to report on that trip in the August 2004 issue of folio.

A couple of years ago Kathy and I turned into the White Sands National Monument west of Alamogordo for a delightful picnic lunch in those pristine gypsum dunes. Not this time. We rolled on into an Exxon station in Alamagordo to give the old girl a drink. Despite the weight, the high speed, and the air conditioning, the engine gave us almost twenty-four miles to the gallon.

We headed north for some thirteen miles to the little town of Tularosa, where 70 turns right to head into the Sacramento Mountains and the Mescalero Apache reservation. The Apache were among the orneriest of the south- western tribes, and the Mescaleros were among the orneriest of the Apaches. But the gummint finally won out. Now the Apaches are getting their evens in the casinos, especially the Inn of the Mountain Gods, where the Whities are being fleeced 24/7.

We passed through Ruidoso, and past the celebrated Ruidoso Downs racetrack the four lanes shrunk to two as we pulled through the Sacramentos and coasted down to the featureless valley of the Rio Hondo.

It’s a fairly straight shot across the desert to one of my favorite cities, Roswell, New Mexico. Roswell gets credit for hosting the first alien visitation, which crashed in 1947 a few miles out of town. The gummint, thinking we of the great unwashed couldn’t handle such news, covered up everything with a whopping tale about a weather balloon.

Roswell doesn’t care all that much anymore. The farmer who hosted the crash still gets three bucks a head from the folks who visit the site. Two museums operate full time on the subject, and the Fourth of July sees hordes of True Believers descend on the city, filling every hotel room and every restaurant seat.

Still on 70, the road now leads to Clovis, where we holed up for the night.

Just west of Clovis we entered the Texas Panhandle, dumping US 70 for US 60, which takes us north to Amarillo. We hit I-27 a few miles south of town, which led us up to I-40. Now 40 through the Panhandle would be incredibly boring except for the fact that Texas has done a good job identifying Route 66, the Daughter Road. (Which happens to be two-thirds as long as the Lincoln Highway, the true Mother Road, a dozen years younger, and nowhere near as scenic.) "Historic Route 66" signs are mounted on I-40 wherever one can exit and follow the old highway for a few miles.

We gassed up in Groom, home of a humongous steel cross that attracts lots of traffic from the interstate. We found ourselves more enthralled by the Leaning Tower of Groom—the old municipal water tower. The city evidently let the installation contract to the lowest bidder, brother-in-law of the mayor, and now the tower has about a thirty-degree list to the east. Quaint enough that the town has adopted the Leaning Tower as its logo. The structure was abandoned long ago but it still stands, evoking smiles from many of the thousands of daily travelers.

We left 40 for a short spurt on Route 66 some twenty-five miles to the east, at the Alanreed exit. And man, what we saw took us back to the early 1930s. In the first place, it is a beautiful, shaded, two-lane road. In the second place, it led us by a gorgeous yellow brick Texaco station, with two canopies at ninety degrees from one another. It was built in downtown Alanreed in 1930, and moved to this site and restored several years later.

Along the way to the east we kept seeing strange critters alongside I-40. "Those look like armadillos," spake The Management. "No way," spake the Old Man, knowing a great deal about road kill. We stopped in Clinton’s charming Branding Iron for lunch, crowded with after-church diners. There we were served by a delightful woman of about sixty. We described the road kill to her. "Those are armadillos," she said. "Around here they are referred to as backhoes, because they can do more damage to a garden in one night than a backhoe could do in a week. We can’t get rid of them."

After patronizing a couple of turnpikes, at $3.50 a pop, we hissed into Springfield, Mo., where we dined at a Cracker Barrel. We find Cracker Barrels are chock full of quaint, the walls studded with reproductions of old magazine covers, washboards, bent trombones, and other memorabilia. The food is plain, lots of it, and the service is good, but white tablecloth it ain’t. The clientele, including us, I guess, is Tobacco Road. But now and then we stop at a Cracker Barrel because the menu is large and they are easy to get to.