It took forever to get out of Dallas and Fort Worth. The two cities bleed into one another across the Texas plain in a great bland sprawl of strip miles and flat industrial buildings like a hundred miles of Mississauga. Finally we escaped on a little two lane highway going west through bobbing oil derricks and religious compounds bristling with barbed wire. Those dropped off too after about an hour, and at last it was just us, the road, and the setting sun.
You-Had-To-Be-There Moment #33
Peter: “If it says ‘Snack Bar’ in there, I’m going to rub my butt in your face!”
The cool silent drive with a case of beer in the back seat cooler was a good cure for the sticky heat of Texlahoman Shuburbia. It was dark by the time we crossed the Brazos, and we drove long into the night on that little road across the Texas plains. Wow! They say everything is bigger in Texas, but I’d just taken that tomean big tall hats, big gas-guzzling cars, big fat beer bellies, big like super-sizing your Big Mac combo, not like COSMIC big. The horizon stretched farther away than it had any right to on a planet of this size. There was some kind of thunderstorm maybe a hundred miles north of us. We never saw a drop of rain and could barely hear the thunder, but the distant sky crackled and flashed and the thunderheads turned red with dust.
Somewhere between the little towns of Rule and Old Glory we just had to stop the car and get out under the sky. The storm had rolled off to another part of the world and there were no clouds, just the big black sky and an unbelievable number of stars. We lay back on the dry scrubbly grass and talked about infinity and UFOs and tried to comprehend the size of it all.
You take the good, you take the bad…
And if you think that was cool: When we finally did stop for the night (which meant getting the proprietors of the Brown Town Discount Motor Lodge out of bed at three in the morning) The Facts of Life was on!
Next Stop: Crash landing at Roswell.
There is a museum in Dealy Plaza devoted entirely to the Kennedy assassination, located, appropriately enough, on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. Unfortunately, the museum is done with restraint and good taste. No blood-splattered death car a la Buford Pusser, no “interactive” rifles with telescopic sights, no black velvet paintings of Jack, Bobby, and Elvis chasing tail together in heaven. Kennedy was treated positively, but it was no hagiography, and the assassination itself was presented with realistic skepticism towards both the Warren Commission’s official explanation and the many theories of paranoids the world over. What a let down.
What visit to Dealy Plaza would be complete without a stroll on the knoll? The Grassy Knoll, that is, where, conspiratoid legend has it, Kennedy’s real killers were perched that fateful day (not to be confused with the Grassy Gnoll, who can attack with his trusty flail or claw/claw/bite for three attacks per round, hey-o, tip your waitress). Many fine books and videos were on sale there on the sidewalk, each one revealing the Real Truth, no doubt. We pretended to be Men In Black and lurked and skulked and made only 90-degree turns.
It’s not just the title of a Supertramp album, it’s a way of life. While New Yorkers and Californians pick away at their sissy little yuppie breakfasts of yogurt and double lattes, in the heartland a nation of truckers and farmers and people with two first names is mowing down acres of hash browns and home fries and mountains of omelettes and griddle cakes and rivers of bottomless coffee. As you ponder the question, “Is it really a good thing to get steak and eggs for less than $2?” here are some side orders from the great pancake houses and truck stops of Cholesterol Nation.