Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the sort of restaurant where you didn't have to watch your food being cooked and where
the glass of water they served you wasn't autographed with lipstick. This was living. This
was heady opulence.
It was against this disturbed and erratic background that I became gripped with a curious
urge to go back to the land of my youth and make what the blurb writers like to call a jour-
neyofdiscovery.Onanothercontinent,4,000milesaway,Ibecamequietlyseizedwiththat
nostalgiathatovercomesyouwhenyouhavereachedthemiddleofyourlifeandyourfath-
er has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
I wanted to go back to the magic places of my youthto Mackinac Island, the Rocky Moun-
tains, Gettysburg—and see if they were as good as I remembered them being. I wanted to
hear the long, low sound of a Rock Island locomotive calling across a still night and the
clackofitrecedingintothedistance.Iwantedtoseelightningbugs,andhearcicadasshrill,
and be inescapably immersed in that hot, crazy-making August weather that makes your
underwear scoot up every crack and fissure and cling to you like latex, and drives mild-
mannered men to pull out handguns in bars and light up the night with gunfire. I wanted to
lookforNeHiPopandBurmaShavesignsandgotoaballgameandsitatamarble-topped
soda fountain and drive through the kind of small towns that Deanna Durbin and Mickey
Rooney used to inhabit in the movies. I wanted to travel around. I wanted to see America.
I wanted to come home.
So I flew to Des Moines and acquired a sheaf of road maps, which I studied and puzzled
overonthelivingroomfloor,drawinganimmensecircularitinerarythatwouldtakemeall
over this strange and giant semiforeign land. My mother, meantime, made me sandwiches
and said, “Oh, I don't know, dear,” when I asked her questions about the vacations of my
childhood. And one September dawn in my thirty-sixth year I crept out of my childhood
home, slid behind the wheel of an aging Chevrolet Chevette lent me by my sainted and
trusting mother, and guided it out , through the flat, sleeping streets of the city. I cruised
down an - empty freeway, the only person with a mission in a city of 250,000 sleeping
souls. The sun was already high in the sky and promised a blisteringly hot day. Ahead of
me lay about a million - square miles of quietly rustling corn. At the edge of town I joined
Iowa Highway 163 and with a light heart headed towards Missouri. And it isn't often you
hear anyone say that.
