5/10 – 5/13/21
It seemed like a great idea at first. For two weeks, I would explore the Great Plains, cruising from the Panhandle of Texas to badlands of North Dakota, from the floodplain of the Mississippi to the foothills of the Rockies.
Then I remembered how boring the Great Plains are.
Gradually, inexorably, my itinerary migrated into more interesting terrain. I wouldn’t quite avoid the Plains. But I wouldn’t spend much time there either…
5-10
Tent camping is great when the weather cooperates. But when it doesn’t – and it usually doesn’t – tent camping is less than great. And even when the weather is fine, tent camping entails all the tedium of setting your tent up and taking it down and spreading it out to dry. In Alaska, as dedicated readers will recall, I hit upon the solution of simply putting an inflatable mattress in the back of a rental Subaru Outback: almost as good as a camper, and much, much cheaper.
So, early this afternoon, I strolled into a Subaru dealership in Chicago’s north suburbs and picked up the Outback I had arranged to rent for the next two weeks. The car and I quickly established a close but troubled relationship. I liked the way it drove. But I was less than enthusiastic about its state-of-the-art safety features, which beeped officiously at me whenever I approached the median or ventured to glance anywhere but straight ahead.
After a long ride through the familiar skyscrapers and tail lights of the city, I returned to my parents’ home and arranged my setup for the next weeks: the air mattress behind the passenger seat, a suitcase of clothes beneath its head, a cooler for food and gear beside it, and everything else crammed or draped wherever it would fit. Then, at last, I set out.
I followed I-55, paralleling the first leg of my western road trip five years ago. Just south of Joliet, a spring thunderstorm appeared on the horizon. For a few minutes, thunder roared and rain hammered on the car roof. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the storm was gone, and sunlight was flashing on puddles in the fields. After stopping for a sandwich in Springfield (my first pit stop on two previous road trips), I continued to the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, to spend the night with my aunt and uncle.
5-11
Morning was bright and clear, spangling the muddy back of the Mississippi. As I made the long drive across Missouri on I-44, I detoured occasionally onto old Route 66, which paralleled the interstate as a service road. The most scenic of these detours was the Devil’s Elbow, a short stretch of the old highway that twisted and wove through rock cuts and woods hung with kudzu. I left the interstate again a few hours later to eat lunch in the windswept city park of Galena, Kansas.
I encountered a wall of rain at the Oklahoma border, and was alternately drizzled and poured upon all the way to Tulsa. Once I finally reached that city, I emerged from my car to explore the local Art Deco buildings, relics of the oil boom of the twenties and thirties.
Aesthetically gratified, I delighted my other senses with a fabulously greasy burger in a Route 66 diner that dated to the Eisenhower administration (and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned too often since). Then I was off again, this time to the campsite I had reserved on the shores of Lake Texoma (“Playground of the Southwest”).
The site, I discovered, had already been claimed by a family of geese, who hissed at me as I backed down the gravel drive, and hissed some more when I sat on a bench overlooking the lake. After one of them made a lunge for my potato chips, I chased them into the lake. They lingered just off shore, honking resentfully.
As night fell, I retreated to the car. Drizzle tapped on the roof, young frogs croaked, and the lights of the Denison Dam glowed across the dark lake.
5-12
I woke to fog on the lake and drizzle peppering the windshield. Wriggling into the front seat, I ate a quick breakfast of trail mix and headed south into Texas, reaching Dallas just in time to catch to morning rush. Once I finally reached downtown, I headed straight to the Dealey Plaza, site of the Kennedy assassination. I peered up at Oswald’s window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. I walked up and down past the X’s on the pavement that mark the spots where the president was struck. I cast a dubious eye over the grassy knoll and triple overpass. I walked up to the place where the Zapruder film was taken, and played it on my phone.
Once I had rehearsed my favorite conspiracy theories, I strolled around downtown Dallas for an hour or so, taking in the scenery. The business district of every big American city is a cornucopia of architectural styles, and Dallas has an especially fine selection of skyscrapers to gawk at. After circling the business district, I returned to my car and drove out to Fair Park, home of the Cotton Bowl and an impressive collection of Art Deco exhibition halls, all built for the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. Besides the entry road, which was being used as a mass vaccination site, the park was almost eerily quiet. I wandered among the deserted buildings, feeling like an extra on an empty film set. And then, when I had seen my fill, I headed over to Fort Worth.
Having always thought of Dallas and Fort Worth as more or less the same city, I was surprised by how much more “Texan” Fort Worth felt – fewer skyscrapers, more Stetsons. Fort Worth is famous for its Stockyards, a working livestock market that has gradually become a sort of cowboy Disneyland. Fun though this was to wander through, I enjoyed myself more at the Kimball Art Museum, a wonderful (and wonderfully free) collection of Old Masters (including a Caravaggio and the only painting by Michelangelo in America) displayed in a monumental exhibition hall designed by Louis Kahn.
To balance out the highfalutin pleasures of the Kimball, I ate a late lunch at a brisket place bristling with antelope heads. Then I made the long drive into the Hill Country, and to a campsite on the banks of the San Gabriel River.
5-13
For the past few months, whenever I have a long drive, I’ve been working through the audio version of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson. So as soon as I realized that my route would bring me through the Texas Hill Country, I added LBJ’s boyhood home and ranch to my itinerary. In sleepy Johnson City (named for a relative of the future president), I inspected the modest frame house where LBJ spent much of his childhood and walked around the courthouse square, where the only sound was a dove calling in the trees.
Onward, then, to the ranch – the “Texas White House” where LBJ lived whenever he could for the last two decades of his life (including almost a quarter of his presidency). Although the main house was closed, I spent a pleasant hour exploring the grounds (now home to the “Official Texas longhorn herd”), the plane Johnson used to visit the ranch during his presidency, and the cemetery where he and Lady Bird are buried in the shadow of a spreading live oak.
The next stop was San Antonio. As one does when visiting San Antonio, I started with the Alamo. As everyone says, it was smaller than expected. It was also more crowded than I had anticipated, especially for a weekday. Once I had seen my fill, I headed over to the Riverwalk and strolled in the shade of bald cypresses and live oaks, peering up at the skyscrapers on either side. Then, realizing that my two-hour parking permit was about to expire, I headed back to my car, and to a burger place a few miles from downtown.
After a late lunch, I committed to the long drive west on I-10. The scrub along the road gradually grew shorter and more scraggly. The hills became jagged. The highway emptied. I had entered west Texas. I stopped in a windswept campground just outside Fort Stockton, at a site surrounded by prickly pear.