My Own Personal “Song of the Open Road”

A windy day in New Mexico

One of my Arizona neighbors suggested that I could listen to podcasts and/or audiobooks all the way across the country. I told her I usually have the radio off on long trips, but that sometimes I sing as I drive along. One of the songs from “The King and I” was in my head all across New Mexico, finally ceding place to an old pop song or two. And then came “The Red, Red Robin,” which I like to perform (mostly to myself, in solitude) in a slow, plaintive, bluesy rendition. Often, though, the songs were playing only in my head, over and over, and anyone seeing me at the wheel would have noted nothing more than silent stoicism or perhaps a few escaping tears, because everything the Artist and I had seen before triggered memories, and I missed him every minute, every mile. This trip was, for me, a kind of pilgrimage but not to one particular destination: the entire length of the journey was its point.

Sunny was seeing this picturesque ruin for the first time.

Vaughn, NM: Position still not filled? I could do that!

My route on Day One took me east on I-10 from Willcox to Las Cruces, 70 through the San Augustin Pass to Alamagordo, and then U.S. 54 to Tularosa and on to Santa Rosa, New Mexico. The stretch from Tularosa to Santa Rosa became a favorite road for the Artist and me, starting with the first time we traveled it (top photo of this post is from that stretch), and since Santa Rosa was also a favorite New Mexico town, it made sense to stop there for my first night.

Evening in beautiful Santa Rosa, NM

Little Sunny Juliet and I covered over 450 miles that first day and 515 miles the second day, finishing up Day Two with a visit to a big, beautiful dog park in Winfield, Kansas. 

And if the name “Kansas” brings to your mind a flat, empty, boring landscape, you don’t know Kansas at all. I left U.S. 54 at Meade and dropped down to U.S. 160, a very narrow two-lane road but very light on traffic and heavy on gorgeous scenery. Often the road ran straight ahead of me to the distant horizon, but it had many deep, rolling dips and rises that it reminded me of ribbon taffy. The vistas off to either side were monumental and breathtaking, too; unfortunately, without any road shoulder, pulling off to photograph the land was close to impossible. Just think for a moment about all the hill regions of Kansas: Red Hills, Flint Hills, Sand Hills, Gypsum Hills – and those are only the ones I know. There are more.

 

The morning of Day Three began well – but then! – well --! 

Getting a tow

At Duke's Alignment & Tire, Winfield, KS

Well, the good news was that (1) I carry AAA road service; (2) I was still in Winfield, a town large enough to have towing and tire services; and (3) though I had bought four new tires in Arizona before leaving (and was not happy to have ruined one of them so soon!), I had also given car room to one of the old tires so I would have a real spare in case I needed it. So while I lost three hours of travel time that morning, the situation could have been much, much worse, and I was grateful to Cole, the young guy who handle the big towing rig so easily, and to Duke, the guy who got me in and out with my spare mounted as quickly as he could. And as I've said, Sunny and I had visited a fabulous dog park in Winfield on Monday evening, and we made it there again before the tire incident, so we were pretty well pleased with Winfield overall, and I had no regrets about my chosen route.

Winfield was very, very good to us.

Tuesday afternoon did not see us covering us a lot of ground, either, what with construction stops and detours, but this is how it goes sometimes on the road, and once I gave up the idea of making any kind of distance record for the day, I found myself stopping over and over with my camera. Because, why not? (And bear in mind that the photographs I take with my camera are only a small fraction of the ones I see to be taken but drive right by.) For instance, when I stopped to text my sister that I was finally in Moline, Kansas, she texted back that the oldest swinging suspension bridge in the country was there. I looked up and saw a sign on the other side of the road directing me down a side street to the bridge, and here it is. The road itself was originally a Cherokee trail. It seemed well worth the time to make that little detour.

What town was I passing through when this cabin caught my eye? Surely I made a note of it in my road atlas....

Right across the street from the old log cabin was this very photogenic old truck. 

And who wouldn't have stopped for a picture like this?

Eventually, of course, despite the tire problem, road construction stops, detours, and numerous photo opps, the puppy and I made our way across Kansas to and across Missouri. Redbud trees in bloom against spectacular rocky road cuts, and U.S. 54 rolled for many miles as a limited access in Missouri, divided highway rather than two-lane, making for easy cruising; however, I didn’t mind at all the twisting, curving two-lane stretches that preceded and followed the easier divided road. Day Four would be an easy distance: El Dorado Springs, Missouri to Springfield, Illinois, and so, reaching Louisiana, Missouri, by noon and knowing I was only about an hour and a half from Springfield, I decided to explore the town of Louisiana. I had an ulterior purpose. Because --.

 

The Artist and I crossed the Mississippi River together many times. We crossed often at St. Louis, which I always considered a “nightmare,” due to very heavy traffic and all the converging and intersecting expressways at that point, a true crossroads of a very busy country, all of whom seem to be on the move when you are threading your way through that maze. My preference was to cross at Hannibal. The river town famous as the birthplace of Samuel Clemens draws heavily on that history for its tourist business, but it’s still a small town, and the last time we came through there we explored around a bit and had lunch rather than simply rushing through.

 

Louisiana was a different story. 

 

The only time we crossed the Mississippi at Louisiana, Missouri, we were on our way east. I was at the wheel, and when I saw that very old, very narrow, old iron bridge ahead, all I could fixate on was getting safely across it! The Artist said, too late, that he would have liked to see something of the town. “Do you want me to go back?” “No, we’ll save it for another time.” But “another time” never came, and so this time I would see Louisiana for both of us.

 

…Comes into my mind now another song, “The Water Is Wide,” an old Celtic folk song. Ah, my love and I! Our love never waxed cold, never faded away....

 

What do I do in the car besides sing, silently or aloud? On this trip, I shed many tears. Not only for shared memories that are now mine alone, but for sights my love and I thought we would have time to see but never did see together. How he would have loved this river town, too! As my emotions ran a rollercoaster gamut, over and over, from excitement to pangs of grief, I kept turning corners in Louisiana, Missouri, and going around blocks and exploring farther and farther from my designated route, jumping out of the car over and over to photograph scenes I wanted so much to share with my beloved partner, the Artist. -- So many scenes that I am going to put them in a separate post and leave this one with an image of dogwood in blossom in the soft Illinois prairie rain. Good night for now.

Dogwood blossoming in the prairie rain....

Its Own Kind of Beauty

I'll explain a little further on....

As we drove out from Traverse City on M-37, one of my favorite roads in the world (modest, quiet, familiar), we relaxed into the first leg of our trek south and west. I left the camera in the case but made mental notes of scenes along the way. This is some of what I saw:

Traverse City: riders on fat tire bicycles in the snow

South of Chum’s Corners: DNR deer check station (muzzle-loading season now)

Looking down onto the Manistee River valley: a snowy path ahead winding toward far banks of grey hills (lesson in perspective)

Restaurants and gas stations in small towns: “Welcome hunters!”

White Cloud: Sally’s Family Restaurant had a new sign out front. I couldn’t read it all as we passed, but the first two words were, incredibly, “Order online”! (Sally’s! In White Cloud!)

Newaygo: Sun peeking out at last as we stop at our usual cafe for a little pick-me-up

It was cold in Kalamazoo, but the Artist’s daughter’s house, where we dropped in for a family update, was warm and inviting. Those photos, sadly, are on my phone rather than on my camera, so you're not seeing them here. Then early Monday morning we went through northcentral Indiana on our way to central Illinois, captivated by the subtle beauty of the prairie and musing on prairie prehistory and history and the differences between prairie and the Great Plains, and since the Artist has always loved a horizon line, he encouraged me to get out my camera and take photographs as we drove along.  I managed to do so by using the sports setting (stop-action) on my Canon Rebel. These may look repetitious (and I could have adjusted color and didn't), but we were exclaiming minute-by-minute on our glide through this landscape. Does it do anything for you?

frosty cob

Originally I had planned a route of two-lane roads to I-55, putting us on expressway for the last leg through Illinois but we were so seduced by the beautiful haze on the prairie landscape that we took a final 2-lane instead to Springfield. The haze accounted not only for lovely atmospheric effects, but the cold air also turned those drops of moisture on trees and grasses to crystals, so that what looked like a morning frost occurred in the late afternoon. That is what you saw up at the top of this post, and here are some more shots from the same locale:

There was a spectacularly frosty tree in one ordinary small town yard.

And here is another small town sight, an old school still welcoming prairie students. Below it, still in the same town, a much more modest building also caught my eye. It was the contrast that intrigued me. 

As we began to run out of light, it was too late now to go back and take that easier expressway route. Driving was more of a challenge. At the same time, the combination of atmospheric haze and after-sunset hues turned magical, as buildings stood out against the sky in silhouette and each roadside tree we approached presented itself in all its glory. 

The prairie! It is not a land of lakes and hills, but it has its own timeless beauty.

Surprisingly, Back in the High Desert

Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in. Just when I think my head and heart have fully returned to Michigan, the Southwest borderland re-exerts its tug.

Last night it was a movie we’d seen before that I watched with new, Western-wise eyes. The opening shot was all it took. It looked like the road through Dos Cabezas to the Chiricahua Mountains – that ribbon of two-lane through golden grassland. The story was set in Wyoming, which set me to musing how many places in the West might look like Cochise County, Arizona. We watched on, caught up in the story, but I continued to eye background mountain ranges carefully.

Then it came – a sequence with Nicolas Cage driving the car, Dennis Hopper in the front passenger seat, and two other actors in the backseat: the luckless, unemployed veteran, the hired killer, the shady sheriff, and the sheriff’s wife. The car approaches a railroad crossing at high speed. Along comes a train. The driver, ordered to keep accelerating by the killer with a gun in his hand, swerves at the last minute, bumping and bouncing along parallel to the tracks and the speeding train before, overtaking it in a burst of speed, catapulting over the tracks in front of the train for a hard landing and getaway.

I come from a railroad family. Railroad safety was the gospel in our house. Scenes like this in movies always trouble me, as I think about impressionable young people seeing only excitement and not their own wrecked bodies. That’s my background.

But this time, watching the sequence, all I could think about was where it was being shot. It looked so much like Willcox, Arizona, that the make-believe of the story was suddenly secondary. There! The depot! But a big semitrailer truck strategically parked on Maley Street hide the WILLCOX sign at the end of the depot (now City Hall) from sight. And too soon the action moved to another location.

At the end of the movie, I wanted to see all the credits. Sure enough! Thanks to Willcox, Arizona! “I knew it!” I exclaimed in triumph. “I knew it was my little cow town!” Patiently, David searched back through the movie for the car-train sequence, and, like a pair of detectives carefully screening film from a surveillance camera, we watched it all again, frame by frame.

There! This scene I photographed after a rainstorm are in the movie! Even more exciting, in two different shots the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas can be clearly seen by anyone familiar with them and looking for them, as I certainly was. And finally, a local sign not hidden from camera view: Maid-Rite Feeds! The wonderful feed store east of the railroad tracks!

“Red Rock West” was made in the 1990s. The sculpture of Rex Allen was not yet in place in Railroad Park, but the park itself was recognizable, with its enormous trees, as was the block of old buildings facing the tracks. “Where’s Rodney’s?” we asked each other and were disappointed that while we could spot the tiny building in an out-of-focus background, the identifying sign was never visible. COMMERCIAL BUILDING on a corner was the only store sign we could see on the strip. But there! The sheriff’s office in the film had used the interior of one of the buildings, Railroad Park and its trees visible through the front windows!

All photographs above are mine, from our winter near Willcox. To take my tour through the ordinary little town (and to see Rodney and his place), click here. Below are some shots from early in the movie.

In the morning we returned once more to the opening sequence, certain now that it was not Wyoming and not WY 487 but my own beloved AZ 186. How could I have doubted for a moment? I took the shots of the opening scenes this morning but did not go all the way through to the car-train sequence. 

Opening shot: "Red Rock West"

Name that road!

Not its real name!

To see all the shots of old historic Willcox, you need to rent the movie, “Red Rock West.” (Roger Ebert loved it.) It will be an action-packed visit to my little cow town! And be sure to watch for the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas in the background.

Dos Cabezas, Willcox, Cochise County -- the movie made me "homesick."