“Folks, you’re probably noticing a bit of turbulence. I’m going to put the seat belt sign on for the next, oh, fifteen minutes or so. Flight attendants, please take your seats.”
It’s getting a little bumpy over the Wind River Range in northern Wyoming as we cruise at 36,000 feet, on our way towards an early arrival in Seattle. I’m heading back for a four day weekend with my son, and I’m pretty excited about it. We’re going to go suit shopping; I’ve lost the weight equivalent of one and a half sons in the last few years and I now have only a single business suit that fits, which is a handicap. I have fond memories when I was little of accompanying my father to The Men’s Shop in Westbrook, Maine, when he needed a new suit, and I’m looking forward to taking my son to Nordstrom’s for a couple of hours of suit selection and fittings. Despite a rainy weekend we have a packed schedule, and on Sunday it’s my birthday, which I imagine will involve John Howie Steakhouse; my son heard a radio ad for John Howie Steakhouse when he was three and now he asks to go to John Howie Steakhouse for my birthday at least seven times a day when we’re together, regardless of the time of year.
We’re flying a bit south of the route I took when I drove across the country three weeks ago, this time more or less paralleling Interstate 90 across South Dakota, now Wyoming. I’ve driven that stretch before – east to west – and it’s really quite dull, a hard travelled four lanes with lots of truck convoys, with endless coal and oil trains keeping pace next to the highway in a kind of intermodal marathon race across the high plains, towns spread out every fifty miles or so with dusty single level motels competing with two star chains (Day’s Inn, Shilo’s, Motel 6) which indicate their status with two or even three stories and perhaps an overchlorinated indoor pool.
The rest stops in those areas are beautiful in their way, and looking down from seven miles in the air, I can see every now and again their footprint down below. They are staggered across the ribbons of freeway, one on the westbound side of the freeway and one on the eastbound side – rarely facing each other directly, offset by a half a mile or so – with long looping off ramps leading to strips of parking tarmac. Two of the strips will be widely separated with a couple of buildings spread out amongst some landscaping, and the other strips will just have a thin dark separation of hardscape and lighting – that’s where the truckers and RV’ers are shunted to. From up above everything appears in shades of light brown in the late morning clear autumn sunlight – but the spinning wind turbines in the distance give a hint to the winds that whip up dust devils in the parking lots and scour the picnic tables. There are no trees on I-90 high plains rest stops; their leaves would be stripped bare in a week, their bark and wood scraped away before a season is out. The wind blows all year long except in those eerie terrifying silences on summer midafternoons before a tornado.
I love those rest stops. Because of the winds they’re almost always low to the ground, long flat reinforced concrete structures that feel more like bunkers than buildings, but with long windows and usually skylights of scoured Plexiglas that let in light the same tone as the pale khaki of the plains themselves. They are spartan and clean – metal appliances in the bathrooms with few moving parts or exposed pieces which could be stolen or damaged, rarely do you see a vending machine, at most maybe a kiosk with a map of the local area (endless flat, straight roads with small towns at the junctions and advertisements for local bars and casinos and steakhouses and motels). They are silent except for the traffic noise, a half mile away on the main road, and the whistling of the prairie winds through the crevices and windows and doors as they open. My dog finds these rest stops challenging – he doesn’t like peeing on buildings, and he’s curiously shy about pooing in the open, preferring to run a bit ahead and finding a little shade or taller grass for privacy, but those little dignities are not on offer here.
Down below, the highway is winding up the long, slow buildup into the Rockies – I-90 twisting north towards Billings, while we map a straight shot into Idaho. We’ll probably head right over Yellowstone Park, and indeed now we’re heading over the deserted canyon lands of northwestern Wyoming. Somehow, though, the rest stops below make me think of Italy.
On September 14, 2001, my father and I were supposed to fly to Paris, pick up a rental car, and drive across France for two weeks. Several days ahead of the departure, however, events got ahead of our plans, and we ended up going on the trip two years later, in October 2003. Dad’s knees were starting to bother him, so to make sure he would be comfortable, I asked for a Mercedes when I made the reservation. We got what an old friend of mine would have called a German staff car, missing only the little flags on the front hood and bulletproofing: a low slung black Mercedes saloon – I love that word, a kind of Dasheil Hammett shorthand for a graftier version of four door sedan. It floated on the highway, making 140 kilometres an hour seem like napping on a cloud, but on backroads, I sometimes felt like too much a gangster, driving a car too big for the winding lanes on my way to dump a body in a ditch.
We started in Lyon, drove to Annecy in the foothills of the Alps for our first night, and then more or less on a lark, we took the highway and the tunnel to Switzerland and then Italy. The drive was spectacular, on big looping French tollways – we were blinded by the sun reflecting off the glacial face of Mont Blanc, barreled through the tunnel into Switzerland, again through another tunnel into Italy, and descended into Turin and its brown hazy polluted valley. And as we drove back towards France, we climbed the autoroute up into the hills and we stopped for gas at an Italian rest stop. It was on a long, winding ascent towards the border, close to the tree line – dusty in late fall, carved out of the side of a mountain on the way towards the border at the summit of the pass. It was nothing like the Cold War prairie shelters of I-90 in Wyoming. A louche building – nothing spartan here – of cheap dark steel and slightly tinted windows with neon “Espresso” and “BAR” signs beckoned as we pulled into the stalls for a fill up.
The Merc was in its element and we were in a great mood; the young Italian guy manning the petrol pumps smiled as we got out, probably assuming my father was a rich guy from Munich and I was his dutiful son waiting to get the keys to the family estate. I gestured for the kid to fill the tank with diesel – I don’t know how because I definitely didn’t speak Italian – and we walked inside. There was a bar – an actual proper bar, row after row of colorful liquor, aperitifs and digestifs in dozens of shades and fancy-lettered labels, and in the center, a prominent chrome espresso machine. My dad and I gave one another a look (surely making available several shelves of hard liquor on a twisting highway, where the unenforced speed limit was 140 kilometers an hour, was a really bad idea?), and he went to the men’s room while I walked around the attached shop.
The shop made no sense whatsoever, an odd collection of pornography, various grades of motor oil and random automotive accessories, tourist souvenirs, and cooking supplies – not groceries, cooking supplies; had you needed, say, some tongs and a whisk, this shop would be served you well. Oh, and cigarettes – a wall of cigarettes, mostly brands I’d never heard of, and lighters which were a form of pornography themselves. And glassware for the marijuana smokers driving on the highway that day. There seemed to be no organizing principle except to supply anyone looking to smoke, get mildly stoned, masturbate, or stock the kitchen cabinets in a stylish new flat. Most of the merchandise – with the exception of the tobacco products – was dusty. It felt more like a money laundering operation than an actual shop. The attendant sat in a curly wooden bar chair behind the counter.
My dad came back from the men’s room and we went to the bar. I was doing most of the driving – Dad’s knees were already starting to give way fifteen years ago – and needed a snack, so we ordered espressos and a sandwich. The coffee was exquisite, confirming everything we’d ever thought about Italians having the right focuses in life – forget about efficient governance or safe driving, just make sure the coffee is perfect and available, perfect, everywhere – and the sandwich was just as good. A roll, thin and crusty on the outside but soft and chewy innards, drizzled with olive oil and with thick cut raw cured ham, a deep red streaked with white fat. We split on sandwich between us as we drank our coffee and I think we actually both got a cognac with a second espresso, embracing the Italian autopiste ethos of gluttonous pleasure. Had I been smoking at the time I have no doubt I’d have fired up a heater – I’m not sure if it was allowed in 2003 in Italy but I remember that others felt comfortable smoking indoors.
I paid the shop attendant for the coffee, the sandwich, and the gas. We walked back out into the blinding afternoon sun, back into the Benz, and off we roared towards the border.
You won’t find that in Wyoming or Montana, although if you exit the freeway properly and drive into the small dusty towns, you can find bars with semi trucks parked outside and truckers knocking back the booze. You won’t find perfect prosciutto or rolls that still make you smile fourteen years later. But somehow the rest stops are just as good in their own way. Seriously, I’d take the Italian rest stop any day of the week, but if I were driving across the Montana plains and came across that kind of a place, I’d probably avoid it. The prairies demand frugality, they demand respect for the high winds and the dust storms and the lonely gigantic sky. If there were a way I could do these biweekly trips such that I could incorporate a bit of driving across Wyoming, I’d do it. But the best I can do is look down from the plane and remember.
For now, though, the clouds are thickening as we cross into eastern Washington. The first storms of winter are already over Seattle. The seat belt light comes on, and we descend into the rain.