RAT Route 66

[josh@whirl-i-gig.com]

Petro Stopping Center, North Little Rock, AR

Elvis is nutso for truck stops.  Says they remind him of his youth; they put him in mind of who he was before he ground his hips that famous first time and lifted his viral little self up like a rifle to shoot into Icon territory.  I want to understand what he means.  I study these folks: simple people trying to make good, hunched over a wheel three hundred days a year to chase that yellow line and sleeping in a cot backside the cab-all to ensure that our milk is fresh and our shelves are stocked with Snapple.  If anything's real, it's them.  But just reading that last sentence, I can tell that all I see that the glare of my preconceptions has turned all the truckers in the world into a single stock character.  They're interchangeable unshaven men in identical Jiffy Lube hats.  The truckers, their rigs, even the hoary woman who's refilling my coffee are so of a piece with the world that I know secondhand, sentimentally-through 70s movies and Waylon Jennings songs-that I can only see my image of them.  They're all Kris Kristofferson to me; actors living their lives in shorthand. The question I have then, is: Do I seem as secondhand to them as they do to me?  Yes.  Yes, I do.

Sallisaw, OK and environs

No longer is Oklahoma the land of Tom Joad and Tumbleweeds.  No more does the corn here grow high.  These Okies from Muskogee are no not content to be called local yokels any more.  Oklahoma is giving itself a makeover. It is now "America's Corner" and "Native Territory."  They want me to remember them for the five different  Indian Nations who once had the run of the land.  For the Trail of Tears (they're proud of it).  For the Buffalo Soldiers and "Black Towns" peppered throughout the state. It reminds me of those white suburbanites who, full of self-loathing and shame, identify so deeply with their ancestors victims that they begin to conjure up Native American great-great-great grandfathers, changing their sense of self (in all sincerity) so they can hold their heads high again; revisionist history helps them get by.  So with Oklahoma which no longer is a product of manifest destiny, rather, it is the one true haven for all that is "other" in the American experience.