On the Road: Central City, Colorado

Click on the Thumbnail for MapNote: Originally posted on Blogger on August 3, 2006

Unfolding the Map

Littourati, I will not post as much this next week as I am heading for California for a friend's wedding and some time with the family. However, a good tour guide should whet appetites for what's coming. So, I have plotted Sal's course to Sacramento in advance. Oh, the places you'll go! Just click on the image!

Book Quote

"Central City is an old mining town that was once called the Richest Square Mile in the World, where a veritable shelf of silver had been found by the old buzzards who roamed the hills. They grew wealthy overnight and had a beautiful little opera house built in the midst of their shacks on the steep slope. Lillian Russell had come there, and opera stars from Europe. Then Central City became a ghost town, till the energetic Chamber of Commerce types of the new West decided to revive the place. They polished up the opera house, and every summer stars from the Metropolitan came out and performed. It was a big vacation for everybody. Tourists came from everywhere, even Hollywood stars."

On the Road, Chapter 9

Central City, Colorado

I've never been to Central City, but it seems to have experienced at least twice this century what my hometown has experienced in the last ten years. When Sal goes there in 1947, it seems to be in the midst of an upswing in its fortunes based on tourism and its famous opera house. However, this evidently doesn't last long, and Central City today is still searching for its reason to exist after the historic gold mines closed down and the more recent constructed gold mines, casinos, have not performed very well.

My hometown, Fort Bragg, California, is the midst of such a wrenching upheaval. A few years ago, the main employer in the town, Georgia Pacific, shut its doors for the last time. The previous few years before that, workers at the mill, as they were being regularly downsized, either took retirements or began to try to find something else as a livelihood. When the gates shut, only a couple hundred people still remained at a huge complex that once employed thousands.

Without its main employer, and with a fishing industry that had gone into the tank years before, Fort Bragg is trying to redefine its image. Following the lead of its neighbor to the south, Mendocino, some are trying to turn Fort Bragg into a destination for lovers of arts, crafts and food. Others want to develop the mill property which sits vacant and idle, separating the main bulk of Fort Bragg from the coastline. A few ideas that have been floated around are a community college, a large meeting center, stores, shops, houses...you name it. However, it has been difficult to follow through on any of these things, and Georgia Pacific still owns the land so it all depends on who GP wants to sell it to.

In that way, I can relate to Central City as I read about it today. Like Fort Bragg's history as a lumber town, Central City had a glorious history as an old West gold mining town, with all the stories and legends that go with it. In Sal's time, it is trying tourism to resurrect itself in the shadow of its more successful neighbor, Black Hawk, just as my town is trying to attract more tourists today by partly following Mendocino's lead. At present, Central City is apparently dealing with the failure of the casinos to revive it and is again trying to decide what it wants to be.

Central City probably looks a lot like Jack saw it before he sent Sal there in the novel, but there are things that are associated with modern America that would seem strangely out of place to a person from that time. I've had this experience myself in my home town. The company store, where I bought my first pair of steel-toed boots when I went to work at the lumber mill for the summer, has become a little mall, with boutique stores and a spa. I was relating to my wife, on a visit to the spa, how the store used to work, and it stocked everything a mill worker could want. To pay, you handed money to a cashier, who then clipped the money to a line and "zipped" it upstairs, where another worker would make the change and then "zip" it back down. In the back of the company store, where the spa is now, were all the heavy things you needed for work in the mill or in the woods. And there I was, probably 20 years later, sitting in a tub of water with jasmine fragrance in a set of rooms carved out of the back rooms of the store. I'm sure that if you had asked me, or any of the people who worked at the lumber mill in times past, if they could envision such a scene in that place, they would have looked at you like you were out of your mind.

But of course, back then we didn't envision that the mill would ever close. Central City, during it's heyday, probably thought the gold would never stop flowing. And Jack managed to catch Central City in its second wind, hoping that it had found the answer to recovering its glory days.

If you want to know more about Central City

Central City, Colorado History and Facts
Central City Opera
City-Data: Central City
Legends of America: Central City
Wikipedia: Central City

Next up: Creston, Wyoming

On the Road: Grand Island, Nebraska

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on July 6, 2006

Unfolding the Map

As always, you may click the image at right to get yourself to the map, which is keeping track of Sal's (our) progress across America!

Book Quote

"...another cowboy, this one six feet tall in a modest half-gallon hat, called us over and wanted to know if either one of us could drive....His wife was at Grand Island, and he wanted us to drive one of the cars there, where she'd take over....Of course Eddie could drive, and he had a license and I didn't. Eddie drove alone, the cowboy and myself following, and no sooner were we out of town than Eddie started to ball that jack ninety miles and hour out of sheer exuberance. 'Damn me, what's that boy doing!' the cowboy shouted....

"We stopped along the road for a bite to eat....and Eddie and I sat down in a kind of homemade diner...and here came this rawhide oldtimer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner....He came booming into the diner, calling Maw's name, and she made the sweetest cherry pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. Whooee, I told my soul, and the cowboy came back and off we went to Grand Island."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Grand Island, Nebraska

A couple of things come to mind in reading this excerpt from On the Road. First is the sheer exhiliration of being on the open road. I have a love-hate relationship with car trips. The hate part comes in two flavors: I hate getting ready for car trips, and I hate packing things up after a car trip. I usually love the act of being in a car trip.

I remember at home, when I was growing up, there was something intangible about car trips. I remember that there was even a smell that I associated with car trips -- I would be helping to put things in the car, or I would be around the car, and it just smelled different. I can't describe the smell, other than it was sort of sharp and metallic, but I only smelled it just within an hour before we left somewhere.

By car trip, I mean any extended trip anywhere. Not just a trip into town to the store, but a trip where we actually went out of town, and we spent more than one-half hour in the car.

There was something about being on the open road, about the new sights, about other cars moving past us at fast or slower speeds, that just captivated me. Of course, I also had a tendency to get violently carsick on roads that had sharp turns, so I also had unpleasant memories of car trips as well. But mostly, my memories were great. I always had a great gift of recall, so if I had been somewhere once, I could usually direct my parents back to it (when they would actually listen to me). I was captivated by freeway systems, how in the cities they bent back and around each other as onramps and offramps wound around, and I loved bridges, especially the Golden Gate and the Richmond-San Rafael bridge that looked like a big roller-coaster.

As an adult, I still find myself captivated by car trips, especially over new territory that I haven't traversed before, or for a while. I also find that it's easy to do what Eddie (in the quote) did. On a recent trip from El Paso to the Guadalupe Mountains in west Texas, we were literally "balling that jack" at 90 for a good half hour before I noticed. We were so caught up in the scenery and the endless vistas that the speed just escaped our attention.

Of course, I have said it before in this blog and I'll say it again. Finding a good local food place, with the emphasis on good, is a treasure in itself. We usually take a chance. Sometimes we get unlucky, like our last car trip down to Mountainair, New Mexico, where we stopped in a local cafe only to find the food greasy, spicy, and despite that, relatively tasteless. At other times, we hit the jackpot and find a great eatery and even hints of an adventure. A year ago, we stopped in Pietown, New Mexico, after a weekend camping trip in the Gila Wilderness and had a great meal when the managers of the place decided that they would stay open a few extra minutes with us. Not only did we get the meal, we got pie and we got the very interesting story of the couple that managed the place. We usually don't find that mixture of luck, adventure and mystery in McDonalds or Burger King, and therefore, we don't stop there often.

If you want to know more about Grand Island

City of Grand Island
Grand Island Chamber of Commerce
Grand Island Convention and Visitors Bureau
Grand Island Independent
Wikipedia: Grand Island

Next up: Shelton, Nebraska

On the Road: Omaha, Nebraska

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote:  First published on Blogger on June 29, 2006

Unfolding the Map

Sal reaches Omaha by bus, and is ready to start thumbing again. You, dear Littourati, can click on the image for the updated map if you wish.

Book Quote

"Then Omaha, and, by God, the first cowboy I saw, walking along the bleak walls of the wholesale meat warehouses in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots, looked like any beat character of the brickwall dawns of the East except for the getup. We got off the bus and walked clear up the hill, the long hill formed over the milleniums by the mighty Missouri, alongside of which Omaha is built, and got out to the country and stuck our thumbs out."

On the Road:  Chapter 3

Omaha, Nebraska

Omaha brings to mind an Indian, but not just any Indian. This Indian stared stoically in profile at the end of a television program that I watched every Sunday when I was growing up. The show was Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and I used to be captivated by the exploits of Marlin Perkins and his trusty sidekick Jim. With Perkins' voice narrating, almost quavering on the edge of old age, he and Jim, or more usually Jim, would find some fearsome jungle critter, tag it, and send it on its way, usually not without some sort of drama. If there was any wrestling to be done, Jim usually tackled the creature, holding it down while the sedative was administered or the tag applied. I remember that it used to come on right before the Wonderful World of Disney, and I liked it better than the other animal show, the name of which I can't even remember.

Omaha also brings to mind Omaha Steaks, which my mother happens to supply us with every few months or so. I'll come home, and big styrofoam chest will be sitting on the porch, inside of which is the remnants of dry ice, and frozen steaks, or pork, or ham, or burgers, and sometimes even a chocolate cake.

I suppose in Sal's mind, Omaha is the beginning of the real West, which he announces by pointing out the first cowboy he sees. Here, a number of American icons come together -- the Missouri River which winds across almost the entire Western half of the country, Sal's cowboy, the beginning of the open plains, and the name itself from an American Indian tribe. However, at the middle of the 20th century, the myth of the old West is rapidly fading. Where once 50 years before Omaha was truly on the edge of the wilderness, if not smack dab in the middle of it, by the time Sal comes through it it is a small city. Later on, Sal will briefly describe some Indians he sees, and his description of the "beat" cowboy gives an indication that the polish has worn off of what was once a new, untamed frontier. To Kerouac, "beat" meant many things according to John Clellon Holmes, author of "The Philosophy of the Beat Generation." (1958) It could mean a world-weariness, but it could also mean an emptiness of the sort which made one tired of the conventions and ready for new experiences. Here, in describing the cowboy, I take it to mean that he meant the former, a worn-out cowboy, fifty years too late and out of his element in a town that once would have belonged to him and others like him, wandering the streets like an anachronism.

To Sal, however, the plains beckon, and in his own beatness, the plains are a metaphor. They are wide open and seemingly unending, where new possibilities and experiences lie just beyond the horizon. In that sense, maybe Omaha still did lie on the edge of a new frontier in 1947, less physical and more of the mind, but still tangible and realizable.

To learn more about Omaha and the Missouri River

City of Omaha
Omaha Convention and Visitors Bureau
Omaha World-Herald Mutual of Omaha
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
Wikipedia: Omaha

Coalition to Protect the Missouri River
Missouri National Recreation River
Wikipedia: Missouri River

Next Up:  Grand Island, Nebraska