On the Road: Council Bluffs, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for Map

Note:  Originally published on Blogger on June 28, 2006

Unfolding the Map

I'm going to wax eloquent on suburbs, today, Littourati. Make yourself get a drink, make yourself comfortable, sit back and click on the image if you wish to see the updated cartographic record of our journey.

Book Quote

"We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I'd been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another, all laid out in the dismal gray dawn."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Council Bluffs, Iowa

I've never been to Council Bluffs. About the only thing I know about Council Bluffs is this description in On the Road, and the fact that Council Bluffs shares a roller derby team with Omaha. Yes, that's right. Roller derby, that girl-on-girl full contact sport on skates that you may remember from the 70s. It has exploded in popularity in the past 2-3 years. Council Bluffs has the "Rolling Thunder Derby Dames," which also represents Omaha.  (Editor's note:  As of 2010, it appears the Rolling Thunder Derby Dames are no more.)

But I digress. My topic is suburbs. I wonder if Jack was aware that 1947 was around the time of the explosion of suburban America? As returning GIs came home and began looking for places to live, the crowding of the cities was inevitable unless something else was available. Suburbs were the answer, with affordable housing away from the sprawl, traffic and dangers associated with the big cities, family friendly but still within commuting distance to workcenters in the city centers.

I've lived in a number of cities now: Milwaukee, San Antonio, New Orleans and now Albuquerque. In each area, I did not live in the suburbs but within the city limits. In each, my experience of the suburbs has been different and I find myself torn as to how I feel about them. One thing I don't like about the suburbs is my perception of their "sameness." It is as if the suburbs choose to remain in an America untouched by diversity. Houses tend to have the same overall look, more so if they are built en masse by a developer. Here in Albuquerque, many people live in Rio Rancho, which is growing at a pace that one day may make it the largest municipality in terms of population in the state, but on my few trips out there, I have visceral feelings about streets laid out with houses that have the same general design, the same garage facing the street. I once asked a friend, who was driving with me out there, "Why were we so afraid of communism?" I meant it! We were told we'd have no choices, and that we would be forced into uniformity under communism. In driving through a development in Rio Rancho, I decided we didn't need communism to get what we feared. And we accept it!

In New Orleans, Metaire is the suburb to the west. Many people go to Metaire because it offers cheap apartments and chain stores and eateries. As a result, the business district of Metaire, and many other suburbs that I've seen, consists of the same bland chains. Sure, a Target is good, and a Burger King is good. But block after block of big box stores and 10 McDonalds within a five mile strip? And the aesthetics of these strips -- they are built for traffic, not pedestrians. Stores and chains are set back behind big parking lots as traffic zooms on by. You can go to any suburban area and find the same exact thing. Once again, the uniform sameness we once so feared.

In San Antonio, we reached a point where people began to flee the suburbs. The city continued to grow outward and outward, to a point where now people are concerned about the land needed to recharge San Antonio's aquifer, which is being paved over at a dizzying rate and does not allow the water to soak into the earth. People actually flee outward, trying to escape those strips and chains, hoping to find Nirvana at the edge of the wilderness. Instead, as more and more of them go there, they find the strips and the chains follow them.

I like living either in the city, or in the country. The in-between is not for me. The cities offer me variety, diversity, and excitement. The country provides me with rest, relaxation, and quiet. The gray area of the suburb does not give me any solace, but makes me feel uneasy. I think that Jack (and Sal) perhaps had this visceral reaction as well, being city boys, but didn't quite realize that within a few short years, the suburb would be the rule, not the exception.

If you want to learn more about Council Bluffs or suburbia

Council Bluffs: Iowa's Leading Edge
The Daily NonPareil: Council Bluffs Newspaper Online
Wikipedia: Council Bluffs

Levittown: The Prototype Suburb
National Geographic: The New Suburb?
YouTube: Music video - Subdivisions by Rush
Wikipedia: suburb

Next up: Omaha, Nebraska

On the Road: Stuart, Iowa

Click on the Thumbnail for Map

Note:  Originally published on Blogger on June 25, 2006

Unfolding the Map

Time to discuss small towns, and the fact that sometimes you just have to break down and take the bus. As usual, click on the image to go to the updated map.

Book Quote

"We stood in front of the railroad-ticket shack in Stuart, waiting for the westbound traffic till the sun went down, a good five hours, dawdling away the time...I decided to spend a buck on beer; we went to an old saloon in Stuart and had a few...We got back on the road in the darkness, and of course nobody stopped and nobody came by much. That went on till three o'clock in the morning. We spent some time trying to sleep on the bench at the railroad ticket office, but the telegraph clicked all night and we couldn't sleep...so when the Omaha bus came through just before dawn we hopped on it and joined the sleeping passengers...."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Stuart, Iowa

I'm a little at a loss as to what to write about for this point in Sal's journey. I already wrote about waiting for a ride while on the west coast of Ireland. I've written about bus journeys and my experience with that.

Perhaps I can write a little about small-town America. Sal is from the big city, or at least close to the big city. When he lived with his aunt in Paterson, New Jersey, he indicates that he spent a lot of time in New York. Thus, he's really a big town man.

I can imagine that alighting from cars and buses into small towns where the sidewalks roll up at dark was quite different for him. New York, as the song goes, is the city that never sleeps. But small towns sleep all the time. They sleep at night, and even during the day many of them seem to be dozing in somnabulent bliss, waiting for either something exciting or for night to fall so they could once again drift off into a kind of dream.

I grew up in a small town in Northern California, and in the days before it became a major tourist destination for Bay Area folks, it was very quiet. Only a few people were on the street at any one time. What kind of exciting thing was needed to wake our town out of its stupor? Outsiders were one thing. The sight of a couple of unknown guys hanging around on Main Street all day waiting for a ride would have engendered discussion and comment. Later, as hippies became more common in my hometown, people around town became more blasé about such sights. But I can imagine that in the late 1940s, in Stuart, Iowa, the sight of Sal and his newfound Irish companion lounging around town with their New York accents probably brought them notice from many people. These same people would probably have talked about them, but not with them, watching but avoiding them until eventually they slipped away and the town could go back to dozing or sleeping.

Don't get me wrong. Small towns are anything but dead. Behind the scenes, small towns are hotbeds of activity. If the National Security Agency really wants to spy on all Americans, as one side of the current debate argues, then they should really tap the small town gossips, who keep eyes on everything and really do know everyone's business. One thing I've learned in growing up in a small towns is that they have their deep, dark secrets and structures of society that outsiders will find it hard to learn and penetrate. But even if small towns are very good at keeping their secrets from outsiders, within them there are very few secrets: Mr. Johnson knows that Mrs. Smith is an alcoholic, and Miss Jones knows that Mr. Johnson is sleeping with Miss Thomas behind his wife's back. These facts will be common knowledge that nobody talks about, until a blow-up occurs, it becomes very public for a day, and then all goes back to normal.

It is no secret why many of the 50's horror films were set in small towns. They were inscrutable, dark and somewhat menacing places, difficult for city dwellers to understand, where anything, even an alien invasion or an attack of some sort of terrible monster, could happen. Is it any wonder after 5 hours or more in town and no ride available, Sal and his friend grab the bus?

If you want to know more about Stuart, Iowa

Stuart Chamber of Commerce
Stuart, Iowa
Stuart Region: Adair County
Wikipedia: Stuart, Iowa

Next up: Council Bluffs, Iowa

On the Road: Adel, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote:  Originally posted on Blogger on June 23, 2006

Unfolding the Map

I've been a little tardy, Littourati! A couple of crises with some friends and a lot of work this week have kept me from getting out these newest posts. I apologize. Click on the image to see the updated Google map.

Book Quote

"A guy with a kind of toolshack on wheels, a truck full of tools that he drove standing up like a modern milkman, gave me a ride up the long hill, where I immediately got a ride from a farmer and his son heading out for Adel in Iowa. In this town, under a big elm tree near a gas station, I made the acquaintance of another hitchiker, a typical New Yorker, an Irishman who'd been driving a truck for the post office most of his work years and was now headed for a girl in Denver and a new life."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Adel, Iowa

I love the all too tiny description of the guy Sal gets a ride with. I suppose that one complaint I have about the book, which isn't that much of a complaint, is that Sal really doesn't say much about these small-town characters that he meets. I wonder if it is because, despite his stated interest in America, that he really isn't interested in them?

I would be questioning why this guy had such a truck. What are the tools for? Is he a plumber, an electrical worker, an auto mechanic, a farm machinery mechanic? Where is he going and what is he doing? It kind of frustrates me that Sal doesn't ask these types of questions. Of course, that could be just where he's at. Sal is very interested, as we'll see later, in the hard drinkers, the hobos, the people who are interesting and "beat." Perhaps the ordinary does not entice him. However, these little snippets are fascinating to speculate about.

Who of us doesn't know the guy with the toolshack on wheels? I think that it is possible that every town, like Adel, had one of them. Picture the guy as slightly eccentric, maybe with a strange feature, like a missing finger or strange tick at the side of his mouth or one eye just a little crossed or pop-eyed that has a fascinating or disturbing story behind it. I grew up in a small town, and it was not uncommon to see every male who had a pickup truck carrying a number of tools (including a chainsaw). But the guy who built a shack on the bed of his pickup when I was growing up was the guy who lived just outside of society, somewhere in the woods, was probably a hippie growing some weed, and only came into town once a month to stock up on supplies.

Even where I live now, in the city of Albuquerque, there's a guy that I usually see riding his bike past my house. He has wild curly hair and a graying beard, and he usually waves hi at me though he never speaks. But when I see him driving, he is driving one of those "toolshacks on wheels," a painstaking little A-frame built carefully on the bed of his 1970s era pickup. What's his story? Why is he living in the city and not off the grid somewhere?

These are some stories that I think Sal missed in his hurry to get to the coast and in his desire to meet "interesting" characters in his definition. Because ultimately, his friends don't seem to be as interesting to me because they all do the same thing, philosophize and drink and philosophize some more. These little glimpses into the oddities of American life that Sal passes over, as seen in Adel, might have turned out to be as interesting or even more so than he imagined.

For more information about Adel, Iowa

Adel city website
Dallas County, Iowa
Wikipedia: Adel

I SO wanted to find a picture of a toolshack on wheels, but I couldn't. Sorry!

Next up: Stuart, Iowa

On the Road: Des Moines, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote:  Originally posted on Blogger on June 17, 2006

Unfolding the Map

In this post I offer reflections of motel stays and loss of self On the Road. As usual, click on the image to see the progress of Sal Paradise's journey across the country as we move place by place through the book.

Book Quote

"Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks - and there're a lot of them in Des Moines - and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Des Moines

I don't really know much about Des Moines, other than that it is the state capitol of Iowa and that nearby Ames is the home of Iowa State University, but I like this passage because of how Sal describes his room. In my 20s, I did a lot of traveling by car, and I stayed in a lot of cheap motel rooms because I didn't have a lot of money for extra amenities. I can't say that I've ever stayed in someplace where filthy graffiti is written on the wall next to the bed, but you can see how for Jack Kerouac and perhaps Sal Paradise, that's a mark of distinction. Really, one doesn't care what the room looks like, if you're tired enough. As long as the bed is clean, you are doing fine.

One thing that always happened to me when I stayed in motel rooms is that I would always oversleep -- I would plan to leave the next day around 9 or 10, and I'd go to sleep. The next morning, I invariably would awake to the sound of the maid, and find that it was easily 12 or 1 o'clock and that they were wondering if I was dead or something. Part of the problem is that instead of the "beat yellow windowshades," most motels would have those heavy dark curtains that kept the room dark even on the brightest sunny days. When you combine that with the old air conditioning units and heaters which made a lot of noise, and the fact that I was really tired from driving about 14 hours, it was a perfect combination to keep me sleeping.

The other thing that Sal realizes, after he sleeps, is that he doesn't really know who he was. As he describes it:

"I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and rally didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."

On the Road: Chapter 3

I think we've all had that experience where we don't know who we are. For me, it seems to be related with age. I wake up, and realize that I'm now 42. My 20s AND my 30s are behind me, and I'm still trying to figure out what I am supposed to be and do in this life. Sometimes I know who I am, whether it's flattering or not, and sometimes I don't. And unlike Sal, I can't say that I'm not scared sometimes.

If you want to know more about Des Moines and the State of Iowa

City of Des Moines
Internet Tour of the Iowa State Capitol
Iowa State University (in Ames)
Netstate: Iowa
Official State of Iowa website
Wikipedia: Des Moines

Next stop: Adel, Iowa

On the Road: Iowa City, Iowa

Click on Thumbnail for Map

Note:  First published on Blogger on June 17, 2006

Unfolding the Map

This post will be a reflection on the US highways. As always, click the image to see the updated map of Sal's journey.

Book Quote

"Here the big trucks roared, wham, and inside two minutes one of them cranked to a stop for me....And what a driver - a great big tough truckdriver with popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig under way and paid hardly any attention to me...And he balled that thing clear to Iowa City....Just as we rolled into Iowa City he saw another truck coming behind us, and because he had to turn off at Iowa City he blinked his tail lights at the other guy and slowed down for me to jump out...."

On the Road: Chapter 3

Iowa City, Iowa

Sal doesn't really stop in Iowa City. The truck slows down, he gets off, gets on another truck, and heads toward Des Moines. It's too bad he didn't stop, because he would have seen a quiet, pleasant university town. My wife's parents, her father just returned from duty in the Navy during World War II, would have been moving into a basement apartment near the downtown. A lot of returning GIs would have been wandering around, taking classes at the university on the GI bill.

But Sal moves on, heading down Route 6 west. Route 6, which he mentions earlier in the book when he's first planning this adventure, at one time was the longest federally funded highway in the U.S. It was even longer than the famed Route 66, which as the song says "...winds from Chicago to L.A." It was shortened slightly later, so that instead of going from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it now stops short of the Pacific at Bishop, California, but it still is the longest continuous highway in the U.S.

Today, many of us have grown up in the era of interstates. The interstate system came about in the 1950s in a wave of highway building meant originally as a strategic and efficient way to move supplies and troops around the U.S. in case we ever faced an attack on our own soil. By bypassing the downtowns, it also made commerce and pleasure travel more efficient as well.

However, had Sal Paradise been making his trip in 2006 rather than in 1947, he would have found travel much different. Sal is often dropped off in downtowns. Every route he takes takes him through the hearts of towns and cities. And because very few business chains existed at the time, each town is a unique experience, with its own culture, shops, and cuisine on display. This stands in stark contrast to today, when we can simply zip past each town on the highway, and stop for the same McDonald's Big Mac, fries and a Coke regardless of whether we are in Pennsylvania or Utah.

I have always been somewhat fascinated with the US highways. I remember when I lived in Milwaukee and US 41 ran a few blocks away from my home on its way up into northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I was fascinated when I found out that the same US 41 ends up Miami. I wondered about what kinds of things one would see on US 41 traveling from it's top to its bottom. At one point, I thought that a good basis for a book would be traveling the US highways and documenting what I saw along the way. Later, after reading William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, where he intentionally travels along highways that are marked "blue" in his map and are thus anything but interstates, and documents his experiences in small towns of America, I began to take such highways whenever I felt I had the chance and the time to get off the interstate.

To find the America that Jack and Sal experienced, one must get off the interstates and back onto the US highway system -- the system that existed before the interstates were built. These US highways still, for the most part, penetrate the cities which in turn reveal their dirty laundry -- their ghettos, their backyards, their seedy motels and their less flattering sides -- as much as they reveal the states of their downtowns, whether they be brand new and gleaming or in a state of disrepair. I find that the trip is much more interesting when you come upon a unique town square, or find a restaurant that looks interesting and different. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you might chance on a civic celebration. If you take a US highway, rather than an interstate, you may take longer to get where you are going, but you will still see some semblance of the America as it existed when Jack and Sal were on the road.

If you want to learn more about Iowa City or the U.S. highway system

City of Iowa City
Iowa City/Coralville Online Resource
University of Iowa
Wikipedia: Iowa City

History of the US Highway System
Route 6 Tourist Association
US Highways from US 1 to (US 830)
Wikipedia: The US Numbered Highway System

Next up: Des Moines, IA