Vacation 2000


“What I Did On My Summer Vacation”

or,

“Fear and Loathing in West Texas”
The day began just like any other: I woke up at 4:30, ran five miles, read a few chapters in The Good Book, ate a hearty breakfast and went to work.  Heidi had taken the day off to spend the morning chasing off her hangover and packing the car for our vacation to New Mexico.  It being Friday, I was off work at 12:15, and the plan was for Heidi to meet me outside my office building in downtown Chicago to begin our 1300 mile odyssey to Albuquerque.   By 12:17 I was curbside,  and Heidi, with impeccable timing,  pulled up with our trusty Pontiac Sunbird.  I hopped in and we sped off to sit in traffic for two hours.

Snaking through downtown en route to the expressway, we heard a deafening roar coming from above and looked up to see a sortie of menacing black "Apache" attack helicopters.  Heidi was immediately adrenalized.  “Those bastards!” she exclaimed.  “They’re moving in.  This is it man… this is The Shit!”   I was perplexed, to say the least, and inquired as to what on Earth she was getting at.  “It’s the UN you dolt!" she sputtered.  " The UNITED NATIONS!  Look at the `copters! It’s the new world order… globalized government… tyranny… but they won’t get us!  We’re heading for the hills- pronto!” 

I reminded her that the air and water show was going on at Navy Pier, and the helicopters were most certainly part of that, but she would hear none if it.  “The hell you say!”  She snorted.  “Confound it man, have you taken leave of your senses!?  That’s just a COVER!”  I decided to drop it and munch on the sandwich she had packed for me.  Global hegemony or no, it didn’t change the fact that we were on vacation and my good mood was irrepressible.  Hitler could have come back from the dead with a legion of zombie slave-warriors for all I cared.  I was in the zone.

That was metaphorically speaking.  Back on Earth, we were stuck in traffic.  Stop and go on the Stevenson expressway- a maddening way to start a vacation, let alone a twenty-two hour road trip.  An  hour later though we were on the open road and cruising through the soporific byways of central Illinois.  Stultifyingly boring.  Flat as a monkey’s ass, and nothing but corn for four hours before you hit St. Louis.  Add that to an hour of crawling through congestion along the industrial blight of southwest Chicago, and you’ve got five hours of hell on wheels.  But it all ends in St. Louis.

St. Louis.  Gateway to the West.  First city of the “Show Me State,” whatever that means.  Show me what?  You ask the locals and even they don’t know.  Heidi figured it was some kind of a secret Masonic thing (“They’re behind everything, you know”). I guess it will remain one of life’s many mysteries. But St. Louis was the first big milestone, and after passing through the Rust Belt and the Corn Belt, you empty out into the Bible Belt upon crossing the Mississippi, like some freaky rite of passage. By this time I was driving, since Heidi didn’t want to battle rush-hour in St. Louis.  The traffic isn’t that bad, so much as the portage from one highway to the next can be a bit confusing, and we didn’t want to pull a Griswald and end up in East St. Louis.

After Illinois, Missouri is a real treat for the eyes:  lots of trees and hills, although this is definitely the land of the billboard,  ninety percent of which are for tourist traps and Jesus  A couple even seem to feature tourist traps FOR Jesus.  There are about 5 different Jesus dot coms advertised, as well as your garden variety “repent or be damned” sort of messages.  The tourist traps are the sirens on the rock for Heidi.  I had to lash her to the mast (at least duct tape her to the seat) as we drove by the Precious Moments  Figurine Museum, Mystic Caverns, Billy the Kid’s Hideout, and the Queen Mother of all tourist traps, the has-been capital of the world: Branson, Missouri.

If you are like me (and God elp you if you are), you always wondered whatever happened to Tony Orlando, The Osmonds, and Yakov Smirnoff.  Well, you’ll be encouraged to know that they are alive and well in Branson.  Whatever happened to the cast of Hee Haw?  They’re in Branson.  Lawrence Welk’s entourage?  Branson.  You can even pay to see (and my brothers and sisters, I truly shitteth thou not) a review featuring the minor characters from the Andy Griffith Show.  I discovered all this at the Motel Six in Joplin, MO, where we ended our first day on the road at 11:00 PM.  They have an entire wall of brochures in the vending area, and Heidi was salivating in front of it, casting longing looks in my direction.  I shot her my best “no stinkin’ way” glance as I filled up the ice bucket to keep my Mickey’s Wide Mouth cold.  There’s nothing like a few frosty bottles of malt liquor after a long day’s drive through God’s country.

By 7:30 the next morning we were on the road and heading into Oklahoma.  Not as inspiring as Missouri, the view from the turnpike in Oklahoma is nevertheless pleasant, and far preferable to that of southern Illinois.  Plus, you can play the “spot the roadkill” game to break up the hours, as the highway is punctuated by armadillo carcasses. The billboards in Oklahoma are largely devoted to “The Big Texan,” a roadhouse in Amarillo that boasts a free 72 oz steak dinner if it can be consumed in one hour.  In fact, the billboards for “The Big Texan” begin in Missouri, which meant that I had to spend 800 miles trying to talk Heidi out of taking the four-and-a-half-pound steak dinner challenge.  Once we got into Amarillo though she looked around and agreed that it was best if we got the hell out of there as fast as possible.  We sped by “The Big Texan” without even honking.

The Texas Panhandle, for those of you who have never been, has to be the most godforsaken spot on the planet.  It makes southern Illinois look like the French Riviera.  The landscape is positively post-apocalyptic, and the only life that wouldn’t seem out of place in that awful wasteland would be an ape on horseback dragging a chain-gang of feral humans shackled at the neck.  Now I realize that I have, in the past, been suspected of slight hyperbole, and it has been suggested from time to time that I am prone to taking certain factual liberties.  With that in mind, and as Heidi as my witness, I swear to you that the panhandle has vast miles in which not a single tree or shrub is visible to the horizon on either side of the highway, which is a LONG way away given the fact that the ground is flatter than a parking lot.  The saving grace is the 75 mph speed limit, as the only good thing about being in the Texas Panhandle is that it affords you the singular pleasure of LEAVING the Texas Panhandle.  Such relief is comparable only to something on the order of severing a gangrenous limb.  Sixteen miles outside of New Mexico, however, the Plain of Doom and Despair dramatically breaks into the expansive mesas that rightly earn for New Mexico the moniker “The Land of Enchantment.”

By that time Heidi had been lulled into a torpid stupor of sensory deprivation, and the sight of such verticality was a shock to her senses.  She shrieked like a harpy as all the synapses in her frontal lobe fired in concert, but as she became reacquainted with visual stimulus the pain sublimated into a state of mild intoxication.  We cruised past Tucumcari, and two hours later found ourselves winding through Tijeras Canyon, mountains on either side, emerging into Albuquerque.  We pulled up to our final destination, the "Casa de Luz"-  my old apartment building- at about 6 o’clock and were happily munching carne adovada burritos and slurping green chile stew an hour later at the fabulous and rightfully famous Frontier Restaurant on Central Ave.  

Our holiday consisted mostly of eating as much New Mexican cuisine as possible and visiting with friends.  We took in the penultimate home game of the Albuquerque Dukes, as sadly, the Dukes will be moving to Portland in 2001.  True to triple A standards, the game was a comedy of errors.  Former Boston pitcher Robinson Checo took the mound for the Dukes and managed the difficult feat of striking out six through four innings while also giving up eight runs.  There were two rain delays and an appearance by Tommy Lasorda (who graciously autographed my program), and as we were filing out of the ballpark after the game, a loud crack of thunder rang out and the stadium lights went dead.  

We also visited the Albuquerque Rattlesnake Museum, where Heidi was unable to resist making salacious remarks about sucking venom out of bites inflicted on indelicate parts of the body.  A few of the nearby tourists seemed a bit scandalized, but nodded knowingly when I made a fist with the thumb and pinky extended, tipping it back and forth to form the international “she’s been drinking” sign.

Our foray into the Jemez mountains for a few nights of camping was abbreviated unexpectedly by the failure of a simple fan switch on our car’s cooling system.  The two hundred dollar repair bill added injury to the insult of campus interuptus (as Heidi cleverly turned the phrase).  Still, we got in a good couple of days of cruising around towering mountains, past brilliant red mesas, through majestic canyons, and damn near over a particularly brazen roadrunner.  We camped under an ocean of stars, gazing up at meteors, passing satellites, and a resplendent Milky Way.  Our tent was pitched by a babbling brook, and we sat around our campfire listening to the breeze rustle gently through the trees, filling the air with the sweet, vanilla scent of ponderosa pine.  Then the booze kicked in, and I forget what happened after that.  The next day, we limped back to Albuqerque in our hyperthermic Pontiac, gratefully making it without further travail.  It would have been a real shame if we broke down, because then Heidi would have had to get out and push in that hot sun.  But the fates were kind to us, and by the next afternoon we were mobile again.

As the week was coming to a close, we finished off our shopping, buying a 35 pound sack of green chiles and having them roasted on the spot for us.  We froze them and packed them in dry ice for the return trip.  In addition we also bought several pounds of dried red chile and lots of cans of chile for use when the frozen stuff ran out.  We spent our last night in New Mexico visiting with the parents of one of my college buddies, who treated us to an incredible meal of enchiladas and an incredible view of the Sandia mountains.  Their homestead is frequented by a rather sizeable flock of hummingbirds. There were at least sixty individuals of four different species, each one more beautiful than the last.  Heidi thought they tasted like chicken.

So on Friday we packed up the car and with heavy hearts bid “adios” to our friends.  We braced ourselves for the horror of western Texas, which loomed just beyond the horizon, and thankfully were in Oklahoma by late afternoon.  The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, and we were back home at 6:30 on Saturday evening.

So that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.
Fear and Loathing in West Texas
September 10, 2000
Copywrite Marc A. Healy