Tu Aug 21 - The Bad Day & Jack's Big Ride

days on the road: 14
route: Atlantic IA to N. Platte Neb
playlist: special terrifying Neb. weather forecasts,
Son Volt “Traces”
photos: main drag in Gothenburg Neb. and cool silo building there (sideways, sorry!)

My first bumpy day on my trip. Left my feather pillow at the ever so hermetic Days Inn in Atlantic Iowa. Dag! Like loosing my blankie.

Then Nebraska isn’t as cute as Iowa. Fields with for vast new metal shed/barns and muddy corrals full of dirty, soon to be slaughtered steers. Cute, Scenic, Beautiful – these descriptors are the way we define the quality of our travel - how we make it worth all the gyrations and money. So was feeling like a looser. But that’s crazy! Jack Kerouac could give a damn about palm trees and standard definitions of scenic beauty! worried about money and camping..no exercise.

I hadn’t had any excercise. I was tired. The other thing I wasn’t liking was my itinerary. My friend Todd wasn’t going to be in Denver but I felt I should go cuz that was the way Jack went his first trip out west. So that was vaguely where I was headed. Spend the night on the Platte and then out to Denver. But lucky for me Jack didn’t stick to his itineraries the few times he actually had them.

Jack traveled like he aspired to write –improvisationally, immersed in the process and the serendipity. “Sal” Jack’s alter ego in On The Road was ready to embrace those who crossed his path with ecstatic celebration. If they fit the outlines of his iconography he would pretty near deify them on the spot. This lends his travels a happy, jerky unpredictability, I decided to replicate. But first I went to Gothenburg Nebraska.

Jack picked up what he called it “The greatest ride in my life…” in Gothenburg. After getting stuck and then unstuck in Stuart he made it to Gothenburg where “two young blond farmers” from Minnesota stopped. Smiling, affable, they were mad fast driving a truck with a wide-open flatbed trailer behind it. They picked up every hitchhiker they saw. It was like some happy, high speed Raft of the Medusa. Two hobos were there, one with a young kid he was protecting. There were drifters and college kids, Jack, 7 or so guys all flying along a public highway with not so much as a six-inch railing between them and the road. Snuggled under a big tarp like so many cold puppies, yellin’ tales and pullin’ on the whiskey bottle Jack bought in North Platte.

It is a glorious image, focused thru Jack’s 25-year-old elation. It reminded me of smoking pot with new girl friends at Goucher College. Hearing Jimmy Cliff’s Harder They Come for the first time. Falling out all over the dorm hallway in ecstatic, happy giggles. I was young, free, and high in America. The end of that cycle, for me and Jack, was less than glorious. But those beginnings seemed incomparably beautiful. Jack drinks in the “wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska.” He writes “The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.”

On Route 30 Gothenberg Nebraska doesn’t have the charisma of Stuart IA. (Really! I’d go back to Stuart!) but like so many of the tiny towns on Jack’s old road it is more vital then expected. Trainsm are many and long in Nebraska, roll through. Community leaders moved the Pony Express Station from out of town into a little park and there it sits every long, low, square-logged bit of it. The sixties are SO back! The young hipster babe in Gothenburg is wearing big sunglasses and gunning her Dodge to really LOUD Janis Joplin. I take pictures of the hugely dramatic silos straddling the train tracks.

The side roads of the Midwest feel like Demuth and Sheeler paintings to me - just with an added layer of dust and flies. They were great painters who loved big soaring industrial structures. I am so about that! Would somebody PLEASE tell me why I am supposed to think a palmetto (that would be a weed in Florida gang), why a palmetto presented as a palm tree (not) in an ugly plastic pot is beautiful. Aaargh! For the thousands you spend on that you could plant a real tree and help cool the planet. But I digress….

So after Gothenburg I head back west again on Interstate 90 with the big question. To camp or to motel? My tent is burning a hole in my trunk – haven’t used it yet! And these soul-sucking hotels are putting a hurt on my budget. But here is the thing. You should hear weather forecasts in Nebraska. I must again note that I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

NPR offers true succor, habit, routine, human voices. I listen happily. Then – zip – off goes NPR and in cuts this very calm, composed lady with some cheery Nebraska weather updates. All carefully geographically and temporally calibrated. The list is long. About six counties are under a “red flag” alert for possible fire. Another four or so are under flash flood warnings. Several are under a tornado watch. And then much of the state is in the path of a destructive storm. The lady very clinically tracks the path of said storm – it has hail the size of quarters and at 6:45 is traveling west toward Boone and Greeley counties. Now I don’t have a clue what county I am in but it does seem a moot point. Especially when (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) the lady cuts into NPR twice more to keep all us happy drivers and farmers up to speed. Warnings get extended. Hail gets as big as golf balls.

Call me a weenie. Even though the weather I am driving through is just overcast, I don’t camp. Next morning I get up in North Platte, bond deeply with my elliptical machine at a gym with a box of free cucumbers at the door, and get a new attitude. It is Wednesday I'm going to Carhenge to meet a messenger I didn’t know was coming.