Escaping the Winter of Our Time
Can we really live in bubbles or our own making?
Corn and porn. Speaking generously, the Midwest countryside in late January elicits thoughts of tweekers and Ed Gein. Mile after mile of dead ground, dirty snow, and cornfield stubble, interrupted only by king-sized, prefab porn warehouses with names like Lion’s Den. With cars in the lot. I ponder those parked cars from my passenger seat speeding down an empty I-55. Having grown up in one of these microdot towns, I know just how Aunt Bea everyone can be. So, I’m thinking to myself, you park your car in the porn lot, the only car in the lot, with what excuse? Car trouble? Needed cigarettes? Because you just know Tom Peterson or Arnie Thompson will be driving to town for morning coffee with the other men, who are bigger gossips than women, right past that warehouse where your white Buick is parked.
It was the last day of January 2017, and my husband, Rex, and I were enroute to Palm Springs from Chicago. It was a needed respite from marriage-testing winters. Winters start off with such goodwill — the first snow on your eyelashes, the tucked-in hush that a snowfall brings to a scrambling city, a momentary belief in the goodness of humankind. Even January is still manageable. Its lung-singeing arctic temperatures give hardy souls bragging rights if nothing else. But then, somewhere around Valentine’s Day, winter loses its cheery elves. In our house, my husband, a transplant to our northern climes, begins to pace and snap. Little inconveniences irk, daily rituals lose their luster, and he — Mr. Sunshine who wakes up with a song in his head (truly) — no longer sings.
I’ve known this about winter since childhood when another transplant in my life — my mother — displayed similar tendencies. There is only so much wallpapering a stir-crazed woman can do in the deepest, longest winters of northern Iowa and only so many twenty-foot-long scarves she can knit, and when the last room was transformed and the last of a dozen pair of mitten with gnarled thumbs befitting giants were completed, we all ducked for cover.
I personally like the hibernation. I find summer with its insistence on “getting outside” to be oppressive. But I also know that sometimes it’s just easier to go find some sunshine and warmth for those ashen, sun-starved faces. Palm Springs it was.
Back on the road, we stop for the night in Blytheville, Arkansas, at a Holiday Inn with unironic pink plastic Kleenex dispenser the size of a bread loaf and a full-water, slow-swish toilet in matching pink. After a pork fritter and a glass of merlot (what were we thinking?) in a restaurant awash in blue and green carpeting and faux brass railings, we settle in for an episode of “Hunted” on TV. Seems about right.
4:00 p.m. in a Tex-Arkana truck-stop: “Number 49, your shower is ready.”
The next morning, our Perkins waitress, six months pregnant, has clearly realized that this is now her life. She plunks down our plates while looking past us and splashes coffee into our cups. We cut the enormous cake they call a muffin in half, pass on the added butter, and slurp down the watery coffee.
Back on the freeway, we hurtle down the freeway in our own bubble carrying civilization with us — jazz on satellite radio, French language CDs, and a Monocle magazine. We are the people Trump voters hate.
4:00 p.m. in a Tex-Arkana truck-stop: “Number 49, your shower is ready.” We drive for hours on a four-laner with no shoulders, dry grass lapping the edge. I look over at Rex. His eyebrows are twitching like a dog dreaming. He is deep in his own thoughts, probably about how much he loves to drive his car on an open road, heading to warmth in February.
West Texas on a two-lane blacktop makes you wonder if you’re the last person on earth and just don’t know it yet.
Outside brown earth has turned to red and corn to scrub. On the right side of the road, the past: oil wells and cotton fields. On the left, the future: wind turbines lined up on the lip of a ridge like an invading army. I stare out the window in a game of “can we outrun the freight train?” that is snaking parallel to us. We cannot. It is miles long against an empty landscape. We pull up alongside Odessa, whose claim to fame was being hit by a meteor. We drive on.
West Texas on a two-lane blacktop makes you wonder if you’re the last person on earth and just don’t know it yet. We blast through towns that are nothing more than a handful of weather beaten homes with empty porches and a barren corn crib out back. Desperate to break the monotony of desert driving, we stop in an advertised “ghost town.” The ghost town is, hilariously, abandoned. We peek through a hole in a high wooden fence to see a smattering of nostalgia, including a Calistoga wagon the texture of driftwood. Onward.
The vast nothingness begins to cede to life and the occasional cluster of squat cinderblock shops with a preponderance of proprietors named Joanne — Joanne’s pies. Joanne’s biscuits. Joanne’s crystals. Hand-lettered signs advertising “coffeeshop” or “beads and crafts,” the cursive descriptions tilting uphill in entrepreneurial hopefulness but no one in the parking lot. Most of the signs have since bleached pale in the merciless sun. A few hang askew on one hook only. Defeated. Are the proprietors disillusioned with life’s ruthlessness, I wonder. From the optimism that drove them to commission a sign for a business to the reality that not that many people want your pies is a hard fall. How long did they hang on until they were forced to admit that others simply did not share their vision?
Farther down the blacktop, a “trading post” advertises Indian arrowheads, jumping beans, and rattlesnakes in a box. In this era of video games and apps, do kids still get excited by “rattlesnakes” in a box? If the crowd in the parking lot is any indication, the answer is no.
Far in the distance, a mobile home trailer stands alone in the scrub. I imagine the person behind the mobile home door — an old man, tall and lanky, deeply wrinkled who talks to himself to remind him what the human voice sounds like. Or maybe he gets his dose of humanity from talk radio. He is startled, and then suspicious, of anyone approaching and greets them at the door before they can knock.
It is an unforgiving isolation out here, alone to figure out how to fix the water pump or the stuck window. Far away from humanity yet sleeping with a gun for protection.
A man behind me in line has a bottle of Jack Daniels and a ham sandwich wrapped in cellophane. It is 10 a.m.
We pull into a gas station, two mechanics are leaning on a garage door frame, the wind rustling their overalls at the knees. I get out of the car and stretch. The sun is warm between snatches of wind. The men watch. I walk past to the convenience store. One of the men takes a last drag and tosses a cigarette butt onto the ground with a flick of his finger. The door of the convenience store is heavy and I have to pull it twice to open it. Inside is dark, utilitarian. Metal shelves with cat food next to motor oil next to taco shells folded like napkin holders. I buy a granola bar and a Diet Coke. A man behind me in line has a bottle of Jack Daniels and a ham sandwich wrapped in cellophane. He buys it without a word exchanged. He walks out — tinkle goes the door — to his light-blue 1970s Ford pickup truck. It is not yet 10:00 a.m.
We enter Palm Springs from the east like the Donner Party would have welcomed spring.
Hours later we pass under an old-school “Welcome to California” sign above the toll booths, and I feel like a kid in the backseat of the family Oldsmobile circa 1964 enroute to a new life in sun-baked land of opportunity.
We enter Palm Springs from the east like the Donner Party would have welcomed spring. Its optimism is contagious, this time capsule to a cheerier, more optimistic time, a time of big cars and wide roads, of low slung rooms with low-slung furniture all airiness and light, of swimming pools and tiki bars, of gin martinis and thick steaks on the grill. This oasis in the desert instantly banishes the relentless isolation and hardscrabble towns and lonely trailers that are now in our rearview mirror. The cowboy, the rugged individualist, the gold miner, the iconoclast, the manifesto writer — alienation and individualism wrapped up as an icon — gone. That uniquely American adulation of alienation, the freedom from social obligation that severance and distance allow. Gone. Instead, California! The hopeful, sun-soaked America of the mid-century.
We wear plaid. We grill steaks. We live, in other words, like midcentury Americans.
“My people!” I cry as I roll down the window. We settle in, giddy and relieved from 21st century concerns. We spend our days baking in the midday sun by the kidney shaped pool and putting green or we drive around looking for parking spots so we can sip an iced latte on a back patio of a downtown store. We play tennis and take a “spa” every night at 6:00 with a cocktail in the hot tub. I make a mousse from the lemons on the tree. We wear plaid pastels. We grill steaks. We live, in other words, like midcentury Americans. The town is such a time capsule that a sighting of a person in cargo shorts, a ball cap, and an iPhone creates a moment of cognitive dissonance.
But of course it is a myth. Like the man in the isolated desert trailer, we cannot escape from the world of our own era. We cannot retreat to our tribes. We cannot abandon our realities. The midsection of the country we crossed — the pregnant Perkins waitress, the shuttered businesses, the abandoned homesteads, the empty parking lots, the Jack Daniels breakfast — cannot be conveniently ignored with a gin martini in hand.
But of course it is a myth. Like the man in the isolated desert trailer, we cannot escape from the world of our own era.
The next day in a midcentury design shop at the north end of town, I stare at the sad redo of the famous Slim Aaron’s 1970s photo “Poolside Gossip.” The photo captures the essence of Palm Springs in garish technicolor, two ladies in bouffant hair and midriff tops lounging poolside circa 1972. The photographer has recreated the scene with the same women, but who are now in their 70s. The glamourous girls poolside in white lace midriffs and mod orange velour of the 1970s are now posed in sensible pantsuits (though the same bouffant hair), with the deep wrinkles of a life in the desert sun. One of the women died shortly after the photo was taken, the store owner tells me. It is time to leave. Nostalgia is too dangerous, a backward-gazing analgesic for the timid.
