On The Road

[More stuff from the 'writing with my students this summer' file. Also very rough drafty.]

The road from Tucson to New Orleans pretends the north does not exist. In Summer, 1999, a month before my wedding, I drove that road. Alone in my Ford Ranger pick-up, royal blue, I made my way across Interstate 10. Browns, grays. Saguaro cactus, tumbleweed. After the lights of Tucson fade, a dry expanse. Cars and trucks on 10 are salty pumpkin seeds, dryingon a cookie sheet in a low oven.

Semis cut through the one-hundred-and-ten degrees as Arizona becomes New Mexico. Still no cities. Over-priced gas. The radio scan button on continuous loop becase of no F.M. stations until El Paso. Finally a city. I-10 sits on al elevated plain through town, overlooking a valley, border at the bottom. Unadorned chainlink fence separates El Paso, USA, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

A roadside stand. Three tacos and a bottle of water. Back on the road, a station from Juarez plays mariachi music, the only genre loud and brash enough to cut the heat. Trumpets, violins, a guittaron. Guantanamera.

Eastbound for hours and hours. Still not halfway through Texas. No fast-food joints. Ghost town gas stations with names I’ve never heard. No chains or franchises here. Barbecue brisket for dinner at a convenience store that sells live bait even though there’s no water for miles. Brisket comes on a styrofoam plate dripping with a maroon-colored sauce, part spicy, part sweet, all Texas. Speckles of peppercorns map that sauce and the tangy scent gets into your sinuses before the first, sitting-on-the-tailgate bite.

The sun is setting but the digital thermometer advertising a local feedstore still registers in the triple digits. I’ve driven nearly one-thousand miles since my 5:00 a.m. Tucson departure but I know I’ve got another hundred in me. Another hundred before I find a sign that simply says “Hotel.” No name except “Hotel.” It’s dusty. No cars in the lot. Not as bad as a place in Tucson called the “No Tell Mo-Tel,” with flexible hourly and weekly rates. But bad. I wake the proprietor with the night buzzer and pay with cash. Fill a pocket with Saltine packets from the counter.

Next morning I realize that West Texas somewhere, somehow, at some point became East-Central Texas. What’s the difference? One word: humidity. I’m on the road at 10:00 a.m. and now I’m sweating. And there’s some—not a lot—but some grass along the interstate.

More trucks. More higway. Day two miles click off at a slower clip. It’s a law. But I did well over half the trip on day one. Cruise control. Still water in ditches. The southwest is behind me, the bayou in front. Truck-stop salad and ice cream for lunch. I pace a semi with Louisiana plates for at least three hours, thankful the moist sun’s not as bright as the Tucson sun.

I find a radio station playing hip hop. Good stuff, too: Wu-Tang Clan, Tupac, an old Digable Planets song, some Spanish-language rap I’ve never heard before. I imagine Texas kids, living hours away from Dallas or Houston or Baton Rouge, worlds away from L.A. or Detroit or Brooklyn listening to gangsta rap in trucks, bedrooms, basements.

Welcome to Louisiana. Bridges over swamps where I look for alligators. The bayous form raodways like in Venice and primitive fishing boats dot the murky waters. Cloistered communities. Creole families whose language, food, religious, lifestyle mixes four or five eighteenth century cultures into one jumbalaya.

I’m hungry but I push through Baton Rouge where every car sports an LSU bumper sticker or license plate holder or both. Long humid stretch from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, but I can already taste beignets and muddy black coffee from the French Quarter. Already I’m bumping into drunk businessmen, spilling their hurricanes and slurring their “excuse me”s. I’m already smelling musky incense from Santeria shops. I can hear zydeco folk songs. All on that last stretch of I-10.

I’m only fifteen minutes from Versailles, the Eastside Vietnamese quarter, my final destination, when I see the ‘New Orleans City Limit’ sign but I exit 10 anyway. Two days in the car. A shower and bed await in Versailles. But I exit I-10 for one final round of freeway food. Oyster po’boy, dressed: hard French roll, soft in the middle, lots of salty oysters, deep fried, lettuce, tomato, pickle, mayo. Goodbye, Tucson. Hello, N’awlins.