The week
between Christmas and New Year’s, I
mostly burn fossil fuel at speeds in
excess of a mile a minute. Truths
are gathered, the
most
obvious being that if anything can go
wrong, it will and there’s nothing you can
do about it so you might as well just kick
back, listen to the Dixie Chicks and eat
chocolate. Second to the first is
that construction is the rule, not the
exception. The cure for the orange
barrel blues is, again, chocolate and the
Chicks. Not even noon, and I unwrap
my first of the day. But I’m only
going to have one. Really.
Besides, this chocolate has
raspberry-filling and therefore, with a
cup of coffee, gives me three of my fruits
and vegetables for the day. (Hey,
good nutrition is important, and coffee
and chocolate are both made from beans...
)
Turning my
back on Illinois, I cross the big river
past St. Louis’ famous arch and into the
west where radio stations start with K
instead of W.
Years ago, I
traveled with my parents at an age when,
for some reason, I knew that stations
west of the Mississippi began with K but
had no clue as to the likely range of a
station. Further, I didn’t realize
that “campgrounds” was spelled with a K.
Why would I? Throughout the trip,
across the Dakotas and Wyoming into
Colorado, Utah and back east via Kansas
et. al., I saw signs for KOA.
“Must be some really popular radio
station,” I recall thinking, perhaps
some out-west version of the powerhouse
CKLW from Windsor, Ontario that
dominated my then top-40 soundtrack.
Not long into
Missouri where, by the way, not only do
radio stations start with K but many state
roads have letters instead of numbers, I
note gas prices are lower, and the speed
limit higher than in Illinois. On I
go. Big wheels keep on turnin’,
petrol keeps on burnin’, rollin’ on the
freeway into Oklahoma, where the speed
limit goes up another notch and gas prices
take another drop. Thus the pattern
emerges of an inverse correlation between
speed
limits and gas prices. Get out here
in the spacious places, and people are
going farther faster for less. I
can’t extrapolate my formula to, say, New
England or even Idaho, but it held for the
lower heartland.
On a radio
station that starts with K, I listen to
classical music hosted by Jeff Esworthy,
the Jeff I know from his days in Kent,
Ohio to be an aficionado of off-color
jokes and flat-out the best old-time
fiddler I’ve ever played with, the Jeff I
know is now in Minnesota, not in Oklahoma.
It’s the NPR version of
local-radio-that-really-isn’t.
The banks of
this river of road turn red.
Farmland morphs into rangeland. I
see horses, llamas, miniature donkeys and
bison, but mostly cattle, massive
rectilinear blocks of beef, mighty hunks
of Black Angus cholesterol on the hoof.
Which brings me to the 72-ounce steak.
I’ve seen
numerous billboards announcing “Free 72 oz
Steak!” That’s four and a half
pounds of meat, people. I wonder
briefly who would even want such a thing
and drift idly into wondering what part of
the animal yields a steak that size.
I never learn the answer to the second
question but get at least one answer to
the first. Days later, eating
breakfast at the 49er Diner in Death
Valley National Park, I listen in on the
next table where a perfectly
normal-appearing woman is telling her
granddaughters about having ordered a free
72-oz steak. (Of course I eavesdrop
– that’s what you do when you eat out
alone.) She tells the story so well,
I don’t even have to admit I’m
eavesdropping by asking her questions to
fill in the details. The deal is,
it’s free only if you eat it all within an
hour. And you have to eat not just
the steak, she tells them, but the bread,
the vegetables and the mashed potatoes
that come with it. Her 72-oz steak
experience was in Hawaii, not along
Interstate-40, yet another example of the
cult of bigness rampant in the land.
Oklahoma
lays claim to the world’s largest
McDonalds, a record I always thought
belonged to Beijing, but what do I know?
I pass (thank goodness) the exit for the
“World’s largest Precious Moments gift
shop” in Missouri somewhere. At Exit
112 of I-40 in Groom, Texas, is the
proclaimed largest cross in the western
hemisphere. This one leaves me
scratching my head. Earlier, I
passed the cross planted near the I-57 and
I-70 split in Effingham, Illinois, which
I’m pretty sure is in the western
hemisphere.
No claims are
made for Illinois' cross, but
Midwesterners are more modest than Texans
by state law, I believe. The
Illinois cross not only looks as large as
the Texas one, they both appear to have
been made by the same metal fabricator.
The former is 198 feet tall, the latter is
listed as “19 stories high.” Since I
don’t know the formula for converting
stories to feet to stories, I’ll let you
do the math. I’m going to go drive
some more.
