On the Road with Rolo

I drove all the way from Salina, Kansas, to Aurora, Illinois, without getting on the interstate. I quickly realized the appeal of what writer William Least Heat-Moon calls the blue highways because they were that color on old highway maps: the act of driving itself is more enjoyable, I can focus on my surroundings instead of the tail lights ahead of me, when I stop for gas or to get a snack it’s at a local place where the other customers are locals instead of all those passing through on the interstate, I get to pass right through the heart of old towns instead of bypassing them entirely. I’ve seen lively towns, near-ghost towns, attractive towns, not so charming towns… As Heat-Moon puts it in Blue Highways, “I turned south onto state 4… after that the 42, 500 miles of straight and wide could lead to hell for all I cared; I was going to stay on the three million miles of bent and narrow rural American two-lane, the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs, backwaters, jerkwaters, the wide-spots-in-the-road, the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns. Into those places where you say, ‘My god! What if you lived here!’ The Middle of Nowhere.”

I crossed the Missouri River at a spot near where Lewis and Clark passed, and then traversed southern Iowa on highway 2, passing newly plowed fields of deep-brown soil, freshly painted red barns, buildings in shocking states of falling apart and caving in on themselves, charming old farmhouses and one-house suburban dreams with no urbanity within sight, cows, pigs, sheep, horses, and an alarming amount of roadkill. Somewhere along the way I took a detour two blocks to the north to see the world’s largest courthouse square–nice, but probably not worth more than a five-mile detour, if you happen to be in the neighborhood like I was. I tried to find a scenic route–one of the roads marked with green dots in my Rand McNally atlas–in eastern Iowa and either couldn’t find it or did find it, but decided Rolo doesn’t do dirt roads, and turned around, back to trusty highway 2. I spent the night at a Super 8 in Burlington, Iowa, right along the Mississippi, where I made up for the sleep I lost the night before, tossing and turning on the floor in Kansas.

The next morning, I couldn’t leave town without checking out Snake Alley, which Ripley’s Believe It or Not calls the “crookedest street in the world.” It’s paved with bricks laid on end to give the horses better footing, giving it a nice effect. Not as scenic as Lombard Street in San Francisco, but Ripley’s might be right–this does seem to have more turns in a smaller stretch than Lombard. After admiring the mighty Mississippi from the Iowa side, I crossed the river and picked up the Great River Road, following one of the routes mapped out in a book I edited, Road Trip USA. Unfortunately much of the drive doesn’t actually parallel the river, so that was a little disappointing. To follow those magical green dots, I crossed the river three times that day, getting the best views just north of Muscatine, Iowa. I arrived in Rock Island, Illinois, on May 1 just as the immigrant-rights folks were marching across the bridge to Iowa. I lunched at the Blue Cat Brewpub, where I enjoyed a “regional favorite:” pot roast smothered in melted cheddar cheese and carmelized onions, with mashed potatoes and red beans on the side, and an Off the Rail Pale Ale to wash it all down. It was fabulous–my mouth’s watering just thinking about it! A few hours from Rock Island the “blue highway” became more urban and less interesting, and I finally hopped on the interstate to Chicago around Aurora, where I passed through another immigrant-rights rally just winding up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.