The Road

Joey and I drove many times across the eastern half of the United States.  Even now, when I think about road trips, he is my default partner, the Smith to my Jones, the Pancho to my Lefty.  As children and teenagers we rode and drove all over the place - up to Colorado, out to California, across the Midwest to Philadelphia and back home through Virginia and Tennessee.  We first visited Charlottesville, VA, where he would end up attending college, on an early road trip together.  We stopped there with our grandfather on our way back from a visit to the ancestral homeland of Doylesburg, PA, where we had gone for the dedication of a new headstone for an ancestor who had fought in the American Revolution.  In Charlottesville, we stayed in a run-down Knight's Inn done up halfheartedly in Arthurian decor - wall sconces, exposed beams, pointed arches - where I vowed (falsely, as it would turn out) to one day spend my honeymoon.  Later on that trip, at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in Tennessee, Grandpa caused a slight stir when he objected vociferously to the green beans that they tried to serve him.  Grandpa did not like green beans.

When we were both living on the east coast - Joey in DC and Virginia, I in Boston and Philly and Western Mass. - we frequently arranged to drive home for Christmas together.  We tried to vary our route each time.  Once we headed due west across upstate New York and the tip-tops of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, in order to reach Iowa, where we had never been.  It was on this trip that we both visited Michigan for the first time, scooting across the Indiana border to a little town called Sturgis, where we ate some atrocious Chinese buffet food before scooting back over to I-90.  It remains my sole experience of Michigan.  Later that day we were chased across the campus of the University of Notre Dame by a foul-tempered red squirrel, an event that began with some slightly perplexed trotting and ended with a full-bore sprint into the bookstore, where we remained until the coast was clear.  We ended that day with burgers and beers in a quiet pub in Iowa City, a town full of Christmas cheer but utterly devoid of people, all of the university students having left town.  We really liked Iowa City.

We both took great pride in knowing the principal routes to or from places on the east coast.  On the phone, we would often debate the merits of taking I-64 through Kentucky instead of I-81 through Virginia (the consensus was that I-64 was just as pretty and not nearly as crowded) or I-70 rather than I-80/90 through the Midwest.  We both agreed that I-40 - with its heavy truck traffic, frequent construction, and crumbling surfaces - was the worst road in the country (even if it was the one we most frequently traveled).  Underutilized federal highways, such as US-72 through northern Mississippi and Alabama, were among the best.  Whenever possible we tried to escape the interstates and take the scenic route, following the blue highways in order to see something other than guardrails and taillights.  Our bibles were the Roadfood books of Jane and Michael Stern and George Motz's hamburger book, although we gradually decided that the former were much more discerning than the latter.  Joey, a great completer of lists, was especially determined to visit as many places in these books as he could, once spending a couple of weeks rambling through Texas and adjacent states with his friend Patrick eating barbecue, burgers, and anything else the guides pointed them towards.

We went many places on these trips.  Elvis's birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi.  A barbecue festival in Huntsville, Alabama, which we stumbled upon by accident.  Louisville, where we ate large pancakes.  Kansas City, where again we ate barbecue.  The Pie Shop in Devalls Bluff, Arkansas, where the proprietress insisted (despite our firm denials) that we must be twins - it was the first time someone had made that remark since we were little boys and really did look like twins.  Milwaukee was butter burgers and frozen custard.  Minneapolis was pie shakes and cheese-stuffed burgers.  Madison was deep-fried cheese curds.  We once had something called a pigsickle in Clinton, Oklahoma, which was essentially a McDonald's McRib Sandwich, but one that almost certainly came from an actual pig.  This restaurant was called Jiggs, and it was full of pigs of a more metaphorical kind as well - that is, local law enforcement officers.  Joey always made a snorting sound (like a pig) when he spotted a cop setting a speed trap on the highway (a practice that I've also adopted, much to the embarrassment of my wife), but he did not snort at the pigs we saw at Jiggs.

We had other road rituals besides snorting at law officers.  When we crossed a state line we would raise our hands about halfway off our laps and give a small, high-pitched "woo-hoo" (neither of us being too demonstrative, this was about all the enthusiasm we could muster).  This also is a practice that I continue, one in which Kate is a more willing participant.  We also listened to music.  Often we would buy or burn new CDs in anticipation of an upcoming trip, or we would use the long interstate hours to share with one another new albums that we particularly liked.  We usually tried to match the music to our environment: in Minnesota we listened to the Replacements, in Wisconsin it was the Violent Femmes, south of Chicago it was Sufjan Stevens' "Come on Feel the Illinoise."  Bob Dylan could be reliably deployed in just about any landscape, as, indeed, could any number of the country/alt.country/Americana artists we loved: Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Uncle Tupelo, Townes Van Zandt, Terry Allen.

Recently, Tina and Patrick discovered a band called Frontier Ruckus that would almost certainly have been a a Joey band.  It has all the makings: a rustic sound (with banjo, saw, etc), vibrant and intelligent and evocative lyrics, and just enough left-of-centerness to distinguish them from a thousand other rootsy, folksy bands.  Here's a song of theirs that's pretty good:

I listened to this album twice recently, once on my drive home for Christmas (leaving Fort Smith, Arkansas, alone on a foggy morning) and once on the drive back to Nashville (hurtling east out of OKC with Kate by my side).  It was kind of like having Joey in the car.  Kind of.

This summer, before the accident, Joey was planning to swing through Nashville on his way home, where he planned to spend a few weeks.  I was going to join him for the drive, and we were contemplating a side trip up to Omaha, since we'd never been to Nebraska.  He had been to 40 states (I'm still at 39) and intended to hit them all before too much longer - I'm not sure what his deadline was, but I am sure he had one.  I've decided that it's up to me (and anybody else who wants to come along) to complete the list for him, and sometime in the next few years Kate and I are going to head out west (where most of his unvisited states are) and begin crossing them off.  It may not happen all at once, but it might.  We'll start with Nebraska, I think, and try to end up in Alaska.  So that it rhymes.  And we'll bring along his Snoopy doll, and a roadfood book or two, and a bunch of new music that we haven't ever heard before.