Desolate

Between Michael and I we had three cars, and when a squirrel made a home in the one parked on the street and chewed through the wiring causing a tow to the repair shop, we decided that one of those cars needed to go. Mallory was driving a seventeen year old Honda and so I offered her my much newer Honda Fit. Will, who had already made plans to visit his sister, offered to drive the car out to her. Not one to be left out of a road trip I decided to tag along, and on a Saturday morning in early May we hit the highway.

Like all the road trips I’ve taken, I appointed myself Deputy of Snacks and loaded up at QuikTrip. The guy behind me said he approved of my choices and wanted to go wherever I was going. I told him I was headed to Los Angeles, he said he was from LA, and as we were discussing the route we were taking the guy behind him overheard and said he was from Pasadena. I was in the middle of the country in the middle of a reunion of West Coasters which I took as a very good omen.

Will mapped things out and had lofty goals. Our first stop for the night was going to be in Albequrque which was twelve hours away. We made our way south through the small farming communities of Kansas where we stopped and ate lunch at a local diner. Nearly everyone around us had ordered a burger and we followed suit. There we were in the corn and wheat fields of the Midwest in a gathering place that was likely the host of every event for miles around – wedding receptions to Kiwanis Club meetings to post-funeral luncheons. I found it both endearing and a little sad.

After that we traveled briefly through Oklahoma and Texas and then a long haul through New Mexico. Will had picked our next stopping point and when dinner rolled around we exited the highway. Part of this town’s claim to fame was being on Route 66 but its heyday seemed to have evaporated. We drove from one dilapidated area to another – every home with peeling paint, rusted cars in front, garbage and unused bicycles laying next to the road. After thirty minutes of driving without many options we found a place to eat though neither of us were excited about it. Mostly staffed with younger adults, I wondered if this was as good of a job you can get in a town like that. On our way back to the highway we passed a young couple walking their baby in a stroller past a park. The park was a bed of gravel that consisted of two swings, a metal climbing gym, and not a single tree to shade it. One can only imagine how hot that metal got in the New Mexico summer. We never saw a hospital, a school, a library, a doctor’s office, a church, police or fire department, even the ubiquitous mattress stores that are in every direction where I live. Every motel and restaurant along Route 66 were abandoned. There were more closed businesses than open. Like the small towns we had passed all day, Dollar General was the grocery store, Wal-Mart, hardware store, and Walgreens combined.

The following day we ended up in a different but equally depressed town for lunch – a place that claimed to have the best food in town plus antiques. The antiques were mostly old bikes that were covered in dust and likely hadn’t been touched, moved, or sold in years. The restaurant was half a dozen wood tables and chairs and two women taking orders and running food back and forth. When we went to pay the credit card machine was causing problems and they offered to get so-and-so on the line to walk them through it but I had cash and so we paid and left. The sky was foreboding and the wind was picking up when we walked outside and by the time we made it to the gas station we were in the middle of a dust storm. Though short-lived, it might have been the single most scary weather event I’ve ever experienced and a fitting farewell to New Mexico.

That trip was two months ago, and I think about those towns every day. I think about how impossible it must be to leave because that takes money and a U-Haul and a security deposit and how can you possibly save for that? I think about having a kid who’s autistic or dyslexic and what kinds of services they need and don’t get. I think about an appendix that bursts or a car that breaks down or needing a lawyer and none of those services are either close by or free. I think about how drugs can come in through the back door of any small town and infiltrate it to the point of collapse because when there is no hope you escape in whatever way you can.

I’ve taken many road trips over the years and seen so many towns like that but they never included watching a sweet, young couple pushing their baby in a stroller against the backdrop of a colorless landscape. They were chatting the whole time they were walking and I wondered what hopes and dreams they had for their young family. But this country, this land of opportunity, decided this week that it should wrap its hands around the ankles of those young parents who had the misfortune of being born in a lousy zip code and put them on notice that they will have to work ten times harder to stay afloat. And while all eyes are turned towards those stunning New Mexico sunsets, nobody notices those same hands are reaching inside their stroller and snatching their baby’s future.