The Road to Olympia, Part 6: Love Me, I'm a Liberal

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

During my drive to Las Vegas, the Veteran’s Memorial Highway brought me through a handful of Indian Reservations.  I’m not particularly educated on the state of Indian-Government relations but I’ve read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I’m a fan of Ward Churchill so I have at least a baseline understanding of the savage, locker-room rogering that was Manifest Destiny.  All the same, actually seeing the Godless stretches of sun-withered rock that the government assigned to its defeated enemy really drives the point home in a way that books can’t.

Though I know full well that the Indian people had no voice in the decision I imagine that the U.S. Government, having thoroughly won the American Indian Wars, called forth a representative from the surviving tribes when it was time to assign living space:

U.S. Government:  That is some lovely property you all were living on, wasn’t it?

Indian Representative:  Yes, that is why we liked living there.

U.S. Government:  Well, we need it

Indian Representative:  For what?!

U.S. Government:  Stuff.

Indian Representative:  What stuff?

U.S. Government:  Jamba Juices, hockey rinks, hot dog stands.  White people stuff.

Indian Representative:  But what about us?

U.S. Government:  That’s what I wanted to talk to you about!  Using the most scientific methods currently available we have located the absolute worst parcels of sandblasted hell in America

Indian Representative: Why?

U.S.G: Because we want to give them to you!

Indian Representative: I’m sorry?

U.S.G.:  So you can live there, silly!  All of you.  Bring sunscreen.

Indian Representative: I have a few reservations about this.

U.S.G.:  Great!  That’s what we’ll call them.  Now get out of here you crazy kid.  Remember what I said about sunscreen.

Indian Representative: But I don’t…is that a shotgun?
U.S.G.:  I said get

Since NPR liked to disappear on me whenever I got interested in a subject, thoughts like this were all I had to keep me company.  I’d given up on country radio after hearing Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw” three days running.  It’s a catchy song and I’m not particularly sensitive but every time I heard “You can find me in my wigwam /I’ll be beatin’ on my tom-tom / Pull out the pipe and smoke you some / Hey and pass it around” I wanted to throw up.

A mild diversion came when I saw a sign advertising a Wildlife Viewing Area.  The last several hours of driving had brought me endless vistas of windswept hardpan and I was a little sceptical as whether any wildlife not existing solely at the microscopic level could possibly thrive here.  A tour guide would have to be a Zoloft-popping mixture of cock-eyed optimist and Spalding Grey to sell that particular Wildlife Viewing Experience:

“Here in front of us we have some rocks, heavy ones by the look of them.  To our left if you look closely you can see more rocks, one of which looks like an anvil.  Oh!  Look!  Just over there I thought I saw…no, no…that was a rock too.  Isn’t this fun?  Who else could go for a Jamba Juice?”

Night had fallen by the time I got close to Vegas and traffic had fallen off to almost nothing.  As Highway 95 slipped by beneath the moonlight I had a look at the map and realized I was driving parallel to Department of Defense land.  Then it hit me – this wasn’t just any DoD land – this was the Nevada Test Site, formerly Nevada Proving Ground, one of two nuclear testing sites used by America during the Cold War.  Hey, I read books.

From 1951-1992 over 1,000 nuclear devices were tested on-site, often resulting in fallout that insisted on ruining the day (and genetic material) of anyone who happened to be downwind.  These blessed souls are cheerfully called “Downwinders” by those who take an interest in the subject – I imagine this is because “Boy Howdy, You Are Boned-ers” is too much of a buzzkill.  Over the years there were a number of settlements paid out by the government although the official figures are apparently well-hidden.

Scenes from The Hills Have Eyes came flooding into my head and in desperation I reached for the radio.  Even “Indian Outlaw” was better than that.

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

The Road to Olympia, Part 5: Like a Bat Out of Hell

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones.

The last thing I did before leaving for Nevada the next day was wash my car.It’s not that I thought it was going to stay clean on the drive to Winnemucca but I wanted to make sure I washed off every trace of John Day before advancing further. I was going to burn my laundry too but my car has suffered enough without the added indignity of coming into contact with my bare ass.

See you in Hell

Fittingly, the car wash was the second worst I’ve come across. The soap smelled like the chemical development team had started off aiming for “lilac” but given up somewhere around “How long has this sandwich been behind the radiator?” It did the job but only after the investment of six dollars and about a dozen passes with what may be the western world’s feeblest foaming brush. 

I hit the highway at speeds that would have made the protagonist from Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” look like he was driving a float in the Tournament of Roses Parade.  Trees, mailboxes and hitchhikers whizzed past as I desperately tried to out run whatever white trash Wendigo haunts that town.

This haste was to blame for the lives I took – for my becoming a murderer.  A mass murderer, really. In my defense it’s hardly my fault – these hapless victims should have known better than to wander directly into the path of a man recklessly fleeing a Mayberry so awful that Andy Griffith would have eaten Opie at birth as an act of mercy.

The victims in question were hundreds of small white butterflies that swarmed the road at several points in the Malheur National Forest. At first I thought there were tiny balls of fluff bouncing off my windshield, then I looked closely and noticed they had wings. 

I do not know how many of them I killed but should there ever come a day when butterflies rule the earth I will be the first against the wall.

Crossing into Nevada was a relief – not only was I able to put Oregon’s weak-kneed speed limits behind me but I was pretty sure that the Wendigo’s house-arrest anklet would stop him from crossing state lines. 

I have no more affection for the desert than I do any other climate that will kill you without taking the slightest notice but I concede that it has a grandeur all it’s own with jagged outcroppings of rock silhouetted against the sky and the way shadows of clouds lay across the mountains like drop cloths.

It’s not all grand, of course.  Much of it is, as my Saskatchewan-born grandfather once said of his own home, “as flat as piss on a plate”, and driving through it can become wearing over several hours.  At one point the boredom became so acute I found myself listening to finance shill Dave Ramsey‘s radio show and being deeply concerned about the fate of those calling in.  I actually teared up after one caller confessed that her husband was adamant about keeping their new truck, even though the prohibitive monthly payment meant they would lose the house they currently shared with their children.

The shedding of a tear not related to immediate physical injury or the loss of a sporting contest shocked me out of my stupor and I snapped off the radio. To reclaim my masculinity I turned up the CD player and sang along to “Sylvia’s Mother” until I arrived in Winnemucca.  Before you talk smack about Dr. Hook all I have to say is this – there is nothing more distinctly male than trying to talk your way past a woman’s mother.  

My hotel room at Winner’s Casino would have been unremarkable under normal circumstances but after the Little Pine Inn it felt like the Taj Mahal - ”I can walk around in my bare feet?  I don’t need to sleep in my clothes?  I have arrived in life.”

And in rarefied company no less

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

The Road to Olympia, Part 4: Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Reading is for suckers.  Click "play" on the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

It was late afternoon by the time I arrived in John Day, Oregon via highway 395. The light had taken on a beautiful golden tint you sometimes see at the end of the day – the kind that can make a garbage dump look like Venice in the spring.

395 turns into John Day’s main street, with most of downtown lining either side. Signs welcoming home 3 local boys from their tours of duty in Afghanistan were up in every window and there were yellow ribbons around the trees. Unlike Fox and Dale, two down-at-heel hamlets I’d passed through earlier in the day, John Day, seemed like a pleasant, welcoming example of Small Town America.

The first crack in that facade came when I pulled into my motel, the Little Pine

Looks nice, right?

Inn at the far end of downtown. On the outside it looked no worse than anywhere else I’ve ever stayed. Sure, the rough-looking woman who checked me in had a voice like Captain Beefheart and the only other guest was a bearded man who claimed to live in the mountains but I wrote it all off as part of being in a blue collar town well off the beaten track. Then I saw my room.

Where is your God now?

“Lived in” is one way to describe it, “I expected to find Bob Crane’s tenderized corpse in the bathroom” is another. The brown shag carpet was long enough to hide a marijuana grow-op from passing helicopters, several of the lights didn’t work and everything was covered in what is best described as a thin film made up of equal parts dirt and neglect. When I looked in the bathroom what I saw made me wish I’d found Hogan’s moldering corpse instead. Radiating out from the toilet’s base was a thick ring of accumulated dirt (I refuse to believe it was anything more) and nothing, from the sink to the shower stall, was quite what I’d call clean.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!"

After dropping my luggage and vigorously washing my hands I set off down Main Street to find dinner. The sun was now almost fully set save for a pink band where the mountains met the sky. The downtown that had, not two hours before, felt like a living advertisement for war bonds now felt like a small seaside town an in H.P. Lovecraft story right before something tentacled rose from the sea and caused everyone to require fresh underpants.

The Mayberry facade cracked and fell apart when I noticed that in many of the windows – right next to the signs welcoming home John Day’s troops – was another sign forbidding entry to anyone displaying neo-Nazi apparel or tattoos. They warned that in the eyes of the community everyone was created equal and hate would not be tolerated. Suddenly I regretted shaving my head before leaving home.

Just then, as if to drive the point home, a scrawny twenty-something with a shaved head and swastika tattoo on his bicep rode past on a bicycle. I guessed John Day, like a lot of towns that have seen better days, was having a hard time keeping its young men occupied when work ran thin.

Dinner was beer and pizza in the Dirty Shame Saloon, not far from the motel.

And I'm pretty sure the pizza
gave me food poisoning.

It was your typical small-town watering hole where the menu incorporates the entire nutritional pyramid (pizza, hamburgers, chicken, deep-fried) and the locals eye you up as you walk in.

Ever paranoid I sat with my back to the wall and ate while a fat woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt sang along with the jukebox.  To distract myself I set my mind to figuring out whether the mullet-sporting person who kind of looked like Meat Loaf in the video for “I’d Do Anything For Love” and was stood at the far end of the bar was a woman or a man.  After 20 minutes I failed to come away with an answer.  

When Aretha was done at the jukebox I could suddenly hear a group of middle-aged tourists at a nearby table discussing “The Celestine Prophecy”, a 1993 novel full of New-Age hooey.  The conversation was more literate than I was expecting, given that the book has less intellectual value than “Go Dog Go”.  Then one of the participants said, “I’d rather read a list of quotes than an entire book” & I realized I wasn’t listening to people, I was listening to organic tape recorders.

Then I heard “Where love rules there is no will to power” and decided it was a good time to head back to the motel.

Where I was murdered. The way my stomach feels right now I only wish I was joking.

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal