Elk City, Oklahoma — The coffee maker in the motel room malfunctioned, giving off a wispy curling smoke such as might be seen in a horror movie and stinking up the room in a way John Waters might appreciate. I’ve gone down to the lobby to get a cup of lobby coffee and have it here next to me. I have not yet drunk enough of it.
A huge storm came in the night. Around 2:00 a.m. I was awakened by thunder. There was that and the causal lightning and buckets of rain. It was after 3:00 before I got back to sleep, to dream of the Cadillac Ranch and the great Groom Cross, both of which are along Interstate 40 and both of which Owen and I saw yesterday in passing. At the Cadillac Ranch, the frontage road was clumped with the SUVs and pickup trucks of sightseers who had stopped to see the noted work of art, photos of which I had seen before and which is somewhat smaller in real life. As we passed the great Groom Cross, I saw no one and did not see the grounds with their array of bronze sculptures. While many poor could have been fed with the money it cost to erect a cross nearly 200 feet tall and fashion the accompanying structures, the poor will always be with us and would only have got hungry again so they will have to find some other way to get by.
There is also a leaning water tower in Groom, about which I did not dream.
The lobby telly says a cold front is coming. It is a barrier of stormy weather through which Owen and I will be motoring later today in the great yellow Penske rental. Time to finish the coffee, pack up, check out, and head out. Breakfast possibly in Oklahoma City.
These posts are such a treat. I feel as if I’m reliving my own migration, that long trek up through the desert behind an orange-and-silver U-haul, with the dust storms rising from the salt lake beds and turning all the taillights pink.
What are you and Owen listening to as you drive?
hi. i’m intending to post today’s update a little later, but to answer your question, we were swapping between his pandora and my cd’s until his aux cable failed this afternoon. he was treating me to murder by death and rush and something else that was like enigma, while i was treating him to mark knopfler and front 242 and something else that he put in after his aux cable failed and i don’t know what it was because he turned it down and that penske diesel is loud and i didn’t ask, i couldn’t hardly decently hear the stuff when it was turned up.