Roads

Driving America's Great Highways

Larry McMurtry

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439129012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As he crisscrosses America—driving in search of the present, the past, and himself—Larry McMurtry shares his fascination with this nation's great trails and the culture that has developed around them. Ever since he was a boy growing up in Texas only a mile from Highway 281, Larry McMurtry has felt the pull of the road. His town was thoroughly landlocked, making the highway his "river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book."In Roads, McMurtry embarks on a cross-country trip where his route is also his destination. As he drives, McMurtry reminisces about the places he's seen, the people he's met, and the books he's read, including more than 3, 000 books about travel. He explains why watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show might be the best way to find joie de vivre in Minnesota; the scenic differences between Route 35 and I-801; which vigilantes lived in Montana and which hailed from Idaho; and the histories of Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, and Custer that still haunt Route 2 today.As it makes its way from South Florida to North Dakota, from eastern Long Island to Oregon, Roads is travel writing at its best.

JUNE

The 75 from Tampa to Miami. U.S. 1 Through the
Florida Keys. The 41 West to Naples

THE FLORIDA KEYS, modest pods of earth protruding from a green sea, with U.S. 1 superimposed upon them, would certainly seem to validate my theory that littorals produce a gentle but distinctive seediness. The Keys constitute a kind of double littoral, the Atlantic on one side, the Gulf on the other. The little communities spread over these pods of earth provide more than enough seed to satisfy even the greediest eye.

My personal favorite is Key Largo—few communities its size can boast as many bright yellow buildings. The Banana Hill Center for the Healing Arts is perhaps the most vivid of these, though Flea Largo (an antique shop) is also splendid. For those who prefer pink buildings there’s the Pink Juntique (another antique shop) just down the road. Opportunities to heal body, spirit, and mind—assuming these can be kept distinct—abound. Besides the Banana Hill Center, Key Largo offers several massage therapists and a European psychic; nearby Islamorada boasts a mentalist.

Deep in the mind’s eye, as one drives past these brilliantly colored establishments, are black-and-white memories of the young Lauren Bacall and the not so young Humphrey Bogart. They made Key Largo together in 1948.

The drive down the Keys, from Key Largo at the north end to Key West at the south, is a good place to start thinking about oceans. Two are frequently visible from U.S. 1. Plains of water stretch away both left and right. But lots of people live in the Keys, and lots more visit—the 125-mile drive down the 1 is apt to be a slow experience. Once in a while a drawbridge has to be waited out. The farther south I go the more varicolored the sea becomes. Here and there one sees patches of vivid green, as distinct as farm plots in Iowa, though elsewhere the sea is gray, metallic, or blue; in part these variations result from the ever changing light.

When I had tried to come down the 75 earlier in the year, the Everglades had been burning, so I waited. To reach the Keys I flew to Tampa and crossed the state on the southern end of the 75. The Everglades were no longer aflame—I wanted to pass as close to them as I could. All across the state the roadside foliage was verdant and bright, a medley of deep greens. Stopping at one point to relieve myself I found I could have used a machete, just to get deep enough in the foliage to be out of sight of the road. The plants in their millions didn’t welcome invaders—not even momentary invaders. From Tampa this kingdom of plants extends south more than two hundred miles. Highway 75, the Everglades Parkway, is also known as Alligator Alley, though the actual alligators have been expensively fenced off the road.

The question that rose to mind as I studied this fortress of palmetto is why Ponce de León, or Narváez, or de Soto or any of the European explorers bothered to hack their way onto this peninsula. Surely they could not have supposed for long that the treasures of the Orient were hidden in these marshes. But they came and kept coming, determined in their greed to have this new continent even if there didn’t immediately seem to be much in it worth wanting. They rooted out the native peoples and pressed on. Soon I was passing through the Miccosukee Reservation—the Miccosukees are now the proud owners of a new casino. They are also deeply involved in the rapidly intensifying debate over how to save the water-deprived Everglades. I feel, as I drive through the Big Cypress National Preserve, that I’m looking at a kind of low rain forest, where the natural dramas occur in the marsh rather than in the canopy.

Once past the Big Cypress, the marshy south Florida plain stretches away to the Atlantic—very beautiful. Twice, crossing bridges over small inlets as I proceed down into the Keys, I have to pull left in order to avoid rear-ending pelicans, which seem to claim the slow lane for themselves. Perhaps there are delicate thermals over the slow lane that motorists are unaware of—but the pelicans know.

In the lower Keys the brilliance of the foliage, so evident all across Florida, begins to bleach out, as if the sea and the winds have conspired to steal the nutrients that made the plants so bright. By the time one reaches Deer Key the scrub seems rather dingy. On this key the traffic is held to a strict forty-five miles an hour, in hopes of sparing the rare Key deer. A sign informs us that fifty-five Key deer have been killed by motorists already this year. We all inch along, but I see no Key deer.

As for fabled Key West itself, it might be a blessing if Disney just bought it—it’s essentially a theme park now anyway, and Disney would at least know how to manage the parking, which is, at present, a torture. Certain historic districts have been more or less roped off, in hopes that visitors will intuit from them the easygoing charm for which Key West was evidently once noted. This takes more intuition than I can summon; “easygoing” is the last adjective one would apply to Key West now.

Though my drives along America’s roads were not designed as pilgrimages to the homes of writers, I felt it would be churlish, since I was in Key West, not to see Hemingway’s house. I had looked at it once long before but had not gone inside. In northern Michigan I had been in the vicinity of the fishing camps of his youth—the Big Two-Hearted River country—so it seemed only fair to check out his place in Key West, from which he also did a good bit of fishing. I found the house, handed over $8, and took the tour, an experience that proved, on the whole, disquieting.

As a writer-bookman I’ve always been curious about writers’ libraries—what books they read, what books they keep, what books they don’t have. I have seen the library of Evelyn Waugh in the University of Texas at Austin; I’ve also, at the University of Tulsa, seen Edmund Wilson’s books, and Cyril Connolly’s. Hemingway read—he had a large library. There is a photograph of him standing on a small library ladder, arranging the books in his villa in Havana, La Finca Vigia. There are nine thousand books there; from the look of the shelves in that photograph they are good books, well arranged by their owner and principal reader.

But the books in the Hemingway house in Key West are mostly just moldy junk, shelf fillers, worthless books of the sort that can be gathered up at any Goodwill store. It’s hard to believe Hemingway had any hand in their selection. Though the house itself is gracious, well shaded, and spatially comfortable, the furniture and objets seem ill assembled, indifferently arranged, mediocre. It’s hard to imagine Ernest Hemingway being really comfortable in these rooms; there’s a stiffness here that’s a little off-putting. In the late twenties he first showed up here with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. There were two wives yet to come, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. Any of the three, I suppose, could have been responsible for the furniture in the Key West house, with its nightclub-era feel.

I didn’t want to engage with Miami on this trip—Miami, for me, is heavy work. I went back through the Keys and, once on the mainland, turned west on highway 41. My hope was to get a slightly more intimate look at the Everglades than had been possible along the 75. Highway 41 goes all the way across the peninsula, from the Atlantic at Miami to Naples on the Gulf. The largest town along this highway is Ochopee, and it is not a large town. An observation tower in the southern part of the Miccosukee Reservation does allow one to look deep into the Everglades—the vista over this immense, complex water world is beautiful, spooky, compelling. Saving the Everglades is going to be one of Vice President Gore’s principal concerns—we are sure to hear a lot about it in the 2000 presidential campaign.

I want the Everglades saved, and I want to know them better, but on this particular afternoon, I can’t quite get my mind off the Hemingway house in Key West. I had gone to it casually but left it puzzled and somewhat disquieted. It must be that I want to think of Hemingway’s taste as being the equal of his best prose—that would be, in the main, the prose written before he ever set foot in Key West, which he did, I now gather, at the urging of John Dos Passos.

In my view the furnishings in the Key West house, as it sits today, are more suggestive of Hemingway’s worst prose. As I drove across south Florida and finally turned north, toward Tampa, I began to wonder if I had invested more in Hemingway’s early excellence as a writer than I had realized. I hadn’t read him carefully in at least thirty years and had, in the main, avoided reading much about him, since much of what has been written about him makes him seem insufferable. Edmund Wilson mentions in his journals that Hemingway had become insufferable; and yet Wilson also records how shocked and saddened he was by Hemingway’s suicide, mentioning what a loss he felt, for Hemingway had been one of the writers most important to Wilson’s generation.

I was not exactly depressed by my visit to the Hemingway house—just disquieted. I chewed on this disquiet all the way across Florida and halfway up its length. The point may be that it’s always tricky to go near writers whose work you really like. They may turn out to have bad furniture, or tacky women, or both. I once was a prolific reviewer of contemporary fiction, always for newspapers. What I discovered early on was that it was much easier to be generous to the work if one kept free of any association with the man or woman who wrote it. I once met a well-known writer in an airport; he recognized me and immediately struck up a conversation about his favorite subject, himself. Though a jerk, an asshole, and a bore, he was, and he continued to be, an excellent writer; but from then on, I avoided reviewing him. I couldn’t forgive the books what I knew about their author.

The simplest analysis one can make about Florida is that its character, tone, flavor, ambiance is largely determined by one geographic fact—it’s a peninsula, with most of its population balanced on the coastal rim. The interior of the state is comparatively empty; Orlando is the only large or largish city not set on a beach, unless you count Gainesville, which essentially is just a college. Thus almost all Floridians are people of the littorals, which may explain why so few of the men bother with long pants, or even, for that matter, shirts. Though I was only in Florida for a day I saw as many deeply bronzed bodies as I would expect to see in Arizona in a week. The women of Florida—the specter of skin cancer no doubt on their minds—are a good deal more decorous than the men.

Back home, after my short trip down the south end of the 75, I felt that the trip had raised questions that it would be fun to investigate. Did Ponce de León really believe that the fountain of youth lay somewhere out in the pines and the palmetto, when he anchored off the northeast coast of Florida in 1513? He had come to the new world in 1493 and was soon hard at work putting down native rebellions in Puerto Rico and elsewhere. He was not simpleminded, but he may have been at least somewhat beguiled by the prospect of rejuvenation in a marvelous fountain; many unsimpleminded people with the same desire keep the fashionable spas of the world humming even now.

Also, I wanted to read Henry Adams again, on the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, in the hope of understanding just how it was that we wrested Florida from France, even though, at the time, it was still claimed by Spain. And I certainly intend to break my ban and read a bit about Hemingway. I want to find out which wife, if any wife, was responsible for the furniture in that gracious house on Whitehead Street, in Key West, Florida.

JULY

Washington, D.C., to Dallas
via the 66, 81, 40, and the 30

WHEN I RETURN to Washington now I feel as if I’m returning to the place where I lived before I died.

That I have this feeling, a powerful feeling, takes some explaining, in view of the fact that I’m alive, healthy, active, and to all appearances, living an enviable life, mostly in Texas. But the feeling I get—that I was living in Washington when I died—is too potent to ignore. What I mean by it is that I lived there before my heart surgery, which occurred on the second of December 1991, at which point I experienced—if I may be permitted an oxymoron—a death that wasn’t fatal: my body lived on but my personality died, or at least imploded, disintegrated, shattered into fragments. For the past eight years I’ve been struggling to collect and reassemble these drifting fragments of personality and I believe I have now reassembled most of them. They fit together a little crookedly still, but that’s only to be expected after one has been radically cut open.

I don’t intend to spend too much time on the mind-body ambiguities that this experience has exposed, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that I’m far from being the only person to experience personality death while continuing physical life. Victims of stroke very often survive physically but lose all trace of personality—that which, in their view and the view of their loved ones, made them uniquely them; and soldiers, after combat, too often feel that their souls have fled while their bodies continue to function.

Of the little drives I’ve made so far along America’s roads, this route from Washington to Archer City is the most clearly a retracing of an old, deep-worn, homeward path. During the twenty years in which I was mainly domiciled in Washington I drove this route at least three times a year, which means I’ve driven it about sixty times, often enough to have acquainted myself with virtually every gas station and convenience store along the way. Sometimes these drives had something of a utilitarian motive—I might be hauling books from the bookshop in Washington to the younger bookshop in Texas; but they were still, in the main, homing drives, long lopes down the highway that I took whenever I had had enough of the east.

As I prepared to drive those same overfamiliar roads again it occurred to me that my effort was obliquely Proustian, a retracing of my past that is analogous to the many rereadings I’ve done in the last few years, always of books I read before the surgery. In these rereadings and redrivings I’m searching, not for lost time, but for lost feelings, for the elements of my old personality that are still unaccounted for. I’m not anguished about these absentees, just curious and somewhat wistful. I don’t really expect my old personality to be waiting for me at a rest stop in Tennessee, or a Waffle House in Arkansas, but I am still listening for chords I haven’t heard in a while, wondering if a passage in a book or a place I once liked along the road will cause them to sound again.

I have not been in Washington much, since my operation. In the first years after surgery I didn’t know what had happened, or was happening, but I did know that I needed to be under western skies, bathed by western light. Personalitywise I was almost a blank. I had had my competitiveness removed, and a person without competitiveness has little chance in Washington, D.C., whose elite echelons—journalistic, legal, bureaucratic—comprise one of the most competitive social entities on earth. I realized I was in no shape for Washington, so I left, even though that meant deserting my bookselling partner, Marcia Carter; it also meant ceasing to have much part in the affairs of Booked Up, the exciting rare-book shop we had built up together over almost thirty years.

But I left—I couldn’t help it. When I did reconnect with the antiquarian book trade, almost five years later, I did so by shifting most of the general stock of Booked Up (that is, the cheap books) to Texas, where I could be a bookseller and yet be within the embrace of those skies.

I suspect that another factor in my current bittersweet response to Washington is the you-can’t-go-home-again problem, though in my case it’s not so much a matter of going home as merely going back. Washington never felt like home, but it was nevertheless a place where I worked effectively for some twenty years. Marcia Carter and I had great fun hustling rare books in the Washington of the seventies and eighties, when many of the substantial personal libraries of the capital were being broken up. The opportunity, which came to us almost as soon as we opened, to buy from the libraries of such legendary Washingtonians as Huntington Cairns, James M. Cain, David Bruce, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth was, to young booksellers, extremely exciting. The few antiquarian booksellers operating when we opened in 1971 were old and tired; for a few glorious years we had the libraries of the town almost to ourselves; we bought wonderful books, established an exceptional stock, had a great run.

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one’s youth. Pickings are still good in Washington, and Marcia is still there, picking them, but they are never likely to be quite as good as they were in our first years, which is perhaps what causes the you-can’t-go-back feeling to assail me when I land in Washington now.

David Streitfeld, for twenty years the preeminent interviewer of literary folk for the Washington Post, recently made me his five hundredth interviewee (Wilfred Thesiger was his 501st).

In his ruminations on my life and character David quotes some friend of mine as saying I was a good hater, a comment that produced indignation in the bosoms of a number of my friends, some of whom don’t consider me any sort of hater at all. In the course of arguing this point I realized that I once did hate something: that is, eastern privilege, or what Lyndon Johnson simply called “the Harvards.” In Texas the only Harvards I had known were one or two courteous old professors at Rice—I didn’t, at the time, know what the president meant. It was evident, even in Texas, that some people had money and some people didn’t, but I never really associated this disparity with class: out west there were only two classes, middle and working. The first thing Washington revealed to me was the existence of an American upper class, possessing qualities, opportunities, and privileges that I hadn’t realized existed. I had been blind to the existence of such a class, and such privileges, but I immediately realized why Lyndon Johnson and, later, Robert Dole hated and distrusted that class.

Johnson and Dole were, of course, politicians, but I was a novelist of manners, to whom social stratification is as vital as lifeblood. Much as I resented eastern privilege I immediately realized that it was teaching me something I needed to know: what would the novel of manners have been without the struggle between old money and new money? In Terms of Endearment, begun only a year or two after I moved east, my heroine Aurora Greenway is class proud enough to claim Boston ancestry, although she is really only from New Hav...