Chapter Thirty-Six
The Mother Road
As Zizi and Nick were seeing more of each other all the time, Victoria began to think more often about how long she intended to stay with her father. She had moved over to the boathouse, where Zizi had stayed the first night they met, and like Zizi, she felt like a guest there. The pressure to find a new job had disappeared with her new wealth, but she still didn’t know what to do with her life away from the paperboard mill, and her quest to find, or even to define “home,” was not satisfied by visiting her father. She loved her father, but her father’s place was an unhomelike home.
When Victoria was young, there were few family vacations or long road trips; Nick did not like crowds, and he had seen more than enough of the wide world during his military service. Victoria contemplated the possibility of getting away on a long trip--she had a car, cash, and lots of time. On the way back from their meeting with the lawyer in Grand Rapids, Zizi had playfully suggested Victoria go to Alaska. Victoria was an avid follower of Deadliest Catch, right from its first episode. Dutch Harbor seemed dangerous and romantic; she could almost feel the icy saltwater spray coming over the decks as she watched, and smell the fresh-caught King Crab in the holds. The crews seemed to live free and exhilarating lives, unlike her own. Perhaps a visit to a faraway place would help her find herself, pull her out of her self-imposed, flatline dullness. Maybe she would meet some handsome, bearded, crab-fishing Alaskan, someone like Scott Campbell, a.k.a. Junior, Captain of the Seabrooke on Deadliest Catch, who would sweep her off her feet, not take “no” for an answer, and let her join him in the wheelhouse, and live in a cabin by the sea, and watch large brown bears eat salmon in a nearby stream. So, as impulsively as she had uncharacteristically rented the pontoon boat to visit her father at Devil’s Elbow, Victoria decided to drive to the West Coast, catch a marine ferry to Alaska, and follow the Aleutian Chain to Dutch Harbor, a series of solo hops into the unknown. At the edge of her unhappiness, she felt a need to change her environment, her outer world, and perhaps turn her inner world inside out to a fuller expression of life, something bolder and braver. Her fear of change (so deep within her) still sat on her chest like an unattended marble headstone.
Always practical, Victoria mapped out a travel plan to cover parts of the country new to her, and this included most everywhere. She decided to drive Rt. 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, and then turn north to catch a marine ferry to Alaska in Bellingham, Washington. When she informed Nick of her plans, he was enthused for her and helped with her preparations. He suggested Victoria return from Alaska to Michigan on a different, more northerly route, so she could visit her older sister, Anne, in Montana. He bought her a Garmin GPS for the car. Zizi went shopping with her at a local outfitter, and she bought a raincoat with a hood, a windbreaker, sleeveless and long-sleeved tops, two sweaters, two bras, slacks, hiking boots, a floppy hat to protect her from the sun, bug spray, suntan lotion, a backpack, binoculars, and a digital camera. Victoria wanted to buy a fanny pack, but Zizi said, “no.” Zizi wanted her to buy sexy underpants, but Victoria said, “no.”
The day she embarked on her journey, Stretch came over for breakfast with Flash, and everyone gave her a cheerful send-off, except for Scratchy who had no interest in travel. Stretch supplied her with his homemade trail mix for the journey--Texas pecans covered with local maple syrup, both dark and light chocolate, and Michigan-grown dried fruit. She felt the cold metal of the eagle keyring as she turned on the ignition. This trip is for me and for you, Tom, she thought. By the end of the first day, she had connected with the beginning of Rt. 66, the Mother Road, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and stopped for lunch at a White Castle, eating her first sliders. The enormity of the city widened her eyes, and the traffic kept her alert and on the move.
Compared to her first response to the layoff at the mill, when she could hardly manage to change positions from the window to the chair to the bedroom, she was now in motion, at least physically; she was traveling down a rolling highway, the first two-lane Main Street of America. Whether or not her mind and heart would open to new possibilities and experience this odyssey as an adventure and opportunity for growth, remained to be seen.
The evening of the first day, Victoria managed to visit the Joliet Museum’s Route 66 Welcome Center where she purchased a white porcelain coffee mug emblazoned with the famous “Route 66” highway sign. Over the next seven days, Victoria took her time moving back and forth between the remnants of the highway’s two- and -four-lane roads, finding the original brick sections, stopping to see the classic fiberglas figures along the route: the iconic, humanoid Muffler Men, over twenty foot tall statues with a steely gaze, lantern jaws, broad shoulders, and big blocky shoes: Bunyan, the Gemini Giant holding his model rocket, Cowboy “Sam” with his Stetson, Dude Man, the Indian, the Gas Station Attendant, Golfer, and Hamburger Man. Victoria was absolutely dumbfounded by the sights along the road; she looked at them with the eyes of a young child; as if the objects along the road, many so old, so long-neglected, were new and erected just for her. Rather than run-down, Victoria viewed it all as beautiful and refreshing.
She had her picture taken sitting on two enormous rabbits at either end of the trip: one at Henry’s Rabbit Ranch in Staunton, Illinois, and the other at the Jack Rabbit Trading Post between the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest in Arizona. She photographed a 1932 gas station, world’s largest catsup bottle, a thirty-foot high Abraham Lincoln beside a wagon; ate lunch at the Cozy Dog Drive-In, visited the Pig Hip Museum, and found huge turkey tracks in the concrete on an abandoned strip of the original road. She loved driving by the classic drive-in theaters, and having chicken dinners at places like the Ariston Cafe, a 1930’s roadside diner in Litchfield, Illinois, a place whose sign reminded her of Mikage’s plan for her future restaurant. (The tag line under Ariston Cafe’s sign read: “Serving local patrons and international travelers)
Her zigzag journey and all the strange and colorful sights contrasted starkly with her life up to this point, a life represented more like a sequence of dots on an endless straight line leading eventually to death; other than the passing of her mother, a distant concept she could not fathom and chose not to think about too hard. Even though she followed dots on a map, the dots jumped up and down, turned her backwards at times; down bumpy, dirt roads, brick roads, as well as smooth asphalt ones with brightly-colored passing lanes. The roads led to interesting places filled with eccentric people doing strange things, like the man at Henry’s Rabbit Ranch who took her picture sitting on the giant rabbit, then gave her a tour of his rabbit cemetery while selling car insurance to a local teenager on the phone.
On her approach to Albuquerque, she passed vintage motels on Central Avenue, the country’s longest main street, a welcome respite for weary travels decades ago who found a place to sleep after driving a 100 miles from Santa Rosa, the last stopover on the route. Many of the motels were in danger of the wrecking ball with weeds growing up over the doors and windows, but tired of staying in Motel Six’s, Super 8’s, and Hampton Inns, Victoria searched for a classic old motel where she could spend the night. Her guidebook showed the Aztec Motel, but when she arrived at the address, it was just a pile of rubble, reminding her of the discarded mountain of aluminum walkers she had discovered in the nursing home after her last visit to Cal and Tom.
She happily found the El Vado Motel, a Route 66 treasure, rescued by the city in 2008 for preservation. All the old rundown segments of the avenue were under pressure to be torn down, and replaced with shops, condos, upscale apartments, restaurant franchises, and coffee joints. While the El Vado was still closed to the public, Victoria stood motionless, and looked through the chain link fence to see the adobe cabins lining the motor court, and its magnificent neon sign of an Indian woman haloed in a circular rainbow of yellows, reds, and blues. She lingered for a long time in the darkness before moving on, frustrated she could not find a place to stay even for one night, still feeling homeless.
Victoria kept driving through Albuquerque to Gallup, and stayed in her first and only five-star hotel of the trip--El Rancho Hotel, built in 1937 as a watering hole for movie stars who arrived on Santa Fe Railroad trains to film “cowboy” movies. When she arrived at her room, Humphrey Bogart’s name adorned the door; the luxurious room opened to a patio looking out on a large pool. Even though Victoria had over $25 million dollars in the bank, she asked for the AAA discount, and haggled over the price of the room--over $100 for the night. She was dead tired, disappointed she couldn’t find a place to stay in Albuquerque, nearly faint from hunger, and vaguely depressed.
Victoria watched children and their parents play in the water of the pool outside her patio door, and she began to feel lonely for the first time after all the long hours of the trip. She removed her travel clothes, let them drop to the floor, and before showering for dinner, sat on a bath towel on a chair near her bed, with nothing on and nothing on her mind. Over the long trip, and weeks away from her daily routines, she had exhausted her defenses and thought herself out. At this moment, she arrived at point zero in her life; something inside let go like a tightly-coiled spring breaking her reserved, unassertive, prim and proper, essentially Victorian self into small pieces.
She slowly looked down the length of her tall frame to her naked feet with new eyes, and observed her body as good, beautiful, created; even her big feet were deserving of love. She ran her hands down her quiet, deep-breathing chest, stomach, legs, and touched her angles and curves with interest, as if she were touching herself for the first time, her hands moving like a stranger’s hands over a slumbering, feminine body. Her limbs no longer felt awkward; they seemed to fit together just fine, in harmony and beauty, and impressed her as worthy of nurture and even praise. Victoria could feel her heart beat quicken, and a warmth and tingling in her liquefying skin; faint stirrings of arousal and desire.
When she rose to take a shower, she felt more coordinated in her movements, more erect. When the warm water beads bounced lightly against her in the shower, she finally arrived at a physical, mental, and emotional intersection, a point of steamy inner and outer inertia. Forward movement could now proceed, slowly, but deliberately, like a train leaving a station, or a plane powering up the engines before take-off. For the first time since her mother died, since she lost her home, since she lost her job, she felt a new, but pleasing pressure, a light-hearted yearning for a missing piece of something or someone. Like a war soldier bivouacked for the winter in a deep forest without the charge and retreat of battle, Victoria was now ready to move out from her walled-off cloister into the dust and heat of mainstream life for triumph or defeat. She thought of Zizi’s motto: “Think positive, you can do it!”
She walked down to the dining room and bar, and at first, she noticed only couples, but then she turned to a baby googling at her. She smiled back at the baby, and then engaged the parents in conversation, exchanging travel chitchat with them, and asked to hold the baby. Victoria had always thought “small talk” a waste of time, but she actually enjoyed hearing the couple talk about their first trip along Route 66--what they saw on the road, where they stayed, what they ate. She went over to the bar, and started talking with two oddly-dressed men who turned out to be golfers. Victoria had never played golf, but the two men were not reticent about explaining the sport to her: the terms, the rules, the challenges of the fairways, sand traps, and rough; the practice and skills required, the equipment, the gadgets, the thrill of competition and the frustrations of the game. Victoria had never won nor lost anything in her life beyond a board game. She talked with the two men for two hours over beer and whiskey, her debut into the world of social give and take. She even laughed at jokes she could not understand; she wasn’t even offended when one of the golfers called her, “Vicky.” She felt incomplete and whole at the same time, as the weight of being “Victoria” drifted away unnoticed. Back in her room, she looked out and up to the unthinking moon and stars, her mind attaching no adjectives to them; unfiltered by mental cobwebs to trap and alter what she sensed not only with her eyes, but through her entire body. The moon and stars were simply moon and stars, and she was simply a woman.
By the time she completed her Route 66 journey, she had driven over 2,500 miles through eight states: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and finally, California to the road’s end, a few blocks from the Santa Monica Pier. After a night in a motel on Manhattan Beach, she drove Rt. 101 up to Gilroy, then over to Santa Cruz, and checked into a motel on the ocean for two nights of rest and relaxation. She was close to her point of embarkation, but now she wanted to let her new way of being sink in without the press of travel. This prisoner of time and measurement allowed herself to get off schedule.
In the morning of her first day in Santa Cruz, she walked the same beach where Mikage had met Axel many years before. She talked with people, played with small children, bought Bay Shrimp in a paper tray at Stagnaro’s, and visited the amusement park. In the afternoon, she walked into a book store and browsed the shelves; purchased a used novel, and read on her patio in a reclining lawn chair overlooking the Pacific. Like a neglected book standing for years on an upper shelf, she removed the dust jacket from her shelved life, and began to turn the pages. The first evening, she bought a pre-paid phone card, and called her father to let him know how she was doing She asked to speak to Zizi.
“Zizi, this is Victoria.”
“How have you been?”
“I changed.”
“How?”
“I stopped thinking and started breathing, and then I lost control...the chaos in my mind exploded and what was left...well, I feel free...beautiful and free. Maybe these feelings won’t last, but it doesn’t matter, because this is how I feel today.”
“What are you going to next?”
“Rejoice...and make new friends on this trip...and I’m going to take it easy and not worry about the future, and I’ll buy a cell phone so we can talk...by the way, how are things going with you... and my father?”
“I love him, but I still cannot shake off my past...he may get tired from me, but so far he is very patient.”
“He’ll wait until you’re ready...what ever you’re facing, you will not face it alone. Remember the advice you give to us, ‘Think positive, you can do it.’”
“ I will...good-bye.”
Two days later, the new Victoria arrived in Bellingham, refreshed and ready for adventure, like a feather about to be carried away by the wind.
