Towns of the Blue Highways
Towns of the Blue Highways
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
IT WAS REALLY TOO EARLY TO STOP FOR the night when I came riding into Effingham, Illinois, a few weeks ago on my way home from the Honda Hoot in Tennessee. I pulled over into the shade of a tree and looked at the clock on my Beemer’s instrument panel. It read 18:07.
I grinned and shook my head. Was it really necessary to use military time on a motorcycle clock? Did any rider ever seriously wonder if it was 3 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon? A 12-hour clock works fine on motorcycles. We aren’t coordinating the D-Day invasion here.
Anyway, in civilian time it was a little after 6 p.m., with about three hours of good summer daylight left. I looked down at the Illinois map on my tankbag and realized I could easily make it to Springfield before nightfall. But I was hot and a little tired, having ridden since 5:30 in the morning. That’s O dark early, military time. Twelve and a half hours in the saddle, with stops only for fuel, fluids and a fish sandwich in a fast-food joint with a terrifying clown on my drink glass.
Stop for the night, or keep rolling?
I decided to cruise around Effingham and see if it had the Three Essentials for an early stop: A clean motel, a decent restaurant and a movie theater.
Most likely it would have the first two, because it’s a big town at the junction of two Interstates. The theater might be another matter.
Turning off Highway 33,1 headed downtown to the square around the courthouse, and there-lo and behold!-was a movie theater. Not just that, but a genuine neonfestooned downtown movie palace called The Heart Theater. On the marquee was the third and last of George Romero’s excellently creepy zombie trilogy, Land of the Dead.
Perfect. Effingham had everything.
I got a room in a nearby Mom & Pop motel, but Pop had forgotten to fix the air conditioning (the air coming out felt exactly like hot dog breath), so I checked out and got a room in a modem box out by the Interstate. By then it was too late to look for a restaurant before the 7 p.m. movie ( 1900 hours) so I decided to dine on popcorn and Junior Mints. A classic meal.
Fun movie, great popcorn, good mints.
I rode back to my blissfully chilled room, slept like the dead (better, actually, than the guys in the movie, who seemed restless), got up early in the a.m. and hit the road.
As Effingham disappeared in the mirrors, it dawned on me how few towns on my 1700-mile, four-day trip had been this inviting. I’d gone from Wisconsin to Knoxville and back almost entirely on what author William Least Heat Moon called “blue highways,” those meandering roads that never go directly between two major cities. In doing so, I’d seen perhaps a hundred towns of all different sizes. By the time I hit Effingham on the way home, it occurred to me that America has metamorphosed into a country with, essentially three kinds of towns: 1) Dying towns; 2) medium-sized towns that are holding their own; or 3) big, growing towns that have way too much traffic and sprawl.
Towns of the first class, the dying, are easy to spot. Their Main Streets are mostly closed and boarded up, and the only place to buy groceries is at a convenience store/gas station. There are no sit-down restaurants, theaters or motels. If any businesses remain open on Main St., they are most often bars, a tattoo parlor, a tanning spa and a video rental.
It escapes me why a town without a hardware store or a grocery needs a tattoo parlor, but there you go. The one wellkept, neatly groomed business in town is usually a nursing home. Which, of course, absorbs the stored wealth from another era, rather than producing it. Lastly, there’s almost always a magnificent stone bank building in town (the kind Baby Face Nelson might have robbed), now used as something else. The old brick high school is closed or turned into cheap apartments.
At the opposite extreme are large, growing cities. Many of these are probably good places to live, if you’ve been there a while and know your way around. But from a cross-country motorcyclist’s point of view they have little to offer but clogged freeways, sprawling suburbs and what my friend John Lamm calls “the architectural sound loop.” Home Depot, Office Max, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc., over and over. Stoplights, dripping radiators and frustrated suburbanites waiting for the four-second left-turn arrow. On bike trips, I avoid these places like the plague.
Somewhere in between, we have the Effinghams of this world. Medium-sized cities that retain the critical mass of population needed to support a few good restaurants, a movie theater, some motels, maybe a book store and at least one bar that makes a decent martini and has dark beer on tap. And, ideally, that crown jewel of commerce, a motorcycle dealership. Or two or three.
These places have traffic and visible human activity, but not the overheated, Malthusian kind that drives you nuts. They also usually have a working downtown that has somehow resisted the predations of the big box stores. Essentially, the same features that make a traveling rider stop for the night also make “regular” people want to live in a town, or move there. And stay.
I grew up in a small Midwestern town of 1500 people that, in the mid-Fifties, had four grocery stores, three hardware stores, four restaurants, two dime stores, two clothing stores, two furniture stores, a local newspaper, a dairy, an old hotel, a new motel, Ford and Chevy dealerships, a train station and a beautiful old brick high school on the hill. And a nice movie theater.
I went back last spring and found that nearly all of that is gone now, and the movie theater is for sale. It’s still a nice place, but much of its kinetic force and spirit are gone, along with so many of the people who made it all work.
I often wonder if I take motorcycle trips now just to look for that town, as it was in 1955.
Sometimes I find part of it, and stop for the night. □
