The Ugly American

I believe it bears repeating that there are certain advantages to being the daughter of an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman. Take, for example, the heightened sense of driver awareness I acquired in my role, at the age of 10, as my drunk father’s front-seat lookout as he lurched across Route 66 with us in the family Fairlane.
“Dad, stop!” I’d yell at the red lights.
“Watch out, you’re swerving!” I’d screech on causeways.
“Police car, Dad, police car!”

On these occasions, my father always kept packets of peanuts scattered about the front seat. He once told me conspiratorially that peanuts mask booze breath better than peppermint gum. That there is knowledge, if you ask me.
Plus, my father insisted that I not wear a seatbelt. “If you’re strapped in, you can’t get thrown clear of the wreckage. It’s always better to be thrown clear,” and he’d finish by waving his arms in a sweeping motion, as if to indicate that, at the moment of impact, my prepubescent body would fly out the window and float down on a distant patch of cushy clover.

But there was no clover along Route 66 in the Arizona desert, which stands out the most among the memories of my travels with him. Back then, much of Route 66 was a truly wasted artery—as dead as a limb on the wrong end of a tourniquet—as opposed to what it is now, which is still dead, but dotted with markers to point out noteworthy, if desolate, landmarks along the route.

In fact, it’s probably this very desolation that saves the ruins along this portion of Route 66, as the land is not valuable enough to attract the bulldozers of big-name developers. So legendary ghost towns like Two Guns and Canyon Diablo, both in Arizona, are left to disintegrate, if not with dignity, at least in solitude; Their roofless, hollow adobe structures and rickety bridges are hardly discernible from the dust from which they jut. Lately, though, these places have sustained an odd insurgence of renegade tourists eager to make contact with a past they hold dear, no matter how decrepit that past may be.

Though one tough-nut survivor is Meteor City, population two, a lone outpost along this stretch that consists solely of one rather large gift shop under a concrete geodesic dome. I remember it vividly because of the box of Sandlewood-scented caches for sale by the cash register. I stood by that register for what seemed like hours one day as my Dad discussed the advantages of aluminum in the trailer business with the store’s proprietor, who was a lot more agreeable than the liquor store owner we’d visited earlier that day, a man who held a weathered baseball bat as he walked my dad back out to our car, saying, “I ain’t buying any of yer crap.”

Still, my father saw the former mother road as his personal mother lode; a powerful magnet for trailer-dwelling social outcasts, and he considered himself the man to set them up. I never saw him sell a single trailer, but he made a lot of “contacts,” and contact was in short supply in those parts. Meteor City, for example, got its name from a giant crater that was formed when a massive wad of iron crashed to earth from outer space 50,000 years ago. The actual crater has had little ­contact since, barring its short-lived fame as the film location of the 1984 movie Starman, starring Jeff Bridges. But today the crater sits fairly untouched, miles and miles from the roadside where Meteor City was built. We visited the crater, too, but it was the gift shop that stuck in my memory.

For one, it didn’t sell anything from outer space as you’d think it would with your 10-year-old brain. Instead it sold, and still sells, Indian crafts, bags of polished rocks and Route 66 memorabilia. The place is now under new ownership, and the population has changed, though not by much—just as the place has changed, though not by much. The same box of caches sits by the register, and their scent brings me back to those days with my Dad, who is gone now. But I’m here where we were, and I’ve done what I came here to do; make contact with a past I hold dear, no matter how decrepit that past may be.