Friday, May 30, 2008

DAY 7 - Shoe toss between Reno and Vegas




There wasn't anything in particular we wanted to do in Reno, so we didn't do anything to speak of. It was more or less just a pit stop. We did stroll through the smoky casino of our hotel, but other than the stiff, haggard old patrons that were crusted to the slot machines and drink carts, there was little that sparked my curiosity.

95 South
Highways like 95 south, from Reno to Vegas, bequeath some of the reasons I love exploring the forgotten byways of the Southwest. There are no Starbuck's. There are no Holiday Inns. Just maybe a shithole diner and a place to get gas if you're lucky. In the absence or Corporate America you are gifted instead with an endless expanse of deserts and sun-baked mountains. Every 40 miles or so brings another ghost town with petrified store fronts and pickup trucks frozen in rust. 85 miles an hour on a one lane road that if you drive all day you might get somewhere. You see things that are so odd they make you look twice. Rocks for sale. Plane wreckage at the entrance to a brothel. Rain followed by a rainbow. An old yacht turned into a roadside house. A dead tree kept alive by shoes. The drive we did yesterday was one where every Tom Waits song that played on the stereo seemed to make that much more sense to me then they did the day before.



Just before 10pm we rolled into Sin City. I don't know all that we're gonna do here, but I'm gonna do my best to get in some trouble and play it off like it was all Annie's fault. Peace from the road.

Jimmy
(In the retired army/truck stop town of Hawthorne, Nevada, I ate my first McDonald's cheeseburger of our cross-country drive. For some reason it feels little more like a roadtrip now.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mightly black,
whose life was bleak,
surrounded by shackles,
a slave to work you were,
until a ranger from the north appeared,
Freed you he did with a journey to the unknown,
With weight lifted happiness filled your heart till it burst,
You stained the fingers of freedom with your life's blood,

Ode to the mighty Black pen