Late in the evening in back-road America, you tend to pick the
motels with a few cars parked in front of the rooms. There's nothing less
appealing than an empty courtyard, with maybe Jeffrey Dahmer or Norman Bates
waiting to greet you in the reception office. The all-night clerk at the
Lincoln motel (three cars out front) in Austin, Nev., who checked me in at
around 11.30 p.m. a few nights ago, told me she was 81 and putting in two
part-time jobs, the other at the library, to help her pay her heating bills,
since she couldn't make it on her Social Security.
She imparted this info without self-pity as she took my $29.50,
saying that business in Austin, Nev., last fall had been brisk and the 57
motel beds available in the old mining town had been filled with crews
laying fiber-optic cable along the side of the road, which, in the case of
Austin, meant putting 20 feet under the graveyard that skirts the road just
west of town.
Earlier that day, driving from Utah through the Great Basin
along U.S.-50, billed as "the loneliest road," I'd seen these cables, blue
and green and maybe two inches in diameter, sticking out of the ground on
the outskirts of Ely, Nev., as if despairing at the prospect of the Great
Salt Lake desert stretching ahead, through league after league of sagebrush.
So we can run fiber optic cable through the western deserts but
not put enough money in the hands of 81-year-olds so they don't have to pull
all-night shifts clerking in motels? What else is new? At least the lady in
Austin, Nev., was spry and interested in life, refreshed by her intermittent
naps on the couch in the sitting room of the reception office, dipping into
her book, with the motel cat to keep her company, across the road from the
International Cafe, which serves good breakfasts and decent drinks from a
magnificent wooden bar that came round the Horn from Europe back in Austin's
mining heyday in the 1870s.
People who drive or lecture their way through the American
interior usually notice the same thing, which is that you can have rational
conversations with people about the Middle East, George W. Bush and other
topics certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on either
coast. Robert Fisk describes exactly this experience in a recent piece for
The Independent, for which he works as a renowned reporter and commentator
on mostly Middle Eastern affairs.
Fisk claims on the basis of a sympathetic hearing for his
analysis -- unsparing of Sharon's current rampages -- on campuses in Iowa
and elsewhere in the Midwest, that things are changing in Middle America.
After 25 years of zig-zagging my way across the states, I can't say I agree.
It's always been like that, and even though polls purport to establish that
90 percent of all Middle Americans claim to have had personal exchanges with
Jesus and reckon George W. to be the reincarnation of Abe Lincoln, the
reality is otherwise. Twenty years ago, Fisk would have met with lucid views
in Iowa on the Palestinian question, plus objective assessments of the man
billed at that time as Lincoln's reincarnation, Ronald Reagan.
Some attitudes do change. White people are more afraid of cops
than they used to be. A good old boy in South Carolina I've bought classic
cars from for a quarter of a century was a proud special constable back in
the early '80s. These days, if a police cruiser passes him on the highway,
he'll turn off at the next intersection and take another road. Reason: A few
years ago, a couple of state cops stopped him late at night, frisked him and
accused him of being drunk. This profoundly religious Baptist told them
truthfully he'd never consumed alcohol in his life. Then they said he must
be a drug dealer. He reckons the only reason they didn't plant some cocaine
in his car was that he told them to check him out with the local police
chief, an old friend.
I know from the stats that a lot of Americans are poor, so how
come I'm often the only fellow on the road, or in town, in an old car, aside
from some of the Mexican field workers in California for whom such cars are
home? Most everyone seems to be in a late-model pick-up or at least a nice,
new Honda Civic. I know, I know. The poor are out there, lots of them, but
the whole place just doesn't seem to feel as poor as it often did in the
early '80s, in the Bush recession. Then, day after day you could drive
through towns that felt like graveyards, with no prospect of fiber optic
cable running under them.
Take Grants, on 1-40 in New Mexico, west of Albuquerque, N.M.,
which became the nation's self-proclaimed "uranium capital" in the '50s
after Paddy Martinez heard descriptions of what uranium ore looked like and
led the mining prospectors to the yellow rocks he'd been looking at down the
years. The mines closed, and I recall from the early 1980s, Grants, N.M.,
looked sadly becalmed, with its Uranium Cafe and souvenirs and motels from
the great days of Route 66. The audio in the Mining Museum still speaks
plaintively about radiation's bad rep, despite the fact that in modest
amounts it's good for you, and there was much more of it around when the
world was young.
Well, 66 nostalgia is still strong in Grants, N.M., but aside
from the Lee Ranch coal mine, the juice in Grants's economy now comes in
large part from three prisons, one fed, one state and one private.
No wonder people are nervous of cops. There are so many prisons
for the cops to send you to. So many roads where a sign suddenly comes into
view, advertising Correctional Facility and warning against hitchhikers. I
was driving through Lake Valley in eastern Nevada along highway 93, with
Mount Wheeler looking to the east. Listening to the radio and Powell's
grotesque meanderings, I was thinking, why not just relocate the whole West
Bank to this bit of Nevada where the Palestinians could have their state at
last, financed by a modest tax on the gambling industry? The spaces are so
vast, you wouldn't even need a fence. Then reality returned in the form of
the usual sign heralding a prison around the next bend.
Heading west along U.S.-50 from Austin, Nev., I came to Graves'
Point, the site of fine petroglyphs. A sign informed me that "The act of
making a petroglyph was a ritual performed by a group leader. Evidence
suggests that there existed a powerful taboo against doodling." The graffiti
problem: Some things never change. On the other hand, they do. Ten thousand
years ago, those hunters chiseling the rocks were in the age of a vast sea.
Maybe 700 feet deep south from the petroglyph ridge was once beachfront
property. The world was warmer then, and we're heading that way once more,
from natural causes. To leave you on an upbeat note: At least the natural
radiation is on the wane.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
