Santa Fe to Sallisaw, Oklahoma: Woke up on the early
side and got breakfast with Maya at the St. John’s dining hall. It was just one big room and reminded me of a
dining hall I’d seen at Bowdoin, only smaller.
We paid up front with a middle-aged cashier named Oliana. Oliana had a
thick Russian accent and a thick build and wore thick blue eye shadow. Looked like she’d been stuck on the set of
the “Lady Marmalade” music video for ten years. There was an automatic coffee maker in the
dining hall and it had flashy lit-up buttons and a plasma display and was
clearly new. But auto-coffee is
auto-coffee no matter the oldness or newness of the machine producing it. I pressed the button for “Hot Coffee” and
nothing happened so I pressed it again and again. Oliana ran over to me shouting, “Only press
once! Gentle, gentle!” Sorry, Oliana. I should have read the instructions page
before playing. (Tim Note: The same
thing happened to me. I was holding down
the button and Oliana ran over screaming, “No, no hold button!”)
The dining hall had an omelet bar, which was awesome. Loaded up
on eggs and sausage and salsa and beans then took off. Spent the day on
40E. Our plan was to pull a Flagstaff:
drive for a few hours and then pick a little town where time/distance-wise it
would make sense to stop at a motel.
Figured out our destination at a Texas restaurant called “Calico County
Diner” or some such. CCD was spacious
and full of knickknacks from the 1950s.
The tables and floor were made of a darkly finished wood that looked a
little worn. Our waiter, a red-bearded
guy with a reedy voice, came to the table and set down a basket of biscuits and
fried cinnamon rolls. Yes, please. He seemed mildly surprised by everything we
said. “Can I get you anything to drink?” “Water’s fine.” “Water…?”
“Actually can we have some coffee as well?” “Oh…so…two coffees? And the water?” “Yeah and can you make mine an iced
coffee?” “Oh…we don’t…do that
here….” We used our map apps to plan the next stop and decided on Sallisaw, OK. Combined with our grunginess (we’d showered
in the morning but were wearing old clothes) the scheming tone of our
conversation made me feel like we were bank robbers planning our next job. Maybe that’s why the waiter was spooked: we
were clearly outlaws. On our way out I
saw that CCD was situated next to a sad-looking restaurant called “TX Chicken:
Thai, Chinese, and Japanese Cuisine.”
All styles converging towards “Asian.”
Crossed the Oklahoma-Texas line
without realizing it. There wasn’t a
“Now Entering Oklahoma” sign and it was a let down as we’d been hoping
to take a picture of such a sign and send the picture to our friend Say Tay. Finished J. Rufus Fears’ lectures (the ones
on Philip and Alexander were AWESOME) and I kind of wanted to listen to them all
over again because I felt I’d missed so many details the first time
around. Listened to the first of J.
Ruf’s “American Liberty” lectures but the pace of his speech was slower and his
tone less belligerent than we’d come to expect (he’d delivered these lectures
later in life) and he started putting us to sleep. Passing through OK City we put on Dave
Chappelle’s “For What It’s Worth” and that woke us up. Chappelle is brilliant. Then we
listened to part of a 2013 Louis CK special.
He’s brilliant too.
Before we left Santa Fe,
Maya told us the exciting part of the drive was over and she was half
right. Texas and especially Oklahoma
looked to us like Upstate New York or Pennsylvania.
Not so exotic as Arizona or New Mexico.
But Tim and I were actually happy with this.
It was nice to drive familiar-looking roads. We understand how we were supposed to drive here. Easy.
The easiness of the roads also allowed me to execute a record-breaking lane change:
.7 miles from middle to left lane, beating Tim’s
previous record by .2 of a mile. (POINT:
ME!!!!!)
We pulled into Sallisaw
around 8pm. It was effectively just a
road with trucker-friendly stores scattered around it. Tim and I checked into our motel (Sallisaw
Inn) and started to move our stuff into our room and discovered upon opening the door
that the room was about 100 degrees.
Turned on the AC full blast. As
far as we could tell there were only three other parties at the motel (only
three other cars at least…one an old Chevy Cavalier with a sticker on the rear
windshield reading “In Loving Memory: ‘Jimbo’”). We were all of us placed at different corners
of the motel and Tim pointed out that this was a thoughtful touch. I didn’t understand how it could be
considered so until we turned on our room’s old fat-back static-producing TV
whose volume needed to be pumped up to overcome the hum of the AC unit. Very noisy.
Went outside and did an
interval workout in the parking lot and the sunset was pretty although we
weren’t really watching it. Then we took
off down the Sallisaw drag looking for a grocery store where to buy beer and
dinner for me (Tim skipped). Most of the
stores were closed (it was 8:45) but there were a number of pop-up firework
stands set up in empty parking lots.
Firework sales were booming in Sallisaw (Greg Note: I realized like three days after writing this that it was a brilliant pun).
Found a “food mart” called “Marvin’s.”
They were ten minutes from closing by the time I walked in and their
premade food items had clearly been sitting around all day. Mostly fried chicken. I found a “Chef’s Salad” that featured ham
and bought it for being the least fried thing available. Also bought baked beans that turned out to be
marinating in a too-sweet BBQ sauce.
Marvin’s didn’t sell beer (how high-and-mighty of you, Marvin’s) so we
went elsewhere. Drove
back to the room which still seemed to be 100 degrees. There we watched the tail-end of
BEETLEJUICE on ABC Family (so, so good…Tim Burton, what happened to you?) and
then watched EASY A on FX. EASY A was sort of incomprehensible to me. There was this really dark turn towards the middle involving Lisa Kudrow that mucked up the tone of the movie and was totally unnecessary. Anyway I hoped my inability to "get" EASY A was not a sign of impending or already-arrived-at insanity. Frankly I can’t even remember if we made it through the
end of the movie. (Tim Note: We did. Furthermore, I [Tim] liked OK and could see myself living there. It was green. First state in about a week I could see
himself living in.) (Greg Note: I didn’t have much love for OK but really
liked New Mexico, possibly because it was CORMAC COUNTRY.)
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