The rain and thunderstorm from the previous evening had not entirely made up its mind.
I watched the news before sleep took me — equal parts weather forecast and optimism, washed down with some food I had carried from the café in St. Louis. The risk was not rhetorical. Tornadoes in middle America are not metaphors. They are real, they are sudden, and the loneliest road in America would be a particularly poor place to meet one. I filed this thought under "things to worry about tomorrow" and let the tiredness of the day — the concentration, the rain, the accidental state-crossing — pull me under.
Morning proved the optimism correct.
I looked out of the window and the sky was clear. But it was not the weather that held me. It was the water.
Right behind the motel room, quiet and unhurried, ran a small stream that opened into what was unmistakably a private lake. Ducks — white, unhurried, indifferent to me — dotted its edges. I stood there after breakfast for a while, watching them, thinking about the lake.
In India, a body of water like this would have seventeen competing claims on it — the government, the village panchayat, the farmer next door, the man who has been washing his buffalo in it for forty years. Here, someone had simply put a fence around it and called it theirs. America has been blessed with more natural resources than almost any nation on earth. It has also, I thought, been blessed with a remarkable appetite to capture, own and label them. The ducks had no opinion on the matter.
I took the car out for a slow drive through Vincennes before leaving. I hovered around the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park — that grand rotunda built to honour the Revolutionary War general who wrestled the Northwest Territory from the British. It sat there magnificently, a little too large for its surroundings, the way American monuments often do. I was too restless to go inside. This is something I was beginning to understand about myself on a road trip — the road takes priority. Everything else gets demoted. Museums, historical sites, the carefully curated versions of places — all secondary. The place itself, lived in and moving, is what the road offers.
Lagootee arrived next. A small, middle-of-nowhere town that the highway had not forgotten but the world largely had. Someone had mentioned it was close to Amish country and I had been quietly hoping — the Amish, that extraordinary community that has chosen a different bargain with modernity, were something I had only seen on television. I wanted to see a horse-drawn buggy. I wanted to see the hats.
Instead, I walked into a diner and found something equally worth seeing — a full house of sixty-plus year olds, four or five waitresses also of similar age at ease with each other like a family, and a level of conversation and banter that needed no translation. These women knew every customer by name, knew their orders before they sat down, knew which one needed more coffee and which one needed more sympathy. The omelette was excellent. The coffee was strong. The Amish were elsewhere, and I did not miss them.
Outside Lagootee, I had my first solo encounter with an American gas station.
In India, pulling into a petrol station is a full-service production. Someone waves you in, someone else asks — cash, card or UPI — a third person handles the nozzle, and if you are lucky, someone offers to wipe your windshield. You sit in your car like a person of leisure while the world organises itself around your fuel tank.
Here — a machine, a card slot, a series of prompts, and the distinct impression that the machine was mildly impatient with me. I recalled every instruction Soumya provided me. I followed every step. I filled the tank. No help, no guidance, no human involvement whatsoever. A small and private victory, celebrated alone in a car park outside Lagootee, Indiana.
The drive east from here was where the road began to tell a different story.
The Rust Belt. A phrase that sounds almost romantic until you drive through it. Town after town that had once hummed with industry and population, now wearing a hollowed-out look — discoloured houses, broken fences, overgrown lawns, shops shuttered so long the signs had faded. These were not abandoned places. People lived here, families persisted, curtains moved in windows. But the prosperity that had once organised these towns around it had quietly packed up and left, and what remained was the structure without the pulse.
I stopped for coffee in one of these towns. Walked in. The few people inside looked up with the particular attention reserved for something genuinely unexpected. I was, in that room, an alien. Not unwelcome — just entirely improbable. I drank my coffee. We exchanged nods. I left.
I crossed from Indiana into Kentucky briefly — the road dipping into a third state almost as an aside — and then into Ohio, the land flattening and widening with each mile.
I crossed briefly through Kentucky — the road dipping south almost as a casual aside — and then into Ohio before the day finally drew me into Chillicothe.
Chillicothe is one of those American towns that carries more history than its current size suggests — Ohio's first state capital, ancient Hopewell culture earthworks buried in its surroundings. I knew none of this then. What I found was a pub dedicated to Highway 50, warm inside, unhurried, with good beer and decent food and the kind of atmosphere that a long day of driving makes feel like paradise.
I had a couple of beers. I had food. I was content in the specific way that only honest tiredness and honest hunger, both met at once, can produce. Yet again, talking about regrets, I should have bought some more highway 50 merchandise as memorabilia.
The route maps and details in the planned kept referring to mounds and I was keen to explore them - but I realised you need to know about something for you to be excited about it. What it is? What it was? What it could be? I missed the mounds despite their highlighted importance.
I did not want to miss a good night’s sleep. The motel that night was however a different matter.
Practically empty. Situated beside a freeway that did not sleep, massive trucks announcing themselves through the thin walls at regular intervals. Around it, the kind of vast empty American space that looks fine in daylight and deeply unsettling at night — a car park the size of a small town, pools of orange light, nothing moving except perhaps some shadows.
I was the only guest, as far as I could tell. But I had company, the cleaner of the room had left a small hand written note for the guest ! The gesture brought the human connection to a rather inhuman situation. I wrote something back and left a tip.
I locked the door. I did not investigate further. The road, I reminded myself, was waiting in the morning.
It always was.
No comments:
Post a Comment