The Shadow Catcher

What can one 83-year-old stranger posing as my father tell me? He’s unconscious, silent as these stars. Silent as a photograph. You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes. Edward Curtis claimed he lit out for the territory to document a race of people he believed were vanishing before the nation’s eyes—The Vanishing Race was what he called the first photograph in Volume I.

He believed that the indigenous peoples of the United States were laid out on their deathbed, in their final throes, that he better light out for the territory to verify identities.

And maybe I am lighting out for Vegas just like Curtis did — for some final oath. We love the best we can and light out for the territory all our life, hoping for the button that says PRESS TO LEARN, fooling, maybe, no one on the way about who we are and where we’re going and the things we think we’ve left behind as we drive onward into silence past one great roadside attraction after another, never even knowing ’til we get there that we’ve carted our Aunt Sally with us, sound asleep, dormant, snoring, right behind us.

the mad greek

Try leaving all those family ghosts behind you when you’re on

The Mother Road.

That’s what Steinbeck called Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath—the Joad Road. Is there a Father Road?

Or is every road, every ribbon toward mirage, presumed to be the road to masculinity, the road each one of our American fathers had to take at some time in his life?

Thunder Road.

Highway 61.

Highway out of boyhood. Springsteen and Dylan hammering the licks, their testosterone passed off as social contract, their pretense of melancholy a pretense of some greater ethos called “freedom.”

When it was drawn, graded and paved Route 66 clove to the old railroad routes like young Plato to ol’ Socrates. Wherever there were train routes in this country, automotive roads would follow. “No nails, no Christ,” the poet Donald Hall has written. No Socrates, no Plato. No railroad, no interstate highway system. Before 1956, when the Interstate Highway Act was written, there were already “national” roads — the Dixie Highway, north to south, from Michigan to Florida; the Lincoln Highway, east to west, from New York to San Francisco — but there existed nothing on the scale of what President Eisenhower envisioned, 4-or 6-or 8-lane superhighways built not necessarily as connective tissue between two primary destinations, but for the mandated task of hauling freight across long distances as fast as possible with no unnecessary stops.

To eat, for instance.

Or take in a museum.

Sleep in comfort.

See a show.

Haul ass was the mantra of the new inter-state of being, so we got these monster roads where no roads had gone before, which forced us to face the fact that we could cross the country now in record time without ever seeing, stopping in or pausing at a real place or a real town.

And you may ask yourself, David Byrne reminds us, “Where does that highway go to?”

This one goes to Vegas and beyond, following as Route 66 sometimes did, the Union Pacific and Amtrak route into the Mojave through Barstow and Baker toward Nevada.

But Amtrak doesn’t serve Las Vegas anymore, not by train, anyway, only by bus (then why call it “Amtrak”?), so the trains one sees running beside Interstate 15 are blue-collar rigs, trafficking in bare necessities, not leisure.