Tony’s Rant

it’s been a while since I’ve blogged Survivor, much less just wrote anything. A lot’s happened in my life, but that doesn’t belong here for the world. But I was just laying here watching “Cars” and thinking about when I was younger. My parents took us on a road trip from California to Fort Worth, Texas, where I would one day live. But as I was watching it, I was listening to them talk about the infamous route 66. Thinking back, I remember actually getting to spend some of that trip on Route 66.

At the time, it felt like endless hours spent in the middle of nowhere with occasional cool places to look at, like the “horrible THING” or the some western museum to wander around - but mostly, as a kid, it felt like endless hours looking at nothing. But you know, looking back at it as an adult, I realize just how lucky I was, as a child, to have seen what I did see - but you know, as with many things, we don’t realize what it is we have until it’s gone from us. That narrow patch of road in the middle of nowhere showed us what this country actually is - what our founders crossed to open those parts of the country - what people endure to make a living in nowhere - and many of them depended heavily on that little patch of road in the middle of the desert.

We crossed the actual deserts. I remember signs on the road saying “last chance for gas for 80 miles” - I remember barrels of water in the middle of nowhere attached to posts so people could stop and add water to their overheating radiators. I remember stairs that went up one side of a barb wire fence and down the other so travelers could make a - well, “pit stop” without tearing down a ranchers hard worked fences. I remember seeing the cactus that looked like bandits from old time westerns with their hands up in the air. I remember seeing the bluffs and the buttes in the middle of nowhere rising majestically into the desert sky. I saw the “thing”, several “Jessie James” and “Billy the Kid” museums, and more little mom and pop stores than you can shake a stick at - and you know what? They were actually happy to see you. When you walked into their store, or sat down in their restaurant, they were happy you were there and treated you like you were royalty.

You know, I can’t help but think, as I sit in traffic jams, and zoom across the landscape at speeds way too fast to actually see what is around me - thinking one state pretty much looks like another - black asphalt with yellow and white lines, that we lost something somewhere out there in the desert. We lost a little bit of who we are - where we came from. And as I stop in another corporate gas station where the attendant seems more interested in what’s on the television, or talking on their cell phone than actually selling me the prepackaged food I’ve plopped down on the counter, that we lost something there as well. We lost a very important identity. But the only reason I know all of this is because my parents drug me out on a little desert road in the middle of nowhere when I was little, and showed me what America is, what it looks like, and what kind of people make it great. Thanks Mom and Dad, for introducing me to Route 66. May what’s left of it live on, lest we forget where we come from, and what we are. And may anyone who reads this find one of these little out of the way roads and slow things down just a little bit, so maybe, they can find a little bit of this unique piece of Americana that exist no where else like it does on Route 66.