Tuesday, July 28th – Colorado Springs, CO to Kearny, NE
“I took many pictures on my visits to Detroit, but back home they just looked like snapshots of abandoned Nebraska farmhouses or small towns farther west on the Great Plains.”
– Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia“
We drive to Colorado Springs to see the Ghost Town Museum, but it turns out to not be an actual ghost town, just an indoor situation behind a gift shop. So we head to The Manitou Cliff Dwellings, once the home of the Ancestral Puebloans. It’s pretty packed, mostly with children delighted by what must seem like world’s coolest treehouse.
“Perhaps you can even ‘feel’ the spirits of the people who lived, worked, and communed in such spaces centuries ago,” says the guide map. I have a feeling if we could feel them, they would tell us to go back where we came from.
The site is impressive primarily for the size of their multi-story labyrinth gift shop. On our way out, Abby drops her phone about two feet and it shatters, immediately. We spend the afternoon going to the Apple Store, not getting an appointment, and then having a forgettable meal in the very cute downtown Colorado Springs. By the time we head out for Nebraska it’s already getting late.
The parts of Colorado we drive through seem positively wealthy compared to where we’ve been. Enormous houses, enormous churches, ranches dotted with horses. Everything seems new, and the closer we get to Nebraska, the greener everything is, too.
I don’t know much about Nebraska, besides that Conor Oberst is from Omaha and that Brandon Teena — the 19-year-old trans man raped and murdered by his girlfriend’s buddies — is buried just outside of Lincoln, and that his grave is hardly an adequate memorial to his life, reading, as it does, Daughter. Sister. Friend. There was a 1997 Vanity Fair article about Brandon by Joan Didion’s husband that discussed, briefly, how legendary Nebraskan Willa Cather kept her hair short and wore men’s clothing without much recourse, noting that The tyranny [Brandon] could not escape was less that of gender then of class, a prison more tyrannical than Willa Cather’s prairie town, especially in white America, where class distinctions are not supposed to exist. Abby, who grew up butch, queer and poor in Indiana, once said of her home, how long can you keep loving a place that doesn’t love you back.
Our identities shift with the landscape. In my late teens, my best friend Ryan’s boots made him gay in New York but almost the opposite — a cowboy — in Oklahoma. Now, Abby’s haircut makes her gay in California but something similar though not as sinister in the Midwest — an art student, maybe, or a feminist. Traveling while gay means new rules across each border, the rest stops where Abby will wait for me to show up and provide a live referral when her right to the women’s bathroom is inevitably questioned.
It gets greener and greener and greener and flatter and it feels like lying down! this sky though, I text Abby. I’ve never been here but already I can taste home, but then it just keeps getting darker and we’re a little lost, ’cause GPS doesn’t know about the construction happening here. We get to the hotel. They give us a room with two beds and we have peanut butter crackers for dinner.
Wednesday, July 29th –Â Kearny, Nebraska to Toledo, Iowa
I drug your ghost across the country, and we plotted out my death.
Every city and memory we whispered “Here is where you rest.”
-Conor Oberst, “The Calendar Hung Itself”
If we are going to just come out and be honest about it — about the bone and marrow of our ragshop hearts — we have no trouble deciding whether or not to have breakfast at Perkins.
In the daytime, Nebraska is just gorgeous, all rolling hills and farms and yes, the standard abandoned small towns, until we roll into Omaha, which looks, somehow, exactly like Indianapolis? The cashier at Kitchen Table seems like she could be our friend.
As we drive I catch myself grinning as my bones settle into the land beneath our wheels, wishing Abby was in the car with me so we could talk about farms.
Our next stop is Toledo, Iowa. We’re in Toledo for one reason only: The Designer Inn & Suites. Tama County contains Toledo and also the Meskwaki Bingo Casino Hotel, which boasts “the loosest slots in Iowa,” which I initially read as “the loosest sluts in Iowa,” and felt very confused.
The front page of the brochure for “The Designer Inn & Suites” invites travelers to “treat” themselves to “a night of romance.” It beckons with well-lit photos of various themed rooms, including but not limited to: The Heart’s Delight (heart-shaped tub, rose petals), Northern Nights (white and blue, Igloo themed, like being inside a Mallo Bar), Crystal Cave (lanterns, rock walls, very Fraggle Rock), Arabian Nights (racist) and Rainforest (our selection). We’ve been promised that “the moment you enter this suite, you will be instantly transported back to your own private Rainforest, with the exotic background and sound effects letting you know you have arrived.”
As advertised
One of our most severe regrets regarding California was that we never stayed at The Madonna Inn. We adore camp and kitsch and earnest Midwestern ideas about romance and whirlpool tubs. The room is painted to look like a jungle. A circular bed with a rainforest-themed comforter lies beneath a large circular mirror and a canopy of plastic trees and surprisingly not-dusty leaves. A larger fake tree overlooks the turqouise hot tub in the room’s far corner, with its trickling fountain and large puddle-shaped mirrors that make the tub look like a forest monster with a gaping mouth and huge, lopsided eyes.
All of this is the work of Gary Strobusch of Wisconsin, who bought the Toledo Days Inn in 2003 in hopes of creating multiple theme rooms like the singular ones he’d built for other hotels since ditching the custom-car business for the waterbed business and the theme-hotel-room-creation business. “Lying on the bed lit by tiki torches, guests spot birds and butterflies resting in the greenery covering the ceiling,” The Waterloo Courier said of our room in 2005. “Sitting in the whirlpool, people make out an orangutan etched into one of the surrounding mirrors.” YES INDEED.
We’re starving, though, and the nearest open vendor of food is, unfortunately, Wal-Mart, so we drive 45 minutes to get there, the ride in the dark feeling just like the ride from my Grandma’s in Reeseville, Ohio, into Wilmington, home of their closest Wal-Mart. On our way, I read to Abby about the cold case of Hellen Mae Brown, a 61-year-old resident of Tama County, Iowa, whose body was found in a river 24 days after she’d gone missing. “As I recall there was an idea that she had been drinking quite a bit at the time she disappeared,” said then-Tama County attorney Jared Bauch to the Tama Toledo News, “and her companions were rough customers.”
We talk about how dumb we are while soaking in the tub, eating cheese and crackers and drinking the champagne Alex and Mary gave us as an engagement present. I always wanted to stay in places like this as a kid. Dreams really do come true.
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Goddamn.
Amazing. Thank you for sharing this – wishing you all the best as you start to make incredible new memories.
i want to read this every day over and over like it’s a book next to my bed. i’m glad you’re home now
THIS IS SO GREAT I’M SO HAPPY YOU AND ABBY MADE IT HOME
Breathtaking. Thank you for sharing this beautiful reflection!
thank you so much for this riese. i feel like you just shared a bit of your soul with us and i couldn’t be more grateful. truly beautiful.
That was gorgeous. It really felt like I could see the ghosts you were describing in the background of your photos. Thanks for writing this.
This is so utterly beautiful.
I live in NYC now, but I grew up in the southwest. It has always, always seemed weird to me to hear or read what other people have to say as they experience my wide open section of the country. And reading this, I think I finally understand why. My ghosts get in the way of listening to them tell their stories, listening to them verbalize their experiences. It feels foreign to my ghosts, and they push back as these new ideas and new descriptions and new feelings try to occupy the same space, their sacred space. Hearing other people describe my home is always when I feel my listening skills are at their worst, when my mind wanders the most, when mental images are at their sharpest. This was enlightening to read and hopefully I will remember this in the future.
This is brilliant, Riese. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.
I’m someone who can’t stand to hear strangers talk about places I have lived (and yet always seeks out opportunities to do so?), so this strikes a real chord with me. Thank you for putting it into words–I have a lot to think about here.
And yes, Riese, lovely and haunting. Welcome home.
Yes I’m also a person who feels weird hearing people talk about my places but keep seeking it out just the same, and I never really knew why. But yes what you said; that’s exactly it!
I love this. I love how you and Abby beam in your photos together. I LOVE the ghostly collage of photos in front of Cinderella’s Castle. I love the integration of quotes and facts. The description of places being layered with ghosts really resonated with me too.
Tracking down ghosts seems much more effective than running from them. Thank you Riese <3
this is so fucking perfect that i can’t even stand it. i want it to keep going, all across the country and until i fall asleep.
i LOVE this.
This is so beautiful. You are so beautiful.
Thank you for this beautifully honest piece. My favourite thing that I’ve read in a long while.
This was beautiful.
This is so lovely it hurts. And that Beauty and the Beast theory is my new head-canon.
According to this itinerary, you and Abby and I ate at the Cracker Barrel in Benton Harbor on the same day. Only I was moving out of Michigan, to Wisconsin, to live with my girlfriend for the first time.
Okay, that is totally crazy! I hope you had cinnamon apples.
<3
Gahdammit, I just love it when you write stuff like this.
Riese, your feelings about Cracker Barrel have not been a secret for some time. ;)
I’m honestly pretty jealous about that jungle hotel. Especially knowing that the faux-leaves weren’t even dusty.
This was excellent.
I really should be getting commission from the Lima Ohio Cracker Barrel at this point.
Also yeah the whole room was incredibly clean! Id expected it to be sort of shabby and gross but it wasn’t. Much like the actual rainforest, I’m sure.
<3 LOVE LOVE THE PHOTO ESSAY. Writing is always always on point!
Ugh, this stupid essay with stupid love thoughts and stupid Midwestern feelings has given me these stupid tears. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ghosts. Ugh. Feelings. Gross. Cracker Barrel. Ugh. Ugh.
This was wonderful.
Beautiful! Thank you.
This is lovely
I loved this.
This is so interesting and wonderful. You are too.
Riese, absolutely brilliant. I adore this essay. And I find the love and adventure you and Abby have a constant inspiration.
This is perfect. I’m so glad you guys are home and happy. <3
Reading pieces like this always make me feel like I’m curled up on the couch, chatting with an old friend. Absolutely beautiful writing and photographs. I’m so happy for you and Abby :) You look so vibrant and so full of joy in the photos.
I’ve been waiting to read this till I had uninterrupted time and the desktop. It was worth the wait. Thank you.
Beautifully written, so engaging. What a great start to a new phase in both of your lives.
Thank you for sharing this.
Absolutely beautiful! From the start of 2011 to the end of 2014, I lived in 5 different states including both coasts. This captured so many of the feelings I had during all the moves and road trips. I grew up in small town Ohio and landed in Chicago, so I have a lot of feelings about the midwest. This article brought them ALL to the surface. Also, I really want Steak and Shake now, so thanks for that.
Loved reading this Riese. You captured a cross-country move in a really beautiful way. Also, hooray to more midwest Straddlers!
I feel like I just finished a good book. I relate to your feelings about Cracker Barrel so hard. There’s a string of Cracker Barrels off I59 and I20 through Alabama that have all my road trip memories.
I left Michigan for California 18 years ago and I have such bittersweet memories about suburban Detroit n my beloved Ann Arbor. Your writing brings all the good back! And I’m looking forward to reading about all the adventures ahead. It’s kinda my corrective experience to hear about happy queers in the mitten
. Also, the links to the Detroit articles are great. Please keep the coming.
My parents have watched Breaking Bad from beginning to end handfuls of times. My mom says it’s because when she isn’t watching she misses Jesse and has to keep going back for more. I know this is a weird analogy but I sorta feel that way about this piece. Even though you and Abby are people that exist in the real world, and even in MY real world, these characters you just wrote are the kind that now that I’m finished reading about, I’m going to miss. As always, looking forward to your next story.
i loved this. as i build up the courage to finally leave where i am and move somewhere new, reading about these journeys inspires me.
i know that when i am finally ready to leave, i’ll read this again.
i loved your pictures, too.
This is a thing I want to keep close forever and always.
Ugh this was so goddamn good. It makes me want to travel and it makes me want to come home.
I was looking forward to read this and the Goodbye California article for a long time. Now for the special A+ week I upgraded from Cobalt to Bronze and was finally able to do so. I loved it! Always love your writing, it’s something very special. And gorgeous photos!