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.”
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.
