Scenes from the Golden State: Highway Signs

“Look, let me get another one of these.” With an index finger, the man at the bar taps the empty Coors Light bottle, its silver label peeling at the edges. Black flies light beside his dinner plate — refugees from the California heat — and he swats at them with his free hand. 

“Why don’t you wait a while?” The bartender is pouring himself something milky from a mason jar. He doesn’t look up when he speaks. “You’ve had plenty to drink already.”

The man offers a blank, heavy-lidded stare. He grabs the bottle, holds it firmly by the neck, and makes little circles with the butt. 

Damn. Empty. So much for that glass-half-full bullshit.

“Come on, man, I’ve just had this one since I got here,” he whines, still swirling the imaginary contents in the bottle. 

“It’s not the one you had since you got here,” the bartender shoots back taking a sip from his own glass. “It’s the ten you had before you walked in the door.” 

“Well, guess I can’t deny that,” the man concedes. He smiles and then the smile fades into something like sadness. He looks at the door and beyond the door, beyond the fields and the road and the sky to some far away place. 

A mile from here, out on the highway, there’s a white plywood sign that reads in big uneven block letters “COLD BEER. HOT FOOD. BIG ASS BURGERS. NEXT EXIT.” That’s what brought me in. It’s the sort of sign I’ve learned to trust when I’m in farm country, and this is farm country. In every direction, there are miles and miles of vineyards and pistachio and almond groves. I don’t know why, but this sort of surprises me. In my back East mind, I start calling it Kansas, California. Maybe it’s the other way around though. Probably is. Another DIY sign says California farms grow half the country’s food. California comes first then. California, Kansas. 

Still, this is near-desert, and there is drought, and life is hard and bless-ed and dirty and rich in a way that feels ancient and intractable. There is Eden. And there is Eden’s opposite. I’ve seen healthy green fields out here. And I’ve seen rows and rows of dead trees standing dry and brittle like ghost armies. I imagine whole groves crumbling into dust. I imagine them being pitched and tossed, scattered on the wind. When I see them now, I turn away. Something about them makes me feel ugly and ashamed. 

The bartender turns on a television mounted to the wall behind him. Wild-eyed cowboys line up one after another to be thrown limp-limbed into the air and onto the ground by confused and agitated livestock. Another TV, in the back corner, is trained on the gravel lot out front. I stare at the white Buick I rented at the airport and hum an old country tune. The man behind the Dollar rental counter told me I looked tired. I am tired, but it doesn’t matter that much. There’s nothing to do but eat and get on down the road. 

When the food comes, it’s as advertised. Hearty. Fresh. The highway signs never fail me. The burger is one of those voluminous culinary wonders piled so high with onions and lettuce and tomato that it does away with any ideas the diner might have about manners. I keep my head down and try to work out the math and physics in secret. There’s no way around it … just … through it. 

When I look up again, the man at the bar is watching me with a wide alligator grin on his face. “Why don’t you come over here and sit next to me, sweetheart? I’ll buy you a drink.” I say no thanks, that I’m driving. He takes it ok. He’s got the sort of blue-collar confidence that doesn’t take anything as rejection, even when it is rejection. He talks across the room anyway. He says he used to work as an over-the-road trucker, but then he had a little girl with his ex, and he likes to see his daughter, so he picked up a local route. He says he traded his personal truck, some kind of Ford job, for a Kia Forte. “I was a boy,” he says. “And I made a lot of mistakes. I’m trying to be a man now … but the old ways still creep back in.”

He says he saw a couple riding a bicycle on the shoulder of the road last week, the man in the seat and the woman on the handlebars. They both looked happy, he said. They were laughing. “What do you think it takes to find a girl like that?” He says he’s just messing around. Joking. I can tell he’s not. 

Twenty minutes or so later, he gets up to go. “If you ever change your mind,” he says lingering beside the table, “give me a call.” He doesn’t give me his number, and I don’t ask him for it.

I pay my own bill and box up what’s left of the burger. 

Back out in the parking lot, I see a sign stapled to an old telephone pole. “Lost Dog,” it says. There’s a photograph I can’t quite make out. “Lost,” I say out loud to myself. “Lost.”

California, Kansas. Kansas, California. Like itself alone, and like everywhere else. Crops grow and fail. People search for love in strange places. Dogs get lost, and their owners track them down. This is an America not so far from my own. 

The sun is sinking in the sky. There’s that familiar orange glow on the horizon. You can almost feel it now — infinitude. 

Before I leave, I turn and give the place one of those last looks. I hope it’s around for a long time. “I’ll miss you,” I tell the white-washed cinder block walls. “Maybe we’ll see each other again one of these days.”

Back in the Buick, “Don’t Cry No Tears” is playing on the radio. Tomorrow, the coast.