Lonesome Crowded Western Civilization

Some Literary Drive-Bys

By guest contributor T.R. Hudson.

It’s easy to forget how vast this country is when we are confined to our everyday lives. On the off chance we get to travel, a rarer and rarer luxury these days, unless you are of the business class who must jetset from one place to the next, we go to the airport, sit in the large steel tube, look out the window maybe once, and some of us rawdog these flights with only our thoughts to entertain us. (I tried rawdogging some of the cross-country drive. Results are below.) We never get a real sense of America’s size until we drive from one end of it to another. I didn’t even do a coast-to-coast road trip, but still, I am in awe of how large our home is, how empty most of it is, and how desperately I want to keep it that way.

My other travel writing was always around a vacation or some occasion of great levity, but here I was on a mission, leaving my little piece of God’s Green Earth, returning to the East Coast, not far from where I grew up. I didn’t get to spend much time in each place, mostly driving on the interstate, so take my notes with the levity and irreverence I am trying to imbue them with. This is more a literary drive-by than an in-depth analysis of a place. Towns that I stopped in that I liked may be on their last legs and I wouldn’t know it. The cities I was happy to leave may be on the upswing and in the process of a welcome urban renewal. I only have my point of view.

Pimping My Ride

My car has an electrical issue. Let’s call her “The Green Mile,” because I vaguely remember it being about death by electrocution and there was one part about a guy being burned to death due to a sponge or something like that. The car isn’t green, but isn’t that part of the fun of this exercise? The Green Mile needed some work to get me across the country. Swap the winter tires out for all-seasons because it can still snow in May deep in the Rockies. Gotta get the oil changed because I packed up a lot of my tools already. She also had some work done on the front suspension, and every time we go visit my in-laws, I pick up a screw in one of the tires. I swear, she’s a machine that turns my money into someone else’s money. But she’s otherwise reliable, and she doesn’t have all the modern features of the nanny state, nor has a homeless man used her as his bathroom, so she’s better than any rental I have written to you about.

Colorado

My home for the last few years was the mountainous, majestic, beautiful, sunny Colorado — 300 days of sunshine per year, look it up. I, like many Coloradans these days, was a transplant to the Centennial State. It was a natural destination for the post-Covid world. Where most places felt congested and stuffy, Colorado is open and breezy (although that rush of newcomers to the state has congested the infrastructure, the roads, and made housing unaffordable; and, as Tim Dillon so aptly observed, Denver is one bad mayor away from becoming Portland). The drive from my cozy abode and mountain town to the border reminds me so much of one of my favorite bands, Modest Mouse, and their aptly titled album The Lonesome Crowded West (1997). “[I] didn’t move to the city \ The city moved to me \ And I want out desperately.” The great blob of urban sprawl is crawling past the suburbs and into the farmland, putting cookie-cutter newbuilds on any parcel of land that they can and selling them for 600k. I went to a cattle ranch to pick up a quarter cow and saw that across from where the cattle grazed was a row of townhouses. Who is going to buy that? And for more than my own home, at that?

The drive that day was lovely. Lomez recommended that I listen to Donald Sutherland’s reading of The Old Man and the Sea, and it was an excellent choice. The Sensitive Young Man and the Road seems hacky, so we will go with some other title. I’m not exactly young anymore. Not old, either. Not even middle aged. I’m just a man. The Man and the Road. That’s too vague. The beauty of Hemingway, and the curse he’s left us, was his use of adjectives. Never too many and always in the right place. We know about the sea. In fact, the sea is too great for adjectives. It is all at once serene and rough and deadly and beautiful and calm and all other things. The man, Santiago, is old. He knows it. It is the most remarkable thing about him. He has outlived his loved ones and he fears that he’s outlived his usefulness. He does not say so, but he believes that like the great fish he has caught, the world does not deserve him either. He loves only the sea, the fish, and the boy who comes to take care of him and fish with him. The Old Man and the Sea is such a great title, only a great story could live up to it. Were it called The Old Man and the Fish or The Fisherman and the Sea, the story itself would suffer. Perhaps we will find a worthy title for this essay.

I, vainly, hope that I can one day write something so good that a voice like Donald Sutherland’s will read it aloud. He, like the title itself, adds to the book. There’s a reason that Lomez recommended this specific reading and was right to do so: Sutherland has presence. Bravado. Charisma. What we once knew as gravitas and we appreciated it. But now, it is not enough simply to be; the world must see us “being.” Anyway, his voice adds to the story. It’s a great voice. A great voice will never say anything foolish, whereas a weak-voiced genius will never be heard. Cultivate your voice, men. Cultivate gravitas.

As I write this, my Colorado Avalanche are in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Gabriel Landeskog has returned to the lineup after injury had sidelined him for years. Like the Great DiMaggio of The Old Man and the Sea, I think of the Great Landeskog and his team. He is an old man in hockey years, though we are the same age. MacKinnon and Makar are more skillful hockey players, but Landeskog is the Captain, and that is because he too has gravitas. The only Avalanche player greater than Landeskog is Joe Sakic, who is the greatest hockey player I have ever seen. He beats out Norm Macdonald and Dimes and Gio Pennacchietti as my favorite Canadian. He, too, has gravitas. I am taking a piece of the place I know as home with me as the team faces some lesser hockey franchise that does not get snow. But Dallas wins and moves on, and that is a pity.

Random Thought #1: What are the esoteric health benefits of eating one’s boogers? Can this be a gimmick account? Bronze Age Toddler.

Nebraska

I have few kind words for the Cornhusker State. They don’t even call the Nebraska football team “The Cornhuskers” anymore. They’re just the “Huskers.” Stupid. Nebraska peaked with that one picture of their behemoth offensive linemen. It’s been decline since then. I love farmland. I love the look of it. I love what it represents. Man working God’s creation to produce food for his fellow man. That is civilization. It’s as fulfilling a life as most could hope for. I certainly could not do it with my soft hands and lack of discipline. The farmland in Colorado was vast, and the animals had much space between each other. As soon as I drove in Nebraska, I saw a factory farm. Hundreds of cows herded into a small dirt patch, surrounded by an oppressive fence while not even a mile away, freedom. Buffalo could have never survived the closing of the West. How does one herd buffalo into a pen?

Podcasts

I had more recommendations than time to listen to all the podcasts and books and music that people gave me. Thank you to all. I opted for my regular rotation: Blood Satellite, Timeline Earth, The J. Burden Show, The Pete Quiñones Show, and the various shows my friend The Prudentialist puts out; or, when all else fails or is exhausted, I will always have The Art Bell Archive. All that I have mentioned put out great content and pass the test I am about to lay out: If you’re going to make a podcast, is it something you’d listen to on a long road trip? If I bring my podcast back, I will do so with that thought in mind.

Sailors Take Warning

God speaks to my wife directly. He does so to me symbolically. There was an accident on I-80 eastbound just outside of Omaha, Nebraska. As I crawled past the wreckage, I saw a burned-down barn from long ago and a dead possum in the road. The fire from the car was almost out, but it had spread to the field around it. The ambulance on the scene was in no hurry to get out of there, which I took to mean that there was no one who needed life-saving care. The message was clear because at the time, I was thinking about how easy it all was, how simple it would be, to sit in one place for eight-plus hours and enjoy the road trip and I could make even better time if I was doing 85 the whole time. God said no to me and that I should be careful and that steadiness was going to win this race. I wonder about the driver. Did he get such a warning? Did he ignore good sense and the Lord above? Or was he ignorant and died ignorant? I don’t know which is better. Is it worse to know God and to reject Him, or never to know Him at all? I imagine the former is worse, but I know God. I fear that I reject Him every day. I fear that He never knew me.

The First Hotel

I am not a real driver. Real drivers sleep in the cabs of their big rigs or in the driver seats. I had a bed. I wasted money on hotels. I play “King of the Road” in the car, but I sleep in a bed. The first one was a cheap place for long-term renters, but I only needed a night. Expedia canceled my reservation before I got there, or at least that’s what the slack-jawed clerk behind the counter said. I doubt his competence. The dog is my only companion. She has no idea why we’ve left home and why we’ve left my wife behind, and she is mad at me, I think. “Why have you split up the pack? Who will be there for her?” There are two beds in the hotel room, and she jumps to whichever one I am not in. She doesn’t eat. I order an overpriced burger from a trendy Millennial burger joint, the kind that has been castigated lately by the terminally online and the normie alike. Just a crazy dude with a dream and exposed brick and $12 truffle fries and a chalkboard menu and a rotating beer list that no one remembers because everyone just gets the house ale that’s $2 cheaper. One of those. I give the dog a bit of my scraps afterward, and she eats that, but nothing else. I hate the $25 meal I just DoorDashed. I ate an overpriced burger and curse the day Squanto gave maize to the palefaces.

Iowa

Rolling hills are not the first thing I think of when I think of Iowa. I think of corn and corn-fed beef. People say “Corn-Fed Iowa Beef” like it’s this great thing, but corn-fed anything lacks. It’s a starch. I used to think it was a vegetable, what with it being in the vegetable aisle. But it’s a starch. I don’t know what a starch is.

Birthplace of John Wayne

John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, and his mother must have had a lot of starch, because he was weighed in at 13 pounds. My baby is measuring smaller but on the smaller side of normal. I think Mrs. Hudson would faint if the baby was 13 pounds. Anyway, while you’re driving across Iowa you’ll see a sign commemorating the birthplace of “The Duke.” The John Wayne Birthplace Museum has a bronze statue of the man, and over Memorial Day Weekend, there is a celebration, the museum shows a John Wayne film, and a band plays live music. There’s also a statue dedicated to James T. Kirk’s future birthplace in Riverside, Iowa. This state contains multitudes.

Earlham

As I am driving across the state, my wife calls me and asks if I’ve eaten. “No dear, I’ll grab something at the next truck stop.” She asks me what exit I am about to cross, and I tell her. She looks ahead and finds a café that I will pass by in half an hour. She orders me a breakfast burrito and a coffee and some beignets because apparently “you have to try the beignets.” They were pretty tasty, though I’m sure Sandbatch has opinions about it. I recently learned that like champagne, a beignet can only really be called a beignet if it’s baked in the French Quarter of New Orleans, on Beignet Ave. Otherwise, they should be called “Sweet Pockets.” I didn’t know that until some guy told me, and that’s where I get most of the information I have. I suggest you stop at Beans & Beignets in Earlham, if to save yourself from Dunkin — who’ve removed Donuts from their name entirely. They’re just Dunkin now. (Like, I always called it “Dunkin” for short, and I’m pretty sure everyone else always called it that, but you wouldn’t expect your buddy Mikey to change his name from Michael to Mikey because everyone except his cunt girlfriend calls him Mikey. Fuck you, Jessica.)

I take a sip of my coffee, and I thank God for my wife. It’s then that I appreciate women, specifically my woman. She civilizes me. She sees what is and wonders what can be. I would be fine with a shitty cup of coffee. It makes me much happier to drink a good one and to have a real breakfast instead of something just defrosted from the back. Men saw Old West boomtowns like “Tombstone” and thought: “Hey, that’s pretty good. There’s even a dry place to sleep at night.” Women had the idea of bringing comfort into our lives. But then we’re too comfortable these days. “Comfort is man’s greatest addiction,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. Hot showers ruin civilization, but it is also a testament to us that we can have hot showers whenever we want. Who can stay hardened in the face of a hot shower? Even the Count of Monte Cristo learned how to sleep in a feather bed after 13 years on a stone-cold floor at the Château d'If.

I have no idea what kind of place Earlham is. I imagine it’s the kind of place we’ve seen in thousands of movies and television shows. There’s a large sign as you’re driving into town that tells of all the high school champion events they’ve accumulated over the years. I wish I could say I slowed down to take notice of them, but I did not. I think they’re big on gymnastics. Probably not many team sports because the population is less than 1,400. Perhaps there is a giant meth industry I am unaware of or some other kind of seedy underbelly that I narrowly escaped. My East Coast cynicism is suspicious of those who are nice to my face.

The World’s Largest Truck Stop, Trucker’s Atlas, & A Frozen Treat

I visited “The World’s Largest Truck Stop” on I-80 near the Iowa–Illinois border. There was a museum of trucking, as well as several rigs from different eras, and it reminded me just how important trucking is to everything we do in our modern world. If the highways are America’s veins and arteries, then trucks and truckers are our blood. I will be using that line when I run for office. I see a Ryder Truck and feel called to Oklahoma for no particular reason at all. Perhaps I really was MKUltra’d. My dad was a truck driver. I remember how heartbroken he was when I joined the Army and my MOS field included “Humvee Driver.” “Forty years as a truck driver, and my son becomes a truck driver.” I ended up getting switched into a different job field, but that was the first time I’d ever really disappointed my dad.

“Let’s all have another Orange Julius \ Thick syrup, standing in lines \ The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns \ Well, so long, farewell, goodbye.” These are part of the refrain to Modest Mouse’s “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” the banger that opens The Lonesome Crowded West. You’ve got to have some set of balls to write a six-plus minute song to open your album. Anyway, I didn’t get to enjoy the frozen orange soda milkshake in its heyday. Now, there aren’t many Orange Juliuses left in the world. But the World’s Largest Truck Stop has a Dairy Queen that serves them. I could not hold in my excitement.

Me: “Oh, would you look at that. Neat.”

I did find convenient parking. I always yell when I find a good parking spot, as I pull into the spot. The dog looks at me wearily. “Faggot,” she yowls.

I often wonder what Isaac Brock thinks about the state of the Mall and the death of Mall Culture. He predicted it, but then, it wasn’t that difficult to predict. We now have e-commerce, which is great if you like mindless spending you never contend with until the bill is due and then, the bill is never really due and you can just keep DoorDashing and buying things with Amazon Prime and you ladies out there can get things delivered in discreet packaging because you’re way worse than men in that regard. At least in the mall, you needed to speak to people. The food court was a third place for those who could not drink and could not drive and cliquing was based on the stores you shopped at. There are no more cliques. The football players have pink phones and paint their nails. It was really cool to be against consumerism and try to be an individual in a sea of conformity, but now your individuality is itself a consumer product. The algorithms that play puppet master to your life are tailor-made to give you more of what you’re looking for — to make “you” more “you” — and the worst part is, you find out you aren’t that unique at all. So you’re alienated in a sea of sameness. At least you could identify your people in previous decades. Anyway, the drink was fine, I guess. I get why it’s dead. No CIA front to bring it back from extinction. Get your Mammoth Burger and Orange Julius or TAB. Egg Creams for dessert. At the mall.

Truck Driver Safety Tier List

Below is a list of the truck drivers on the road, ranked from safest to least safe. There was one guy who was swerving back and forth that I had to gun past him as soon as I felt safe to do so. I really hope he didn’t hurt anyone. Be safe out there.

1. Owner/Operators

2. Walmart Drivers

3. Anyone driving a Mack

4. Shipping/Freight companies

5. Rent-to-own Drivers

6. Other

7. Empty Tractor Trailers on a windy day

8. Box Truck Drivers

Illinois

There’s a Hindu Truck Stop in Illinois that has a remarkably clean bathroom and sells Chicken Tikka Marsala. I didn’t partake. It smelled of curry and questionable life choices. Gas was cheap, and I don’t think it was watered down. It’s on I-80 toward Chicago, so if you’re feeling adventurous, I guess that’s something to do. Definitely level-1 adventure. Driving through the South Side of Chicago is a higher-level adventure. The road trip is enough. I’ve been to Chicago before for a wedding. I saw “The Bean” and got a book and did a riverboat tour of all the Art Deco-inspired architecture. Sufficient.

Random Thought #2: We’ve missed out on the greatest pinball machine ever. A Don Quixote-inspired machine that spins a windmill when you “tilt.”

Indiana

In Indiana, I passed a town with a large water tower bearing the name, and I can’t for the life of me think of what it was called. Driving past it, I thought of Tom Petty and John Mellencamp and all those Midwestern anthems of small-town love and happenstance. I had this whole thing planned where I’d talk about the people who lived there and their connection to the water tower and all the first loves that had been realized there and all the children conceived near it and how more than a handful of people had lived their entire lives in the shadow of that giant metal canteen on stilts. But that doesn’t much matter if I can’t find the name of the town. The name grounds it to reality, makes the place real. I could just say a place and you’d take my word for it, but I had the thoughts tied to a specific name.

(Edit: I looked through my notes, and it was Gary, Indiana. Shit.)

I saw a trucker discreetly try to dump a piss jug, and he looked ashamed as I walked by with my dog. It was a gallon jug that had once been water. It was mostly full. I was impressed but pretended not to notice. His truck had Indiana plates, so I guess he was coming back from someplace far away because that was a lot of piss. I wish the dog would just go already so I can get back on the road and leave this guy to his business. I wonder why he didn’t wait until it was all the way full. I guess you’re playing a dangerous game if you try to fill the whole thing. What if you have more? Was there a second bottle for overflow? Mr. President, a second piss jug has been emptied.

I drive by a factory that has been converted into an Amazon warehouse. I shed a tear at the sight. It was once a producer and was now a distributor. Can you ever be proud of your work when it’s drudgery in an Amazon warehouse? At least in a factory, you can say, “I made this,” or, “I helped make that.” Amazon warehouse work, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if a man got home and bragged about how many piss bottles he filled that day.

Ohio

I drove through Ohio and have no recollection of it, except that in Cleveland, there is a turn on the highway that one must slow down to 35 MPH to make. What a horrible place.

Pennsylvania

I spent less time in Pennsylvania than Ohio, and I remember it much more vividly. An old man stopped me at the rest stop to see if I could fix his phone. He said he could no longer hear anyone he was trying to talk to. In his other hand, he was holding printed-out directions to wherever it was that he was going. Typically when I deal with old people, especially ones I’ve just met and especially if they are having issues with technology, I make sure to be very aggressive and condescending and treat them like children. But this guy was wearing a gun on his hip. Instead, I opted to call him “sir” and said that I would be more than happy to help him out. I even tipped my cap to him. His phone was indeed acting up; it was not some Boomer mistake. I restarted it, and that seemed to do the trick. He looks at me like some prophet or soothsayer. I have exorcised the demon that has taken his voice. I require no repayment for my deeds. I am a benefactor of Man. Perhaps the Boomer will pay it forward by purchasing a boat or RV or sell his house he bought in ’85 for a little less than 4x what he paid for it. I don’t care for Boomers, and neither should you. Or do, I don’t care. We shake hands, and he heads back out, and I pat myself on the back for doing the bare minimum for my fellow man. Maybe I’m the Boomer I hate?

New York State, Capital of the World

The Syracuse Expedition

Upstate New York really set itself up to fail with how it named its towns and cities. Ilium, Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy, Hudson, Aurelius, Brutus, Cato, Junius, Milo, Ovid, Seneca, Arcadia — I could go on. Most of these places today are rusted-out shitholes or dying villages that may get revitalized by an influx of gays escaping New York City. Much like the Athenians before me, I ventured unknowingly into Syracuse and was met with disaster. I was looking for a nice place to walk the dog and remembered the big Orange ‘S’ and how the Orangemen, now known as the “Orange” because tradition means nothing, were the pride of sport in the United States. I, a New York Giants fan, remember that Tommy DeVito, New Jersey native and the greatest Italian-American since the Great DiMaggio, with the uncanny ability to snatch defeat from victory and to eat chicken cutlets and mooch off of his parents to go to a no-show job in East Rutherford, was an alumnus of Syracuse. It turns out, dear reader, that Syracuse sucks. It’s not as bad as places like Detroit or Philadelphia or Camden, but I think it was my expectations being slashed across the face and taken for the $30 in their wallet that threw me. Here I was expecting an institute of higher learning and the charming city that supported it, and instead I got fentanyl slumps, a car on concrete blocks, and some immigrants trying to sell me oranges that were definitely from the market they were standing in front of. I was worried about losing my car at one point when I ran inside the Marriott to use their bathroom. I wonder if that’s how people actually get to Syracuse. You’re driving by, and suddenly, you lose your car and you just need to make a fresh start of it and save up enough to get out of Syracuse. Call me Nicias, I guess.

Random Thought #3: I guess I thought “Orangemen bad” before it was applied to President Donald John Trump. Perhaps after he’s Made America Great Again, he can restore the original nickname. Once the Washington Commanders go back to Redskins, all the dominoes will fall. Soon, I will be able to burn my Cleveland Indians attire in peace.

Pilgrimage to Ilium

I took a long detour to pay homage to a place not visited for some time by most Americans. The river that split the town in two was still there. The Victorian houses and a few mid-century moderns stood tall, though many were dilapidated and in need of repair. The smokestacks from the Ilium Works were inoperable but still there and looked just as they’d been described by Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a writer toward whom I have much esteem. Downtown, there is a bronze statue of him, smoking a cigarette, looking off into the distance. They use the older Kurt because he was not a handsome man; you can be ugly when you’re old, and if you’re famous enough, they call you distinguished.

I don’t have too far to go today, so I take my time. I walk the dog down by the river, remembering Player Piano (underrated), Cat’s Cradle (overrated), and Slaughterhouse-Five (perfectly rated). I stop inside a dinette and order a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich. There’s only an old man in the dinette. Not many people in Ilium these days. He’s not too old, and I feel friendly enough to say good morning and he looks up from his newspaper and says good morning and he can tell I have questions and is good enough to put down the paper and indulge me. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s just me in there. Maybe he’s lonely. I don’t typically talk to people, especially strangers. But I feel I’m in a special place and let myself go a little.

All of this happened, more or less.

“Have you lived here long?”

“Yes. I was born in Schenectady, but I lived here my whole life.”

“Must have been quite a place in it’s heyday.”

“Eh, it was a town with a big factory. Same as anywhere else.”

“Kurt Vonnegut put it on the map, I guess.”

He grunts or says mhmm or something. “We were on the map before he wrote his first book. My mother met him when he came here the first time in the ’50s. At least, she said she did. I don’t doubt it, but I doubt it made an impression on her.”

“It’s funny, the way I read it, the ‘Ilium Works’ was a stand-in for conglomerates and corporations and greed. But now it’s just an empty building.”

“They thought about opening it again as a shopping mall.”

I’d seen that sort of thing before, in Bend, Oregon, and Franklin, Tennessee. Take an old, historic building or set of buildings and repurpose them so that the community does not need to suffer the indignity of tearing down something distinct for something indistinct and ugly.

“How come it didn’t happen?”

“Couldn’t get the money. Or the interest. Not enough people to serve it. Not more than 3,000 people here these days. Used to be twenty times that.”

Were Kurt Vonnegut alive, he might have cared about the Ilium Works and what it had become. Hollowed out long ago, the machines and computers scrapped, the copper wire stripped from its walls. The great iron gate rusted away. But it was trending toward that near the end of his life, so maybe not, no. I think that if there is a thesis here, it is that whatever we think of as gay and cringe and soulless now may be held onto dearly by future generations as having the last bit of marrow in a rotting corpse called humanity or maybe sincerity or some other kind of thing we can’t quantify but get suckered by ad-men into pining after. Ilium, New York, is not there and never was. But there are thousands of Iliums across this country. Thousands of towns doing as towns do, just like the Old Man who went out every day, even when he was old and infirm and believed that he was unlucky. And just like men, they cannot be defeated, only destroyed.

Arrival

Like all things, my journey ends. The Green Mile has gotten me from point A to point B. Insanity and malice motivate me toward the end. I can’t listen to anything. I don’t even want to stay in my own head. All originality leaves my mind, and I’m playing the same thoughts on repeat, wondering how I will word specific parts of this essay and where I’ll put certain parts and wondering what works. But I’m two hours away from “home.” I find that foreign language music helps in this moment. I don’t know what they’re saying, so my mind can go blank, and I can just vibe to the music. The following is a list of recommended foreign music:

• The Music of Édith Piaf

• “The Toreador Song” from Carmen by Bizet

• La Mer by Debussy

• “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot by Puccini (Actually, all of Turandot is worth a listen, especially with Pavarotti as Prince Calaf — brilliant.)

• “La Bamba”

• “Queen of the Night aria” from The Magic Flute by Mozart

• “Miserere me, Deus” by Gregorio Allegri

• “Il Mondo” by Jimmy Fontana

I’m a retard, but a cultured one. Most of these, I learned about from movies and television.

The hospital my daughter is to be born in is within walking distance. I can make out the corner of the building from our new apartment. I unload the car, take the dog for a walk, and blow up the air mattress we’ll be sleeping on until the moving company gets here with the rest of our stuff. Reminds me of Figaro. That’s another for the list. Thanks, Bugs Bunny. I need to get groceries. The store isn’t far away. I think I’ll walk.