My great road trip, my vision quest on wheels aimed to take me places I’d never been to, places no one I knew had ever been to. Because what is self-progression if not confronting the unfamiliar? But first, I had to go somewhere very familiar. I had to go in reverse, taking the same route out of Dallas in the opposite way my parents arrived. I had to go back to the family history.
Five years before I was born, my parents looked at each other and said “What the hell are we still doing in Texarkana? Let’s leave.” Then they left. Although I have never actually lived in Texarkana, it played a large role in my life. In 1955, when my father was five years old, he, his sisters, and his parents moved there from Murfreesboro, Arkansas. He married my mother there, and they decided to head for the big city of Dallas in 1982. As far back as I can remember, I have fond memories of my parents taking me up to Texarkana with a decent frequency, visiting the various aunts, uncles, cousins, and other family members who had stayed in Bowie County. And, as is the way a small town operates, many of them are still there.
The drive to Texarkana is generally uninspiring. I may feel this way because I’ve been up there so many times, but acclimatization bias aside, no one’s writing poetry about Interstate 30. Of course, the hardnose opposition towards interstates has long been a favorite subject of travel writers. William Least Heat-Moon made his name and fortune by rejecting and damning “the tyranny of the freeway”. But as I drove out of McKinney, passed through Farmersville, and merged with I-30 on the outskirts of Greenville, I found one thing to be true. There’s no difference, in Texas at least, between the back roads and expressways. Consumerism has played no favorites in its reach across areas both rural and urban. No matter what route you picked, Dairy Queens and Jack in the Boxes were the chosen landscape. The only difference that mattered was, on local roads you were forced to stop every half a mile, likely to encourage passing drivers to really consider stopping at that Burger King. On the interstate, you were gone baby, gone. As long as you have fuel in the tank, you’re allowed to zoom past the franchised eyesores.
The creation of Interstate 30, and the rest of the interstate highways, was the result of a road trip that lasted about as long as mine. A young Dwight Eisenhower participated in the Army’s first Transcontinental Motor Convoy, designed to draw attention to the poor state of America’s then-current public road infrastructure. The convoy traveled from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, leaving July 7, 1919 and arriving on September 6 of the same year. Forty-seven years later, Eisenhower’s experience in the convoy resulted in his support for the Federal Highway Act of 1956, which birthed the Interstate Highway System. Thanks to Eisenhower, the same trip from D.C. to San Fran would take just about two days, compared to the two month journey back in 1919. I’d say we owe a lot of gratitude to and for our highways.
While I defend our nation’s arteries of transportation against critics like Least Heat-Moon, I again concede that the drive from Dallas to Texarkana is, frankly, boring. Thankfully, it is a quick trip, clocking in at just 3 hours. I was spending the night at my cousin Susan’s house, on the Texas side of Texarkana. When the city was founded, it was believed to sit on the border of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, providing the namesake. Unfortunately, after the city was already named, it was discovered that no part of Texarkana actually rested within Louisiana. And though this must have certainly been embarrassing for the surveying team that took the original measurements, I feel that Texarkana rolls off the tongue better than Texarkansas would have.
When I arrived at my cousin’s house, the majority of the Texarkana-based family was already there, sitting in the living room waiting for me. Also waiting for me was a pan of chicken dumplings in the kitchen. Chicken Dumplings is my Death Row last meal, and I was almost as happy to see it as I was my family.
After hugs were exchanged and food was served, we piled in my cousin’s SUV and drove across I-35 to see my aunts. The two of them live in side-by-side apartments in an assisted-living community, and are two of the sweetest ladies you could ask for. Just a second after knocking on the apartment door, it opened and I was greeted with the reminder, “You look so much like your father.” Being my dad’s older sisters, conversation revolved around him almost the entire visit.
My father died in 2001 when I was thirteen years old, as a result of a freak accident while working on his car. One of the tragic effects of having a parent die before you grow up, besides everything, is that you lose a large access to your genealogical narrative. If I have questions about my father’s childhood or another aspect of his life prior to where my memory kicks in, I can’t just ask him. Everything is second-hand, like a family history Goodwill.
Every time I get the chance to hear stories about my dad, I’m all ears, and this day was no different. One of my aunts shared a good one that I had never heard before. When he was a teen, for some reason no one in the room could remember, my dad disliked the neighborhood paper boy. Ever the joker, so he taught his niece and nephew, my cousins, to flip the paper boy off every time he rode by, and, being kids, they didn’t know any better, so they did. They did this for some time without incident, until one morning my aunt came outside to see her children proudly raising their middle fingers proudly in the paper boy’s direction.
“What are you two doing?” she screamed.
They turned, beaming with smiles. “The Hawaiian Peace Sign!”
“The what?”
“The Hawaiian Peace Sign!”
“Who taught you the Hawaiian Peace Sign?”
“Uncle Rick.”
That’s the kind of person my father was, and I like to think it’s the kind of person I am. It’s cliché but, as the saying goes, don’t take life too seriously. Because you really won’t make it out alive.
