Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  A city’s reputation has never been a strong determining factor in my decision to visit a habit born, most likely, through years of defending my own hometown, Dorchester, from brass generalizations and ill-informed assessments. That is not to say that I am not prepared for what I find. My first impression of New Orleans, for instance, was much like I had heard but even here I gradually grew comfortable in the Big Easy, especially in the Garden District which is practically a small city with invisible but clearly drawn boundaries. Chicago, on the other hand, was a surprise. I walked freely through the streets there day and night and never once felt unsafe nor saw reason to for that matter. San Francisco was an interesting case. I saw evidence of the homelessness and substance abuse problems that have become almost synonymous with the city, but, for the life of me, I really could not make the case that it was any worse than Boston or New York City. The reason, I suspect, that th...

  “This train WILL stop at Tucumcari!” -Lee Van Cleef (Col. Douglas Mortimer, For a Few Dollars More)   Ah, but the train could not stop at Tucumcari in For a Few Dollars More. In the 1870s, when Sergio Leone’s Western takes place, Tucumcari was known only as a mountain that towered over the New Mexican valley upon which the city that would take its name in 1908 would be built. Tucumcari Mountain, once the pride of Comanche territory, now presides over a city of lights. But the lights are almost exclusively the lights of a Route 66 staple, the iconic motels that have greeted travelers with dazzling neon for decades. Because of their limited capacity, I was expecting some difficulty in finding vacancy in these motels during the Mother Road’s centennial. The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, for instance, had already been filled up by April when I began booking my stays so I was fortunate to find a room in the delightfully eccentric Motel Safari. Opening in 1959, this...

  Environment often dictates behavior and for that reason, most anywhere else I would have passed by a Buc-ee’s with little more consideration than I would have passed by any random rest area. But since its opening in Clute in 1982 and its expansion throughout and outside of Texas, Buc-ee’s has brewed such local fervor that I had to stop at its Amarillo location before departing the city. It is, to be sure, unlike any rest stop I’ve seen before. Tacky, perhaps, but not without value. Roughly the size of a smaller K-Mart, Buc-ee’s offers its own merch (hats, shirts, plush toys of its mascot, the titular beaver etc.) as well as a wide array of snacks, baked goods and take-out options. I stocked up for the road, mostly with bottled drinks and cleaning supplies, and can win the approval of any Texan I tell I’ve been to a Buc-ee’s.                                             ...