Anderson, a squarely built man of seventy-three, with hands that testified to a life of hard work, was a retired farmer. He’d also done a stint in a meatpacking factory in Omaha and believed that Americans had become too soft, leaving immigrants to take on the tough, dirty jobs.
“They come here to work, and they’re welcome to come here to fill in for the people who won’t do the jobs. If they [Americans, he meant] want the jobs, they should accept the wages.” Anderson spoke in full, concise sentences, with never an ah or uh or silent pause between them—the emphatic voice of a man whose convictions had been won through experience, not learned from an editorial or a blog. “I farmed, and every year we hired Mexicans to pick our sugar beet crop. But people got after us. ‘Why don’t you hire locals?’ they said. So one year we did, and they destroyed about one fourth of the crop, didn’t care if they worked well or not. So the next year we hired our old crew back.”
He thought that the friction between the native-born and immigrants was worse now than in the past, and he wasn’t confident that everyone would eventually get along. Not only were there more foreigners; they were more assertive.
“The outsiders were kept back in the past, but now they’re setting their foot forward and saying they want equal opportunities, and there are some here who are against that, them stepping up, saying, ‘What’re you doing, saying that you’re the same as us?’”
Returning to my car, I passed St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. Kids from a Christian youth group, some white, some black—children of Sudanese refugees—were skipping rope, supervised by a young man and a woman. The kids lined up and took turns at jumping the rope, twirled to a sung cadence by a white girl holding one end, an African girl, her hair wound in tight braids, the other. There was much laughter and chatter, and the whole scene was so heartwarming I could have believed it was staged to show that harmony between native and newcomer was possible. Still, I was careful not to make too much of it. Maybe these kids were new blooms of the “old feuillage”; but in the current atmosphere, it wasn’t certain that the African children would be allowed to graft themselves onto the American tree. I hoped they would be, as my forefathers were, even as I was, but if they and the other seedlings blown here from far away had to sprout up separately, I wasn’t sure what would happen to Whitman’s cry, “My ever-united lands.”
The following day I had lunch at Sanchez Plaza, a restaurant, grocery store, and bakery. I might have been in Nogales instead of the heart of Nebraska: coral-colored walls outside, terra-cotta tiles inside, mariachis trilling on the sound system, shelves crammed with red beans and black beans, poblano and serrano and jalapeño peppers, piquant sauces, many varieties of rice, and a bakery case with Spanish breads and thickly sugared pastries.
This establishment was the creation of Filemon Sanchez, short, muscular, forty-six years old, with restless eyes deep set in a strong, square face. As I talked to him, I entertained a fantasy that he could change Tattoo-man’s ideas about Mexicans.
You could think of Sanchez as ordinary—a small businessman in a small city in a sparsely populated state. But the obstacles he had to overcome to get where he was from where he’d been made him remarkable. He was born in southern Mexico, in the state of Michoacán, one of eight children, his father a subsistence farmer.
“Our life was very poor,” he said. “I wanted an education. I told my father that I wanted to stay in school, but he couldn’t help me out. When I saw there was no way out, I decided to come to the U.S.”
In 1986, through a family connection, he signed up with a crew of migratory field hands bound for the citrus groves of Florida. He picked oranges and grapefruits from sunrise to sunset, moved on to North Carolina to harvest cucumbers and tomatoes, making forty cents a bucket. The more he picked, the more he earned, but it was hard to earn much.
“We were on our knees all day, and sometimes you couldn’t take it anymore and had to stop.”
From North Carolina, the crew headed west to Nebraska’s soybean fields, and there Sanchez underwent a kind of conversion experience.
“My idea was that I would stay here for two years and save twenty thousand dollars and go back to school in Mexico,” he said over a love ballad’s brassy riff, his quick, dark eyes darting side to side. “But after a couple of months in this country, I saw that there were more opportunities here, and that I could do better here, and I decided I didn’t want to go back.”
He threw a fleeting, economical smile across the table while I ate my chicken fajita and marveled at America’s power to beguile and bedazzle. The only opportunity it had given him was the opportunity to break his back in the dirt twelve hours a day for pocket change; yet he saw a possibility to better himself. I couldn’t think of a sensible reason how or why that vision popped into his head. I can’t now. It’s as if a magical pollen swirls in the air of this country, summoning up dreams in the waking mind.
Sanchez landed a job with a roofing contractor, worked at that for a year and a half, then hired on at Swift, pulling down seven-fifty an hour cleaning hog bellies in the tripe room. He had to quit four years later, disabled by injuries to his neck and shoulders. He found less arduous employment with a program to educate Grand Island’s Latino community about HIV-AIDS. A turning point came when Swift offered a settlement for his injuries.
“I had to start something with that money. You know how it is when you get money: you spend it and don’t know where it goes.” He flicked another spare smile. “A friend of mine out of Chicago taught me how to bake Spanish breads and pastries. I started doing baking in my house. Eighty bags a day. I knew the Latino community from working with the program. I knew the market and went door to door, and I made maybe forty bucks a day.”
Business grew, he rented space in his present location, and opened a bakery and, eventually, this restaurant.
I looked around the busy place and asked, Was this what he’d dreamed of the moment he’d decided he wasn’t going back to Mexico?
“No,” he said. “This came up…” Sanchez hesitated, his pupils slipping right to left, left to right. “I don’t know how it came up…” He paused again. “I think this came up thanks to the guy who showed me how to make pastries … And that guy told me, ‘You gotta open a business.’ That’s what motivated me.”
He was drilling the value of education and of a dollar into the heads of his children, three girls and a boy. His eldest daughter was going to college in the fall; she and her sisters have jobs in the business, waitressing, working the register; his four-year-old son sits beside him when he’s behind the counter.
“A lot of kids, you know, they say, ‘Poppy will buy it.’ I tell mine, that’s not how it works. You have to earn it, you have to do something. I don’t want you at home, watching TV or playing silly games on the computer.”
He dismissed the tensions in Grand Island. Yes, Latinos had marched in the streets for immigration reform; yes, there’d been attempts to pass anti-immigrant laws; but no, Sanchez himself had seldom gotten a hostile look or any other indication that he wasn’t welcome.
“Maybe sometimes I say hi to someone and they don’t answer. I’m the kind of guy who smiles a lot—it’s my way of saying hi—and maybe someone doesn’t smile back at me or say hi, but that doesn’t stop me.”
I’d seen the walls and barriers rising on the Mexican line, the glass eyes of the surveillance cameras peering into the desert at night. Three thousand Border Patrol agents are stationed in Arizona alone, ten for every mile of its border with Mexico. Keep out, you huddled masses yearning to make our motel beds, butcher our hogs, build our houses, harvest our crops, landscape our yards. This is nothing new. The Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s aimed to block Chinese from landing on our shores; as late as the early twentieth century, certain East Coast ports prohibited Irish immigrants from disembarking. (New York was an exception. That’s why so many Irish had bought steerage tickets on the Titanic.) Now we’ve transformed the Mexican border into a semblance of an
eastern European frontier during the Cold War. We’ve chosen to arrest and deport those already here (giving the businesses that hired them a scolding at the worst). How many Filemon Sanchezes have been cuffed, jailed, and sent home, and are we really the better for it?
20.
The model names of the two RVs that pulled in beside us were an omen. Storm and Hurricane. At one in the morning, barefoot and naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, I dashed outside into a Niagara of rainfall, slipped on the trailer step, and jammed my toes into the ground. I then limped to the truck, shut the hardtop windows, and herded the dogs into the trailer.
Leslie took the wheel for the next day’s drive, west on U.S. 30, the Lincoln Highway. I sat with the passenger seat pushed all the way back, my throbbing right foot propped on the dash. I was positive I’d broken my big toe and had said so on a cell phone call to a friend. Maybe I went a little overboard.
“If you’re going to say you fractured your toe,” the dog wrangler quipped, “then I’m going to start saying I shattered my wrist.”
Nevertheless, she took me a couple of days later to the Great Plains hospital in North Platte to find out if I had indeed broken bones. A tall, crew-cut doctor named Ben examined me; a charming blonde, Collette, took an X-ray. Both flinched when they looked at it.
“You’ve had an awful lot of work done on this foot,” Dr. Ben observed. “What happened to it?”
Putting on my best laconic Clint Eastwood imitation, I said, “Old war wound.”
“Vietnam?”
I shook my head and gave the abbreviated version: I’d been covering the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 when I was ambushed and shot in the right foot and left ankle with an AK-47.
“Well, a lot of that shrapnel is still in there,” said Dr. Ben.
“Yeah, it is,” I said, trying to impress Collette with my stoic bravery, though to what end I can’t say.
Turning to present injuries, Dr. Ben told me that I hadn’t fractured a thing and gave me a prescription for hydrocodone.
* * *
Steinbeck called Route 66 the “Mother Road.” The Lincoln, then, is the Father Road, the first transcontinental automobile highway in the United States, opened to traffic in 1913. Jumping off from Times Square, it spanned thirty-four hundred miles to its finish in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park. Early guidebooks cautioned that the monthlong trip was “something of a sporting proposition,” and advised adventurous motorists to carry camping equipment and all necessary tools and not to wear new shoes because they would have to wade rivers and streams to test their depths before crossing.
The idea to build a coast-to-coast motor road sprang from the fertile brain of Carl Fisher, the automotive entrepreneur who also built the Indianapolis Speedway and developed Miami Beach. He may have been inspired by Horatio Jackson, the first person to cross the continent by automobile. Jackson and his mechanic Sewell Crocker accomplished the feat in an open-top Winston touring car in 1903, exactly one hundred years—by a wonderful coincidence—after Thomas Jefferson assigned Meriwether Lewis the mission of exploring the Louisiana Territory. Someone had bet Jackson that no one could make the trip in less than three months; he and Crocker did it in two.
With machinery primitive by modern standards, and with a lot of human muscle wielding picks, shovels, and sledgehammers, construction of the Lincoln was finished in just two years. Aside from the fact that it was built in an era when Americans did big things rather than argue about doing them, it was completed quickly because it was laid down on existing routes, some of which had been in use for centuries: a Dutch colonial road in New Jersey from 1675; the Lancaster Turnpike in Pennsylvania dating to 1796; a Sauk-Fox Indian trail in Ohio.
The five-hundred-mile stretch between Omaha and the Wyoming uplands followed the Platte River valley, which had been carrying human beings from one place to another for a thousand years. The valley’s flatness (plat is French for flat, and the Otoe Indian word Nebrathka means “flat water”) and the plentiful water and lush grass it provided for game as well as livestock made it an ideal corridor for travel.
You could make an argument that if it weren’t for the river, there never would have been a Lincoln Highway. Its genealogy would go something like this: the Platte begat the Great Medicine Road, a web of paths beaten along the riversides by migrating buffalo and the plains tribes that tracked them; the Great Medicine Road begat the Platte River Trace, a caravan route for pack trains hauling supplies to Rocky Mountain fur trappers in the 1820s; the trace begat the Oregon and Mormon Trails, and they begat the Pony Express, which begat the Union Pacific, the first transcontinental railroad, its storied golden spike banged down in 1869; the Union Pacific begat the Lincoln, and it U.S. 30, which today flanks the north side of the river. Hugging the south side is the youngest member of the lineage, Interstate 80.
Traveling the Lincoln, I felt connected to that past, to the history of America and its ceaseless comings and goings. Here and there we saw markers that would have been familiar to motorists nearly a century ago. The emblem—a white square with an L in the middle, bordered by a red stripe above, a blue stripe below—appeared on the original road’s mileposts. Fred rolled on pavement covering the tire tracks of automobiles with extinct brand names; those had bumped along crushed rock laid over the wheel ruts of prairie schooners and freight wagons trundling beaver pelts out of the Rockies; over the bootprints of pioneers, forty-niners, and mountain men, the moccasin prints of Kanza, Otoe, Arapaho, Pawnee, and Cheyenne.
Early pioneers had joked that the Platte was “a mile wide and an inch deep, too thick to drink, too thin to plow.” They would not have recognized the modern river, considerably less than a mile wide (irrigation dams on its north branch have strangled its flow), or the modern landscape: corn, soybean and wheat fields, pivots, grain elevators tall as NASA rockets. Gun barrel straight, the Lincoln shot from one small town to another, each with its civic-booster slogan. Wood River proclaimed possession of “a Proud Past and a Promising Future.” Shelton boasted that it provided “a Slice of the Good Life.” Gibbon announced, “Welcome to Gibbon—Smile City.” A sign across the highway as it passed through Cozad (whence that name?) declared that the town was split by the hundredth meridian. A milestone on our journey—from the Texas hill country well into Canada, one hundred degrees west longitude marks the approximate boundary between the moist forests and prairies of eastern North America and the semiarid climate of the western. We were on the high plains, the True West.
For a while, we paced a Union Pacific freight train, its boxcars canvases for graffiti artists. The statue of a zebra stood on a farmhouse lawn; beside it a (real) polka-dot horse grazed. We flipped off the Lincoln onto Nebraska 47 for a look at the Platte. Swollen from the snowpack melting in the Colorado Rockies, it roiled along between corridors of cottonwood and pale green Russian olive.
We pressed on toward Ogallala. A wall of bruise-colored cloud blotting out half the sky persuaded us to end the day’s travels there. We found space at a family-owned place called Area’s Best Campground—best, apparently, because it was the only. A biker club rumbled in, rolled their Harleys under a ramada, threw covers over them, and huddled together to wait out the advancing storm. It came on with a menacing beauty. Thin, white clouds scudded past the blue-black thunderheads; rain curtains dropped, edged in pink at top and bottom. Then thunder that made us think we were under bombardment, lightning bolts rocketing at the vertical, at the horizontal, at crazy angles, at times lighting up the entire sky. There seemed no end to these Great Plains storms, and we were getting sick of them.
After unhitching the trailer in a torrential downpour, we went to the faux-frontier Front Street Steakhouse and Crystal Palace Saloon for dinner and to catch its weekend Wild West show. One hundred and twenty years ago, when Texas trail drives ended at the Union Pacific railhead, Ogallala was a rowdy place. Though it’s still something of a cow town, the only gunfights now are blank-cartridge duels fought by waiters in cowboy getups. The wa
itresses dress as dance-hall girls and kick up their heels on the same stage where the make-believe gunslingers die make-believe deaths while a piano player in period costume plinks old-timey tunes. Chewing on a so-so prime rib, I thought it would be interesting if towns like Ogallala staged the West as It Really Was shows. The dance-hall girls would exchange their cute outfits for smudged calico shifts and go without bathing for a couple of weeks; the men wouldn’t die in thrilling shoot-outs but of cholera—the big killer on the Oregon Trail, accounting for a hundred times more victims than all the outlaws and Indians combined. Clearly, I’ll never land a job in Hollywood or the tourist industry. To paraphrase a line from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: This is the West, sir. If it’s a choice between legend and fact, you’ll never make a dime going with the fact.
* * *
Fred’s trip odometer read 2,930.6 miles. I was anxious to head north, back to the Missouri and the Lewis and Clark Trail. Leslie found the route on our atlas: Nebraska 61, a skinny red line wiggling 140 miles into South Dakota. Entranced by the blank spaces through which it passed, she dubbed it “the road to nowhere”; there were only three towns on it: Arthur (pop. 117), Merriman (pop. 128), and, between them, Hyannis (pop. 182). Old photos of the Kennedys playing touch football on Cape Cod flickered in my mind’s eye. How did a village way out here come to be called Hyannis? That’s what drew me. And the white spaces.
Becoming more adept at hitching up, we got off earlier than our usual 9:45 a.m. In need of groceries, we then tried stocking up at the local Save-A-Lot, where we saved quite a lot because we hardly bought anything. Leslie noticed that the signs above the aisles that usually said CEREAL or CANNED FRUIT directed shoppers to Pop-Tarts, Kool-Aid, and beef jerky. “The three basic food groups,” she said.
The Longest Road Page 15
