Robert Beck, July 2014
Robert Beck maintains the Gallery of Robert Beck at 204 No. Union St., Lambertville, NJ
www.robertbeck.net (215) 982-0074
Road Trip
The state line between Texas and Arkansas goes right down the center of the street in Texarkana. The cities on each side blend together as one, sharing the wealth of donut shops, pickup trucks, ammo stores, signs with scriptural quotes, and plaid work shirts. It looks like a good place to breed cheerleaders.
Texarkana is located at lunchtime if are driving from Dallas to Washington DC, as I was, accompanying my daughter, Cynthia, who was moving to her new home. It was a timely place to take a break after my first four hours in a Corolla stuffed to the headliner with all of her belongings that for whatever reason hadn’t been sold or shipped.
I’m an old-school map guy and this was my first phone-centric trip. Cynthia is consumer-tech-fluent and the phone is an integral part of her life, if not her body. For many people today, most of what you need comes out of the phone and a lot of what you experience goes in. It is advisor, minstrel, and friend.
The signs along Interstate 30 were not promising. Dairy Queens and Cracker Barrels are very popular. After consulting Yelp and deciding on barbecue we took one of the Texarkana exits and followed the phone’s GPS directions to Big Jake’s, which promised that theirs was “Dang Good”.
Big Jake’s had pulled pork, chopped pork, sliced brisket, chopped brisket and a bunch more meat listed on the large wall menu, and the line moved quickly. My chopped pork came with a medium size potato hidden under a hefty cake of butter covered by a corpulent smear of sour cream and bacon bits. On top was a sprinkle of chives, which counts as a green vegetable in some parts of our country.
The décor was aggressively patriotic: a lot of flags (U.S.), posters of Marines with assault weapons in front of helicopters, pictures of eagles, and a shelf lined with high school football helmets. It gave me the feeling that everybody was looking for an issue to sort out. There was a sizable lunch crowd and most of them appeared to be long-time fans of the potato.
We had no plans to visit any attractions en route and were trying to cover as many miles as we comfortably could so all our stops were brief. We swapped driving chores at rest stops. Most of the gas stations near the interstate sold souvenirs, and at one in Tennessee you could buy a replica of Elvis’s drivers license, confederate flag T-shirts, or a cookie jar that looked like Aunt Jemima.
Dinnertime conveniently found us crossing the Mississippi River into Memphis. We drove along the waterfront and main streets looking for the right place to eat without seeing anything that grabbed us, so we consulted Yelp again. Up came Peggy’s Heavenly Home Cooking, southern soul food, “Where you can get a meal just like Grandma used to make!” That sounded good.
We followed the phone east through urban Memphis for a couple of miles to find Peggy’s. It was in the only building on the block that appeared occupied. Her cheerful sign was balanced by one in the window with a picture of a pistol in a red circle with a slash across it. The one next door was more specific: “No Guns, No Kidding.” Cynthia and I sat in the car staring at it for a minute. She said, “let’s at least take a look inside.”
What we found were the warmest people we would encounter on the whole trip. And the food? I wish my grandma cooked like that. I had the best catfish and turnip greens ever—light, and so delicious. The couple at the next table said they had discovered Peggy’s three days prior and had eaten there every night since.
Again we were back on the road nipping at the heels of a huge storm that was going up the East Coast. The setting sun illuminated the backs of tractor-trailers silhouetted against the dark clouds on the horizon. Sometimes we listened to music from a playlist, sometimes podcasts, sometimes we held to stretches of quiet punctuated by the chirp of the radar detector. I watched cars and trucks slide by my window as we passed towns with names out of history: Nashville, Knoxville, Bucksnort.
Our last night was spent in the Shenandoah Valley. Breakfast was the mysterious scrambled eggs and bad coffee they serve for free at medium-priced hotels. The morning air was cool and crisp. On the road we watched the fog rise between rows of mountains fading blue into the distance. I slipped the phone from my pocket and took a picture.
