MS150 Chronicles, Part Two

Friday, April 15, 2011

I arrived in Gravette without event on Friday morning, still scratching my head over the revelation that April 15 was not the day that Americans needed to submit their tax returns. It appears that the entire country was given until the following Monday because the official Washington, DC holiday of Emancipation Day - normally scheduled for April 16th but falling on a Saturday - had been rescheduled to the 15th so as not to cheese all of the residents of DC out of an extra day off from work. Dumbfounded at the boundless capacity of government workers to reward themselves days off not granted to the lesser mortals of the Private Sector, not to mention their capacity to overpay themselves for same, I roll into the parking lot at HQ, check in, talk to all the Necessary People, check out another van, Tool up and start hoofing it to Chicago Friday afternoon. The skies are clear of clouds but overcast to the horizon, the light a diffuse white, but still the kind that made sunglasses mandatory. Heading north out of Gravette, I cross the state line into Missouri, and quickly run through Noel, Ginger Blue and Saginaw on my way to Joplin, then bear East towards Springfield.

Settling in for a long and oft-travelled stretch through Missouri, I turn on my recently-acquired Sirius satellite radio and scroll through the hundreds of options. For all of its early misadventures and strange history, satellite radio is a boon to the traveling worker, the preferences of some of my weird Early Adopter friends notwithstanding. I'm talking about you, Mike Mullally, who has an individual button programmed for every genre, happily flitting from Jazz to Reggae to Blues. Me, I settle onto the narrow range of channels devoted to Rock & Roll and Right Wing Talk Radio, and throw in BBC for some variety, as well as for the ability to keep track of the impending Royal Wedding. More about that later.

I continue to run through my choices on Sirius radio and discover that there's a channel devoted strictly to Pearl Jam. Seriously. Pearl Jam Radio, 24 by 7. This is great news, not because I'm a Pearl Jam fan - quite the contrary. The reason this is good news is that if Sirius Radio sees fit to devote an entire channel to a bunch of lightweights from Seattle whose sole accomplishment was to outlive Kurt Cobain, then there just HAS to be a channel devoted to the Motor City Madman himself, Ted Nugent. One frustrating hour later, I find that there is no channel devoted to the Nuge. What is more grating is that, over time, I discover that the only place Sirius plays Ted Nugent is on a channel called “Hair Nation”. I hope for Ted's sake that he does not know this.

Soon enough, most of my pre-sets are programmed. Those buttons do not include Howard Stern or The Playboy Channel, not that I didn't check both of them out. Stern had hugely amused Sharon and me some 15 years ago on a driving vacation, and I had to admit to some fascination over how Playboy would project itself in a non-visual medium. As it turns out, The Playboy Channel is nothing but a bunch of addle-brained bimbos, all vying to drop the F bomb as much as possible and in as many forms – adjective, verb, adverb and noun – as possible before they run out of things to say in the hour allotted to them. This gaggle is talking to a Rapper I've never heard of who invites them to visit him at “one of his houses in Houston”. Turns out he has three, and one of them is in The Woodlands. I'm struck by the incongruity of a Rapper having a house in The Woodlands, much less boasting about having three in Houston. See, Houston isn't exactly a Hot Bed of Hip Hop (at least not since the days of Willie Dee and the Geto Boys), and bragging about owning three homes in Houston makes even your average Houstonian wonder why one is not enough.

This bit of entertainment aside, there's little else to hold my attention on The Playboy Channel, so I surf for Howard instead. I find him quickly enough, curious about whether his radio show is as vile as his TV show used to be, as I've not listened to him on the radio since 1996. The modern Howard on the radio gets real old, real quick. The same infantile obsession with women's body parts as the TV version, only now Howard gets to drop the F Bomb however and whenever, and once again in as many forms as possible, as if there's a competition between him and the Playboy Bunnies on Channel 99. I move on once Stern starts recounting his most recent session with his psychotherapist, who is treating Howard for - amongst other things – an addiction to Porn. Stern revels in the gory details, including his obsession with Porn involving women dressed up as nurses. I change the channel and put Howard on my Celebrity Suicide Watch-list, along with Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell and Bill Maher.

Strange to think that these Celebrity Nut Cases should have so much in common, all of them not just world-class Haters, but Self-Loathers to boot. I give them a year before one of them puts a gun in their mouth, and wonder what Group Therapy would look like, was this the Group. Of the four of them, my money is on Charlie to actually pull himself together, with Maher as the odds-on favorite to do himself in, and O'Donnell a close second. Howard's making too much money not to be consoled by it, at least for now.

By early evening I'm in mid-state Missouri, having passed by the Missouri State Highway Patrol Eternal Flame. Seems that the MSHP, or perhaps some do-gooder legislators, have conspired to erect a quasi-religious shrine to fallen state troopers. I'm conflicted on this point. For one thing, Eternal Flames are problematic at best, since I'm pretty sure none of them stays lit perpetually, as has been proven by the several that have gone out in a very public fashion. And what happens when they do go out? Do you just relight the damn thing, no harm, no foul? Does somebody just reset the clock?

Don't get me wrong: I've got no truck with honoring the fallen dead, and Missouri State police have done me a considerable kindness by honoring my 11% Rule, which states that a motorist can safely exceed the posted speed limits by 11% without fear of being pulled over. I have for this reason always had a tender spot in my heart for State Police across the land, all of whom seem more devoted to public safety than revenue generation, and all of whom observe the 11% rule. There is one caveat to this rule: when you go zipping past them at 78 mph on a highway posted 70, you must show them respect by slowing your vehicle until you're out of eyeshot.

Back to the Eternal Flame. In addition to the cost (natural gas doesn't grow on trees, and even sacred cows like, say, the EPA have – if only technically – a half-life), I'm struck by two things: 1) the underlying pessimism of such a project, assuming as it does that public safety will never improve to the point that an Eternal Flame would become irrelevant, and 2) the elevation of one group of Folks over another. I mean, why not a Security Guard Eternal Flame? For sheer volume of candidates to honor with an Eternal Flame, you can't beat an industry that puts an individual in harm's way without benefit of guns or body armor, much less one that lacks the backup of a vengeful and motivated fraternity such as that available to your typical cop, all mobile, and all armed to the teeth.

Plus, statistically, it's a no-brainer: Per capita, Security Guards drop like flies. Were we to extrapolate that criterion, it occurs to me that there's any number of groups deserving of Eternal Flames; Convenience Store Clerks, for example. Why, in Southwest Houston alone, we could stock a Convenience Store Shrine and keep it refreshed indefinitely, or at least until Plexiglas enclosures become the rule, and not the exception.

The clouds have grown thicker and are moving progressively closer to the ground. I'm rolling through foothills, and the clouds are touching the tops of the hills. It's a neat effect, as I can still see far into the distance between the hills, but only underneath the immense layer of clouds that stretches to the horizon both West and East and occupies the sky like a dome in my forward vision. To the East a piece of it actually appears to curve to the ground, obscuring the north end of a short stretch of farmland between the hills. The bottom of this cloud layer is otherwise flat as a pancake, and offers me some perspective on the succession of hills I see ahead of me. I'm rolling up an alley of sorts, and my GPS indicates that I'll be on this generally northeasterly route for some time. Behind me I catch the remnants of clear skies in my rear view mirror, almost cheerily bidding me “adieu, good luck, enjoy your trip up Tornado Alley!”.

As the winds get a little pushy, lightning starts to dance between and within the clouds. I notice with interest that the clouds turn blood red just a second before a lightning bolt. I've not seen that particular phenomenon before, so that is pretty cool. When it shoots from one cloud to another, the originating cloud turns red, and then a second later the receiving cloud, and then the lightning crosses between them. The lightning show continues for the next fifty miles. As I drive through this valley, I try to take several pictures, but none of them come out.

Satellite radio is not offering much in the way of local news and information, so I switch over to normal radio and try to pick up a weather report, without much luck. Soon enough I am rolling through yet another tollbooth, and the operator cheerfully volunteers that “there's tornadoes straight ahead!”, and that “if you run into any hail, you might want to pull over and seek shelter!”. She's so chipper about the whole thing, it ticks me off a little bit. If there's the likelihood of tornadoes, shouldn't she be sternly warning me to seek shelter? I'm not entirely sure I want to get all the way to the “running into hail” stage before I start looking for them. I decide to be less of a pussy about it after I realize that the Toll Booth operator was happily dispensing change and receipts in a driving rainstorm out of a structure about as sturdy as your typical Outhouse, or at least the variety typically found in your less affluent trailer parks.

I continue on for another ten miles or so, and side winds push the car violently to the right some three times in the space of a mile. I'm due for a fill-up, so I drop off of the highway and head a half mile East into a nearby gas station. By this point, the rain is coming down in sheets, something that had not escaped my attention, as I had dialed up the intermittent wipers about once every ten seconds in the mile just prior to getting off the highway. I pull up to a pump, start the gas and run inside to use the bathroom. I know, I know, you should never leave your gas hose unattended, because anything can happen, including the failure of the auto-stop feature on the nozzle, but since that hasn't happened since Dallas some six months ago, I'm thinking hey, what's the likelihood? I finish my business and hustle back out to the car. By this time, the rain has gone from a vertical deluge to a horizontal one, and I'm drenched head to toe in the time it takes me to replace the gas nozzle and grab my receipt.

I head West back to the highway, and within seconds I've driven into a fierce hail storm. With the lightning and the rain, I can't see the hail at all, but the sound as it rattles off the company car is unmistakable. Luckily, I come up on a highway overpass and tuck myself into the last available spot up front on the right shoulder, mere feet from the downpour of hail, which is clear to see now. I'm transfixed for a few minutes as it comes down in sheets, half the size of golf balls and maintaining it's round shape even after striking the ground. A shift in the winds pushes the hailstorm over my van and for five seconds it strikes the front seemingly a thousand times. About then a cop car pulls in front of me. His backup lights advertise that he has thrown it in reverse, and would not look unkindly on any effort of mine to back up so as to provide him some shelter. I look in my rear view mirror and see that the guy behind me has backed up, creating some room. I do likewise, and the cop pulls safely under the bridge.

The hail storm lasts another twenty minutes, coming and going in sheets. Five minutes after that, the hail and rain have practically stopped, and the skies ahead have actually cleared to a dirty yellow. I pull out with the cop and other drivers, roll on another twenty miles, find a motel and call it a night. Curiously, I've not felt the need to listen to satellite radio for the previous two hours.