Mark Winegardner - Elvis Presley Boulevard: From Sea to Shining Sea, Almost

ELVIS PRESLEY BOULEVARD

ELVIS

PRESLEY

BOULEVARD

FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA, ALMOST

Mark Winegardner

The Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 1987 by Mark Winegardner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winegardner, Mark, 1961-

Elvis Presley Boulevard.

1. United StatesDescription and travel1981

2. Winegardner, Mark, 1961JourneysUnited States.

I. Title.

E169.04.W571987917.30492787-24180

ISBN 9780802194329

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First printing

Designed by Laura Hough

For Laura

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Steven Bauer, who kicked my butt enough to turn a dilettante with vague, ungainly literary stirrings into a writer.

Thanks also to Christine Prickett, Richard Bausch and Gary Fisketjon, who sharpened both the concept and the writing of this book and who showed me how much can be added by subtraction.

Most of all, I would like to thank my parents, who, year after year, gave me the opportunity to look out any of several windows and see America rolling by.

Contents

ELVIS PRESLEY BOULEVARD

Preface Now and Then There's a Fool Such as I

F or the better part of every summer as I grew up, RV's filled our driveway. When I was in grade school, they were always travel-trailers, but one year I spent weeks talking about how great it would be to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom without ever slowing below 55. After that, they were always motorhomes. The brand names changeda Smoky, a Norris, a Titan, two Champions and a dozen Holiday Ramblersbut their place on the left side of our driveway, across the street from Moore Park in Bryan, Ohio, waiting for Mom to pack the paper plates and paperbacks and for Dad to fill the water tank and tuck the sewer hose into the rear bumperall that stayed the same for years and years.

Mom and Dad ran an RV dealershipWine-gardner Mobile Homes, Inc.but they bought it right before the first Arab oil embargo and, except for an odd year here and there, the business was always shaky. Still, for me, for my sister Shari, and maybe even for my parents, disappointment in the gradual failure of the business was eclipsed by its best perk: demonstrators. Every spring we'd each wander through the sales lot, folding out tables and sofa-beds, opening and closing cabinets and closets, sitting in a chair and imagining what it would be like to sit in that very spot if the unit were loaded to the gills with sleeping bags, Frisbees and sweatshirts and parked in a full-hook-up space in a Safari Campground in the Ozarks.

Then we'd get together and argue about which RV to choose as that year's demonstrator, whereupon the newly selected RV would take its place in our driveway for the first of a series of weekend shake-down tripslittle jaunts to places like Ohio Caverns, Pokagon State Park, Cincinnati Reds games or Bronner's Christmas Decoration Museum and Gift Shop in Frankenmuth, Michigan. If everything on the RV worked okay and, more important, if there were enough space inside to keep members of my combative family from killing one another, the travel-trailer or motorhome in question was deemed to have passed, and it was out of the driveway and onto the highway for the Big Trip.

We never went to the same place twice, and I grew up feeling superior to the dullards who spent three weeks every August playing and drinking gin in the same Hilton Head condominium. They were vacationers, but we were sightseers, travelers. We were tourists.

I took my first American road trip when I was seven months old, a meandering trek through New England. I loved it, or so my parents claimed. After we got home and unpacked the trailer, Mom says I sobbed for hours after Dad towed the empty trailer out of our driveway.

In grade school I took enormous pleasure in correcting my teachers mistakes in history and geography by telling them I'd been to Yorktown, to Gettysburg, to Vicksburg, to Cripple Creek, wherever. By the time I was sixteen, I'd been in each of the continental United States.

Not that the trips were paradise on wheels. In the travel-trailer days, Shari and I would lean over the front seat of our huge brown Electra, dodging Dad's flailing hand, desperate for a wisp of cool air from the middle air-conditioning vent. And to pass any historical marker or scenic overlook was a mortal sin, regardless of its historic or scenic merits. If I told my parents I was too caught up in a biography of Johnny Unitas to bother getting out of the car, Mom would look hurt and Dad would whack me on the back of the head. And of course, at least once each trip, my parents would get into an argument that sent them teetering on the brink of divorce. One time, in a red-white-and-blue Champion motorhome parked on the beach near Corpus Christi, they banished Shari and me outside for the whole day without so much as a wiffleball while they went at it. We were so bored we didn't even hit each other.

But these summers did instill something in me, a kind of eminently American wanderlust, a love of amusement parks big and small, sparkling and grungy; of reading a different city's newspaper every morning; of roadside souvenir stands in Montana that sell authentic buckskin moccasins; of hanging my feet out the car window, tingling with the danger of oncoming oversize loads, until Mom caught me. A love of crossing state lines.

We'd play license plate games, and getting a Delaware in Oregon or a Nevada in South Carolina or a Hawaii anywhere would spread a happy mist of destiny over the rest of the day. Shari never seemed to catch this. She was also seven months old on her first trip, and she bawled all the way to, through and back from Florida. Rarely, on any trip, did she know where we were or where we were going. She'd ask Are we there yet? every fifteen minutes with only the most tenuous idea where there might be. On one trip to California, Mom tried to inflict a geography lesson.

Okay, honey, do you remember what state was before Arizona?

Shari pursed her lips, then her eyes widened. Mexico!

We all laughed.

Close. That's New Mexico, Mom corrected. Do you remember the one before that?

Shari showed the beginnings of a pout. Dallas?

More laughs.

Now think, punkin. Dallas what? Mom asked.

Texas?

That's right! Mom gushed. Good! You know what was before that, don't you?

Shari, buoyed by her small success, started to smile. Yeah, I know that. That's easy. Indiana!

Then Mom started from scratch, finally giving up when she asked Shari the name of the state we'd be in next. Now stop and think.

Disendyland.

I nearly always knew where we were, because I spent hours studying maps, looking for oddly named towns we'd never go through, looking up populations of cities in our path, studying the Transcontinental Mileage Chart and dreaming about the 3,216 miles that lay between Duluth and Anchorage, calculating how many miles we'd already gone, how many we had to go andas a consequence of all thisfeeling a true sense of accomplishment when I'd successfully endured Kansas.

I was fifteen when we took our last Big Trip as a family, a three-week dash to Washington and Oregon, the only two of the continental forty-eight I hadn't yet been in. Though we fought more on that trip than any other, and it was obvious there wasn't room enough anymore for the four of us in a 27-foot motorhome, I can't remember one specific argument. In my heart I know these were three of the best weeks of my life. I've never been back there, but I still smile when I remember Coeur d'Alene and Spokane, the central Washington desert and the Olympic rain forest, Seattle and Victoria, the fir-lined banks of the Columbia River and the rocky coastline drive that is U.S. 101all those places that, in my mind, are cast in the deepest greens and blues and silvers.