Day 18: On the Road Again

August 1: New York to Roadside America to Shenandoah National Park

Soundtrack: Bartok, Sonata for Solo Violin ,WKCR; Gary Barsky, 91 AM (KZZO)

After dumping the last of my change into the meter next to the Rodeo Bar, I pulled into traffic ahead of the parking police, headed for the Holland Tunnel (with its No Bottled Gas prohibition that kept Steinbeck’s camper out). It was 93 degrees at 10:30 in the morning as I drove past a big red building with horns, around the Fashion Institute of Technology, and by the Handsome Dog Cafe, where the girl on the banner seemed to be sweltering already with the heat. The Bartok sonata on the radio was sad, the Statue of Liberty appeared briefly in the haze to the west and there were no more twin towers at the end of Manhattan.
This time I was careful and breezed through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, occasionally pulling off the road for gas and restrooms and enjoying the suburban ambiance along the turnpike. At Round Valley I found a filling station and a rustic detour around a meandering creek, past well-maintained stone cottages, and a burgeoning development of luxury farm-style houses set among rolling hills and bare graded lots. More Bartok, this time works for piano segued into a rant from a guy named Gary Brisky out of New Jersey who declared “Jerry Springer is worse than pornography” and carried on about Christie Brinkley’s problems with men. I usually don’t listen to talk radio, but he was a lively talker and kept it up until KZZO took over with classic rock. The gossip item reminded me that our friend Scott Harris once saw Christie Brinkley backstage at a Billy Joel concert and not, knowing who she was, said, “Now there’s a pretty girl!”
With no sign of the belching factories that Billy Joel sang about in Allentown, I stayed on U.S. 22 west until it merged with the 78. In Pennsylvania, there is an amazing attraction called Roadside America that recreates a miniature chunk of local countryside with attached souvenir shops and restrooms. The two Lauras and I had stopped there on the way to Fallingwater a few years before and it was charming. During an hour spent reading all the tiny signs and the history of its creation by two brothers over the course of 30 years, the lights dim and the stars come out. The Fallingwater Kaufmans are immortalized with a model department store, their house hovers over a real working waterfall, and the church in town plays Onward Christian Soldiers. Canned patriotic music comes on and the windows in all the little buildings and trains glow and I just sat and cried, the way you do when someone is gone. Charlie never saw Roadside America, corny as it is, and never would.
In the souvenir shop I bought a shoo-fly pie and a bag of pecans and made a meal of nuts and diet soda that fueled me for another hundred miles or so. When I started nodding, I pulled into the parking lot of a library off the turnpike and took a nap in the shade of the building with the windows open. The long days of summer meant light until nine or so and Shenandoah National Park was just ahead off Interstate 81.
All the way, it was around 96º and hit 100º in Harrisburg; the spectre of global warming oppressed the air all across the country; but, as one church in Virginia said “You think it’s hot here...”
It was cooler in Shenadoah National Park, but not a lot: 88 at the entrance and 78 by the time I found a space in Matthew’s Arm Campground. I confess to stopping for fast food at a Taco bell in Front Royal, a trim little National Park gateway town, but it was more for the restroom than the dining experience. My quest was not for cuisine, like a lot of road trippers, but to re-create the kind of trip I would have taken with my son. We would “get the good out” of the National Park pass, stop to hear a bird with a complicated song and look out over the Appalachians, have a smoke and a glass of wine at sunset. We would have put up the tent in Matthew’s Arm, sprayed down with Deepwoods Off and walked the nearest nature trail, maybe starting a fire for marshmallows in spite of the heat, but the most I could do on my own was settle into the bed in the HHR and read Grapes of Wrath by flashlight. It was too stifling to sleep with the windows closed, so I covered the car with a Mexican blanket and sprayed Off liberally, hoping it would repel bears, too.