Mother Road
- Dec 9, 2020
- 1 min read
by Kalyn McAlister
The horsemen come to me spilling prairie promises of Manifest Destiny. That American fever dream of cowboys and Indians—though now they advertise Cadillac Ranches and turquoise jewelry along I-40. But still disenchantments lead us along a path of carved out nostalgia, sun-bleached billboards with yellowed seductions of treats and a *real* West experience amongst New Mexico’s brown terrain only to find replica adobe truck stops filled with cheap imitations. We want real—and I thought there would be more cactuses and sand. You point to the shrubs—chollo weighed down still by winter, the same shade of brown as the rest of the landscape.
But that wasn’t what I imagined—and anyways, there would be real desert in Arizona. You settle back behind cool round shades as I pass yet another Subaru. Oklahoma and Arizona bracket New Mexico in kitsch, old 50s diners, red corvettes, neon-lit motels hearkening back to when America was great in those pre- and post-war halcyon days of open roads and open terrain—but every other town’s a ghost as we ask Google when the next gas station is and count the empty miles that are full of something beyond us.
Tiny antelope graze along ranch fences. I look it up when we switch places—wild on the brink of extinction for eating farmers’ crops—like so many of us native creatures.
Kalyn McAlister is a member of the Chickasaw Nation who writes and lives in Oklahoma with two hounds and a ghost.
