Gordon Berg wears a pair of Roy Orbison’s glasses as he poses next to a cut-out of the crooner at the Roy Orbison Museum in Wink, Texas. Photo by Lauren Berg.
By Gordon Berg
There is an ad for Airstream trailers that hangs above my desk. There are few ads that call to me like this one.
The headline reads: “Dream. Travel. Explore. Live.” Quoting Wally Byam, Airstream’s founder, “…strive endlessly to stir the venturesome spirit.”
The ad copy inspires readers to discover the world around them.
“When we awaken our venturesome spirits, we come alive. We feel hopeful. Passionate. We not only feel inspired, but we want to inspire others. It’s the exploration not only of places and spaces, but also of people and ourselves. It’s an invitation to … stop … and breathe.”
Ooofda! These words are a cure for what ails me. Isolation Fever from the last 12 months has me bouncing off the walls. Cabin Fever induced by this winter’s Arctic blasts leaves me chilled to the bone. And Spring Fever makes me wanna jump-start summer…now!
For me, the only cure for this dis-ease is a road trip.
My wife and I are aching to hit the road again. No Airstream for us. No Viking River Cruises. We just pack the Jeep with essentials, plug “Somewhere Else, USA” in the GPS, start the car and go.
And if you’re like us, you’re a sucker for one-of-a-kind attractions. Like driving past Jamestown, North Dakota a while back. “Honey, did you see what’s at this exit?!! The biggest buffalo statue in the world! Let’s go!”
After driving past a couple of mom-and-pop motels, a nail salon, and McElroy Park … there it was. The mother of all buffaloes. Well … father, in this case. Twenty-six feet tall and embarrassingly anatomically correct.
Or like the time we took the back roads out of Odessa, Texas to make an unplanned pilgrimage to Wink, home of the Roy Orbison Museum. When Roy died in 1988 at the age of 52 the community was heartbroken, so they created a museum in his honor and filled it with donated memorabilia. This is no grand Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame Museum. It’s like the rest of Wink. Small, but proud. A pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of museum.
The museum volunteer, a sweet older woman who had the day off from driving oil trucks, met us outside. “C’mon in,” she welcomed us, with her melodic Texas accent. “Bring your dog, too!”
A dog-friendly museum. That was a first!
Once inside, she proudly talked of Roy and showed us around the museum. There was his high school yearbook with the illustrations he drew for it. She showed us a picture of one of the young girls in town who used shoe polish to dye his blond hair black. She told us the story behind the cancelled check from a retired couple who believed in Roy’s voice and wrote him a check for $100 so he could make his way to Nashville to follow his dreams.
Then she reached behind the counter and pulled out an object wrapped in a Roy Orbison Festival t-shirt. “I think you might like this,” she said.
As if uncovering a religious artifact, she carefully removed the t-shirt to reveal a case with Roy’s iconic glasses in it. “These were donated to the museum by his wife, Barbara. He wore these in 1963.”
I was stunned. There they were. The single-most iconic accessory that gave Roy Orbison his trademark look ⸺ his black-rimmed glasses with the distinctive darkened lenses.
“Wanna try ’em on?” she added.
Huh?! Really?! In 1963, these were the glasses through which he saw the world as he toured with The Beatles and later with The Beach Boys and still later with The Rolling Stones. These are the glasses through which he would have witnessed all the news that stunned the world of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was going to look through these same lenses. Or try to.
“Go ahead and stand next to that cut-out of Roy so your wife can take your picture,” she said. “But don’t put ’em on before you get over there. Those glasses are so strong you’ll fall right over!”
It’s a moment I’ll never forget.
Sometimes the road itself is the destination.
One fall we found ourselves spending the night in Lincoln, Illinois. It was difficult to get to the hotel when we arrived around dinner time because American Legion Post #263 was hosting its annual Schnitzel Fest fundraiser, and there was a line of cars between us and our place for the night. The hotel itself was easy enough to find because it boasted being next to the park with the largest covered wagon in the world. Sitting on the buckboard reading a law book was Abraham Lincoln, even taller than the real deal.
Still harder to miss in this town than the Paul Bunyan-sized Abe were the ever-present signs alerting travelers that Route 66 runs through here.
Route 66. The Mother Road. Written about, sung about, filmed about … this legendary reference alone stirs something deep in our DNA. The call of the open road. The urge for goin’. The way to find Somewhere Else, USA.
After dinner and fighting off our schnitzel-induced comas, we went in search of Route 66. We had visions of a ribbon of two-lane asphalt with vintage cars and trucks whizzing by in both directions. But everywhere we drove, it seemed like Route 66 had been swallowed up by some other interstate freeway that obligingly added “Route 66” to it, like an unwelcome hitchhiker you let ride in the bed of your pickup.
Sigh. Somehow along the way Route 66 had joined Stuckey’s and Howard Johnson restaurants on the dead-end road to the graveyard of lost Americana.
Waking up the next morning, we passed on the complimentary hotel breakfast. It would be days before the schnitzel made any room in our digestive systems. We had packed up the car and paid our hotel bill when something told me to ask. Simply ask. It was persistent. I went back to the hotel’s registration desk and asked the young lady if the real Route 66 still existed somewhere around there.
She smiled knowingly and leaned in a bit toward me, as if she were going to share a little-known local secret. “Yes,” she confided quietly. “Take the road next to the hotel. Follow it about a quarter mile. Turn right at the white house and left again at the next road. The road that goes past the old cemetery … that’s the original Route 66.”
My eyes welled up. I coulda kissed her. But I shook her hand instead.
There it was … up around the bend.
Finding it was like finding an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. It was a deserted road now. Only about 100 yards long. Grass was growing between the cracks. Dried leaves and scrub growth were encroaching on the edges. Its two lanes were narrow by today’s standards. They were just wide enough for two Model Ts to pass each other.
And there … there on the pavement was everything I had hoped to find ⸺ a fading U.S. Highway Shield with the number 66 inside. I actually lay in the middle of the road and imagined all the stories passing by over me. Yeah. It was amazing.
We’ve been hooked on finding these kinds of treasures ever since. And they are literally everywhere. The good news is you don’t have to travel far and wide in search of the obscure and wonderful. Some are right here in our neck of the woods. Just Google “Atlas Obscura” for yourself. It lists 216 such wonders right here in Michigan. You only need a curious mind to find them. You never know what you might discover.
So, as we slowly and carefully emerge from this long pandemic hibernation maybe it’s time to listen to Byam’s wisdom: “To strive endlessly to stir the venturesome spirit.” Maybe it’s time to dream again. Explore again. Something wonderfully unimaginable may be right up around the bend. It might be just what the doctor ordered.
