You don’t need any signs to explain what you’re looking at when you’re near Arizona’s Kayenta Mine. All you need is a copy of Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.
There’s a stretch of I-70 in Utah which runs through a landscape nearly bleached of color. Then, once in the town of Green River, there is a former gas station repainted in bright yellow and orange hues with a truck reading MEXICAN FOOD and a sign reading TACOS.
We may have been in Springdale, UT, but when we mentioned Giddings, TX to our hosts, they began telling us an improbable story that, while set in Texas, was full of Utahn industriousness.
Like any good preacher will tell you, there’s a long line of people waiting for salvation, and on this road many of them drive tractor-trailers. So you wait, and the waiting makes you see where you really are.
Maybe it was the way she said patty, but the patty melt won. We asked if she could cut ours into thirds. She smiled. I wondered how long she’d worked there and been forced to listen to stupid shit like this.
We look at one another. Are we really going to camp here? We’re in the middle of nowhere Mississippi, we have no map, there are no other people, and the forest may or may not be haunted by Nazi ghosts…
It’s night. A group of figures sits around a counter as light streams out of the building. You don’t know who they are or what they are thinking, but the scene feels familiar nonetheless.
The anomalies and challenges surrounding B’s Barbecue make it the grail of any barbecue quest, so we made it the first stop on our second North Carolina trip.
