BREAKFAST AT THE EXIT CAFE
Travels Through America
Wayne Grady / Merilyn Simonds
BREAKFAST
AT THE
Copyright © 2010 by Wayne Grady & Merilyn Simonds
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Greystone Books
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada ISBN 978-1-55365-522-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-155365-656-2 (ebook)
Editing by Nancy Flight
Jacket and text design by Naomi MacDougall
Jacket photograph by Micheal McLaughlin/Gallery Stock
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Text printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer paper
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of
the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts
Council, the Province of British Columbia through the
Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Contents
5 / Route 66
6 / Grand Canyon, Arizona
7 / The Marriage Road
8 / Escalante, Utah
9 / El Camino Real
10 / Jefferson, Texas
11 / Selmalabama
12 / Athens, Georgia
13 / The Outer Banks
14 / The Exit Cafe
Acknowledgements
WE didn’t set out to write a book. We were in Vancouver, intending to drive back to Ontario in our green Toyota Echo, and we decided to take the long way home, down along the Pacific coast, across the southern states, then up the Atlantic seaboard. It was to be a holiday, an excursion. It was just before Christmas 2006, and we were keen to avoid driving across the Prairies in winter. We were naive. We were curious. We wanted to see the mountains of Washington and the forests of Oregon, the deserts of California and Arizona and New Mexico, the canyonlands of Utah, the arid farmlands of Texas, the troubled cities of Mississippi and Alabama, the exhausted plantations of Georgia and Virginia, the great, wind-beaten banks of the Carolinas. We thought this would be relaxing, a break from our writing lives.
We should have known better. Put two writers together in a car and keep them there for a couple of months, and it’s more than likely you’ll get a book. But what kind of book would it be? Both of us grew up, for the most part, in southern Ontario, close to the American border, although neither of us had travelled much in the United States. What we knew of America had come from America, not from our own experience of that country. We knew what Americans looked like and sounded like; we knew how they acted and sang and wrote. What we didn’t know was what they were like at home.
We had no itinerary, no agenda. We didn’t stick to the interstates, as Larry McMurtry did when he wrote Roads; we didn’t drive only on smaller highways, as William Least Heat-Moon did in Blue Highways. The routes we travelled were blue and red and white and yellow on the maps, solid lines and dotted lines and sometimes no lines at all. We didn’t tell anyone we were coming: we were neighbours who were dropping in unexpectedly, wanting only a cup of coffee and some conversation.
By the time we got home, we had driven more than fifteen thousand kilometres; travelled through twenty-two states; put on twenty pounds each; replaced half the car; slept in mom-and-pop motels, boutique hotels, dreary motor inns, the car; eaten in diners, cafes, bistros, five-star restaurants, chain eateries, food courts, the car. Our favourite meal of the day was breakfast, because eating breakfast every day in a restaurant is one kind of proof that you’re on the road. And everyone else in there is travelling, too. Part of the reason we chose the title of our book is that the places we had breakfast took on for us a kind of iconic status. Like America itself, they became, for a time, our home.
John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, his book about driving the rim of America, wrote that “people don’t take trips, trips take people.” He was right. This trip not only took us into America, into the heart of the neighbour we thought we knew, but also took us into ourselves. Throughout the book, Wayne speaks in his voice—his sections begin with W—and Merilyn speaks in hers—M. The result is a conversation and a twinned meditation, too, as we each engage with the landscape we’re travelling through as well as our own interior geography.
We discovered that a marriage between two people is not unlike the sometimes uneasy truce that exists between two countries that have lain beside each other for a long time. We each came to that in our own way, and that, too, was part of the journey.
WASHINGTON looms across the border from British Columbia at the end of a long line of cars and buses. As we await our turn at customs, we watch a man playing with his young son on the wide stretch