A long straight highway across the middle of nowhere approaches a small town out west in the USA. In my mind’s eye, influenced by the brash roadside hoardings that have been clamouring for my attention along the endless road for the last 10 miles, it is a bustling conurbation, full of life.
When at last I get there, the truth is a 6-lane Main Street with one solitary set of traffic lights, from which lead two side roads that are little more than pot-holed dirt tracks. One of them leads to a dingy trailer park with aluminium mobile homes underneath which slink surly cats, wearing worried looks. The other road peters out beneath an ugly water tower of the type which feature right across the American landscape. A kind of cistern on stilts, bearing the town’s name in big, no-nonsense black lettering.
On the south side of Main Street sits the regulation motel with glitzy neon signs, (No) Vacancy being one of them. Alongside, a family restaurant sits single-storied and clean. Out front, a posse of bright red Ford pickup trucks has gathered, never locked. Behind their cabs, in the open pick-up part, lolling-tongued dogs with smiles on their faces stand over fishing tackle, perhaps a ladder or two and a pile of rubble.
On the other side of Main Street (cross it on foot at your peril) sprawls an Exxon filling station, complete with seedy diner. Heavy trucks are lined up in workmanlike rows, ready for the next 500-mile haul.
Floating in on the wind from the track down yonder comes the soft “whoo-whoo” of the American railroad locomotive, one of the friendliest sounds you’ll ever hear, accompanying the slow clatter-clatter of the endless boxcars behind. Then, as dusk falls, a long lull in the traffic allows a wide expanse of desert silence to wrap the street in emptiness, followed by the mournful call of the whippoorwills and their tales of death.
In times gone by, sensible people would have retired indoors. But trundling in from the plain comes a great chrome-clad interstate leviathan, ablaze with light, hauling a heavy load of douglas fir trunks, fallen tree gods on their final journey to be ground to pulp and forgotten. 40 tons of brawn draw majestically to a halt in the unlit parking lot around the diner and, as the truck driver shuts off the engine and kills the lights, it expels an angry hiss of sound, then all is quiet.
The cab door opens and a fat behind the size of Arkansas emerges and lowers itself laboriously down, preceding a thick-set body clad in a red-plaid Canadian lumberjack shirt. Atop the body is a craggy, no-nonsense, ageless face and atop the slowly gum-chewing head sits a long-peaked baseball cap.
The baseball cap points the way towards the steamed-up windows of the diner, inside which other baseball caps are lined up in a dutiful row at the long counter, eyes following a blue-eyed peroxide blonde who has seen better days, as she serves toast and eggs sunny side up with mugs of coffee-flavoured water. These are her men. In her prime she might have been a star; to them she still is.
That’s it. Were you expecting more? That’s all there is to Nowheresville. Blink and you’ll miss it. Yet people come here from miles around to queue at that solitary traffic light in Main Street, Nowheresville and maybe imagine they are in Manhattan.
I grew fond of Nowheresville as I crossed it many times out west at the wheel of my plain and humble Ford Escort car. And imagined myself proud and gum-chewing at the wheel of a big red Ford truck, kicking up the dust along the dirt trail streaking away from the main highway, heading freedom-bound and dogs abarking for that ochre-coloured butte silhouetted against the sinking sun…
