In a recent letter I mentioned the circuitous route my wife and I drove last summer on our way from California back home to North Carolina. The first day it took us past Bakersfield, where I’m told the children and grandchildren of Okies have imposed something resembling Southern culture on a part of California. (I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to check it out; back here, alas, something resembling California culture is being imposed on a part of Dixie.) After that, our trip essentially retraced the Okies’ route from the Dust Bowl, in reverse. Let me tell you about it. (Sorry I can’t show you my slides.)

Crossing Arizona and New Mexico we were going parallel to old Route 66, and sometimes we got off the Interstate to get our kicks on that famous highway. Now that there’s no traffic it’s a lonesome drive, through a landscape of what we recognized from innumerable cowboy movies as buttes, mesas, gulches—stuff like that. There sure is a lot of landscape out yonder, and after a while it takes on a certain, shall we say, sameness. Whenever my attention flagged, though, I pictured a foreground of Okie jalopies headed slowly, wearily west, or broken down by the side of the road, radiators boiling over, a Woody Guthrie song on the soundtrack. All I can say is things must have been pretty dire in Oklahoma.

At intervals we saw reminders of Route 66’s day as a main east-west artery: rusted signs, boarded-up gas stations, deserted snake and monkey farms, Indian trading posts now reduced once again to serving Indians. It was fun to picture summer after summer’s worth of children arguing over where the exact middles of backseats were, back when travel was still slow enough to be something other than just a way to a destination.

Highway travel in the Southwest is still a bargain, or so it seemed after a year in the high-priced part of California. The food was mostly just good, greasy grub, nothing to write home (or Chronicles) about, but I’d already filled my sushi and cilantro quotas for the next twenty years anyway. Decent motels run $20-$30 a night, and in Holbrook, Arizona, gateway to the Petrified Forest (and ain’t that something?) we stopped at one, the Wigwam Motel. The Wigwam is a splendid period piece that ought to be on the National Register, but only three of its tepee-shaped cabins were occupied the night we were there. Give it a try if you’re in the neighborhood, or at least give it a tomahawk chop as you pass by.

Unlike many other “American-owned” motels we saw, the Wigwam doesn’t advertise that fact on its sign. Most of the other places we stayed were run by what my wife and I have come to call, generically, “Patels,” because it seems that most of the Gujaratis who run small motels in the United States do in fact have that surname. (Have you noticed? What is this, some kind of innkeeping caste?) I’m sorry to see them run afoul of nativism, if that’s what’s happening, because it seems to me that they’re real Americans, maybe the last: hardworking, thrifty, family-oriented. And whatever may be going on in big cities, Asian immigrants to small towns are assimilating quickly. They’re not interested in recreating Hong Kong or Saigon or Bombay, even if they could. (After all, they left those places.) Already some of the Asian students at my university are more Southern in accent and style than faculty kids who grew up in Chapel Hill. And it’s not surprising: they’re the children of doctors or restaurateurs or motel-keepers from small North Carolina towns, probably the only Asian graduates of their high schools. Probably honor graduates, too, bless them.

Anyway, there’s a lot of there there in small-town and rural Arizona and New Mexico.”We saw places less like North Carolina than any other part of the United States. I know, places different from here in ways different from other places that are different from here, if you follow that.

But that can’t be said of Santa Fe. When we stopped there briefly to see friends it felt as if we’d somehow warped back into California. Thanks to rigorous zoning, Santa Fe does have a distinctive look, a sort of Walt Disney adobe-land effect. But most of those adobe haciendas have been built in the last fifty years, and increasingly, I’m told, Santa Fe is becoming part of exurban Los Angeles, home to very rich folks who commute now and then by private plane.

Why (I asked my friend) have all these Californians moved to New Mexico? I mean, you can find pseudo- Spanish architecture a lot closer to Beverly Hills.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “These are the ones who think they’re artists.”

And of course the coin dropped. Santa Fe is Carmel-in-the-desert. (Or Sodom-in-the-desert: we heard about one woman’s intimate relations with a tiger-trainer, and subsequently, it was rumored, with his tiger.) Anyway, these are the pseudo rich, who dabble in art, drugs, and kinky sex—not the philistine rich, who dabble in golf, alcohol, and mere adultery. Poor folks like Mexican construction workers or Indian jewelry-makers or tutors at St. John’s College must live in house trailers on some windswept patch of scrub ‘way out of town.

What’s wrong with Santa Fe is exemplified by the merchants who are lobbying against street vendors, arguing that grubby Indians sitting on the sidewalk peddling jewelry (at prices lower than those in the stores) soil the “Rodeo Drive style merchandising environment” that they have created. I take some pleasure from the thought that those Indians were sitting there long before anyone spoke English in Santa Fe and will probably be there long after the last English-speaker is gone.

One place they sit is in front of the old governor’s palace, now a museum where we took in an exhibit on New Mexico’s short Civil War history, which began when a force of Texans swarmed up the Rio Grande with the cry “On to San Francisco!” Now, I have to say that the plan to capture California’s gold and unblockaded ports strikes me as awfully ambitious. I’d just driven from the Bay Area and knew in my posterior how far away it was. Still, the campaign did begin well, with a victory over the Colorado Volunteers at Valverde.

I didn’t realize the present hostility between Texans and Coloradans went back so far, but at Valverde a Colorado officer rallied his troops with the cry, “They’re Texans, boys! Give ’em hell!” It didn’t work, though, and the rebs raised their flag over Santa Fe on March 5, 1862, before losing a battle, and the campaign, at Glorieta. (A long retreat through the desert back to Texas cost more lives than combat had: 500 of the 3,700 Confederate troops were battle casualties; 1,200 died from “other” causes.) The exhibit in Santa Fe displayed wedding rings found in a recently opened mass Confederate grave at Glorieta, and informed us that high-tech methods matching bone samples with tissue from known descendants make it likely that the bones will be identified and returned to Texas for burial.

Anyway, after the glitz of Santa Fe we went on, with some relief, to Las Vegas, New Mexico, 60 miles up the Santa Fe trail, and not glitzy in the least—in fact, a little on the seedy side. Las Vegas had its high point when the railroad came through in the late 19th century, as dozens of once splendid houses attest, and there you can see what is left of a real wild West town (where outlaws were hanged by the score from the local windmill) with little subsequent overlay and apparently no hope of attracting the tourist trade. Aside from an endless motorcade through town for a returning Desert Storm veteran, nothing much was happening in Las Vegas. It looked as if nothing much had happened for a long time.

From Las Vegas to Tucumcari is 106 miles, and we counted every single one because we made the mistake of beginning with only a quarter-tank of gas. The New Mexico highlands are beautiful, in a desolate sort of way, and they were damn near deserted. In the entire stretch we saw only six other cars and one gas station (and it was closed). We passed gates opening on dirt roads leading to out-of-sight ranch houses; one sign said “House 16 miles.” But we made it to Tucumcari, refueled, and drove northeast to Dalhart, Texas, a charmless place surrounded by cattlefeed lots and right aromatic when the wind is right, which it was. The natives were friendly, though, in what seemed a Texas sort of way—or was I imagining things? Anyway, after a whole year in California without going near a hot tub I figured it was all right now that I was back in the Old Confederacy, so I soaked the travel off of me at the Super-8 Motel. Felt good, too.

The next morning found us in the town of Guymon, capital of a patch of ground known as “No-Man’s-Land” because at one time neither Texas nor Oklahoma claimed it. Oklahoma blinked first, and got it. Guymon was the heart of the Dust Bowl, and I thought once again of the Okies and their Great Trek. It’s a hell of a trip even now, in an air-conditioned Plymouth Voyager. We soon crossed into Kansas, arriving at the town of Liberal, proud home of both the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race and “Oztoberfest,” when people dress up like characters from the Oz books. Somehow we knew we’d reached the Midwest.

The next day we explored the ruins of Kansas City, a grand early 20th century American city, lingering at its splendid Great War memorial and museum, dedicated by General Pershing and Marshall Foch when we thought war had been ended, but now rather odd in its attention to that unmemorable conflict. Kansas City’s best days may be behind it, but it is still a famous barbecue town, and I was perplexed to eat barbecue as good as I’ve ever had—in a place that was all wrong.

KC Masterpiece is a restaurant—definitely not a joint—located in a suburban shopping center and owned by an M.D. It sells its sauce in supermarkets nationwide, serves Buffalo chicken wings and Monterey salad, and violates nearly all of Vince Staten’s rules for good barbecue. (For instance: a good place has flies. If there are no flies, you should ask what the flies know that you don’t.) But, my, it was good. That supermarket sauce is great (try it), but the meat was memorable. My beef brisket was merely wonderful, but my wife’s pork tenderloin was sublime. She wouldn’t trade me nearly enough of it. The next day we went to Arthur Bryant’s, over by the old ballpark, a barbecue mecca ever since Calvin Trillin wrote it up. Its atmosphere is 100 percent correct, and it is a great joint with fine pork barbecue—but it’s not as good as KG Masterpiece.

From KC onward the trip got less exotic as we went on through Missouri to North Carolina, via Ohio (don’t ask), so I’ll cut this short. What I want to know, though, is this: how can anyone travel this continent and believe that regional differences are unimportant?

Shoot, my distant kinsman Peter Taylor wrote a whole novel (Summons to Memphis)—and John Hiatt a great song (“Memphis in the Meantime”)—about the difference between Nashville and Memphis. You want to talk about Holbrook, or Dalhart, or Liberal? Good Lord. No, America only looks uniform when viewed from far away—from the coasts, or from 30,000 feet in the air. Up close, it remains a delightful hodgepodge.