Red Beans and Blue Highways

Road Books, Road Trips to New Orleans and Utah, Lost Book Catalogs, and more.

The two books that inspired me to take road trips with little planning were Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, and Roadfood by Jane and Michael Stern. One led me to Louisiana for the best red beans and rice I’ve ever tasted, and the other made me appreciate all sorts of places, whether they had an interesting name, an interesting history, or interesting people.

I discovered these books from a magical thing from a past time: a mail-order book catalog. It was called A Common Reader, and it was managed by James Mustich, Jr., who had been recommending books so well that he made a living out of it. I loved receiving this catalog in the mail and reading his short sales pitches for each and every book, from beloved oldies like archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis, to new travelogues like Blue Highways and Road Food. (Sadly, A Common Reader shut down in 2006, another casualty of Jeff Bozo and his juggernaut.)

I never would have bought Blue Highways by looking at its lackluster cover and title. But once it arrived at my door, I was captivated: the author, after separating from his wife and losing his teaching job, decided to buy an old Ford Econoline van, throw a mattress in the back, and travel the United States using back roads—the blue highways on the road maps—as often as possible. This sounds like a setup for a Stephe King novel, doesn’t it? But I loved travel memoirs, and I still do. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson made me think about hiking the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine; I had read and loved Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley,¹ recommended to me by a charming Activities Director named Tod, at Chestnut Grove Poconos Family Resort, where my mom took us with her cocktail waitress cash to get us away for a few days during the summer when she was flush. Tod was not much like Bill Murray in Meatballs—he was more of a wanna-be philosopher-poet-singer, stuck judging terrible talent contests and taking kids on “nature walks” on country roads. I’ll have to write him into a story someday. A Stephen King type story…

But back to Blue Highways. William Least Heat Moon’s pledge to stick to the less traveled roads got him stuck in snow on a Rocky Mountain pass, but it also led him to communities like Othello, New Jersey, a section of Greenwich Township, a settlement that dates to the mid-1700s. The neighborhood is so named because—supposedly—someone married a “Moorish princess” back in the 1700s and their descendants lived there. Othello only had a post office from 1897 to 1906, according to Wikipedia, before it was swallowed up by Greenwich.

A church in Othello, part of the Underground railroad.

I have driven through historic Greenwich, but it was a rainy day and I didn’t explore on foot. In 1774, it was the site of the Greenwich Tea Party, where rebels burned crates of tea to protest taxes. The part called Othello doesn’t have a statue to the Shakespearean character, but it is nice enough. A church that was part of the Underground Railroad remains standing.

One place he mentioned that I did visit was Echo, a small town in Utah with little more than a luncheonette counter, motel, and a gas station, run by the same man, named Frank. He would hop a bicycle and zip to the gas pumps to turn them on, and then back to ring up your breakfast. I don’t recall if he also cooked, but I don’t think so. Having worked as a short order cook, I can’t imagine trying to mind over easy eggs between jaunts on the velocipede. (How did I end up there? A road trip in a rented mini-RV to Burning Man, all the way from Minneapolis; but that’s another story.) The little diner in Echo was all right eats, but its location in the gorgeous rocky desert of Utah, between the Great Salt Lake and the Wyoming border, and its unlikely existence at all, was the draw. I’m sad to say that Frank’s Cafe and Gas Station are both closed, but I immortalized them in a short story entitled “Kamikaze Death Burgers at the Ghost Town Cafe,” which I may share as next month’s story. Frank didn’t serve a Kamikaze Death Burger; I remember a good plate of eggs and home fries. Nothing Guy Fieri would show up for.

Frank’s, today.

Road Food is the progenitor of such things as Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and I took it with me on my first post-college road trip. To New Orleans! I married someone from Louisiana, but my love of the state and its culture began when I was but a wee child sitting next my Grams on her floral print sofa, watching Justin Wilson’s Cajun cooking show on PBS:

So from a tender age, I had a hankering for Cajun and Creole comestibles. My uncle used to make something he called jambalaya but in kindness for the dearly departed, I will speak not of it. Later, I began reading the Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke, and that rekindled my Louisiana love. Then Road Food rhapsodized about a little place called Eddie’s, run out of a house in Gentilly, where the crawfish pie and red beans and rice were out of this world.

My car was a 1989 blue Mustang 5.0 sedan that looked a lot like the police interceptors of the time, and was dangerously fast thanks to Ford’s crap locking differential, slick Gatorback tires, terrible weight distribution, and well over 300 foot-pounds of torque. A fast car with Jersey plates in the South. What could go wrong? Anticlimactically, nothing. No breakdowns, not pulled over once. I used the cruise control at 55mph for the entire length of I-10 from Florida, where I visited some animator friends working for Disney, all the way to Mulate’s, where Dave Robicheaux liked to take Bootsy, his fictional wife. After my very first oyster po’boy was procured, I fell in love with Louisiana cuisine. And that romance was fully consummated at Eddie’s:

Finding Eddie’s in the days without GPS was an adventure in itself. I had a Rand McNally Road Atlas and an address. Somehow, we made it! Under the I-10 overpass, down potholed streets with ruts by the curbs that could be called ditches, and no street signs, I politely asked an old man sitting on his porch and received direction. Because Eddie’s was in house that blended in with its neighbors. But finding it was oh so worth it. I think I ordered half the menu. I still remember the petite crawfish pie, the rich seafood gumbo, and the “delicate pillows” of the red beans, swimming amongst the rice. (The pillows description is from the Road Food review, and has stayed with me all these years). New Orleans Menu has a lovely tribute to this lost place, which closed in the mid-‘90s, not long after I visited. I swear I can smell the gumbo now. Or maybe I’m having a stroke. If that’s the case, let me fall face first into a bowl of his deep dark roux and drown.

Photo from the NOLA Times-Picayune Archive.

I have road trips on the brain because I bought a new car and I haven’t traveled much for the last two years because we are still in a pandemic. (Sorry. I had to say it.) I just received my second booster shot, because I am over the minimum age, and I will take every precaution I can, within reason. And getting a shot and wearing a mask are within reason. I will be flying soon—a business trip that I agreed to before the mask mandate was repealed by a judge—and damn right I will be wearing an N-95 mask.

…and my Advanced Fighting Systems Mixed Martial Arts t-shirt from when I trained three times a week. It has a nifty drawing of a fighter kneeing their opponent in the face on the back and two crossed Burmese dha swords on the front. So you’d have to be really drunk to hassle me about wearing a mask. It’s douchebag cosplay. (For the return flight, I’ve got my Workout for Warriors: Freak Strength! Shirt.)

The convention I am going to requires proof of vaccination and masks are suggested. It’s in Madison, Wisconsin, so there will be cheese curds and a visit to A Room of One’s Own bookstore, a traipse up the steps of the capital building, and who knows what else. I have a few Pine Barrens adventures to share with you, so your Sunday mornings won’t be devoid of piney lore. This Sunday I’ll start with my visit to Hampton Furnace, a pleasant ruin found down rutted roads nearly closed by washouts. And next week, I’ll tell y’all about how I got lost following the old Tuckerton stagecoach road… here’s a short video of me jouncing down the road to Atsion, set to bluegrass banjo:

1. Yes, I have heard that he made some of it up. That’s what writers do.