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Eyeball to Eyeball
An Excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America
By Lori Hein
Lori Hein and her two children traveled 12,000 miles of American back roads, discovering the country's majesty and humanity. They also explored the love that binds them to each other. A dusty town on New Mexico's Route 66 becomes the setting for an important family moment.
Ribbons from the HighwayFifty miles from Tucumcari, the orange-and-adobe-colored land began to thrust itself upward into buttes and mesas, and wilder red rock in the distance promised utter majesty. The patient hand of time had sculpted the earth into art. In Saint Jon, the cemetery's evergreens, all wind-bent in the same direction, were testament that the artist was still at work. Striations of color in the sandstone mountains told of creation working its craft across eons. Younger tan and ochre work rested near summits, ancient cinnamon and richer maroon layers deeper down.
This was a powerfully beautiful world where the ordinary seemed extraordinary. The bewitching headlights of a hundred-car Union Pacific made the train a shimmering mirage as it curved toward us through the desert. We were in a place where a freight train is the most magnificent thing you've ever seen.
In Santa Rosa, where truckers stopped to rest and refuel, we took in the amazing collection of vintage cars and Mother Road memorabilia at the Route 66 Auto Museum and talked with Anna, the owner. Adam and I both burned a roll of film on the gleaming Mustangs and GTOs, DeSotos and Impalas, Bel-Air Nomads and Tom Joad trucks, all with hoods up to show pristine engines.
I asked Dana to take a picture of Adam and me in front of a tomato-red convertible, circa about when I was born. Dana found us in the lens, then put the camera down. "Adam's taller than you!"
At least once a week over the past few months, before excusing himself from the dining room table, Adam would give me a slim-eyed look and say, "I'm taller than you," which, of course, required me to stand up and prove him wrong. I knew the day would come when he'd be right. We always stood eyeball to eyeball, not heel to heel, because we enjoyed looking into each other's eyes, the one pair saying something like, "I'm not a kid anymore," and the other something like, "Hold on, buddy, I'm still your mother." Mike and Dana measured and refereed. I'd been winning by an almost literal hair for a while now.