Cadillac Ranch
I got to thinking – time on the road gives me time to mull over certain aspects of my life – and I realized that I’ve just about covered all of Texas this year. January, El Paso. February, Corpus Christi & Bossier City, LA. March – back to El Paso. That’s NE, South, Far West, and then, in August, back down through NE NM and into the Panhandle. I was meaning to include the Cadillac Ranch, just never managed to stop. From Interstate 40, on the western edge of Amarillo, this is what it looks {{popup cranchover.jpg cranchover 320×240}}like.
The story, in case \\in case you live in a cave and have never been exposed to Texas oddities\\, Stanley Marsh III “planted” a dozen Cadillacs in the ground, “fins up” [predates Jimmy Buffett’s song “Fins” though> {{popup cranch5.jpg cranch5 320×240}}like this, as typical Texas garden project, a few steps off the road in Amarillo.
{{popup cranch9.jpg cranch9 320×240}}Bizarre sight. Strange site.
Just stopping and looking, or taking pictures, that doesn’t really quite cover it all. There’s more. I loitered there for a while, my handy Visor Cam working overtime in the summer heat, me, meandering an around the resting, rusting hulks. I did stop and casually converse with several groups of people. No one – except me – was from Texas. Although, I suspect the guys working the field nearby were local.
New Jersey, Boston, NY, Canada, and a handful of bikers from NM, that’s all I ran into. No Texans. Curious. Two groups I talked with seemed to be fairly young, maybe late teens or so, doing their first “cross-country” trip. Coast to coast. While I was wondering about motivation for such a journey, one of the pairs [Cancer-Aries>, pointed out a particular piece of graffiti, a {{popup cranchjack.jpg cranchjack 320×240}}quote from Mr. __On the Road__.
