After leaving the poker rooms and the packed windowless casinos hotboxed with cigarette smoke, we jetted on, windows down. We charged away from the claustrophobic clang of slot machines and onto the open road. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. We kept driving. On the road, there are only two ways to go — bomb straight through or take your time. We bombed. And it was spectacular. There was the simplicity of desert driving — flat, straight, two lanes, three best friends. We drove through the day, the night, into sunrise, then waded through the blistering 111-degree heat of Oklahoma. We drove through the Arkansas Ozarks, Little Rock and Memphis, and by midnight we made it to Nashville, Tennesee — the “Buckle of the Bible Belt.”
Photographer Robert Doisneau once said, “A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there — even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.” Capturing only glimpses of my journey into the heart of America, this was my roadtrip — a moment of the eroding arches, a moment of Detroit, overgrown and still crumbling, a moment of the New Mexican landscape out the window, rushing by at 80 miles an hour.
