(A bad-hair day at the National Road Museum)
We passed the S bridge at the intersection of Routes 221 and 40 at 8:05 a.m. on that damp and chilly morning of March 27. About 20 minutes later, in Triadelphia, W.Va., with Alice behind the wheel, we had our first argument.
“If you don’t chill out and quit stomping on the invisible brake, I’m going to turn this car around and go home!” she said.
I did chill out, sort of. But we never argued again for the next 4,135 miles. After our return, someone asked Alice if we’d taken a gun along, for our protection. Good God, no, she told them; if we’d had a gun in the car, someone would have been shot before we reached Wheeling.
I wrote this in my journal:
Our impressions of the road today – shabbiness and neglect dominate, particularly through West Virginia. “This looks really bad,” I said. ‘It looks like West Chestnut Street (in Washington),” Alice added.
The National Road – Zane Grey Museum in Norwich, Ohio, just east of Zanesville, is a pleasant surprise. In addition to a colorful and thorough history of the road, the museum offers exhibits about the life of Ohio native and American West author Zane Grey and an impressive collection of commercial pottery produced in the area.
The life-size figures in the exhibit are a little scary, though, and if they are really true to history, then the frontier must have experienced a critical shortage of hair stylists.
1 comment:
That guy on the left looks like he just bit into a cat turd and is blaming the other guy for putting it into his stew. I have the complete collection of Zane Grey's works, if anyone wants to borrow. (They never do). I hope that when in Triadelphia you stopped at Slick's Triad Social Club. I once went in there with a circuit court judge and a woman who had once been a man. There were a few odd looks from the local clientele.
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