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 like.
The story, 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.