*NOTE: Five years ago I began a journey across the country with Thiel, a dear friend of mine. I was moving from Chicago to Long Beach, California, and she agreed to make the drive with me. I present my journal of that journey on the corresponding day that it was recorded five years ago. Enjoy reliving this adventure with me!
Day 6: January 8, 2014
It’s 1:40 AM and I can’t sleep. I went to bed and fell asleep, but I’m a light sleeper and I was awakened by a loud banging noise. Then I heard someone yelling, and then what I thought was another person laughing loudly in response to the first person yelling. It sounded like they were right outside our room so it made me worried that someone would get into the car, so I looked outside. Not a sign of anyone out there, so I laid back down. Soon I realized that I could hear all of this through the apparently paper-thin wall between our room and the next one. At this point it seems that the “conversation” next door is being held by one person. Between the rantings of the lunatic in the next room and Thiel’s incessant, foundation-jarring snoring, it doesn’t seem that I’m meant for much shuteye tonight. I often don’t sleep well, and can function on a much smaller amount of sleep than many people I know, but I don’t look forward to driving in the morning on the amount of sleep it looks like I may manage to eke out tonight.
The man next door keeps yelling and occasionally banging on the wall or something in his room, then he’ll play a bit of music. For the first 20 minutes or so I worried that maybe something dangerous was going on over there, but at this point it seems that he’s either high on something or stark raving mad, and hopefully that whole mess will be contained to that room. I can hear almost every word until the heat in our room kicks on, then it’s just background noise until it goes off again.
First thing in the morning we’re getting Thiel some Breathe-Rite strips. I pray that they work.
Now the guy in the next room (we’ll call him Cray Cray for short) is saying, “Get OUT OF MY ROOM!” I don’t hear a response from anyone else, and I really don’t think there’s anybody physically there besides him—note that I said physically there. It’s kinda creepy. Now he’s crying and wailing. Seconds later he’s saying, “Get your motherfucking hand off my knee!” Terrifying. I’m going to read through my travel books and figure out what I may want to see further down the road should I happen to survive this night.
Thiel’s snoring suddenly stopped and I managed to snag a little bit of fitful sleep between bouts of shrieking from Cray Cray next door. I woke up again due to his noisemaking and put my ear to the wall to listen. It woke Thiel up and she asked me what was going on. I explained what had been happening all night. It was 4:00 AM at this point. We’ve decided to just go ahead and get ready and leave. I’m going to tell the people at the front desk what’s happening, and I may call or stop by the police station to let them know someone in that room needs some serious help. Not quite sure what to do; at times it sounded as if he may have had someone else in there with him, but at other times it sounded like it was all him. Of course as soon as we decided to just get our day started there hasn’t been another peep out of him. Asshole. All I could think of was The Silence of the Lambs and how horrible it would be if he had someone in that room and we didn’t do anything to help. We’ll see what happens. If they tell me there’s nobody in that room at all I may need to be committed.
We checked out of the motel. It was so early that I had to ring the bell and wake the proprietor to return my key and tell her about the incident next door. She apologized and I told her that it was OK, but that it was really bizarre. I asked her if she knew him and she said he’s staying for a week. She said that he was weird. Yeah. Slightly. She said that she would say something to him about it.
I decided to find the nearest police station and tell them about it just to ease my conscience in case he had someone in there. There were times that it sounded as if he was yelling at someone and there would be an occasional tearful-sounding response, but I also felt as if he was moving around the room and answering himself. It still creeps me out to think about it. He was directly across the wall from me most of the time, so I could hear it all, and to be that close to ravings like that was very uncomfortable for me. I just felt as if there was a tsunami of really bad energy flowing over me through the wall. I laid there and tried to concentrate on sending good vibes through to him before I finally decided that I should just get up and we opted to get out of there.
We located a police station and I went in. The doors were locked to the interior lobby, but a sign there said you could use the provided phone to call 911 or come back between 7:00 AM and 11:00 PM. It was 6:00 AM so I had one hour before they opened. We went to breakfast and then went back to the station. I spoke to a guy at the front desk, explaining what had happened. I told him that at times it seemed as if Cray Cray was alone, but then sometimes it sounded as if he may have been with someone else. He asked if I’d called 911 and I told him that I hadn’t. He said they’d do a well-being check. I thanked him and we went on our way, my conscience eased.
We drove out to Fantastic Caverns. They didn’t open until 8:00 AM and we were about 20 minutes early, so I took a brief nap in the car. I was exhausted, and the prospect of driving all day was really weighing on me. I wasn’t myself at all because driving conditions were still not ideal, and the threat of another winter weather event was looming. I was afraid I’d get too sleepy to drive at some point. Poor Thiel had to put up with that version of Jeff for the whole day. I was snippy and grumpy at points, and impatient. Sorry, Thiel!
Fantastic Caverns is “North America’s only drive-through cave!” according to their billboards. We were initially reticent to support a cave in which you are driven through by Jeep on a trailer, but we learned that the Jeeps are propane-powered. Propane exhaust, we were told, is water vapor and carbon dioxide, just like human exhaust, so we didn’t feel like bad stewards of the planet. We had to wait for them to get everything set up since we were the first customers of the day (and the only customers for the whole time we were there). They were very nice people, and Sue, our tour guide, was a hoot. The cave was interesting, as caves always are to me. Our Jeep was having some trouble, especially at the end, where it was sputtering and wouldn’t restart. We ended up walking out the exit to the cave and back up to the visitors’ center.
Next we drove back into Springfield to tour the Pythian Mansion, which was an orphanage built by the Knights of Pythias, a Mason-like organization, to care for orphans of members of the organization as well as elderly members and their widows. It’s privately owned by a kooky woman and her mother. They live in a portion of it and give tours of the rest. It was mildly interesting, and our guide was kind of a dork, but I warmed up to her by the end.
Pythian Mansion, Springfield, MO.
We left Springfield and drove through some really depressing towns on our way to Carthage, where we had lunch and a little bit of precipitation started happening. We headed out and into Kansas, where we had decided to stop by and see Big Brutus, a gigantic power shovel that stands 16 stories tall. It was much farther out of the way than we thought, and when we got there it was closed. We didn’t even know it was an admission/museum kind of thing. We thought you could just go see it, snap a picture, and be done with it. We took some photos from the road and headed back the way we’d come (or so we thought). We got so lost for so long that I wanted to scream, then cry, then curl up into a fetal position and just forget the world. I was more tired than I’ve been in a very long time. It got dark, then foggy, and there was mist, then snow falling. At long last, after much confusion and backtracking and frustration, we found our way back to where we’d been before Big Brutus detoured us, and into Oklahoma.
Big Brutus, West Mineral, KS.
In a place called Quapaw (pronounced O-Gah-Pah for whatever reason), Oklahoma, there’s something called the Spooklight. Since it was already dark we wanted to try to find it (it’s some weird ball of light that floats around and has been said to even enter cars), but we were so leery of going on a wild goose chase–for fear of getting lost again–that we didn’t even try to locate the spot where it supposedly happens once we realized it wasn’t right on the route we were taking.
It was time to find a place to spend the night so we kept our eyes peeled, but the area was pretty rural and there was nothing to be found yet. We suddenly found ourselves dumped onto a gravel/dirt road, but there had been a sign just before that said we were still on Route 66. Apparently we were on a portion of old road, but not the through portion that we should have been on. We eventually realized that we were on the very original road bed in Oklahoma, which was only one lane. The state didn’t have enough money in 1926, when it was built, to pave a two-lane road. Not much of the pavement survives, but there were a couple of good stretches of it. We drove and drove until we decided that this couldn’t possibly be the way we were supposed to be going, so we turned around and went back down the muddy road until we found where we’d been dumped onto it. Very confusing. We found our way back to the right place and finally found shelter in Vinita, Oklahoma. I apologized to Thiel with as much sincerity as I could muster; I was so tired I couldn’t even show emotion. Then I crashed and got some much-needed rest.
Sidewalk Highway (one-lane Route 66) between Miami, OK and Afton, OK.
P.S. Anti-snoring strips work!
(She may kill me for this.)
Oklahoma! Land of my birth. I wonder you didn’t see a landmark so designating. Odd…