Wan

As in:

As Elsie and Amigo frolicked in the sacred green waters of the Havasu River to the north, Amanda explored more of Seligman, Arizona, and its rich but tenuous connection to the Land of Dreams.

The telephone conversation with her overbearing mother in Manhattan the day before had left her feeling wan and listless. But she was determined not to dwell there. There was no point in having her own life, she felt, if she were going to be imprisoned or burdened by her mother’s ambitions and disappointments.

In the warmth of the afternoon, Amanda sat on a flamingo-pink plastic chair someone had helpfully placed beneath a shade tree at the corner of 1st Street and Schoney Avenue. She read for a while and then put the book down and started sipping from a  a bottle of Coke. In the direction of the Aubrey Cliffs, running off to the northwest, a flotilla of silver gray clouds pleasantly intruded into the otherwise blue sky.

“Oh, if mom could see me now,” she thought to herself. “How she would hate it.”

Eighty years earlier, Route 66 had been the western escape route from the Dust Bowl. Through Seligman thousands of the desperate had fled the dreadful sights of their dying livestock, trying to get to California where they could at least rinse the grime from their faces in the Pacific. By the time Nat King Cole recorded Bobby Troup’s song about the highway in 1946,  the despair of the Dust Bowl had been supplanted by the swinging legend of a winding two-lane road through the American heartland.

An out of work writer is still a writer, and it was hard for Amanda to think that there was any better place to try to understand America than right here in a pink chair beneath a small tree a block from old Route 66 in the middle of Arizona.

Despite the best efforts of the Delgadillo family to keep the legend and the local economy alive, it was clear Seligman was being bled to death as a result of being cut off by Interstate 40 to the south. Yeah, so cargo and upwardly-mobile families in SUVs with video screens could get to L.A. a day or two sooner. A lot of good that had done the country.

Amanda closed her eyes and fell asleep as gentle pulses of a warm breeze brushed her cheek.

When she awoke she was a little startled to see the old man with the cane who’d greeted her that morning at the Snow Cap Drive In. He was sitting on the grass beside the chair looking up at her with pleasantly wrinkled eyes and a broad smile.

“Buenos tardes,” he said. “Brought you another Coke.”