It was 104 degrees and I did not want chicken. I wanted a Cobb salad, maybe, or a Niçoise, so I blew past the chicken place. I also liked the idea of pie because I always like the idea of pie, though I am trying to eat like an adult slightly more often. I wanted to be in a place where pie was an option for me to refuse. But after the chicken place, there was nowhere to stop. I drove past places where diners used to be, their signs were cracked, their reader boards held nothing but a random vowel, the OPEN sign was there, propped in the window, but the windows were curtained with spider webs and OPEN was a long time ago. Much later than my stomach wanted, I rolled into a gravelly parking lot. On one side of the lot, a gas station and mini-mart and on the other side, the diner.
It was my third day on the road, my third stop for road food. There’d been pie, and Mexican BBQ, and now, there would be a turkey sandwich on soft rye, the kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth in a little crescent shape mass of rye bread mash.
“I’ve been looking to stop for an hour,” I said to the woman working the counter. “They’re all gone, all the diners are gone.” Her name was Sydney, I think, it was something unexpected.
“It’s a hard business,” she said, “but also, people don’t stop anymore. They think it’s better to get a pile of appetizers at Applebee’s.”
“Not the same,” I said.
“Oh, I know, I know. Did you save room for pie?”
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In Australia, where I have done two very long road trips, there are road houses, which are sort of like American diners but, in my limited experience, considerably rougher. They’re more like outposts where there’s a store and some hangers-on who seem to subsist on dust and beer, and some stray dogs, and maybe a few ramshackle rooms and a campground. In Europe, there are guest houses, twee and civilized with complicated multi-page menus and often a lovely view and they are destinations in and of themselves. And there are elaborate gas stations, many with excellent food.
And in the US, we have the roadside diner.
I love the diners best.
Not the big interstate diners, not anymore, because they have lost most of their independent charm, invaded by fast food monsters like Pizza Hut and McDonald’s and KFC. No. I love the kind where a door clangs shut behind you and a waitress calls you “Hon” or “Darling” and there’s conservative propaganda on the walls. The kind where there’s a counter and a light up sign that you can see for miles away, especially if you’re out on the plains and when you finally stop, you get a grilled cheese sandwich that is better than any other grilled cheese sandwich anywhere except inside your memory.
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In 1975, the average vehicle got just over 13 miles to the gallon. You’d chew up a little more than 250 miles of scenery on a tank of gas. Older cars — 40s-50s-60s — got about the same mileage, but there were other variables, like how fast you could go, what the road conditions were like, the general reliability of your ride. People didn’t cover quite as much territory in a day.
I’ll do 400 miles a day if I have to when I’m road tripping, but I have blacktop and no shortage of gas stations and a rig that hums evenly at 75 miles per hour. 400 miles is not my first choice; what I prefer to do is make a lazy start, drink too much coffee, and later, stop for a long diner lunch at a crossroads that’s not near anything I’ve come from or am heading towards. I want to eavesdrop on conversations and get a sandwich and I want pie, even if I don’t order it.
I like to have company when I’m doing this kind of trip, but I genuinely enjoy doing it alone, too because it gives me space to think about what I see and to memorize what’s happening around me.
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“Get him a Diet Coke when he comes in, okay?” she says to the kid holding the dishtowel. Then, to the big guy sitting at the table behind me, “We’ve got short ribs and meatloaf today.”
“I’m not that hungry. It’s too hot. Do you have any lasagne? I think I’ll have the meatloaf. No, lasagne. Got any lasagne?”
Another couple comes in, the door buzzer sings, the waitress (manager?) tells them about the meatloaf and the ribs. The couple are big and old, in their 70s, I imagine, and I wonder if they’ve rolled up in a motor home, or a big camper propped on a pick up truck, or they’re local, and it’s time for dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon.
There’s an air conditioner unit on the back wall of the diner. And there’s lot of stuff on little display shelves in front of me; a mug full of pens, a sign that says something like, “Protected by Smith and Wesson,” and some figurines that look like they have fallen down and been glued back together repeatedly.
“We can go too far, too fast now,” I say to Sydney, I think her name was Sydney.
“That’s it,” she says. “All these independent places, they’re going away. But this one, she just bought it back, she’d sold it to a new owner and it wasn’t working at all. Same thing happened with that chicken place up the road. You’re gonna want to stop there next time, best chicken I’ve ever had. They just re-opened a couple of months ago.”
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It’s not the food, though I have had some great diner meals. It’s not that I have some obsession with pie, either, in fact, the last pie stop I made was just okay. The crust was a little heavy (probably overworked), though the filling was good. That’s not what I love about roadside diners, it’s not just about the pie.
It’s that these places, even in the sameness of their menus and their decor, are all so different, they all feel so very much themselves. They’re not cookie cutter establishments where the decorations are sent from a warehouse outside of Phoenix and the made in China uniform polo shirts are embroidered with a corporate logo. They’re siblings, not clones.
And they feel so very American, in the best way. In a “where are you from of course you’re hungry you’re in the right place can I get you some iced tea hot enough for you” sort of way.
The diners are endangered, their framing gnawed by brambles and their roof-lines eaten by moss. Rust loosens the screen door hinges and the sun sucks the color out of the painted lettering on the side of the building that faces inbound traffic. Big, high contrast words, faded from black to gray, from red to pale coral: Good Home Cooking Sandwiches Soup Homemade Bread Pie and Ice Cream Closed Mondays. Our cars, which first made diners possible, are now diner predators, allowing us to fly by them as though they do not exist, they do not matter. We’re killing them by ignoring them.
Sometimes, even when I’m not even hungry, I stop just because there’s a diner. I talk to the waitresses. I get coffee, which surprises me when it’s good — and pie, which surprises me when it’s bad. I eavesdrop and I think, “The roadside diner is going away. Please let this place be here when I pass through next time.” If the door opens while I’m sitting there, I look around and nod at the new visitors, like I belong there.
Because while I’m there, I do.
Image: Abandoned Diner and Gas Station, Nevada Desert by Chris via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Absolutely LOVE this post; the little diners we came across in America were the places that made bigger and more homely impressions than any of the fancy and/or chain restaurants did… Save the diners!!!
Wonderful writing. I could feel the heat of the day and the cool of the A/C in the diner, the kind that rattles a little. In my mind’s eye Sydney looked like Flo from Alice, but I doubt that in real life she did. Did she? There’s a diner across the street from me on 72nd Street, but it’s not the same. When I was in High School, Denny’s was the end all and be all of diners. We’d get the Grand Slam at midnight before heading home. The Denny’s I used to frequent is a doctor’s office now. I drive by when I visit my old stomping ground in Michigan and remember all the stupid, fun, crazy, dramatic conversations that took place over eggs and bacon. That was the life, before career and mortgages made late nights at Denny’s a luxury.
She was actually a little tiny thing, wiry. But it doesn’t matter.