Things are getting weirder than weird as the Republican National Convention invades Milwaukee, so two forlorn Milwaukeeans are choosing to follow Route 66 to remember, to recharge, and to take pilgrimage at the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Is this evasive action wise? Will the road lead them to something better than the RNC? They have five days to find out… (Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.)

Day 0: Saturday, July 13

A security guard at my job says: “Trump was shot in Pennsylvania.”

I immediately ask: “Did they get him?”

He says: “Yes, the shooter was apprehended.”

I pause. My pause continues for so long that there is no way for me to clarify exactly what I’d been asking. We silently drift from the conversation, back to work.

Tomorrow my friend Barry and I will trace Route 66 in a red convertible, cranking folk tunes and considering what RNC carnage we’re missing, all while ranting, raving, singing, freewheeling our way into a better headspace and meeting who knows what characters along the way.

We sleep but cannot shield our eyes from the barrel of summer’s gun, as the 2024 RNC in MKE begins with the shot that missed.

Day 1: Sunday, July 14

The crows circling overhead are in luck as the RNC hits MKE. Will MKE hit back? I doubt it. There’s too much goodwill and Midwestern hospitality they must engender. However, it doesn’t mean we have to stick around for this bullshit. So we hit the road in style, red convertible blistering our way out of town, not looking back, only forward, hopeful but filled with hurt for the United States, saying screw it to cruise control, slamming our feet down, trying desperately to reach escape velocity. The sun and humidity are unrelenting, the heat visible along the horizon and we blast A/C, jabber about the road ahead, and listen to endless cuts from Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Old, Weird America.

We launch with the top down heading due southwest, John Wesley Harding pumping into our waking ears. We discuss Pennsylvania with nothing but second-hand news, both agreeing that things are now somehow even worse. Leaving Milwaukee feels somehow even more necessary, and as I put the top up for the freeway entrance, I sing with Dylan’s “Drifter’s Escape”:

Oh, help me in my weakness
I heard the drifter say..

We connect with Route 66 just outside El Paso, Illinois thanks to a friendly antique dealer who confidently prescribes our directions while leaning on a glass cabinet containing a George Wallace For President button and Nazi memorabilia mingling freely with collectible glass mugs of Hulk Hogan and Brutus the Barber Beefcake.

Free from the freeway, we blast west, our eyes swiveling joyfully out the windows, to the grass, the American flags, the rusted silos and the odd names of towns (Oglesby? I’d prefer not to). The interstate was making me sleepy. You make no moves, make no decision, see nothing interesting. You wake up when you’re on a highway like Route 66. I feel like a dog looking both ways at everything, panting, everything looks interesting, even the corn.

Historic Route 66 takes us to Normal (for once) where we miss an intriguing gas station cafe as Guns N’ Roses “Civil War” rocks the close quarters of our red convertible…ain’t that fresh? We cruise to a Christian coffee shop that closes in eight minutes. We unbox a Cinderella puzzle at the children’s table while we wait for my coffee and cookie. Two minutes later we shovel the pieces back into the box and I ask the barista if there’s anything we should see on Route 66 heading south. It takes her three minutes to tell me how to “turn right at the cow” for American Giants Museum, where grotesque nine-foot statues of Alfred E. Newman, tigers, and a long-legged Christmas Story-style leg clutter a small building hosted by two friendly people who ask where we had come from. (“Oh I love Wisconsin'” is how 100% of questioners have replied on day one). I drop some jive about looking for a horse or dog track for my travel companion to indulge his gambling habits, and we leave the American Giants behind.

It is hot. How hot is it? So hot that two guys who walk/bike 10 miles a day don’t do either today. We agree that 96% of people SHOULD want to be animatronic bears and that my father-in-law burning all of his old fax messages on July 4th was somehow appropriate as we listen to “The Party That Wrote Home Sweet Home Never Was A Married Man.” We aren’t sure how this all fits together, but we’re sure it will, eventually. Maybe the fact that we left our positively otherworldly, undisputed champion cosmic educator women home, or more likely that they blessed our departure, fits the fact that the song “The Party That Wrote Home Sweet Home Never Was A Married Man” was composed by a woman named Fleta Jan Brown (in 1908). And just to make stuff entirely kismet, we pass The Hideout bar shortly after the song finishes (see rolling pin in her hand).

We vault further south, ignoring Springfield in favor of a Petersburg detour, where we find a hotel with a tree grown within an opening through its roof. The patient staff explain the hotel had previously been a bank, so the A/C isn’t in all rooms, and they provide two box fans to boost the savings and loan A/C to counter the 109 degree heat index. We order pizza at the hotel bar and a local sidles up to our table to lament the nearby Dollar Tree taking land away from the original brick streets of his beloved Peterburg. He assures us that the bricks are being relaid with care and that the still-bricked streets are worth seeing. He asks where we are from. We say Wisconsin. And like the server he says: “I love Wisconsin.”

After dinner, Barry tells me that the poet Edgar Lee Masters made Petersburg his home for 11 years. Later, as I write this doddering dispatch, he visits Masters’ home and returns to our hotel, quick to counterpoint my first shot of summer shenanigans with a quote from Spoon River Anthology: “It takes life to love life.” I have yet to read Spoon River Anthology, but I will do so as I trust Barry on this kind of stuff, because he’s always pointing out things like “It takes life to love life” while I’m looking down the barrel of this and that.

Later, we wander Main Street in Petersburg and discover Abraham Lincoln had taken the first detailed survey of the small town in 1835. Then, in 1858, while giving a speech in Petersburg, Lincoln teased the crowd, saying Mary Todd “insists that he will be a Senator and President too. Just think of such a sucker as me as President.” As we wade through the humid evening back to our hotel tree sprouting tenderly through its roof, we dream of such a sucker as President…