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Paul (Hughes) epistle to Alan Reed from Alanreed, Texas Just 1,000 or so miles from Columbia, KY, the home of the real Alan Reed, writer Paul J. Hughes, CEO of Hughes Media in Nashvillle, TN and of good Gradyville, KY Hughes ancestry, discovered Alanreed, TX, and wrote the following to his good friend of the same name in Columbia, KY: Alan Reed, educator, Green River fresh water biologist, scientist, educator, literary critic, GEO tracker owner, reformed radio man, and frequent contributor to ColumbiaMagazine.com. in his role as literary critic Alan Reed - the man, not the town, - correctly critiques this piece as a great chapter for a great road book, evocative of works of Steinbeck, Least Heat Moon, and Keroauc, with a bit of Duncan Hines thrown in for good measure By Paul J. Hughes I was screaming across the continent after visiting several ArizonaIndian reservations and Canyon de Chelly (pronounced "de Shay"). I was in an early morning fog, sippin' my coffee when I checked my messages on my old beat up Sprint phone. Speaking of that, Lil' Red, our waitress in a place near the Interstate commented that she was a relic but she'd never seen a phone quite like the likes of what I was using. Lil' Red was dying to get to Nashville when my friend Skip Dillon told her we were from Music City, USA. She said that her son built beautiful hand-made guitars and he really should visit the Grand Ole Opry. "Yep, I said. "You should get over there." Lil' Red's restaurant specialized in Apple Dumplings, which, by the way, was the name of the restaurant conveniently located across the Interstate from the Chieftain Motor Lodge where we stayed the night before. Wasn't a Chief in sight but a real Indian from India was running the place. It was one of those former Holiday Inns that had been relegated to new prosperous owners planning to keep the flame glowing for us late night arrivals asking to see a room. The adjacent "cafe" had been closed for a few years but there was a discount card for a place across the Interstate in a rustic log cabin style shanty. Apple Dumplin' Restaurant featured all sorts of memorabilia on the walls includingJohn Wayne's burial bill from the funeral home a few miles up the road. Seems that Mr. Wayne had a ranch in the same county. I was amazed to also see a Singer sewing machine just like my mom had in Louisville with the wooden box it was housed in. Lil' Red had the place up for sale because her partner was in poor health. So anyway, I was riding in Skip's beat up GMC truck when we heard a rattling sound from the front end. We had been in just a small crash a few nights before when this twenty-something woman charged through an intersection making a left turn right before our eyes. I mean, she turned into us as if no one was there. And to top it off, she was in her daddy's Lincoln Town Car...one of those big fast city cars with fake wood grain and everything, having just come from the local Renaissance festival. It took us a few extra days to get on the road and head back to Nashville after getting repair estimates and prying the chrome bumper away from the front tire. We drove for days and reached Albuquerque by sunset on the third day. This particular morning the phone had several messages for my retreival. One was from Ol' Buddy, Ol' Pal Alan Reed in Columbia, Kentucky. Alan knows his home county like the lines on his brow, but for some reason, he's never seen the cemetery that much of my family resides in there. Heck, he'd be spooked to see a stone bearing the name of Paul Jones Hughes smack dab in the ground presumably somewhere close to his back yard. So the events of the next half hour in Skip's truck seemed like a ghost story you'd hear on that late night radio show with host George Noory, the UFO guy. No sooner did I get half the cup of rot-gut Texas coffee down when strange chill hit me. Alan had left a message earlier in the morning. Here I was on I-40 heading toward Oklahoma City when one of the upcoming towns listed on the map was Alanreed. Was I seeing this right? The writing was almost too small and my head was too new in the day to discern whether that was what I was reading. "Skip, Do you have a magnifying glass?" No he didn't. I told him that I'd just gotten a phone message from my friend Alan Reed and that I might be mistaken, but right now the map was showing me a Texas town named Alanreed. I felt as if we were driving in a Twilight Zone time warp or something. If there really was an town named Alanreed, there could be some sort of voo doo ahead and I wanted nothing to do with it. Look, I hadn't had any alcohol or anything to distort my finite faculties. This had been a smooth ten day trip starting with a long flight from Nashville International via Southwest Airlines on a mission to help my friend drive back after a three month family visit with his 89 year old mother and siblings. We'd had a fine time tooling around the Phoenix environs and I took the opportunity to sight-see. This morning I sensed that Skip sensed I wanted another road detour like we had done over and over so I could photograph another anomaly. He didn't mind the numerous hours of canyon shots and a few snarling Indians who'd rather not have their pictures taken. This time he was bearing down on the pedal heading for Nashville as fast as we could make it when the first road sign showed: ALANREED 13. In a flash, we were upon the ALANREED exit and the truck took a leap to the right up the ramp to the unknown. Here we were in Alanreed, Texas looking at a filling station, a post office and an Indian trading post right off the Interstate. I figured Skip had felt the strange urge to ferret out this unknown fourth dimensional idiosyncrasy in our routine, so we drove beyond the immediate cluster of buildings. Just a few hundred feet beyond lay the intersection of old Route 66 and Texas Farm Road 291. Right in downtown Alanreed was the epicenter of major activity during the blazing days of Route 66. It was a Texaco station and garage in pristine condition replete with gas pumps and the Texaco star logo. Through a window I managed to get the lens of my camera right up on the glass to avoid a reflection of the hot Texas sun and peek into what appeared to be a past day frozen in time. Here was a filling station office with the men's room, an old roll-top desk and a tire, all abandoned much in the way my driver friend Skip described a remote Arizona town he came upon while camping with several friends in the 1960's. Texas is still a great state for photographing relic buildings. Some years ago I was working in San Antonio and I had a free rental car at my disposal. I would use my spare time and weekends to venture out in the 107 degree Texas sun to capture whatever struck my fancy in an attempt to hone my photographic skills. One of my favorites coincidentally is of a powder blue filling station from years ago with a womens' restroom on the exterior side bearing a sign on the door spelled as "LADES." A bare light bulb hung low from frayed cloth wire with a bakelite switch on the side of the socket. So that day in Texas after driving across the country, the strange opportunity of having Alan Reed leave a message on my modern wireless phone coupled with a town on the map with the same name, led me into a quiet windswept moment from a time when two-lane roads were the cross-country norm and service stations had several employees to "filler' up and check yer oil." Apparently before finally arriving at the current honorable name, the town had several others including Springtown, Spring Tank, Prairie Dog Town, Rusty Shanks and Gouge Eye. No radio station operator, biologist or education administrator were found there on our trip. An omen must be in the offing. This story was posted on 2011-03-20 10:50:07
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