Call Me a Cab

24

I was prepared next morning to apologize for the night before, and to promise I’d do no more tailgating, but Katharine chose to behave as though nothing had happened and I was delighted to go along. We had an early breakfast and drove briskly out onto Route 70, the now-tame sun a beneficent smiling face in the sky behind us. Katharine rode up front and we played word games: Superghost and Twenty Questions. An hour and a half later we lost an hour, zipping across an invisible line from Central to Mountain Time.

Kansas continued flat, but the weather became less certain. Far to the north we could see small rainstorms sweeping across the land like black-sailed ships from the Spanish Armada. From time to time a cloud glided across the beaming sun-face, and some of the traffic coming from the opposite direction had its headlights on, but the storms never quite reached us.

Kansas became Colorado at a town unhappily called Kanorado. This is a fairly common thing for state-line towns to do, cobble up a name from both state names, and the result is rarely euphonious to either the ear or the eye. There’s Mexhoma and Texhoma and Texico; Laark and Arkana and Texarkana; Florala, Monida, and Virgilina; Tennemo and Arkoma and Uvada; Marydel and Delmar. Mexicali and Calexico are across the border from one another. The towns that simply call themselves State Line are a lot better off.

The change of state occurred without much change of landscape, and travel ennui began to set in; we gave up both games and conversation, and drove in a bored patient silence for half an hour or so, until Katharine suddenly sat up and said, “Hey! I did this road!”

“You what?”

“This is my road,” she said, and when I frowned at her in bewilderment she was staring out at the highway with every sign of pleasure and excitement. “Yes,” she said, as though some long-held theory of hers was being vindicated, “yes, yes...”

“You mean— Wait a minute. You mean you landscaped this?”

“That’s right. Those shrubs— That’s exactly what I thought; give it two or three years— There should be a hill along here, on the right, I put it in. Yes, there it is. See it?”

Ahead of us, on the right, was a low hill covered with young trees. I said, “You mean that was flat before? You put that hill there?”

“There’s some sort of meat-packing plant off that way,” she said. “The ugliest thing you ever saw. So we hid it.”

“You put in a hill.” I couldn’t believe it. In my head, a landscape architect hadn’t been anything more than a person who comes in with a lot of seeds and maybe some rose bushes. But this was something else again; to change the face of the land, to put in your own hill, to force trees and ground and shrubbery to conform to aesthetic decisions — I stared out at Katharine’s road in astonishment verging on awe.

And Katharine continued to comment on the results of her labors. “That’s perfect,” she said. “Oh, yes, that’s filling in so well. Those shrubs in the central mall; they cut down headlight glare at night and they make a good flexible barrier to contain a car that’s gone out of control, but at the same time they don’t get in the way of the view.”

What a strange feeling, to drive along on a person’s work of art. There was practically no other traffic, and we in the cab seemed to float through Katharine’s landscape as though our wheels were two feet above the ground. We soared along in bright sunlight, gazing left and right like children’s-story characters in a magic flying shoe arriving at the fairy kingdom. “We did eight miles of it,” Katharine said, her voice hushed as though a loud sound might break the spell.

The most incredible eight miles. Katharine pointed out this and that item, told me why this had been done, what had been changed over there, what the theories were behind the various decisions, and I found I was alternately grinning at the highway and grinning at Katharine. “Fantastic,” I kept saying. It was like having a painter invite you into his latest painting for a little walk around and a guided tour.

“And that’s it,” she said at last, and craned around to look back.

“Why did it stop after eight miles?”

“It was a pilot project, with Federal financing. They’re doing a number of studies around the country, and eventually they may put up funds for a lot more. Usually, you know, when they build these highways, they just grade with a bulldozer and let it go at that.”

“Well,” I said, “I think the Federal government ought to hire you to do every road in the country.”

Katharine laughed, very pleased, and for the next fifteen minutes or so we talked about her work. At one point I said, “There’s a funny kind of link between you and Barry, isn’t there? What he does with faces you do with the land.”

“We’ve noticed that,” Katharine told me. “We decided one time we’d go into business together after we got married, offer to do people’s noses and lawns all at once, for a blanket price.”

“You and Barry get along, don’t you?” I was annoyed to see that the idea troubled me.

“Of course we do,” she said. “That’s why he wants to marry me, and why I think I want to marry him. When you two finally meet, in Los Angeles, you’ll like him.”

“Okay,” I said. And when I glanced over at her, she was giving me a knowing smirk.