Bagdad Cafe

Onward and outward from the Canyon, Arizona stretches into vast expanses of arid desert. I've never really been in a desert and I can say that it is a very interesting and not entirely pleasant experiences. Hundreds of miles between gas stations, dust devils blowing round the desert floor, empty black mountains rising out of the nothingness, and the foreboding sights of abandoned cars, hoods propped open, left to swelter in the unbearable heat of the Mojave. This, of course, was more than a little disconcerting to me. My car, bless her transmission, has seen better days, afterall, but she pulled on through, the trooper and got us through the 100+ blistering heat in fine form.



About 80 miles outside Barstow, California we pulled off at a desert town called Newberry Springs. Now where exactly these "springs" were located, I couldn't tell you. From the looks of it, Newberry Springs is something out of some post-apocalyptic novel. It was not so much a town as a cluster of homes and businesses that dprung up along a mile and half of old Route 66. Sometimes the buildings were as much as a quarter mile apart, and abandoned trucks, decrepit old trucks of the Steinbeckian order, litter there lawns. Smack in the middle of this smoldering mirage stands a relic of that past time, before the construction of the interstate behemoth that is slowly strangling the scant community, the Bagdad Cafe.



By no surprise the only resturaunt in the town, the aptly named Bagdad Cafe earned its reputation after being the subject of a 1988 eponymous film starring Jack Palance. It's menu is basic diner fair, but its ambiance shares an uncertain synergy between with its arid surroundings. Ceiling fans buzz noisily and flies zip around your hamburger and french fries as the elderly waitress asks in a sleepy disinterested tone, "Where ya from?" You can tell she really doesn't care about the answer, but it's what she has been asking folks for the last twenty years, and she supposes she might as well not change her routine. She hollers your order back to the fry cook, who takes his time making it. He hasn't been here for half as long and honestly doesn't give much of a damn about cooking. The burgers a bit dry and the fries a bit overdone, but then again it isn't a place you go for the food. You go there for the dirt, the soiled bathrooms, the clean ashtrays stacked in piles behind the cash registers, relics of an age when people lit up cigarettes with their cups of coffee. It's a dark place, a sad place. A place that exists, you feel, not precisely out of love or a need for money, but more for the sake of tradition. That doesn't mean precisely that they need the cafe to live on forever, but rather that they're just doing what they know how to do, they're getting through life like they know how to and doing the best they can. For some folks that means frying food, I guess, for others asking empty questions and receiving empty answers over drink orders and pots of coffee. And then some of us, when we don't know exactly what's going on in our life, we pick up and leave it. Move it some other place and see how it settles in. It might not work out, I suppose, but I think, for good or bad, most people are trying as best they can.