About a hour before sundown I reached Williams, where snow and a chill temperature awaited me in the foothills of the mountains. There I checked into the Super 8 on the east edge of town for two nights. I didn't have anything particular to do in Williams, but I felt like making gradual movements.
That evening I found myself explaining my "gradual movements" in an email to a woman I had met via on an online dating site. I had made the profile over a year ago, when I was a thousand miles away from where I was, and had since left it dormant, keeping my location underaltered. So the website kept sending me matches from that location, even though I hadn't been there in quite some time.
For some reason I'd felt like responding to one of the matches, and had quickly gotten addicted again to the high of correspondence with strangers of the opposite sex. But of course I found it necessary to explain why I couldn't meet up with them, at least for the next couple months.
Like Kingman, Williams was bestride the old route of U.S. 66, and many of the businesses in town took advantage of the marketing. In fact it was even more intense than in Kingman, since Williams turned out to be the very last town bypassed by the Interstate, and thus lays claim to being the last holdout along "America's Highway" before it was decommissioned.
I spent a couple days of working there, using a local coffeeshop in lieu of Starbucks, and watched movies on TCM in the evenings while fielding more messages from the dating website. I felt as if I were truly in the vibe of the road. It was a zenlike feeling of everything in balance, everything functioned, a well-humming engine.
The only thing I had to complain about was that the steakhouse I wanted to eat at, a local institution called Rod's, was closed the first night, forcing me to eat at the one at the Holiday Inn. But Rod's opened the second night and I enjoyed the rustic dining experience appropriate to the road on which I was traveling.
I even got a follow-up call from my great-uncle in Reno, whom I'd recently visited. His last name is Williams, and I greeted him with "Hey, I'm in your town." He told me stories from the war about flight school in Kingman. He hated Kingman, he told me.
"My sister came out from Los Angeles to visit me and we tried to eat at a local diner. The manager said I wasn't welcome there---because of my uniform."
His sister was my late grandmother. I loved hearing these long-lost family stories.
"Williams is much better," I told him.
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