Scout.com > Cleveland Deserted ... After Being In Acoma Story URL: http://indians.scout.com/2/845138.html Chuck Murr IndiansInk.net Mar 7, 2009 What would you do if you could honestly tell people “Well, early this morning I was in a coma,” – and that was the most pleasant aspect of your day? That’s part of the trials and tribulations of Day 3 of the Great Grind to Goodyear. It began with amusement, became befuddling and ended with thankful thoughts. Let’s just say the old maroon van ain’t what she used to be. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4 The excitement of an approximate 600-mile drive through some of the most scenic parts of the Great Southwest causes a pre-dawn wakeup well before the pre-set alarm on the cell phone gets to chime. It’s about 40 degrees in Santa Rosa, N.M., a few miles west of Tucumcari and not far from Albuquerque – which is vastly under-rated as a good place to live. That is if you like the color brown and desert living. It’s all downhill into Albuquerque, which springs awake as the sun, gleefully shining from the east this time, illuminates to life spectacular colors instead of producing insane glare. Rush-hour traffic isn’t bad, considering one lane through downtown is closed due to the interminable construction. Quite noticeable just west of downtown is one spanking new condo community in which each and every house is brown. Light brown, dark brown, tan, sepia … but nary another color painted on any of them, even for trim. Why? Conjecture is the wind whips up the desert sands so much that the houses all turn that color anyway, so why fight it? Makes sense, which means there’s probably nothing to it. Now it is uphill out of town, with large mountains looming in the distance, some of them snow-capped. Beautiful. Billboards continue to amuse. There’s one for the Shush Yaz Trading Post. Any baseball fan knows where we’re heading … Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski was simply known as “Yaz,” and during his fabulous 1967 season, nobody could shush his bat. That was the year that he led the American League in home runs (44), runs batted in (121) and batting average (.326) as the Boston Red Sox had their “Impossible Dream” season, going from 10th place to the World Series. Yaz’s numbers in the three major offensive categories won him the Triple Crown. That has been done only 13 times since 1901. It happened four times in a five-year span in the 1930s – how about twice in the same year in the same city – when Chuck Klein of the Philadelphia Phillies and Jimmie Foxx of the Philadelphia Athletics both did it in 1933! The Yankees’ Lou Gehrig did it in 1934 and Joe Medwick of the St. Louis Cardinals did it in 1937. Boston’s Ted Williams is the only guy to do it twice – in 1942 and 1947. Then the great Mickey Mantle of the Yankees accomplished it in 1956 and Baltimore’s Frank Robinson in 1966. But since Yaz, nobody has done it. Take that, steroid stooges! Anyway, back to the road, where gas is running low, the price is running high (consistently over two bucks) – when suddenly, there is an exit marked for the town of Acoma. A quick glance also shows the price of a gallon of unleaded is $1.99. The urge of getting gas while in Acoma is just too much. What a perfect time to call home. “Hey honey, guess what? I’m in Acoma. What do you think of that?” “What’s the big deal?” would be the sweetly sardonic reply. “The night before you left, you seemed that way to me.” Lisa Douglas would never treat Oliver like that. She’d just serve him some hotcakes, put on another frilly nightgown and go feed the chickens so they could lay some square eggs. Those Green Acres boom towns of Hooterville and Pixley didn’t have an adjacent town named Acoma. Near the New Mexico-Arizona border is the town of Gallup. For some reason, the Polish section is proliferated by people taking surveys. Think … wait … yeah, you’ve got it. Gallup was the town mentioned throughout the Billy Crystal movie, “My Giant,” where former NBA player Georghe Muresan, at 7-foot-7, is the co-star. Guess who plays the giant? If you haven’t seen it – give it a try. It’s a heartwarming story. Crystal is typically funny, but Muresan, in all his Romanian glory and pronouncing the town as “Galloop,” is surprisingly touching in a sad way. It’s on to Arizona, where the sights at the border border on the spectacular. Border border? Like Walla Walla, Pago Pago and New York, New York – they are all correct, even if that useless computer tool known as spellcheck underlines them as verboten. Breezing along at 75 mph, the eastbound Southwest Chief whizzes past doing 100 on the Amtrak line. Took that exact route several times in the 1980s – imagining what it was like in the days of real train travel. Road sign alert: Fort Courage. Are you kidding? “Green Acres” debuted on Sept. 15, 1965 on CBS-TV – exactly one week after the debut show of “F Troop” on ABC-TV. That was the show about a bumbling troop of cavalry soldiers who “battled” a cowardly group of Indians named the Hekawi … as in “We’re the Hekawi (where the heck are we?)” Around the bend, there it is … a tourist-trap trading post built exactly like the set from the TV show, complete with the infamous lookout tower that in each episode was blasted to smithereens by the near-sighted sentry, Pvt. Vanderbilt. Speaking of the cavalry, it has always been a mystery as to why, at Indians games, when the home team is rallying, the public address system plays a bugle charge. That's the other guys! But it is ironically funny. And then the laughing stopped … along with a heartbeat for a couple of seconds. Cruising along at 75 mph, the van gave a lurch and all the steering was gone. It was like trying to guide a steamship through wet cement. What the hekawi??? Pulled over, thinking it was a flat tire. Checked all four, which remained round – though three of them were without hubcaps. The gusting winds of up to 50 mph had not only been tossing tumbleweed around, but worked its way into loosening the covers and sending them off into the hinterlands. Nothing was leaking from the engine … everything seemed in order, but what in the world, out here in no-Manny Ramirez land was wrong? Got back in, turned the key and the engine purred. OK, so who needs power steering? They didn’t have it 59 years ago when newlywed mom and dad drove from L.A. to Baltimore in a 1941 Dodge. That was mostly across infamous Route 66 – which can still be seen right adjacent to modern I-40 for much of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Nostalic drivers can take the route – but few do. One mile ahead, there’s an exit. Twenty years ago, it would have been passed up by the driver’s foolish pride. Wiser, if grayer, the exit is used and alas, there is a mechanic on duty in his garage next to his house. He instantly sizes up the situation, explaining that a pulley “froze”, which means it stopped turning, and thereby caused the fan belt to fly off and get chewed up. “The good news is – I just fixed one of them this morning on another car, it’s easy to do,” explained the mechanic, who looked like an aging Kris Kristofferson in bad need of a shave, dentistry and a hair salon. “The bad news,” he added, “is that I gotta find some place that has those parts. It’s either gonna be 55 miles back to Gallup or 41 miles ahead to Holbrook … and I charge a dollar a mile plus parts and labor.” What’s a deserted driver to do in the desert? Pony up – and wait. “Kris,” sent his wife, a native Navajo Indian, ahead to Holbrook to get a pulley and a belt. Sounds like a joke in there somewhere, but t’aint funny, McGee. Forget Gehrig and Ruth; Maris and Mantle; Brooks and Frank Robinson -- there's a new Dynamic Duo: Lewis & Clark. Reflect on what those guys did ... cross America, basically on foot, never saying "Where the heck are we," despite positively not knowing where they were or where they were headed. That's more amazing than the Cubs or Indians ever winning a World Series. Thoughts are interuppted by a voice from beneath the van. “Hey buddy, you said you were gonna keep drivin’?” said “Kris”. “You’d a done that, I’d a been towing you in and you’d either by buying a new van or sending me off for 100 miles to getcha a new engine for about four thousand bucks. You might be a little ticked off right now, but the good Lord was watchin’ over you. “You were headed to Phoenix by way of Flagstaff? If you lost your steering near Flagstaff, it wouldn’t a meant a thing to you about a new engine. You’d be goin’ home in a box – if they could find you at a bottom of some canyon. “By the way, noticed them hubcaps is gone. Let me guess. They wuz there this mornin’, weren’t they? It’s the wind. Get ‘em flying around here all the time.” Three and a half hours later, it’s on the road again … and that song by Willie Nelson is not on the big 3,173, either. Now, it is familiar territory. Winslow Meteor Crater, the Petrified Forest, then on towards Mt. Humphries, at more than 14,000 feet the highest spot in the state. Been there, done that – several times. Lots of signs for petrified wood – which is exactly what the Indians do not need this season. Signing free agent reliever Kerry Wood for two years at $20 million – they don’t need him to be petrified at the thought of facing AL hitters after 10 years in the National League. Then again, maybe they do. Petrified wood, after all, is rock solid. And with a rock-solid relief pitcher, Cleveland just may be able to regain the AL Central title. Uphill we go towards Flagstaff, 90 miles south of the greatest spot on the planet, the Grand Canyon – and 140 miles north of Phoenix, which is rapidly becoming an unparadise. It’s getting cold again. The elevation is 8,000, then 9,000 feet. There’s snow on the hillsides, but a bright sun warms the air as I-40 is left behind and in favor of southbound I-17. Signs say to watch for moose the next 30 miles. Moose Skowron? If ever there was a ballplayer who looked like his nickname, it was Bill Skowron, alias Moose of the New York Yankees (1954-62), L.A. Dodgers (1963), Washington Senators (1964), Chicago White Sox (1964-67) and California Angels (1967). Tourist traffic from the Grand Canyon is becoming mixed with truckers seeking to make Phoenix by nightfall. Everyone is hurtling downhill through winding curves … 8,000, 7,000, 6,000, 5,000 feet. Great for gas mileage. Suddenly, near Sedona, the great tourist area known for its red-rock scenery, the highway starts climbing just as sharply. Now the truckers are slowed to 20 in a 75 zone. Grannies and soccer moms in oversized SUVs try to pass, but are too alarmed to do so. Everything is backed up more than a non-fiber diet. It’s back up to 7,000 feet before one last, glorious run to freedom in a spectacular stretch of scenery. This isn’t Kansas anymore … and seems more like Ireland than Arizona. The melting snows have turned all the brown to brilliant green. Cacti have sprung to life, yucca plants are flowering and it’s a desert spring. Careening downhill towards Phoenix, thoughts of a nearly complete journey put life into an exhausting day. It comes to a nearly screeching halt in the form of lane closures from construction and a rush-hour conglomerate in this former cowtown on steroids. It takes 30 minutes to go 10 miles to I-10 for the final part of the journey … and it puts everybody right back on the Fireball Express – directly in the path of the setting sun. Traffic crawls at 20 mph, everybody shading their eyes. It’s this way every day for anyone nutty enough to live west of downtown. You get the morning sun from the east going to work and the afternoon sun on the way home. Even good ‘old Albert Belle has the sense to make his retirement home on the east side of town. Maybe he did live west at one time, and that’s where he got that permanent snarl on his face. Finally, there it is … “Next three exits, Goodyear.” It’s the town named after the tire company based 40 miles south of Cleveland in Akron, Ohio. Seems that in the early part of the last century, Goodyear executives wanted a place to grow cotton, a chief component of their product. They set up shop in the desert, where both the acreage and sunlight were plentiful. Seventy years later, their baseball team moved in for spring training. Next year, the downstate Cincinnati Reds will relocate their spring camp from Sarasota, Fla., to an adjacent complex now being built. More fans will fly out to see their heroes under the Arizona sun. Some may enjoy an Amtrak trip. And others may even be silly enough to drive out … again and again. Copyright © Scout.com and IndiansInk.net