The Roadside Places Nobody Plans Around Are Going Away

TL;DR: Rest stops and motels are the parts of America built for people in transit, and both are getting bulldozed or changing jobs on us. Two writers, six years apart, went and looked. Stop at one while it still has a roof.

Some buildings exist so you never have to think about them. A rest stop is a toilet, a picnic table and ten minutes of not driving. A motel is a door that locks. Nobody plans a trip around either one, which is exactly why they get knocked down and nobody says a damn word.

What is actually vanishing from the Western highways?

Carey Dunne’s 2016 piece for Hyperallergic follows Austin photographer Ryann Ford, who got hooked on these places during a solo drive from California to Texas in 2007. What she found out there was small and strange and looked handmade: faux covered wagons in New Mexico, metal teepees along the Rio Grande, mid-century shelters parked alone in country so big it hurts your eyes.

Then she learned they were endangered.

States cutting budgets were demolishing them, or letting fast food take their place. So Ford spent years on the road shooting as many as she could reach, and the result is The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside, hundreds of images from 14 states. “I had realized that rest stops were more than just toilets and tables,” she writes.

She’s right. These were public buildings, paid for by the public, drawn up by some state employee who decided a pee break in the middle of nowhere deserved a little imagination. A steel teepee over a picnic table is a weird small act of generosity toward strangers you’ll never meet. A drive-through lane is a speaker box that wants your card number.

Ford deserves real credit here. Years of pulling off at places the rest of us blow past at 75, and treating every one of them like it mattered. Somebody had to go look.

She did.

Motel-land is where people live between things

JoAnn Wypijewski’s “Motel-land” ran in The Nation in December 2010, and it holds up sixteen years later. She spends time at a Quality Inn near an unnamed East Coast city, cheaper and nicer than the competition, and the old myth of the motel (the affair, the getaway, the open road) falls apart in about a paragraph.

About fifteen families were living there full time. Nick and Dora fell in love at 16, got an apartment, saved money and bought a house. Eight days after closing, the steel mill where Nick worked laid off its workforce. The house eventually went to foreclosure and they spent Christmas at a Super 8. A couple whose house burned down was living there while they fought their insurer for a settlement. A clerk laid off by an engineering firm worked out of the lobby and applied for jobs online.

The money is the ugly machine underneath all of it. A church paid $324 a week to keep one family in one room, which Wypijewski notes comes to more each month than the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment in that town. Why’d anybody pay that? Because no other landlord in town would waive the security deposit and first month’s rent, and the motel didn’t ask for either. So the people with the least pay the most. By the week. Forever. Dinner comes out of microwaves and crockpots and rice cookers, and the gaps get filled off the McDonald’s Dollar Menu.

What makes it more than a poverty story is who’s living there. After her father was arrested, a seven-year-old girl went knocking on motel doors before school, asking somebody, anybody, for a ride. Now at least seven kids from that motel ride two yellow school buses every day. One little girl did that. The residents keep a rule, “No one interferes,” and they still lend a young mother named Stevie money and rides, five or ten bucks at a time. The owners, meanwhile, lean on the seasonal Snow Birds driving through on their way to Florida.

Wypijewski ends on the line I can’t shake: “somewhere someone is fucking and laughing in the face of absurdity, but sex is the least of it.”

Both stay open only while somebody keeps the lights on

They’re both built for people between things. Both survive only as long as somebody, a state highway department or a family behind a front desk, keeps deciding to leave the lights on for strangers. And both get judged by the guy pulling in for one night, who sees a dated roof and a cheap rate and learns exactly jack shit about either.

The rest stop’s losing to the exit with the franchise. The motel kept its job and swapped out its customers. To everybody passing through, the place was a pit stop, and for fifteen families outside some East Coast city it was the only address they had.

How do you notice them while they last?

Take the exit marked REST AREA at least once a trip and actually walk around. Look at the roofline, the stonework, the sign. If no committee alive would approve that design today, stop the car.

Shoot it, even badly, even on your phone. Ford’s whole archive started with one solo drive and nobody asking her to do it.

At motels, look at what never leaves the lot. The cars still parked out front at midmorning, the kids’ bikes chained to the railing, the laundry drying where no guest would ever hang it. You’re not there to gawk. The room next to yours might be somebody’s address, so tip the housekeeper like you know it.