In the evening time in Dallas, a rich pink sunset frames Interstate 30, the vast freeway from Texas to Arkansas on which the cars and trucks never cease.
From the hotel, you can hear the distant rumble of traffic throughout the night and in the peak hours of early morning and sunset, the volume of cars, headlights on at this time of year, hurtling along the lanes is mesmerising. The vast conurbation between Dallas and Fort Worth seems less a place than a triumph of road design and commercial nothingness. Car parks the size of football fields, many of them empty, eerily lit in the evenings. It’s a disorienting part of the world.
Here for a few days to see Irish boxer Katie Taylor — hopefully — deepen her active-legend status with a win over Amanda Serrano, there was little point in car hire. Because there was nowhere to go. But the car is king. Having managed to check into the wrong hotel (similar names) after arriving, I asked the person at reception how close my actual hotel was and was assured it was just five minutes away. So I could walk, then? It was a nice evening.
Walking would have meant somehow crossing the section of Interstate 30 that becomes an eight-lane freeway
The receptionist stopped tapping at the keyboard and looked up in alarm.
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“Walk?” she repeated in horror.
“No. You can’t walk. Well, I mean, you could. But ...”
No, walking would have meant somehow crossing the section of Interstate 30 that becomes an eight-lane freeway and is named after Tom Landry, who coached the Dallas Cowboys in the 1980s, always wearing a suit and fedora hat. Taylor’s fight was to be staged in the Cowboys’ big, new stadium in nearby Arlington but the warm-up stuff — the press conferences, the weigh-ins — took place in another part of the city, about 15km away.
On the Uber journeys back and forth, one of the drivers was a woman who spoke perfect English in a strong African accent. She had just finished her day at college, where she is almost through a degree in nursing. After collecting her children from school and getting them settled at home, she drives an Uber for most of the evening for income and then studies into the early hours. It was a punishing schedule, yes, but she was filled with optimism about the future. And she drove like Ayrton Senna.
He was a long-haul truck driver now but his rig, for which he paid almost fifty grand, had busted a belt and was out of commission
Another driver was a Texan who had served in the military and been through several tours of “Eye-raq”. He was incredibly polite and pleasant. He knew he’d stopped off in a military plane once in either Ireland or Scotland, he was never quite sure which. Oh, probably Shannon, in Ireland, I told him. He shrugged. Sounds about right, he laughed. He was a long-haul truck driver now but his rig, for which he paid almost fifty grand, had busted a belt and was out of commission. Plus, the rise in fuel prices over the past two years meant that he was struggling to make the cross-country journeys profitable.
Independent drivers are responsible for their gas, lodging and food, he explained. The profit margins became almost invisible in recent months. So, he was driving an Uber in a car he had hired to keep the wolf from his family’s door. Another driver, a woman in retirement years, kept asking if the back of the car was roomy enough. She, too, had hired the car to drive as an Uber and was worried that it was too compact for her guests.
This was American hustle and enterprise and spirit at work, night and day, on the teeming highway system around Dallas. Some of the cars had television screens playing the news broadcasts on silent. The images were filled with the latest cabinet picks by Donald Trump and the outraged, shocked reactions as the hits kept on coming — Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, RFK jnr, Tom Honan. On Thursday evening, there was a clip of Trump in a tuxedo grappling with Sylvester Stallone, also in a monkey suit. Had Sly also made the cut? Was he about to be anointed secretary for muscles? Out on Interstate 30, the traffic was moving too fast for anyone to care very much.
A big crowd was milling around, mainly to see Mike Tyson. Nobody seemed to be giving very much thought about what RFK jnr might do to the nation’s health system
Even in a vast city like Dallas, the goings-on in Washington seems like an abstraction. In the bars and restaurants around Los Colinas, an area filled with hotels and restaurants and a man-made pond that looked as though it had arrived flat-packed and was flawlessly assembled in 48 hours, the football games were playing and the music was blaring. A big crowd was milling around, mainly to see Mike Tyson. Nobody seemed to be giving very much thought about what RFK jnr might do to the nation’s health system. The election was over. People wanted it out of their minds.
The city of Arlington is named after Robert E Lee’s former home, which overlooks the Potomac river in Washington DC and is now part of the cemetery. Arlington’s history is typical in its richness and speed of change: from an Indian preserve to cowboy country and a cotton production centre to its heyday for pleasure seekers who flocked to Arlington Downs for the horse racing, dreamed up by the “wealthy rancher and oilman WT Waggoner”.
At least that’s what the historical marker says. Arlington Downs was razed in 1950. The city was growing faster than the planners could handle and they needed to lay down another road.