The Belvidere Tollway Oasis is on the Illinois Toll Road, at mile marker 54.5. It arches over the highway like a plate glass monument to the spirit of American road trips, a spirit that gave rise to the rest areas and highway parks that dot the drive from Indiana to Minnesota like—well, like oases.
Almost all of the Illinois tollway oases are now closed. Belvidere is the only one that remains, and it will probably close soon—the rest crouch over the highways still, already abandoned. “Belvidere” is somehow an evocative name for the last tollway oasis—like “Bel Air” or “Beverly Wilshire,” it recalls the 60s, Shirley Temples in mirrored hotel lobbies, pencil dresses, fascinators.
In reality, the Belvidere Tollway Oasis features Auntie Anne’s pretzels, a Subway, a Panda Express, and a decent no-name kebab place. On the walls there is a huge “lease space here” poster, probably ten feet by twenty feet. Rather than take down the poster before the Oasis’ pending closure, someone just taped over all the phone numbers you could use to contact the real estate agent.
Perhaps it is the lackluster quality of the oases that is leading to their demise; perhaps people are too busy to stop. The quality of toll roads is so consistently underwhelming that I tend to wonder what they do with the money except pay the people who put out and take back in the sporadic miles of cones. But the Oasis is certainly something, and I walked around it, the concrete instantiation of my many expensive road trips to Illinois and Minnesota, with a vague nostalgia.
If you’ve never taken a road trip across the Midwest, you may not know what to picture. The Oasis is a big structure built right across the highway, all made of windows so that you can watch the cars going by beneath you while you walk around up above. It somehow manages to be both bleak and fanciful, boring and transcendent. There’s usually someone in the lobby selling items on the spectrum between ugly jewelry and kitchy refrigerator magnets. You’ve only stopped to use the bathroom or to buy overpriced gas but suddenly you find yourself elevated above your fellow motorists—the experience is both relativized and made continuous. You have never left the road, and yet you are above the road.
Few people go to the circus anymore, but it’s rare that something that is in fact so far from the general experience is still so intensely a part of the general consciousness. There are, of course, still Cirque du Soleil and Shen Yun, but as one can tell from the names, they seem to be a far cry from Barnum and Bailey. You can still go see the circus if you really want to, but the circus won’t come and see you, the way it is always doing in old stories for children. I have known, since about age eight, the requisite components of a circus—the tightrope walkers, the lions, the fire eater, the magician, maybe a bearded lady. But the circus never came to my town—I never saw a ragtag group of unlikely friends roll into town in their wagons and set up a dubious camp outside city limits while they set up their circus tent, though I know, like the back of my hand, exactly how they should have behaved if they had.
In fact, I have never gotten closer to a circus than last summer in Montreal when I saw the peaked roof of Cirque du Soleil. And I’m not sure I want to; what could be in the tent that would match my childhood imaginings? Could there possibly be a real mermaid in a tank, or a clown that jumps from a great height and is able to use his umbrella as a parachute? Could a magician pull enough doves out of his hat to satisfy all my childhood dreams? Even just seeing the pinnacles of the circus tent was suggestive of a mysterious, magical world of half-light under their towering guard, and I think if I ever went inside, the disappointment might be too much to bear. (I have spent a lot of time in one place with a pointy circus-tent roof, but unfortunately that place was the Denver International Airport, which is not a magical experience most of the time.)
I think many people are like me in their lack of true circus experience, and yet we all still occasionally use the phrase “run away and join the circus.” The idea of running away and joining the circus expresses something very poignant—the desire to be somewhere that isn’t where you are now, to be somewhere that isn’t anywhere, to live on the road. You could join the ragtag group of misfits immortalized in The Greatest Showman. You would live a life both transcendent and down-to-earth, scrappy and individualistic but also characterized by a deeply-held loyalty to a community. Perhaps you would make friends with an elephant. If I joined the circus, I would do the trapeze, which is as much as to tell you that I will never join the circus.
To consider joining the circus captures one of the most ethereal human desires, the same ethereal human desire that built the Belvidere Oasis like a towering glass monument over the Illinois Tollway: the desire to be both mystical and absurd, to be laughed at and yet to be marveled at. The builders of the Illinois Tollway and my trapeze artist alter ego want the same strange, subtle thing. They don’t mind if people laugh at them, as long as they cause people, just for a moment, to look up.
Performative riches of all kinds arise from similar desires—millionaires’ houses full of vending machine collections or water slides, yachts with silly names, Disney World when it’s not taken too seriously, excessive lawn statue collections. Somehow there’s a deep human desire to be elevated above the roadway. We want to be seen by others and for them to see us, because then we will be on the road together, but we also want to be completely, unapologetically ourselves, misfits among misfits. We make strange, grand gestures to communicate those desires. One of my favorite inhabitants of my hometown is a tall, thin man who roller skates around town in sunny weather, playing loud music and dancing backward and forward on his skates. He has joined his own personal circus.
Here’s an example of: the kind of house that someone builds when they want to run away and join the circus.
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