Article 3 - "CAN I HAVE HOT TEA WITH THAT?" February 2007 edition of First Church of The Streets

    One of the greatest experiences of traveling outside of home base is the food. Now that I was in the southern United States with my husband and trusty canine mascot MacGyver, I was going to indulge myself in the culinary delights that I couldn't get while living on Long Island. We were going to go to Hardee's for breakfast.

    I know, it doesn't sound like much of a leap of faith. On the road and the best I could come up with for my first breakfast is a fast food restaurant? It doesn't sound at first like much of an adventure. After coming home from the trip, I've read so many travelogues about people riding around America, lamenting the fact that the corporate world has swallowed up small-town life. They go to the last greasy-spoon diner for two hundred miles down the state road where a sad waitress puffs on a cigarette before resentfully coming over to give them corned beef and hash, using her laconic nature as the icon of a life dying and ebbing away. And here I was, embracing the corporate monster. Not only that, I was looking forward to it.

    To me, the idea of fast food was not necessarily a bad thing. Growing up in a metropolitan area in the seventies and eighties, it was just part of my life, and the idea of small-town America dying seemed something more foreign to me than the idea of big business eating everything up for dinner. Besides, I wasn't going to a fast food restaurant that I could go to down the road. Despite the plethora of fast food restaurants and array of ethnic cuisine littered throughout my hometown area of Long Island, there were no Hardee's restaurants anywhere, no matter if you went to Queens or the North Fork. You could get Thai food, sushi, gnocchi pasta, or palak paneer, but no good old-fashioned Hardee's. And Hardee's breakfasts were something that my husband and I enjoyed whenever we were on the road heading south; those southern breakfasts on the run seemed the quintessential of ethnic America on the go. I really was looking forward to it, except for one crucial detail: the idea of getting a good cup of hot tea.

    I don't know what it was once I crossed into Confederate territory. Every time I had headed south, once I left Maryland and entered Virginia, it seemed like a steaming cup of hot tea was a complete anomaly. It was as though I walked in and asked for a steamed yak stomach. Because every time I asked for hot tea with any of my meals, instead of a boiling cup of water with a tea bag bobbing in it, I always received iced tea. Except, minus the ice.

    I have no idea what this was all about, if things have changed, if it was the way I conveyed my order. But it never failed: once in Virginia, I never got my nice cup of hot tea. I got the iced tea that was left over from the previous night. Hence, I suppose, hot tea.

    This always surprised me. After all, with the exception of Florida, these states were part of the original thirteen British colonies. It confounded me that the plantation states seemed to have forgotten all about Black Pekoe steaming in a cup, instead serving it like some has-been relic that had been sitting around at room temperature. Was this a part of the Civil War that I hadn't read about or something?

    Maybe this was just part of the fast-food phenomenon, divine payback for not gracing the halls of the small town joints that were dotted in between the mass of commercial eating establishments. Like maybe, if I sat in a diner, the joys of boiling orange pekoe would be mine for the asking and a buck plopped on the counter, a tea bag bouncing in a sea of steaming liquid. Instead, in my insistence to get my travel thrills the instant way, I got what I got. Namely, iced tea without the ice.

    No matter. This wouldn't stop me from going to Hardee's. There were biscuits, gravy and grits waiting on conveyor belts there. It was right down road in Luray, not far from where we stayed overnight. I was hungry and I was looking forward to eating it there. Besides, we had four hundred miles to cover by the evening to get to the Smokey Mountains. That was the great thing of fast food restaurants. They were convenient and on the way to something else; not the object of the drive.

    The objective had been to get on the road early, which we did if you considered eight-thirty early. By the time we got our bed rolled up, the dog walked, and everything all set up for the day, despite getting up around seven o'clock, it took us over an hour to get on the road. Luckily, food was just around the corner. I just wasn't sure about the beverage.

    When we arrived at the restaurant, about half of the parking lot was filled. There were pickup trucks lined up like schoolchildren anticipating recess in the parking lot, while campers, zippy middle class cars perfect for office commuting, and soccer mom SUVs idled tiredly in the drive-thru line for the illusion of faster service. The middle class cars and SUVs were nothing I wouldn't see at home; but it generally was unusual to see Winnebagos lined up at my local fast food restaurant, and I suppose, pickup trucks were for the most part considered too red state for the area I came from, because there usually were Volvos or Mercedes Benz cars and not Dodge Rams. Somehow, an SUV was okay. Maybe the semantics of a good title change made all the difference, because certainly, there would be no shortage of them there. And like home, they would be all lined up in the drive-thru, too busy to even stop the car to get out. Fast food had gotten an upgrade with the drive thru line. Me, I generally preferred to go inside to see what was going on and who was there. That was what I did now.

    The restaurant was as full as what the cars outside implied. About half of the store was filled; people of retirement age sat back at tables sipping at coffee, reading papers, and generally looking on at the world about them as though the rest of it was going too fast and didn't know what the hell it was talking about. One man in a mixed gender crowd of about five sat back with his arms and legs crossed; the perfect pose in psychobabble terms to describe a person closed off to the world. He was the one dominating the conversation: I could hear his voice over all the others in the room but not well enough to make out exactly what he was saying. He manned the helm of the conversation, and yet his eyes were on the comings and goings of the crowd around him, as though he was the captain of a cruise ship leading his crew and watching out for sharks at the same time. I couldn't make out the particulars of his oratory, but from his tone, he seemed to be able to say a paragraph and render final judgment. His Southern twang made it possible that he was a local and an owner of one of the pickup trucks outside. Or maybe not. Maybe he was a Floridian or a Texan who got sick of the so-called convenient drive-thru and left the Winnebago at some store that could fit it and hauled everybody out for a long walk to get some eggs on a biscuit.

    There were a couple of tired people of indeterminate age and mixed gender in front of me, drooping as though in anticipation of a hot day without air conditioning. They seemed as though they were confused about what to eat, changing their minds once or twice before coming up with a final story. The minimum wage worker behind the register remained expressionless throughout this exchange. I related to her to some extent; I'd been behind that counter not much earlier, dealing with the same confused customer messing up my computer screen with their mixed up rhetoric. Come to think of it, she and I looked about as thrilled as the tired waitress I imagined languishing in the hypothetical diner that I'd been conjured up. Just a way to spend the time until the paycheck came in, just a job to do, another customer coming through. Maybe this place had more in common with the small-town diner than I might have originally believed.

    Hardee's has a great lineup of food, and I could for a second understand the confusion that the people in front of me experienced. A new sandwich was being featured called the Frisco sandwich, which was described as a having a "folded egg, thinly sliced ham, and American and Swiss cheese on sourdough toast". I suppose the "Frisco" part was the sourdough bread, exported especially for my dining pleasure to the state of Virginia. From what I could tell, the featured sourdough toast was round. It was new and untried as far as I was concerned. This new selection altered my conviction from the usual biscuits and croissants with meat that were available. On the other hand, with the refrigerator we had in our van, stocking up with stuff seemed like a good idea, so we this way we'd have stuff for the daytime without stopping again. This way, we could have some food for later on in the evening, no matter where we decided to stop. So why not get both and pig it up instant American style? Frisco sandwiches, biscuits with eggs, bacon and cheese, croissants with ham, eggs and cheese, and fried potato circles called hash rounds were loaded up promptly into my order. Two orange juices. A coffee. And hot tea.

    Now I confused my colleague. "Hot tea?'

    "Yeah. Hot tea."

    She frowned at this, as perplexed she was with the customers before me, and with this order I had now been placed into the category of Difficult Customer that Makes Life Hell. I knew I was in trouble, and immediately made her life even harder by ordering another coffee. Just in case. I needed some hot liquid, not warmed up liquid.

    Waiting for food can be an interesting experience, gauging everything that is around me. I let myself feel what is happening, immersing in the tone that is about me. This was half the fun of traveling, just to have this kind of experience. Only the laconic guy with the crossed limbs and booming voice seemed to be awake in the crowd. Maybe they didn't drink enough hot tea.

    My bag arrived, as stuffed as a bear stocked up for winter, and with probably the last typical meal one had before hibernation. There were four beverages, requiring a drink holder, the ubiquitous symbol of carry-out drinking en masse. There was an orange juice, chilled to its core like it had been frozen to death for my personal consumption. Two coffees that warned me CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT. But only two. Which meant the fourth contained: CAUTION: CONTENTS NOT HOT, a.k.a.:

    Iced tea without the ice.

    There it was. The iced tea from last night's dinner that someone forgot to put back into the refrigerator. Ahh, the joys of traveling. Where you can be in the same country you lived in and still have people not know what the hell you were talking about. With my hot iced tea, I knew I was in the South, far away from home.