Road trips will never quite be the same after you read Michael D. Yates’ Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue. After 32 years teaching at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Yates and his wife Karen took off on a five-year tour of America in 2001. He has plenty to say about Estes Park, CO; Yellowstone; Manhattan; the Pacific Northwest (with its liquid sunshine); Flagstaff, AZ; and Miami Beach, but it’s not only their scenic pleasures. Yates observes the working class wherever he goes, and even joins them when he and his wife take jobs as clerk and kitchen helper at Yellowstone.
What Yates sees on his travels is economic disparity, racism, urban sprawl, and pollution.
Manhattan: a city where “doormen wear ermine collars in the winter” and “a gourmet hamburger might sell for $40.” Also a city where a noted leftist writer and her husband abuse rent control laws, own three cars, and live in a building originally meant for struggling artists. Meeting them accelerates Yates’ need to hit the road.
Portland: Despite its liberal reputation, the city is “backward and oppressive” when it comes to labor and race. Black residents number 7 percent, and there is a growing Hispanic community of “motel and hotel cleaners, yard-care workers, nannies, and lower-level kitchen staff in restaurants” that is largely invisible to the dominant white population.
Joshua Tree National Park: “From Keys View…we saw pollution from Los Angeles, brown and deadly, coming through a pass in the mountains.”
Miami Beach: “What might be the case today if blacks had been offered the same aid given to the Cubans who came to Florida in 1959? What if the land given away to rich “entrepreneurs’ like Flagler had been given to the former slaves?”
Deadwood, SD: “To encourage tourism—the supposed cure-all for every poor place’s economic woes—the town’s elected officials wanted to have a “running of the buffalo” on a Deadwood street, hoping to provide an American version of Pamplona’s “running of the bulls.”
Though this book was published two years before our current economic crises, Yates explains that “Alan Greenspan’s low-interest-rate-fueled real estate boom has been in essence a form of class warfare, strengthening the power of large property holders…. Thousands of poorer, working-class people were sucked into a bevy of mortgage schemes that promise years of debt dependency, bankruptcy, and foreclosure.”
As Yates says, knowing the facts is one thing, but being free to travel and experience them is far more powerful. In order to create a more equal society we need to “get out of the work rat race.” Like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Yates shows us how to engage.
Available from Monthly Review Press, $15.95, http://www.monthlyreview.org