On the preponderance of Sand motels

Any considered motel nomenclature would begin by marking the impermanence that tends to define these roadside accomodations. There are so many examples to cite of this possible taxonomy that you might lose an entire evening in front of a screen searching words like “rainbow,” “breeze,” “wind,” “wave,” “surf,” “sleep,” and “shore.”

But what of the preponderance of sand? There’s so much dust caught up in the history of the motel. 

The chief trait of sand is its very insignificance. Like a one-storey L-shaped structure set against the enormity of the American landscape, it’s not something that tends to occupy one’s attention. It lacks both financial and intrinsic value. 

It bears our footprints as we walk through it before a gentle breeze erases our trace in much the same way that the former presence of a traveller is extinguished by the motel cleaning staff at 11 a.m. following a night’s stay. 

The motel arises out of the sand as a humble bit of shelter from the desert, but even as it provides protection from the hot sweltering expanse facing the traveller, it always remains indelibly linked to it. 

Homogenous and basic, but also ubiquitous, the motel will eventually be consumed by itself, as the life of convenience and mobility it promised accelerates like a sand storm to envelope our entire way of life. As it is gradually buried, we’re moving too fast to even notice. 

Photos by arbyreed, Bryan Scott, Philippe Reichert, seanmugs, David Meyer, and David Bales.

It’s a shame that Freud died before the meteoric rise of the motel. While the psychoanalyst spent much of his time exploring the psyche of Vienna’s upper crust, he would have had a field day with the North American roadside, a place underwritten by the values and desires of a cultural system that anxiously balances the competing aims of instant gratification and moral purity.

In the motel, we find a remarkable analogue for Freud’s triumvirate structure of the human mind. That notorious trio of Id, Ego, and Superego is reproduced uncannily in the layout of the roadside motor court. 

The Id, that primitive locus of instinct centred on the pleasure principle has its counterpart in the anonymous motel room, where the guest’s modus operandi is typically twofold: rest/relaxation and sex.  This is a place turned away from the world, sheltered from the social gaze, a place where one can indulge in his or her most illicit desires. 

The motel sign, on the other hand, figures as the Ego. It serves as bridge between the Id and the outside world; it asks the traveller to make a decision, to put into motion the sequence of events that will realize his desires. Glowing and bold on the roadside, it displaces the true purpose of the motel by casting it in the bright neon promise of American ambition.

And what of the Superego, the moralistic counter to the chaotic and unrelenting Id? This component of the Freudian psyche is, of course, epitomized by the motel swimming pool. The pool isn’t just where one douses sexual desire in 70 degree water, but the symbolic core of family values at the heart of the motel’s advertised image. It’s also a place where you might wash away the night’s previous indulgences, metaphorically and otherwise. The pool is the motor court’s idealized social identity.

Dreamland. Is there a better name for a motel? 

These are places defined by an economy of substitutions and subterfuge, where the hidden crises and swelling desires of North American society are barely contained by a flimsy structure that’s forgotten by noon the next day. 

If the motel sign is typically a con, the name beneath the neon sets the record straight. There are no shining lights on your receipt, should you be stupid enough to request one.

For all the pomp of the highway display, any good reader spots the chasm between form and content, blazing neon and dull confinement. Since when is a TV anything more than a portal turned around on itself?

You spend the night looking one way as your thoughts spiral progressively inward. No lessons here — just uneasy mornings. A couple at the breakfast bar argues about the impeding nuclear holocaust while you struggle to apply frozen cream cheese to a rock hard bagel.

There’s a name for all of this.

Crossroads.

This is the ur motel marker. Traced back to its German roots, this two-letter prefix means “out of” and “original” all at once, just like a motel room promises adventure and solitude in the figure of the frontier. America in a nutshell. 

To be in a motel is to be at the crossroads — of adventure, the workaday grind, criminality, and life in general. Anything could happen here. And you could take one road or the other out of the parking lot. 

The choice is always, painfully yours. 

Everything is overdetermined on the road. You cower under the sheets of your adventurous spirit. The company of strangers is the only home you care to know. 

If the ultimate promise of travel is self-discovery, the lonely night beside the highway might be the most authentic moment of your life.

Crossroads.

Photos (in order) by David Bales, Joseph Vavak, Jamie Ho, jimsawthat, David Bales.

You could spend a night working out motel names.

Briza — from the old Spanish, meaning “cold, northeast wind.”

Over centuries of journeys and conversations, it becomes “breeze,” the English word that renders “wind off the sea” and later “gentle wind.”

It must be ephemeral. Like a cool briza on hot night. It’s convenient, comfortable — a breeze makes no commitment. The motel sign always leverages whatever it can. A sea of possibilities.

And what of the wind?

That old sand it once blew over is now just terrible humidity.

It has become a gift, wrapped in blinking lights.

The air is full with the history of the road.

Briza.

Two eyes under neon in the night.

Alone in a history of winds.

Freon dreams

The motel has always been caught in extremes. You could exhaust yourself rallying all the binaries, from one storey vs. multiple floors to wish-fulfilment vs. domestic life to kitsch vs. high culture, and, of course, exploration vs. safety.

Beneath all of these, however, there’s a more visceral tension that the mid-century motel exploits: hot and cold. Out there the road is an inferno of melting tar; inside the air is COOLED BY REFRIGERATION. 

As much as the tourist court and its lineage can be traced back to basic shelter narratives, the room itself is always more than a place to sleep. You don’t decorate the roadside in neon promising merely a roof over the head. 

And who wants to watch CABLE TV in a sweltering room? 

Air conditioning is everything in the motel. That spray of strangely humid but somehow still stale air helped to colonize a nation with humble roadside accommodations and tacky signs. So many deep sleeps.

No air conditioning — no deal.  

When the motel arose as a symbol of the American way of life, technological advancement promised, on the one hand, national prosperity, and on the other, everyday comfort. To be assaulted by freon was manifest destiny.

So, one approaches an old motel air conditioner with some reverence these days. Caught in a musty room in a rundown building, the dial-operated machine appears dumbfounding. The pressing question is always “can I make it work?”

Then it rumbles up to life and you shut the curtains, safe and alone. You know immediately that the hum will be just loud enough to lull you to sleep after the last re-run.

For the next eight hours everything makes sense.

Photos by lopuck, skipmoore, G Vargas, Patrick Joust, Greg, Es.mond.

It’s hardly surprising that birds figure prominently in motel nomenclature. The rise of the motor court is made possible by that most basic human urge to take flight. But, of course, there are a variety of other registers lurking in this naming strategy.

Birds are light, highly mobile, and if they nest at all, they tend to do so only seasonally. While some species like the village weaver assemble elaborate structures for the purposes of rearing their young, most construct basic nests or use something as humble as a depression in the ground.

Place matters for birds in broad terms — safety, security, sources of food — but the specifics of the nest, what you might call the animal’s home, are rarely important. Similarly, the motel structure itself is little more than an afterthought when compared to the placement of the business on a worthy road or at a highway junction.

The bird has become something of a model for our travel-obsessed culture, and not just in the form of the commercial air travel that makes our roaming practices possible. It all starts with the road, though — the compulsion to move, to run, to explore. The motel is the nest, the tree branch that temporarily shelters the person gliding along the highway. Unadorned, anonymous, but necessary.

With their migratory tendencies, transitory nature, and typically short life spans, birds subtly serve as the perfect representation of those ephemeral qualities that motel culture has always fostered, eventually giving birth to a global phenomenon captured in the figure of flight.

Among the mixed bag of the motel’s clientele, one finds all sorts, but most of all people in the process: of getting a divorce, of getting a new job, of hooking up with someone, beings on the brink of, but who have not yet achieved their goal, nor decided upon what they want; individuals who do not waste their time in vain lamentations about past failures, nor in futile speculation about a glorious future, unstable and irresolute people who make their way in life without quite knowing where they are going or why they are going there… — Bruce Begout, Common Place: The American Motel.

Photographs from Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places.

Out of the desert a motel was born

The motel wasn’t born in the desert, but it finds its fragile roots there — a little oasis built on shifting sands. This isn’t luxury. The body demands water; hot sand demands shelter. Choice comes later.

And so Route 66, the Main Street of America. This is frontier land, the remains of the dust bowl. Your ancestors surely met an entrepreneur who hawked a surrogate roadside home under the sign of exploration.

Comfort, by definition, is minimal. You want what you need, and you take what you can get before moving on, unsatisfied. The cliches of conquest bolster you and your loneliness at once.

Here a smile passes as heartfelt welcome, and reputation is a matter of shiny teeth and clean bedsheets. Edible breakfast. In the desert of history, the motel is a model of a burgeoning country built on stubborn independence.

This is a place that made it okay to have no place. Once a dream, the horizon became a business model, transition arose as a way of life. You never quite get where you thought you were going, but you know how to move.

To erect a neon sign was like claiming the moon.

Photos (in order) by Willian Eggleston, Maureen Bond, Jo-h, J Bennett Fitts, Steve Fitch, Jody Miller, Steve Fitch (again).

If the twinkling lights of the mid-century motel deployed a frenzy of choice and the unfettered promise of adventure from the roadside, entering the room was always akin to a lobotomy. 

Off the road, pupils like darts, these stripped down spaces still slap you with the crass reminder of the chasm between wish and fulfilment — from excitement to terror in three minutes flat. 

Has anyone ever captured the ambivalence of this experience more honestly, more clinically than John Register?

The motel exerts a gravitational field of nostalgia, but Register offers an antidote in his stark representation of the spaces that exist at the heart of America’s putatively earnest modernity. Maybe our roots cling to empty rooms?

Our distaste for loneliness is so profound that we imagine the road as a place of communal journey, but when we wake up in the middle of the night in a random motel beside an anonymous highway, we can’t help but crave home.

But where is that, anyway? 

The thing that Register might capture better than anyone else is the profound bind posed by conventional notions of place and the desire to escape familiarity. 

What is this better thing that we’re alway after, hunting with such restless desire? Whatever it is — and it is something — the feeling of dread that accompanies not finding it turns the safest of places into monuments of discontent. 

Big things are on the horizon. Sit on that.