SIDE TRIPS

By Pico Iyer

Bob Popplewell is a personnel consultant (trained in psychometrics ) who owns a rattlesnake ranch 60 miles west of Dallas on I-20. There he sells freeze-dried serpents through the mail and, when not firing people for a living, runs eight 900-number phone lines through which he hopes to minister to American Dreams. His own dream is of becoming "a major player in the turtle trade." Not far away, as Mike Bryan tells us in Uneasy Rider: The Interstate Way of Knowledge (Knopf; 349 pages; $25), is Phil ("Shorty") Kendrick, a former egg deliverer who, having seen Jesus, is planning a 450-ft. model of Noah's ark. So far his kingdom extends mostly to a 14-year-old camel he drags around for cameos in Easter pageants.

If you want to see the true America, Mike Bryan contends--and often proves --you have to bypass the blue highways and quaint backroads and hit the Interstate. This he does with the engagingly curious open-mindedness of a true odologist, riding in state-patrol cruisers equipped with "three different sirens--wail, yelp and hi-lo"--and cross-examining moteliers and roadside philosophers at places like the Wes-T-Go Truck Stop outside Abilene, Texas, not so far from where Lee Johnson shows off a half-million-dollar motor coach that does 1,500 miles to a tank of gas.

There are no revelations in Uneasy Rider, and Bryan's occasionally aimless doodlings don't always get many miles to the gallon. But he does explain (in a footnote) why the Chevy Caprice is "the unofficial freedom-mobile in the Middle East"; that cows in Arizona used to feed on cantaloupes and honeydews; and why Sierra Blanca, Texas, receives 225 wet tons of New York City sludge each day. Listening to the routinely outsize tales of ordinary Americans with an amiable deadpan worthy of Richard Ford, he suggests that distance makes the head grow fonder too. People who buy snakes in bottles of Jim Beam may, in fact, be closer than we know.

--By Pico Iyer