Broken down, ruinous, a haunting echo of former resplendency. What was once an Old West amusement park in the middle of Oklahoma is now a dilapidated and greasy adult video store. The billboard across the street - an Ad Council attempt to curb rampant and insidious crystal-meth abuse - flutters, torn and peeling as a lonely tumbleweed skitters across the crumbling parking lot. Welcome to the Route 66 of 2011.
Route 66 wasn’t always like this. At one time it joyfully carried millions of hopes and dreams to distant and exciting lands, all the while nurturing the many various dreams of road-side proprietors from Chicago to Los Angeles. An icon if there ever was one, Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926 and removed from the US Highway System on June 27, 1985, deemed “no longer relevant”. Put in those words it is quite sad; though experiencing its current state, it’s tough to argue. “America’s Highway”, that lays claim to the first drive-thru restaurant – Red’s Giant Hamburg in Springfield, Illinois – the firstly coined “Mom and Pop” shops and also the first Los Angeles freeway, is a meandering jaunt through the annals of American history and culture. But, unfortunately, it is just that: history; an expansive ruin to be viewed like the Mayan cities of the Yucatan and the Coliseum of Rome.
“The world used to come to us,” said one waitress in a dusty old diner as she looked sadly around her fading town along Route 66. “Now no one comes”. I’d heard similar quotes before, as I imagine had she, but what else can be said. These towns are dead, but the residents are like lion cubs sniffing around their dead mother, no inkling of where to go or what to do, just hoping that their mother will suddenly wake up and carry on providing for them.
The beginning of the end came in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act. He was the torch bearer of this new legislation, stemming from his grueling drive across country in a 1919 military convoy. Eisenhower rightly believed that in the name of national defense, America needed an Autobon-esque highway system. Again, tough to argue; the relentless press of progress must be accepted. But at what cost? Like the internet, or diet pills, this progress came with sad realities. The Turner Turnpike from Tulsa to Oklahoma City, an 88 mile toll road, was the first to show the grim augury of what Route 66 would become. This turnpike made the travel between the metropolises much quicker and easier, but did this by blithely bypassing ALL of the small towns that had once prospered along the banks of Route 66. This disregard quickly showed in the nooks and crannies of these once thriving villages. Now, they crumble to dust, desperately clinging to the few tourists that have the time and adequate vehicle suspension to travel Old Route 66 for nostalgic pleasure. Towns along Route 66 took this the way a dog takes being kicked: they either laid down and showed their bellies, or bared their teeth and fought. Some places tried to assuage the pain of bypasses with legislation. New Mexico even carried a short-lived law that strictly forbade them. But, like an abusive master, progress marched on, adamant and unyielding.
Now, 55 years after the Interstates began, they have all but wiped out Route 66. If it weren’t for the National Route 66 Preservation Bill, signed by Bill Clinton in 1999 that allotted 30 million dollars to restore and preserve this famous route, it would be nearly impossible to navigate. Now, at least, the route is dotted with signs reading “Historic 66 Route”. But these signs are still very tough to follow. They lead into the long forgotten towns just fine, but once through the lonely main street, one is left to his or her own reckoning to exit the town. The remaining residents of these locales try to make a living on the old highway, selling worthless baubles all made in China to the few passing tourists eager to stop at anything that looks like a roadside attraction. But the baubles in Oklahoma are the exact same baubles found in New Mexico and so on. We live in a capitalistic society, for good or ill, and it seems that no one is willing to make any real investment in the dilapidated properties along the withered Mother Road. People have interest, no doubt. “Oo, that sounds like such an adventure,” one woman marveled, captivated as my wife and I told her of our journey down Route 66. But, if asked to put stock in the highway, I doubt any sane investor would jump at the opportunity. And it shows; one of the biggest attractions along the 2400-mile route is a fifty-foot-tall futuristic Coke bottle plopped completely out of place at a gas station in the middle of farm land. It’s draw or meaning, who knows? Yet it remains one of the few modern investments evident amongst the ruins.
Much of the way, Route 66 runs parallel to either Interstate 44 or 40, just fifty yards or so from the highway that took its place. It makes those portions of the drive rather tedious and very pointless, just a slower pot-holed road a stones-throw from the dreaded interstates. Nostalgia, forget it. The drone of trucks bumbling past wipes any feel of the old road. And every one of the exits along the interstates could very well be mistaken for any interstate exit in America. McDonalds, Wendy’s, Motel 6; signs and logos so branded into our brains that they become a ringing nuisance like the Macarena. The only respite from this chain-store-nausea comes when the old Route 66 branches off into the desert or wilderness to access small tribal towns and long-forgotten hamlets. It is during these portions that one can finally get a feel of what the old road might have once been like. A two-lane burn though arid landscapes to feel free. On these stretches one can imagine what farmers from the mid-west would have seen and felt as they optimistically fled the dust-bowl of the 1930s for the fertile farm land of central California, or what desperate workers would have experienced as they ran to the Pacific coast for “war jobs” during World War II. A dangerous hair-pinned wind up and over the Black Mountains would have been the last deadly obstacle to California for travelers of Route 66 before 1953. And one of the most thriving attractions of the whole route is just after this nerve-wracking journey.
Thriving may be a gross overstatement because the town of Oatman, Arizona is, by its own distinction, a ghost town. This small, old-west mining town is a journey back in time. A massive band of wild burros walk around the main street, looking for a hand-full of cornmeal or carrots from the tourists that are surprisingly prominent. The town seemed to remain unchanged for centuries and was quite a sight. But inside the stores the same realities exist: worthless trinkets haunt the few shelf-spaces that don’t lay vacant. “Not a lot to do here in Oatman,” one proprietor joked when we told him we were from New York, offering us the understatement of the year. He chatted with us for a half-an-hour or so, seeming fairly starved for conversation. He talked about the coyotes that would sometimes make a run through town, and the abnormally large cat that was a resident as much as the people or burros. “That cat would take down a coyote if it ever messed with her,” he laughed. He talked about the exciting arrival of the new baby burro and tried to remember what its name was and exactly who the father was. He thought that its mother must have strayed out into the mountains and gotten pregnant by an outsider. “She likes to roam, ya know, and that baby is too dark to be from any of the males in town,” he imparted with great thought. Ah, the day to day life in Oatman, Arizona.
There do still remain some elements of charm and nostalgia along the withering Mother Road, one of which is that it follows the railroad almost all of the way. The Santa Fe Line carries freight and passenger trains back and forth and is perhaps a very fitting partner to Route 66; both nearly extinct and quickly being overtaken by that pesky march of progress, consoling each other with lonely train whistles and shifting truck gears.
Despite its dilapidation, Route 66 is certainly still held in the hearts and minds of Americans and the world as a whole. Cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Flagstaff still celebrate the Mother Road, and every little town along the route is splattered with “Route 66 this” and “Route 66 that”. But the sad truth is that most people drive the interstates thinking that they are driving the old Route 66 while bypassing everything that once made 66 what it was. And the end result is that the actual route itself is indeed “no longer relevant”; no longer useful as a road for travel and commerce and, apart from a few exceptions, no longer all that interesting.
That said, while parked at a long boarded-up car-hop in Texas, where weeds perpetually beset the parking lot from cracks that grow wider with every day, the American spirit wafts outward through the broken windows and with the right set of eyes one can see a line of convertibles and cheery teenage girls in bobby-sox skirts carrying fresh hamburgers to bushy-tailed American families, bright and eager to see what lies further down the Mother Road, wide smiles and wonder, brimming with adamant expectations for the American dream, never knowing that they are unwittingly writing American history onto the parchment of a sprawling macadam scroll that will one day turn to dust but shall never be forgotten.
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