“New Mexico. Arizona,” she added.
“California,” they said in unison.
“Eight.” She nodded to herself.
Their game over, the truck driver observed, “It’s America’s Main Street.”
I didn’t ask why Route 66 was important; being a teenager in the 1960s, I recalled the song made famous by Nat King Cole and remembered the television series named after the road. I knew little else, and what stuck in my mind was a question: Why did he think it was “the most famous highway in the world”?
The years passed. An excess of nostalgia for Americana ensured that Route 66 became known, if not understood, in the ensuing decades. Freeways had circumvented many small towns on the route during half a century of “progress,” leaving a hodgepodge of memories where a roadway of hope had once run diagonally across the United States of America. Route 66 retreated to the back of my mind.
But not long ago, just months before what was intended to be a joint journey to Asia, my buddy Peter and I admitted that trip was hobbled by time constraints. We decided to abort it. Dispirited, we retreated to a bar, where we watched the waiter approach with a succession of pale ales.
Suddenly Peter brightened. “Maybe we do something closer to home. Shorter. Within the U.S. Maybe Canada. Mexico?” A long pause. “Maybe a cruise?”
I choked. “That’d be like spending seven days at a wedding reception.” I was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of traveling with someone who’d even propose this.
But Peter was not so easily stopped. “What about Route 66?” He considered it a bit, having surprised himself, and then tried again, to make sure I got it. “Let’s drive Route 66!” he said. “It goes through six or seven states.”
“Eight,” I said.
And drive it we did: on a crisp October day, five months after Peter and I made our ale-inspired decision to seek out the rough and lonely spots that remained of what was once a hectic Route 66, I was at the wheel of a top-down convertible, rumbling across a back road of gravel and cracked earth, out of sight of any other people or vehicles. The sun was bright and the wind was fast. I pressed the gas pedal for more speed. A bullet-riddled marker on a fence post confirmed that this remote and bumpy stretch of hidden history was old Route 66. I looked over as Peter scratched his unshaven chin and adjusted his sunglasses against the glare. He removed his baseball cap, held it out over the side of the car, and let it flap in the onrushing air as a little kid would on a family vacation.
We were halfway through our twelve-day road trip, commonly noted as 2,400 miles, although claims range from 2,200 to 2,448 miles—which tells us a lot about the variation of alignments over the years. By that time, I’d already shed enough misconceptions about the United States to fill our car’s trunk, but I’d also confirmed that the myth is as important to America’s selfesteem as is fact.
That nuance had been captured for me in a conversation the night before with a middle-aged waitress in a roadside diner. When I told her that Peter and I were intent on seeing “every part of the old road,” she said, “I hope you’re driving a Corvette convertible!”
“We’re driving a Mustang. But it’s a convertible.”
“Ah. At least it’s red, right?
“Why red?”
“Because red was the color of the Corvette those two guys drove in the TV show!”
I didn’t have the heart to remind her that the program had been broadcast in black and white.
My equation of a nation is straightforward, I think: land + people + climate + commerce = country. America, the world’s superpower, has a more elaborate formula, complicated by its distorted sense of importance. Many foreigners suspect that the United States rewrites its history away from facts—recasting them in a favorable light, and revising them to suit its sense of greatness. As a result, America is often accused of celebrating make-believe legends instead of the duller truths. But whatever the reputation of Americans in foreign lands, this national “species” is best viewed close up, in its indigenous setting, if one wishes to take its measure.
Many travelers begin their journeys, whether in their own country or another, with biases based on hearsay. Many of these people, both outsiders and residents, see America as arrogant, and getting away with it, in a world that often respects America’s commercial thunder and little else. But if there is a place to see America at its truest, it is Route 66—the road first renowned for its attractions, then for its deterioration, and now for its attempts to reassert itself in the eyes of those who seek an authentic America. Americans love an underdog. Even more, they love stories about people who rolled high, lost it all, and fought to regain respect. In that way, Route 66 is America.
The road has an uncommon presence on the world stage. Route 66 is not a runner-up to any contender; it is the highway of highways. North America’s Alaska Highway, Baja Highway, and Trans-Canada Highway are icon-lite by comparison. Route 66’s peers are on other continents: perhaps the Asian Highway from Singapore to Bangkok, the Road of the Emperors from Prague to Budapest, or the Golden Road from Baghdad to Samarkand.
Many tourists today want an instant “experience.” Route 66 does not grant that. Tourism frequently offers up overmanaged travel; Route 66 eschews that. It is possible to drive from Chicago to Los Angeles in three days on the interstate: you just need to get up each morning and chase the pavement. However, as a fellow traveler told me, “Seeing Route 66 in three days would be like having a smorgasbord on a coffee break.”
Peter can be a stickler for daily minutiae (which drives me nuts). He set the tone of our drive by announcing, “If we’re going on old Route 66, let’s take the time and do it right. That means finding where it’s ignored and abandoned, unpaved and unhappy—not just the smooth parts.” That gave him a motive for the trip, a mini-quest that satisfied his need for a rationale that took him away from more reasonable obligations.
Our ambition became to search for the left-behind and forgotten pieces of Route 66, not merely to “touch it” between speeding along samples of cared-for sections. We aimed for the remnants and dead ends of 66 for no reason other than that they are dead ends—and were once of magical importance. Although today these fragments are often overgrown by weeds, they are compass points to the past. They remind us of pioneers and provenance.
While speaking to others—even world travelers—about our plans, I would hear, “I’d love to do that! I’ve always dreamed of driving Route 66.” Then there’d be a hesitation, followed by: “Actually, all I know about it is that song . . . ” Driving Route 66 was not infrequently a romantic notion accompanied by amnesia.
This cannot avoid being a tale of two boomers at the wheel—one with a love for America in all its exaggerations, the other with a sense that America had become the sum of its flaws. This is us: two friends, simple as that. We are chalk and cheese, Peter and I; he veers right politically, and I lean to the political port. A friend, hearing of our Route 66 adventure, sized the two of us up as “road scholars, not Rhodes scholars.”
Peter stretches taller than most men, weighs more than most men, and has a head described by his mother as “large and capable,” which his body grew to match. He feigns pride, when in fact he is modest. He casts a long shadow on family and colleagues. He bought a grungy shirt and ill-fitting jeans specifically for this trip, but only brought them out when all his collared shirts and pressed pants had had their day. His hairstyle is unchanging—coiffed for years by the same barber, although his gray is becoming grayer (something he will not bother to hide). His lifestyle is overengaged, overcommitted—he’ll be everywhere he’s expected to be; he’d go to the opening of an envelope. He’s generous to a fault, and gregarious—he could have a conversation with a stop sign. He believes that “the good things in life are easy not to do.” And he is loud, and laughs vigorously—often in the face of potential danger, like a freight train whistles before a vehicle crossing.
And I should say that he’s done a poor job in life o
f making time for himself a priority; he’s more bound to an office than to the wilderness, more tied to a Daytimer than to the open road. This would be among his few attempts ever to spend a couple of weeks untethered.
Me? I didn’t need to go far to find a grungy shirt or ill-fitting jeans; my closet is full of them. I bracket Peter’s age by five years—five more in chronology, five less in emotional reliability. I dream of a life without restrictions or obligations. A man of many enthusiasms, I’m not always focused. I’ve hopscotched U.S. state lines throughout my life, visiting family, friends, and back roads, but seldom with a plan. I travel to reconcile my dreams.
I was witnessing workmates and friends afflicted with sufficient money and not enough life. That startled me. “You should save money; you’re getting old,” Peter said one day while we were driving on Route 66.
“I’m getting old, but I’m not old yet,” I replied only a little defensively.
“Seriously, money can be important.”
“I’ve never wanted to be the richest guy in the cemetery,” I said.
Woody Guthrie wrote of the man who “lives for work’s sake and works to dig up more work.” I’d been guilty of that, and I wanted to change it.
Travel is my mistress. I sleep in forty or fifty different beds a year, pull up that many strange blankets, turn out that many bedside lamps, and wake up to that many different curtains, some torn.
Peter and I are in the autumn of our lives. I am still this side of curmudgeonly and, as Peter would say (and has said) of me, “You really can be a bit of an ass.” That makes us each a little set in our ways.
Road trips, like marriages, are about compromises. We went in search of America without being sure exactly what that would mean. Might it mean seeing the country in pockets often overlooked? Perhaps hearing truths spoken by people who don’t often get listened to? Maybe opening our closed minds to the wisdom of the open road? Freedom was our byword, and the extent of our planning was agreeing on our completion date. But we swore we’d avoid prepackaged foods, prearranged experiences, and predictable America.
En route, a conversation with an old-timer captured the openness of the road and of our plans. In a remote Oklahoma town on Route 66, a tall woman with weathered skin looked at our parked car with its top down and asked, “Where’re you going?”
Peter replied, “Wherever the wind takes us.”
The lady leaned forward, laughed with a hint of cunning and said, “Travelers are the wind.”
To Timbuktu for a Haircut Page 32