The Forgotten Road

by Richard Paul Evans

  Later that afternoon I crossed the border into Oklahoma, the fourth state on Route 66.

  The first town I passed warranting a side tour was Commerce, home to baseball great Mickey Mantle (hence the nickname “the Commerce Comet”). I took a slight detour to walk by his boyhood home. There were still dents on the garage door where the young Mantle used to throw baseballs.

  I stopped nearby for an ice cream cone at a Dairy King built in a restored 1927 gas station—probably the fifth or sixth Route 66–era gas station I’d encountered since starting my trek. The owner told me with obvious pride that the gangsters Bonnie and Clyde were fond of Commerce since Bonnie had cousins in town and, if chased, they could get over several state borders quickly. Back then, police didn’t have radios and legally couldn’t cross the state line even when chasing a known public enemy.

  The towns sported names like Narcissa, Afton, Vinita, Chelsea, and Catoosa with its famous blue whale—a consummate Route 66 attraction.

  The whale was built in the 1970s by a zoologist named Hugh Davis, who erected the edifice for his wife to add to her collection of whale figurines. The blue whale is twenty feet tall and eighty feet long, and was constructed over the course of two years with cement that was mixed and applied one bucket at a time. I was thinking about what an absurd thing this man had done for his woman, and then I remembered what I was doing for mine.

  The walking was easy and mostly pleasant until I reached Tulsa, where the Route got confusing as the highway is marked 66 but isn’t the Route 66. It was just as well, as the freeway was too busy to walk on anyway.

  Tulsa’s a nice town, I had held successful seminars there before, but I didn’t stop. I was eager to reach Oklahoma City and the Texas border.

  Three days west of Tulsa I walked through Stroud, a small town with beautiful old homes and the famous Rock Café, owned by Sally, the namesake of the lead female character from Cars. The restaurant’s walls displayed notes and sketchings from John Lasseter and the Pixar artists who came through Stroud to be inspired and apparently fell for the place, as well as the restaurant’s proprietor.

  Later that same day, I stopped by another iconic Route 66 site, McJerry’s Route 66 Gallery. Jerry McClanahan was the illustrator and creator of the Route 66 guide and maps I had purchased back in Joliet and had been using since.

  It was interesting to meet the man behind the words I’d been following. Jerry was in no hurry to be anywhere, so we ended up spending several hours talking about the Route as he shared anecdotes of the people who had stopped by his place—the famous and infamous.

  By the time we finished talking it was getting dark, so I ended up having dinner with Jerry back at the Rock Café.

  The next four days were more small towns as I passed the Route 66 Rock of Ages Farm, a miniature replica of the blue whale of Catoosa (as if one weren’t enough), the famous “1898 Round Barn” in Arcadia, and one of my favorite stops—POPS, the ultimate soda gallery with a sixty-six-foot soda bottle out front and more than seven hundred different flavors of soda, including Coffee, Cucumber, Bacon, Peanut Butter, Buffalo Wing, and the classics Bug Barf and Gus’s Pimple Pop.

  Putting my curiosity aside, I had a cheeseburger and fries with a relatively safe Peruvian Inka Kola, which tasted a little like bubble gum. Two days later I reached Oklahoma City.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Some personalities are too large to be contained in a small locale.

  —CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY

  I entered Oklahoma City on the one-and-a-half-month anniversary of starting my walk. I still hadn’t reached the Route’s halfway point, which was still about three hundred miles west in Adrian, Texas, but it was an important landmark all the same.

  It was an uneventful day, though it was difficult to follow the Route. There were a lot of turns and new roads, and I was grateful that I had my guidebook and map or I probably would have ended up in some other county.

  I spent the night in downtown Oklahoma City and got up early the next morning to get back out on the road, stopping at a Waffle House for breakfast shortly after sunrise.

  There’s a unique society that exists in all pancake and waffle houses, one unabashedly provincial and real, like something drawn from a Steinbeck novel. As I was waiting to give my order, I heard this conversation between an old man and a waitress.

  “Morning, Dawn.”

  “Morning, Albert. I already know what you’re going to order. Biscuits and gravy.”

  “Well, now, Dawn. I might just surprise you today and order the steak and eggs.”

  “What. You win the lottery?”

  The next week and a half was a blur. I passed Yukon, hometown of country singer Garth Brooks, then El Reno, which on its city sign proclaims itself the home of the 750-pound onion burger. Every year, a massive hamburger is made then paraded through town so everyone can have a bite. I wondered where they got a bun that size.

  From El Reno I walked through Calumet, Geary, Bridgeport, Hydro, Weatherford, and Clinton. These communities were all small slices of Americana—the kind of towns where people paint the American flag on the side of their garage and barn, and old men come out of their houses as you walk by just to wave to you. Most of these small towns had once prospered and grown fat off the mother road and have been dying ever since, their survival indelibly linked to the road’s health.

  Before leaving Clinton I stopped to visit the Route 66 museum. A restored 1937 Ford Highway Patrol car sat in the museum’s lobby in front of a large, wall-sized map of Route 66. Along one wall were faded black-and-white photographs of the workers building the road and pictures of Okies, headed west in jalopies piled high with all their belongings.

  I overheard a tour guide say to a group, “People say Route 66 is getting too commercial, but let’s face it, it’s always been commercial. Route 66 was created to turn a buck.”

  I wondered what Ramona at the Munger Moss Motel would have to say about that.

  I also heard him say, with thinly veiled anger, “It was President Eisenhower who killed 66 with his signing of the Federal Highway Act of 1956 and the birth of the interstate highway system.” He made Eisenhower sound like he’d murdered the road.

  I left the museum, walking past the Trade Winds Motel, where my guidebook said that Elvis stayed often, always in room 215. Apparently Elvis was a creature of habit.

  My next stop, Elk City, had another Route 66 museum with the largest Route 66 shield I’d passed so far, towering maybe thirty feet in the air. The museum had an Old West town, a massive collection of weather vanes, and a ranch equipment exhibit. I visited the museum, then took a rest day to do my laundry before heading back out on the road.

  The next two days I walked through Sayre and Erick, both small, “blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em” towns. Erick did produce two famous citizens, though both were nearly as old as the Route itself and now nearly as forgotten.

  The first was Sheb Wooley, who was an actor in the western classic High Noon and, oddly enough, wrote the song “Purple People Eater,” which sat at number one on the Billboard charts for five weeks in 1958.

  The second Erick celebrity was Roger Miller, the musician who sang the trucker classic “King of the Road.” The lyrics stuck in my head. “I’m a man of means by no means, king of the road.” My dad liked that song. He’d sing along with the radio every time it played.

  The next morning I reached the town of Texola—so named because it’s in both Texas and Oklahoma—and crossed the border into the Lone Star State. State number five.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I once, from the stage, claimed to put the star in the Lone Star State. Now I’m just the lone.

  —CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY

  Texas is the largest of the Route 66 states but has the second-shortest stretch of the Route’s road, as 66 only passes through the Texas panhandle.

  By nightfall I reached Shamrock, an Irish settlement with a population of under two thousand. Every year all the men in town grow
beards for Saint Patrick’s Day, putting a price on the head of any adult male not sporting one.

  I stayed at the aptly named Blarney Inn, which advertised itself as “A Wee Bit of Ireland Here in Shamrock.” The young man at the hotel counter told me that an actual fragment of the famed Blarney stone was in a park just a few miles away. “You should go see it,” he said. “If you kiss it, you’ll become eloquent.”

  I just thanked him and took my room key. I thought if I had a car, I would probably go see it, but five miles of walking to see a stone isn’t worth it. And I was eloquent enough. Not that it was going to do me much good out here.

  On my way out of Shamrock the next morning, I walked past one of the most interesting displays of Route 66 architecture, the U-Drop Inn, a gift shop, restaurant, and information center. The beautiful building, which looks totally out of place in the dusty town, is an art deco masterpiece and the inspiration for Ramone’s House of Body Art in the movie Cars.

  By late afternoon I reached McLean. The most interesting thing about the small town (actually the only interesting thing about the small town) was that it was once a World War II German POW camp. I had no idea that German prisoners were ever kept on US soil. There was a war museum but it was terribly disappointing, looking more like a poorly stocked Army-Navy supply shop than a museum.

  I spent the night at McLean’s Cactus Inn. If I had known what the next day would bring, I would have just stayed in bed. I should have stayed in bed. It was another one of those life-changing what-if moments. Only this time I was on the wrong side of it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The woman at the hotel warned me to watch out for snakes. She didn’t specify the kind with feet.

  —CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY

  The next morning at breakfast, Dana, the hotel’s proprietor, informed me that there was no place to stay between McLean and Conway, which was a little less than fifty miles—at least two days’ walking. I wasn’t overly concerned. The weather was warm, and I told her that I could sleep outside in my sleeping bag and tent. She warned me to watch out for striped bark scorpions and diamondback rattlesnakes.

  I filled my canteen and water bottles, then set off for the day. There was little to see but miles of dusty earth. I passed an old 66 gas station that was vandalized and deteriorating, as its whereabouts created no incentive for anyone to restore it or to tear it down.

  At around two in the afternoon I passed the Donley County, Texas, Route 66 Safety Rest Area, Museum, and Tornado Shelter. In spite of having the longest name of any government building in the free world, the facility was nicely built and featured modern eating pavilions and a large children’s playground.

  The fact that the government had felt the need to build a shelter out here made me wonder how often they got tornadoes in the area. I had no desire to see one. One thing was for sure—in this terminally flat landscape, you would see it coming long before it swallowed you.

  The sun was an orange ball touching the horizon in front of me when I decided to camp for the night. It wasn’t an ideal campsite, exposed without trees or foliage, but no worse than anywhere else I could see.

  I walked about fifty yards from the highway, made a cursory search for snakes and scorpions, then set up my tent.

  It was about an hour after I’d made camp when I heard the nonmuffled roar of a motorcycle, followed by a chorus of others. The sound of the engines slowed, as if they were braking. I looked out of my tent and watched the motorcycles U-turn on the highway and head back in my direction. I could think of no reason they would turn around in the middle of nowhere except one.

  I thought of going for my gun, but there were more than a few problems with that. First, my gun was locked in the bottom of my pack and was unloaded. Second, there were at least four of them, and if they were as bad as they looked, they were likely armed.

  And third, they were already on me, the bikes’ headlamps bouncing around me as they rode off-road over the rugged terrain.

  I stood at their arrival. The first motorcycle pulled up within a few yards from me. I knew nothing of motorcycle gang protocol, but I guessed the bike’s rider to be their leader. He was older than me, barrel-chested and bald with a frayed, reddish-gray beard that fell below his tattoo-inked neck. His scalp and face were also tattooed, and there were four teardrops below his right eye.

  Growing up in a poor part of Ogden, Utah, my best friend had two brothers in a gang. I knew enough about that tattoo to know what it meant—one mock tear for every man he’d killed. I couldn’t believe I had escaped a plane crash only to be killed ignominiously by a motorcycle gang. Given the choice, I think I would have taken the plane crash. It was less personal.

  The four cyclists cut their engines, leaving the air suddenly and painfully quiet. With the exception of the lead rider, it was difficult to see the other men’s faces with the cycles’ headlamps facing me.

  “What are you doing here?” the leader asked.

  “I’m just camping.”

  “This is our desert.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “It looked like public property.”

  “Shut up.” He looked down at my pack, which was leaning against the outside of my tent. He said to the large man at his right, “Check that.”

  The rider leaned his bike on its stand and got off. He was even bigger than he looked on the bike. He wore a black vest almost completely covered with a collage of patches. He walked over and lifted my pack, unzipped the top of it, turned it upside down, and shook it. Everything fell out in a pile, including my gun, diary, and phone. The tall man rooted through the pile, put my phone in his pocket, and lifted the gun. “He’s got this.”

  “Give it to me,” the leader said. The man handed it over. The leader examined it, then looked back at me. “Why do you have a piece?”

  “It can be dangerous out here.” I think he missed my intended irony.

  He checked its magazine, then put the gun in his vest.

  “What else he got? Go through the pack.”

  I was afraid he would say that. The man dug through the pockets and pulled out the vinyl bank pouch I kept my money in. He unzipped it. “Look at this.” He tossed the pouch to the leader.

  The man looked inside the pouch, ran his fingers through the bills, then zipped it back up, shoved it under his vest, and looked at me. “Why do you have so much cash?”

  “I’m walking to California.”

  “You sell drugs?”

  “No.”

  “You have drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you have so much cash?”

  “I’m walking to California.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “LA. I’m going to see my wife and kid.”

  “Give me your wallet.”

  I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him. As he looked through it, I said, “Can I keep my driver’s license? It’s no use to you.” Then I added, “You’re not going to want to be caught with it.”

  “I’m not going to get caught with anything.” He took out my credit cards and cash, then tossed the wallet back to me with the license intact.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “He’s got a watch,” the large guy said.

  “Give me your watch.”

  My Rolex. Then I remembered that I had Monica’s ring. I knew he would demand it if he found it. I also knew I wouldn’t give it to him. He would have to take it. I decided to distract him instead.

  I slowly took off my watch, stepped forward, and handed it to him—actually, I presented it to him as if he were a customer in the Rolex boutique on New York’s Fifth Avenue. “Congratulations. It’s a Rolex.”

  He studied the watch, then looked back up at me. “Is it real?”

  “It’s real. It’s worth more than fifty grand.”

  “Why do you have so much money?”

  “I used to be rich.”

  “Why used to be? What happened?”

  “I quit my job.�
�

  “Why?”

  “I hated my boss.”

  The leader grinned. “What else he got?”

  The big guy tossed my things around some more, then said, “That’s it.”

  “Just take the whole pack,” one of the men behind him said.

  “I don’t need a pack.”

  The leader looked at me. “What else you got in there?”

  “Clothes. Deodorant. Maps. You have everything of value.”

  He glanced over at the big guy and nodded. He walked back to his cycle.

  “You can sleep in our desert tonight,” he said. He started his bike, revved his motor, then spun his bike around, kicking up dirt and rocks around me. The others followed. I couldn’t make out the “motorcycle club’s” name on the back of their vests. I stood there, watching their taillights disappear into the distance. Just like that, everything I had was gone. At least they hadn’t killed me.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Small gifts shine bright in the darkness of want.

  —CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY

  As calm as I’d acted, or thought I had, I was pretty shaken up. It took me a while to even lie down, and then I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there, listening to the sounds of the desert and the occasional passing vehicle. Around two or three in the morning, a pack of coyotes began howling.

  Finally, I got up before the sun, rolled up my tent, and started walking. My pack was noticeably lighter, but my step was measurably heavier. I reached the town of Groom by ten a.m. I had no money. No credit cards. Nothing but some camping equipment and hunger.

  Near the road was a restaurant with an odd name, The Grill—Welcome Home. I walked in. The place was surprisingly nice for a diner in the middle of nowhere. There was only one other man in the diner.

  A waitress walked up to me. She was about my age, with dishwater-blond hair and pretty but weary-looking eyes. She wore a sheer white blouse with a silver cross falling above her cleavage.