Drive
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Having decided to start at the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which isn’t far from Lambert International Airport, I keyed it into the GPS and off we went. Built in 1929 as a private toll bridge, it took Route 66 travellers across the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri. The trussed steel girders on concrete make it appear assembled from a giant Meccano set, but the really notable feature is the curious twenty-two-degree bend in the middle that was a compromise between the limits of the geology and the demands of river navigation. Closed to automobile traffic since 1968, it would have been demolished in 1975 except that a collapse of the price of scrap steel meant that it was cheaper to let the bridge stand. Today, the rusting mile-long structure is open to pedestrians and cyclists and, on special occasions, to car clubs.
After walking across the bridge to the Illinois side and then back again, we drove through St. Louis, remarking on the light traffic and laughing as we followed a dancing lowrider. Particularly popular in Latino communities, lowriders are cars and trucks with suspension systems modified so they ride low to the ground. Some owners—who often add flashy paint jobs and graphics, custom interiors and powerful audio systems—install hydraulics, allowing them to adjust the suspension at will and even raise and lower different corners of the vehicle as they drive. While cars from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are favourites, the lowriding scene, which involves a lot of cruising the main drag after dark, wasn’t around during the heyday of Route 66. So seeing the big white Cadillac in front of us bouncing up and down, sometimes one wheel at a time, in a gleeful ballet was a reminder that car culture is alive and well—and mutating.
EVEN THOUGH CHRIS had brought along a couple of guidebooks for the old road, it soon dawned on us that this might be more of a challenge than we had imagined. We stopped at a gas station and bought a map—and then promptly hit a dead end. Right in front of us was a large concrete barrier overgrown with bushes. We turned around and drove back to the information centre at Route 66 State Park near Eureka. The volunteer staffer working the place, and presumably repeating the same spiel innumerable times a day, wore a name tag that said read “Jerry.” He was already busy talking to another struggling road tripper, a man who spoke with a Southern drawl and wore cowboy boots and a weather-beaten trucker’s cap. Outside, his wife—a gargoyle with a peroxide-blond beehive hairdo, ruby-red lipstick and so much makeup she must have used a trowel—hauled on a cancer stick as she sat in a Ford F-350 pickup with a crew cab and Alabama plates. Although she looked terminally bored, I assumed she was secretly delighted to have a husband who would actually ask for directions.
Our wives were back home, and the GPS couldn’t help us, so we were two men with no choice but to seek guidance. We left the centre with another map and some directions. But it was already mid-afternoon and we weren’t even thirty miles west of downtown St. Louis. At this rate, we would never get to Albuquerque. Undaunted, we took off with renewed purpose and followed the road through a series of sleepy towns with names such as Pacific and Bourbon and Cuba, but after accidentally finding ourselves on the interstate again, we decided to stay with the rest of the world and take the superhighway into Springfield. Although it was a minor defeat, the sun was dropping on the horizon, so we soon wouldn’t be able to see much anyway. Besides, it was only the first day and we were confident we could redeem ourselves on the second. Arriving later than we had hoped, we checked in to a hotel surrounded by parking lots. Inside, we discovered a five-storey atrium featuring a ten-foot sculpture by Dale Chihuly, the renowned American glassmaker known for his vibrant colours and abstract designs—we were definitely no longer on Route 66.
Tonyea, the front-desk clerk, told us about the nightmarish road trip she took with her family when she was a teenager. The plan had been to drive to Alaska, across Canada and then home, but she bailed out on her parents halfway through and vowed never to go on any trip like that again. Her story reminded me why I’d never want to be a teenager again, but failed to dent my enthusiasm for our expedition.
Springfield considers itself “the birthplace of Route 66” because that’s where Cyrus Avery, the road’s biggest proponent, settled a dispute over what number would designate the road; although he and his supporters originally wanted 60, they finally agreed to 66. With a population of just over 150,000, the Queen City of the Ozarks is the third-largest city in Missouri, and while the density is a meagre two thousand or so people per square mile, the downtown, which was a short walk from our hotel, had lots of bars and restaurants and a lively feel to it. We enjoyed an excellent meal with a rather unnecessary, though much enjoyed, second bottle of wine and then found a fun place full of college students enjoying a good bar band. And I was thrilled to be in a town with the same name as the one Homer Simpson lives in. But a cool name and a few good blocks of downtown can’t make up for all the sprawl and woeful urban planning—or lack thereof—that goes into creating too many cities just like Springfield.
ALTHOUGH IT REMAINS America’s most celebrated national highway, Route 66 wasn’t the first. One of the earliest efforts at creating a cross-country road was the Lincoln Highway. The brainchild of Carl Fisher, the man behind the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it offered drivers a 3,400-mile route from New York City to San Francisco in a more or less direct east–west path through thirteen states. But a trip from one end to the other meant spending up to a month on bad roads. Despite Fisher’s hope of covering it with concrete in time for San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, little progress had been made by 1917 when the United States joined the First World War. Indeed, even by 1920, as the car was becoming a machine for the masses, the vast majority of the close to three million miles of road in America was better suited for travel by horse and buggy than by automobile. The Federal Highway Act of 1921 offered matching construction funds to states and led to the creation of an interstate system, but it took Avery, a Tulsa businessman, to make a truly car-worthy national highway happen.
As the leader of several highway associations, Avery championed the idea of a route from Chicago to Los Angeles (one that, naturally, would go through Oklahoma). In 1926, when the plan became official, only a third of the 1,648-mile, eight-state route featured pavement. The remainder, according to Route 66: The Mother Road, by Michael Wallis, “was either graded dirt or gravel, bricks covered with asphalt, or, in a few stretches, nothing but wooden planks.” But by 1937, Route 66 was completely paved from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, mostly with either Portland cement or compacted layers of broken stone called macadam.
The path took travellers through the middle of so many small towns that, as early as 1927, supporters called it the Main Street of America in maps and promotional material. And tireless promotion from boosters—whose successes included the Bunion Derby, a 1928 footrace from LA to New York—was one reason the highway resonated with the nation so quickly. Despite plenty of bad road and some dangerous sections, it was an immediate hit with travellers and truckers and many of the almost two million American migrants to Southern California between 1920 and 1940. Not even the Great Depression could kill the buzz. Many Midwestern farming families, having lost everything in the dust bowl, saw the road as the way to salvation and prosperity in California. Suddenly, Route 66 wasn’t just a busy highway—it had symbolic meaning.
During the war, when gas rationing and tire shortages reduced travel for most people, the road was vital for moving troops across the country. After the war, the road flourished as Americans eagerly bought cars. The gas stations, restaurants and early motels, called motor courts, that survived the Depression and the Second World War, began to thrive. Curio shops and tourist attractions joined the increasingly crowded roadside, as Route 66 became popular with holiday travellers. Some drove it as part of a trip to California, especially after 1955, when Disneyland opened in Anaheim; some were on their way to the Grand Canyon; some even saw the road as its own destination.
But just as the Main Street of America was hitting the height of its po
pularity in the 1950s, states started to bypass the old road by building four-lane highways. And in 1984, the opening of Interstate 40 in Arizona replaced the last stretch.
ROUTE 66 OFTEN RUNS along beside the interstate. At points, the two roads are within spitting distance of each other. In the wooded hills of the Ozark Plateau, the modern highway is mostly straight and as flat as possible given the terrain, while the old one curves and undulates. The stark contrast between the two is a testament to advances in civil engineering over the decades, but it’s also a potent reminder that the two roads were built for two different purposes. One takes drivers past everything and gets them to their destination with as few stops as possible; the other invited travellers to visit towns along the way and to stop at motels, diners and other businesses. One is anti-social; the other was decidedly social—and a lot more fun.
So we stopped. In Halltown, a village with 189 residents in the southwest corner of Missouri and long known for its antiques, we pulled up in front of Whitehall Mercantile. The lopsided clapboard building, which sits just steps from the road and dates from the turn of the last century, was once a lodge and general store. The white paint has now started peeling, the concrete steps are cracked and inside, past the rusty horseshoe nailed over the red door with the jingling bell, is a dimly lit, stale-smelling room filled with Route 66 memorabilia, political campaign buttons, old farm implements, kerosene lamps, chipped plates, worn furniture and a few books. I guess the owners knew what they were selling because they’d put up a sign that read, “This is not a museum. This junk is for sale.”
Eventually, Thelma White, the proprietress, appeared from the back. A frail old woman in a white cardigan and blue slacks, she was struggling with Parkinson’s. She moved slowly and with the help of a cane and had to hold the counter when she adjusted her glasses. But that did little to diminish her eagerness to chat, and she urged us to sign her guest book, which already bore the names and hometowns of people from all over Europe, Asia and across North America. Originally from Indiana, she’d moved to Joplin, Missouri, to go to college in 1949 and later settled in Halltown. She told us about how bustling the place had been back before the interstate; in fact, people had to run across the road because the traffic was so thick. It’s not like that anymore, of course. Less than a mile away, tens of thousands of oblivious cars stream by on I-44 every day, but on a Wednesday afternoon in early October, we were the only tourists in town. And to make things worse, the area was in the midst of a drought so bad her husband had just decided to sell his cattle.
Before I left, I bought a fiftieth anniversary–edition copy of The Grapes of Wrath in good condition and with a dust jacket—in other words, a significant upgrade on the old jacketless copy I’d owned since university. White filled out the receipt by hand. Chris was peeved that I’d snagged it, but as I later pointed out, “It’s not my fault you went right to the junk and I went to the books.”
A classic of American literature, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel tells the story of the Joad family, dirt-poor sharecroppers who drive from Oklahoma to California to escape the Depression-era dust bowl. Many of the Okies who took Route 66 called it the Glory Road, but Steinbeck called it the Mother Road. “66 is the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there,” he wrote. “From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”
Though they are usually pursuits of happiness rather than matters of survival, road trips are common in American writing. The most celebrated example is On the Road, the Beat Generation bible by Jack Kerouac. I’d started to read the novel in my early twenties, but soon gave up, cheerfully (if a little arrogantly) explaining my decision to friends by quoting Truman Capote, who’d famously dissed Kerouac’s work when he pronounced, “This isn’t writing, it’s typing.” I started it again in Indianapolis and this time managed to fight my way to the end. Although the back of my paperback edition claims it is the book that “turned on a whole generation to the youthful subculture that was about to crack the gray façade of the fifties wide open and begin the greening of America,” I regret to say I found the typing neither enjoyable nor an inspiration. Perhaps the book just didn’t age well. But I admit that Kerouac does capture a time when young people really did have a freedom that no longer seems possible. Travelling around the country was cheap, jobs were plentiful and cars offered unprecedented independence.
Among more recent road books, many people cite Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least Heat-Moon, as a favourite. Though I found that travel memoir well written, and even compelling in places, Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America is much funnier. Best of all, though, is the laugh-out-loud-funny road trip to Sin City in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
After I returned home, I opened up my new copy of The Grapes of Wrath and saw an inscription made out to Thelma White in 1993. I wondered if business had grown so dismal that she had been reduced to selling her own possessions.
AFTER HEADING WEST from Halltown to Paris Springs, we completed an older stretch of Route 66 and then drove Missouri Highway 96, a newer, wider version of the old road, that led us through Heatonville and Albatross, Phelps and Rescue, Plew and Avilla. The biggest of the bunch was Avilla, with a population of 137. There were plenty of good signs in this area, so we started off making good time. The countryside is not dissimilar to what we were accustomed to back in Ontario, but when we almost drove over some armadillo roadkill we knew we weren’t in Canada anymore. We were, in fact, almost in Kansas.
After Avilla, we saw a sign promoting the 66 Drive-In Theatre, but instead of announcing a double bill, it said, “Closed until April.” I was still keen to stop and check it out except that coming out of Carthage, home of the Boots Motel and the Civil War State Park, the road gave us the slip and we missed it. Once we found our way again, I insisted we drive back to the theatre, which is just west of Carthage. Chris grumbled a bit, but later agreed it was well worth the backtracking and lost time because the place, which originally operated from 1949 to 1985, is a real gem, especially the ticket booth. The grounds were in immaculate shape, even though it was closed for the winter and despite having served as a junkyard for several years.
America’s first drive-in theatre opened in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933, but it took the development of an in-car speaker by RCA in 1941 for the concept to really catch on. The craze began after the war and peaked in the 1950s. By 1958, there were more than four thousand drive-in theatres in the United States, and they were as controversial as they were popular. Parents and other prigs from the Leave It to Beaver era condemned them as passion pits. And it was true that for many young people—who wanted to hang around with friends and take advantage of the privacy a car offered at night to smoke, drink and make out—the movie was the last thing on their minds.
Though moralistic outrage had little to do with it, drive-ins would never again be as popular as they were in 1958. By the late 1970s, after two decades of decline, the industry fell into deeper trouble because of cable television, VCRs and other entertainment choices; trouble getting first-run pictures from the studios; soaring land values; aging owners looking to retire; and perhaps even concerns about the growing amount of nudity and sexual activity in movies. More than 1,000 screens closed between 1978 and 1988. Since the late 1990s, though, there has been a modest revival, with a number of restorations and even some new theatres. Still, by the summer of 2006, there were only 651 screens at 398 theatres in the United States.
While people may not go to drive-ins as often as they once did, car movies remain popular. In Cars, an animated feature from Pixar and Disney, a cock
y hotshot racecar named Lightning McQueen, on his way to a speedway in California, ends up in Radiator Springs on Route 66 instead. New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane didn’t think much of the movie and bristled at the message: “With the price of oil gurgling upward, and even the President conceding that the nation’s fuel consumption could use a trim, Pixar has produced a hymn to the ecstasy of driving.” The movie-going public didn’t mind, and Cars topped the box office for the first two weeks of its run in June 2006—and the DVD gets a workout in many homes with small kids. (Friends of mine had to stop referring to the movie by name for fear their two-year-old son would hear them and demand to see it yet again.)
Movies have been influential in car culture at least since the 1950s, at once reflecting and stoking our love for the automobile. Road trip movies are a Hollywood staple and a few of them are actually watchable, including Rain Man, about a pair of brothers who drive across the country in an inherited Buick Roadmaster convertible because the only airline the autistic one will fly is Qantas; Hard Core Logo, about a punk band on a cross-Canada reunion tour; and Sideways, about a middle-aged man who takes his old college roommate, who’s about to be married, to Napa Valley wine country with hilarious, and sometimes touching, consequences. I can only imagine how many road trips such movies inspired.
Despite Lane’s umbrage at Cars, questionable messages are nothing new. Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean’s 1955 sophomore effort, wasn’t his best film—that would be East of Eden—but it did become his best known and the one that forever linked him to teenage angst. The film glamorized chicken runs because a central scene shows Jim Stark (Dean’s character) taking on Buzz, a local bully, in a “chickie run.” The pair race stolen cars toward a seaside cliff and the first to jump out is a chicken, but while Stark gets out safely, Buzz’s black leather jacket catches on the door handle and he goes over the bluff with the car. Meanwhile, movies with car chases—and they are legion—encourage driving fast and furious. They may seem clichéd now, but that wasn’t the case back in 1968 when Steve McQueen in a 1968 Ford Mustang GT-390 Fastback, two villains in a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum and the streets of San Francisco set the standard in Bullit.