Drive
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To Michels, it is the “hood ornament of Route 66,” and Chris and I agreed it was one of the highlights of the old road. But we could see no antipathy—or even ambivalence—toward the automobile in the installation. If even the artists won’t challenge it, our obsession with cars will never topple.
9 Route 66 (Part Two)
Oil, Booze and Automobiles
FROM CARTHAGE, Chris and I pressed on through Carterville, Webb City and into Joplin. We’d entered the Tri-State Mining District, a region that was once the world leader in lead and zinc production. The base metals helped several towns in the area prosper for many decades starting in the early 1870s. But unlike many neighbouring towns, greater Joplin has continued to grow instead of shrivelling up. Now, with I-44 just to the south and a diverse economy, almost 170,000 people call the metropolitan area home. But like many other towns that have grown a lot in recent years, it reminded us of every other suburb we’d ever been in. Such places may have survived the interstate, but they had certainly lost their Route 66 charm—a few buildings, motel signs and other leftovers notwithstanding.
By the time we reached the Missouri–Kansas state line, we’d noticed that the sky and the horizons had grown bigger. We stopped at a gas station with original pumps and asked a man dressed in blue jeans, a jean jacket, cowboy boots and a baseball cap how to get to Galena. He seemed to us the picture of the archetypal God-fearing, patriotic, rural Republican from Middle America—except that his pickup was a Toyota Tacoma. He pointed straight ahead, grinned and said, in a friendly way, “If you can’t find it, there’s something wrong with you.”
Turned out there was nothing wrong with us, but the economy of Galena, Kansas, didn’t look too healthy. After the discovery of lead in 1877, the town boomed, and by 1904, more than thirty mining companies operated here. Eventually, the town had 15,000 residents and plenty of places for miners to spend their money on alcohol and women. Route 66 made the economy even stronger for a while, but after a decrease in mining activity that began in the 1930s and the closing of all the mines in the 1970s, Galena now has a population of just over 3,200. We kept going, past Riverton, and stopped for lunch in Baxter Springs, which bills itself as “the first cowtown in Kansas” because it was the end of the Shawnee Trail, an early cattle-herding route. It’s another place crushed by the closing of the area’s mines. Then, because Route 66 just grazes the southwest corner of Kansas, doing a thirteen-mile right angle, we crossed into Oklahoma. After Quapaw, we drove through Commerce, another one-time mining town and the hometown of Yankee great Mickey Mantle. On we went into Miami (pronounced My-am-uh rather than My-am-ee), with its Spanish Revival–style Coleman Theatre. Originally a 1,600-seat vaudeville stage and movie house that opened in 1929, it has never gone out of business and the local community is in the process of restoring it.
South of Miami, we took a dirt road to the Sidewalk Highway, which actually predates Route 66. Faced with a choice between paving two lanes for half the route and paving one lane the whole length, the county chose the latter. Today, the little-used road remains a single eight-foot-wide strip, so that when we met a pickup coming the other way, I kept one wheel on the paved section and one on the gravel shoulder. When that ended, we continued on Route 66 to Narcissa and into Afton, where I stopped to aim my camera at the delightfully dilapidated sign in front of the ruins of the Rest Haven Motel. We kept on through towns, villages, hamlets and named crossroads until we reached Tulsa.
We were hitting our Route 66 stride, and Toronto seemed a long way away. So far on my trip, I’d seen lovely countryside but also sprawling suburbs and towns such as Joplin that might as well have been suburbs. What struck me the most, though, were all the small towns left to die by the interstate and the downtowns the car had killed.
HEADING INTO TULSA, we plugged the address of a downtown hotel into the GPS. Nestled among the forests and rolling hills between the Great Plains and the Ozark Mountains, and split by the Arkansas River, the city boasts 140 parks and was the selfproclaimed Oil Capital of the World in the early part of the last century. But when we got there, it looked desolate. Not dangerous, just dead. We saw plenty of beautiful art deco buildings and no human activity, even though it wasn’t quite six o’clock on a Thursday evening. Wondering if a neutron bomb had gone off, we spent the next half hour driving around in search of a hotel that might be close to something resembling a lively neighbourhood. At one red light, ours was the only car at the intersection.
America first struck oil in western Pennsylvania in 1859, shortly after the invention of the kerosene lamp had created a huge demand for the fuel. Discoveries in Ohio, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and California followed. Initially, gasoline was just a kerosene by-product with little value, though it was sold as a treatment for lice, and once Thomas Edison developed effective electric lighting in the 1880s, oil was no longer so valuable. Suddenly, the country—which produced the majority of the world’s supply—had an abundance of a natural resource and no overwhelming way to deplete it.
Internal combustion engines, which several people were working to refine at the time, provided a possible solution to this dilemma. But it took the automobile makers—who put the engines in their horseless carriages and found them more effective than battery power—to ensure that we would one day be addicted to the environmentally ruinous, geopolitically fraught black gold.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States was the source of three-quarters of the world’s crude—far more than its citizens could consume. By the early 1970s, the country had to import about a third of its oil, but few people worried about where their gas would come from or how much it would cost. That changed in 1973. First, Americans faced brownouts and rising prices; then, in October, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, along with non-members Egypt and Syria, announced an oil embargo to punish the Western countries that were supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Some gas stations ran out of fuel while long lineups at others led to frayed tempers and even violence. The government reduced highway speed limits to fifty-five miles per hour and instituted a rationing system that allowed owners of cars with odd-numbered licences to buy gas on odd-numbered dates and those with even-numbered ones to buy on even-numbered dates.
The country went through a second oil shock in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution. With oil prices quadrupling in the early part of the decade and then doubling again at the end, the 1970s were marred by high inflation and low growth, or as we called it back then, “stagflation.” But by the mid-1980s, the price of a barrel of crude had plummeted. And despite a mild six-month increase during the first Gulf War, the cost of gas fell even farther in the 1990s and didn’t rise sharply until 2004.
The experience of the 1970s could have been an opportunity for Americans to adjust to smaller, more efficient automobiles. With the introduction of Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations, better known as CAFE, the average American car started to go farther on a gallon of gas. But the rules had many loopholes, and much of the improvement took place at the expense of safety as manufacturers made vehicles lighter to reduce fuel consumption. This would have been a great time to get good at producing appealing small vehicles, but domestic automakers just couldn’t pull it off. Indeed, when Car Talk, the popular National Public Radio show, held a Worst Car of the Millennium contest, four of the top five were small American models from the 1970s: the Chevrolet Vega, the Ford Pinto, the AMC Gremlin and the Chevy Chevette. Only Yugoslavia’s laughable Yugo was worse. While most foreign automakers, notably the Japanese, had success with their small offerings, the Detroit automakers couldn’t wait for the return of cheap oil. When it did, they concentrated on increasing the horsepower of their engines instead of worrying about fuel efficiency. That was fine with many Americans who would eventually make the SUV the It ride—and under CAFE, SUVs were light trucks that had to meet less rigorous fuel efficiency and emissions standards than passenger cars. Not that today’s fue
l regulations are that severe anyway: just 27.5 miles per gallon. (They’ve been stuck there since 1984, though I suppose that’s better than the 15 miles per gallon we were at in 1975.) For light trucks, an average of just 22.2 miles per gallon is good enough. New standards will require a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, but while the improvement is welcome, it does seem too little, too late.
Along with heaps of burning disco records, gas station lineups are just another weird image of 1970s nostalgia, but we’d be foolish to think we could never see them again. America now has only 3 percent of the world’s known petroleum reserves and, in 2006, the country produced more than 8.3 million barrels a day— and consumed 20.6 million. Though oil now has many uses, from home heating oil to plastics manufacturing, cars are the thirstiest customers: “The typical North American driver consumes his or her body weight in crude oil each week, and the automobile engines sold this year alone will have more total horsepower than all the world’s electrical power plants combined,” according to Richard Heinberg, author of the 2003 book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. “Globally, cars outweigh humans 4 to 1 and consume about the same ratio more energy each day in the form of fuel than people do food.”
By the time he had to give his February 2006 State of the Union address, even President George W. Bush, the former oilman, was admitting, “America is addicted to oil.” But when it came to policies, not much changed. The Bush administration wouldn’t even make a serious effort to encourage conservation, let alone try more drastic measures such as higher gasoline taxes. Instead, it eyed reserves in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with bad intent, even though the amount of oil there would put only a small dent in the amount the country has to import, while drilling would be done at an unconscionable cost to a fragile ecosystem.
The government also maintained its steadfast defence of the Iraq War. Though the weapons of mass destruction weren’t there and the putative ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were a complete canard, the anti-war chant “No Blood for Oil” is too simplistic. The United States gets far more of its oil from Canada and Mexico than from the Middle East. But while America’s neighbours, especially the northern one, seem politically stable, many oil-producing nations in the world aren’t so lucky: civil war looms in Nigeria, nationalization threatens in Bolivia, nutty demagogue Hugo Chavez rules in Venezuela and oil is a political football in Russia. All of which suggests the United States may become more reliant on Mideast oil rather than less. So it seems likely that petroleum was part of the rationale for the invasion of Iraq—or at least a nifty ancillary benefit. But little has worked out well over there, and oil production in the country has remained lower than it was before the war. Nine months after Bush’s “addicted” speech, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote: “And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil?”
High gas taxes long ago forced Europeans and others into smaller, more efficient cars and made them think about how much they drive. Even in Germany, a country with a robust auto industry and an abiding love for fast, well-engineered cars, the government raised gas taxes by three cents a year for five years in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Any such policy would be a tough sell in the United States, with its powerful oil and automobile lobbies, tax-averse population and succession of politicians who, since Jimmy Carter was run out of Washington, haven’t had the guts to ask the American people to make any sacrifices. (In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the country might have been willing to make sacrifices, asking people to go shopping was the best the Bush administration could do.) Even without increased taxes, though, the price of gas is likely to stay high. Additional geopolitical tensions aside, the demand created by the roaring economies of China and India could make oil even more expensive. And if climate change means we’ll endure more hurricanes like Katrina—or even if we’re just entering a period of more and more severe tropical storms—we may find ourselves at the mercy of hard-to-predict and painful shortages and price spikes.
Perhaps spooked by what high gas prices might do to the sales of some of its least-efficient vehicles, in 2006, as gas headed to $3 a gallon (and, in some places, higher), GM launched a promotion to woo Californians and Floridians to buy certain models, including Hummers and other SUVs, by pegging the cost of a gallon of gas at $1.99. Under the scheme, the company refunded the difference between the average price at the pump in the state and the $1.99 cap for one year. Maybe GM got the idea to adopt a standard drug pushers’ ploy after hearing the president say the country was addicted.
THE DISCOVERY OF OIL in Red Fork, now part of West Tulsa, in 1901 led to an economic boom in what was then Indian territory, especially after the massive Glenn Pool oil field strike of 1905. By 1914, Oklahoma produced more than a third of American oil, and by 1920, the city had a population of seventy-two thousand and was home to hundreds of oil companies. The output started declining in the 1930s, and by the early 1980s, Tulsa’s status as an oil capital was just a memory—and today Oklahoma pumps just 3 percent of the nation’s crude.
The brief prosperity did leave Tulsa with a solid cultural legacy, including the Philbrook Museum of Art, and the fruits of an ambitious building boom from the first third of the 1900s. And since art deco was the style of the time, that’s what Tulsans built. The stunning Boston Avenue Methodist Church, completed in 1929, is perhaps the city’s most dramatic example of the style, but there are impressive buildings throughout the central core. Those charms are apparently lost on the more than 900,000 residents of the metropolitan area, most of whom seem determined to live anywhere but downtown, and that means the greater Tulsa area inevitably suffers from sprawl. Even the city itself, with a population of almost 400,000, has a density of just 2,150 people per square mile.
Eventually, we gave up looking for a hotel in a cool part of town and checked in at our original destination. At the front desk, a cheerful young woman with a pixie cut and freckles sympathized with our plight. She couldn’t recommend anything within walking distance and suggested we take a cab up to Brady Village. She also offered to call us one because we’d be wasting our time trying to flag anything. (Along with taking us to our destination, our Lebanese taxi driver explained that the people who worked downtown started emptying out of their offices at four o’clock and the afternoon rush hour was over by six o’clock. We’d just missed it.)
As a bar district, Brady Village was hurting. Once again, that shouldn’t have been the case. Located near a cross-town expressway and not far from college campuses, it’s a section of town dominated by old warehouses—just the kind of area being transformed into entertainment districts in cities all across the continent, including just down Route 66 in Oklahoma City. Plus, the area is home to two popular entertainment venues, the Brady Theatre and Cain’s Ballroom. Though it has since hosted a variety of acts, including Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Wilco, Cain’s is a seminal site in the history of Western swing music because during the Depression, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys—best known for their signature song, “Take Me Back to Tulsa”—recorded their popular radio show there. Later, in 1978, Cain’s was one of the few places the Sex Pistols played during their disastrous and shortlived U.S. tour.
Apparently, location and history aren’t always enough. When we got to Brady Village, the cabbie stopped on a deserted, dimly lit street and admitted he didn’t know much about the area and so could offer us no suggestions. When we got out of the cab, we saw only a few bars and restaurants and, even though it was a Thursday night, they weren’t busy. Nor did we see people on the streets. The most appealing option of an uninspiring lot was a place called Lola’s at the Bowery, which had two rooms—one with a sloppy jazz trio and one with a long, polished wooden bar. We sat at the bar and ordered dinner and dri
nks.
The bartender was a small, thin, fey man with bleached blond hair who had lived in several U.S. cities before returning to Tulsa. When he told us he lived in a downtown condo, we were surprised to hear the place had downtown condos. He admitted he’d lost his original optimism for Brady Village—slow nights will do that to people who rely on tips—and wasn’t even sure Tulsa would make it: “I’m so frustrated.” He sounded as though he was about to cry.
Later in the evening, before he called us a cab, he told us about a conversation he’d had with a woman on the next treadmill at his fitness club. Recognizing him, she asked where he was working now; when he told her, she said, “Oh, I love the martinis there.” What she didn’t like was the location; the problem was that if she and her friends went downtown, they needed a designated driver. The implication was that if they went to a bar near where they lived, they could drink and sneak home on back streets and not have to worry about cops.
As I thought about this story, it dawned on me that sprawl encourages impaired driving. People heading out for a night on the town, or even a dinner that includes a bottle of wine, don’t want to take a cab because they can’t flag one at the end of the night—and they have to travel so far they couldn’t afford the fare anyway. So they drink and drive.
10 Route 66 (Part Three)
The Long and Lucrative Road
BURMA-SHAVE SIGNS—displaying jingles promoting a brand of brushless shaving cream—first appeared along a Minnesota road in 1925, but they may be best remembered as part of Route 66 lore. Spaced about one hundred feet apart in sets of five or six, the small wooden signs were easily readable by people in cars going thirty-five or forty miles an hour. The rhymes were corny—“This cream makes the/Gardener’s daughter/Plant her tu-lips/Where she oughter/Burma-Shave,” or “A Man A Miss/A Car A Curve/He kissed the Miss/And missed/The Curve/Burma-Shave”—but wildly popular, boosting the shaving cream to number two in the market. By the time Phillip Morris bought Burma-Shave in 1963 and started taking down the signs, more than five hundred jingles, many written by the public, had appeared on roadsides across the country. Perhaps they were too hokey for the marketing department at a big corporation, but it’s also true that interstate speeds made the little signs all but unreadable. Now, huge billboards put up by businesses—hotels, restaurants and attractions, for example—and evangelical Christians fight for the attention of highway drivers.