A spin along Route 66 is more than a reminder of things past
A spin along part of Route 66 is more than just a reminder of things past.
With each turn of the wheel, I thought about the Joads, who had so famously passed this way before. Oklahoma tenant farmers, evicted from land that had turned to dust anyway, they were at the centre of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. They were a novelist’s invention but they stood for many real families – 3.5 million people by one count – who fled the drought-stricken Plains states in the 1930s.
Many headed west for the supposedly job-rich Californian fruitbowl, and the Joads were among them. And in the 200km or so that I drove of
Route 66, I kept waiting for them to round a corner in front of me, their anxious gazes fixed on the western horizon and the promise, empty though it would be, that lay beyond it.
For their odyssey on the highway Steinbeck called The Mother Road, the Joads were crammed into and onto a 1926 Hudson Super
Six, a passenger car converted to a truck tellingly reminiscent of a covered wagon. On my eastward trip, I was in somewhat greater comfort. The latemodel Ford Mustang convertible I’d rented was a dull charcoal rather than the fire-engine red I’d been hoping for, but when I clicked the cruisecontrol on at 120km/h, I was set to cover as much ground before lunch as the Joads covered in a week.
Driving from LA to the Grand Canyon, it’s hard to resist the lure of I-40, the interstate that runs from Barstow, California, more than 4000km east to Wilmington, North Carolina. But for the first half, to Oklahoma City, I-40 tracks the path of the fabled US66, hewing to the same general direction but eliminating the winding mountain passes by driving through gaps bashed, bulldozed and blown through the rock.
I was driving against Steinbeck’s flow, first speeding over the Mojave, “the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black centre mountains hang unbearably in the distance”, then into Arizona with its “broken, sun-rotted mountains”.
To leave the interstate at Topock, only a few miles into Arizona, was to enter another world. Oddly, at the diner where I stopped for breakfast, the waitress had never heard of what is named, on all signs, as Historic Route 66: “I’ve only been here a year,” she said.
But reassurance that I was on the right route was not far away: the road was thick with gleaming HarleyDavidsons and, erm, Ford Mustang convertibles, most of the latter driven by youngsters as far ahead of their mid-life crises as I was past mine.
The explanation for the open-top explosion turned out to be simple:
Las Vegas is only two hours to the north and a cruise along Route 66 is a nice day trip.
For drivers such as myself, who were using the road as a roundabout way of getting from A to B, its charms were more elusive. Someone online had written that the section I was driving was “not for the fainthearted”, although they had plainly never tackled the Coromandel’s Port Charles hill on a rainy night in an Austin A30 with one headlight out. Occasional winding sections were interspersed with long flats where the cholla cactus in white, bewhiskered clumps dreamt of spring blooms.
Perhaps rock music on the radio would have added to the atmosphere, but all I could raise was Christian and country – the latter full of the really bad songs in which trucks break down and dogs die. And the roadside attractions were mostly charmless – rusting hulks of once-were buildings, remains too dilapidated to inspire wonder about how it used to be.
Oatman, where burros with “please don’t feed me” stickers on their foreheads wandered the streets, was the tattiest kind of tourist trap, with Bowie knives and belt buckles made in China – a reminder of just how fake an authentic experience can be.
It was with some relief that I rejoined the interstate, and headed for the 64 north to Grand Canyon. Now that was another story altogether.
In Oatman, burros with “please don’t feed me” stickers on their heads wandered the streets.