Romance of the Mother Road
A family from Kenya via Toronto discovers a quaint America along Route 66
‘MILES TO GO: AN AFRICAN FAMILY IN SEARCH OF AMERICA ALONG ROUTE 66’
“There is a mystery when traveling down a well-worn route,” the Mombasa (Kenya) native author writes while lunching with his family at the FourWay restaurant in Cuba, Mo. “It is easy to be curious about who you are sharing the road with: where are they from and where are
they going?”
A mixed-race Kenyan family made
up of a writer father (Route magazine), editor mother Kate and insect-loving eight-year-old boy named Thembi live and work in Toronto, and decided one August not long ago to make the nearly 3,000-mile journey by car from Chicago
to the California coast along the fabled Route 66. They are curious to learn about America and speak to people along the way, and even startle the jaded American
travelers with their optimism about the country. “We may not be Americans,” Kate tells one group of enquiring bikers in Missouri, “but it seems to me that
there is a great deal more that unites Americans of all backgrounds than divides them.”
Matthews’s portrait of the family’s many weeks winding along the Mother Road is nostalgic, cheerful and openminded, and not a little naïve: he really, really wants to like America. As they go, while the author is engaging what has become the “unofficial American tradition of retirees spending a portion of their free time volunteering at historic
landmarks,” people are endlessly curious about them, as well.
In his Introduction (as well as in the Foreward by Michael Wallis, author of
the influential 1990 volume “Route 66: The Mother Road”), Matthews underscores how Tulsa County commissioner Cyrus Stevens Avery in the 1920s first advocated for a new state highway system crisscrossing America, with routes
heading east to west ascribed even numbers, and those heading north to south assigned odd numbers. The major roadway that linked Chicago to Los Angeles would pass through Avery’s hometown of Tulsa and be called Route 66. First commissioned on Nov. 11, 1926, it would be built largely by migrants who stopped along the road-in-progress to find a job, and utilized by the millions of desperate farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Plains states.
Savvy local entrepreneurs recognized the value of flashy advertisement for
food and shelter, and thus the economy in towns along Route 66 flourished. During World War II, as rapid military construction required better roads to and from California, certain sections of Route 66 needed major upgrades, such as the widening of the highway in Hooker Cut, Mo. However, with the construction of
the big interstate highways in the mid1950s, like I-44 and I-40, the humble
route fell out of favor, and was formally decommissioned in 1985.
What the author’s family encounter along Route 66 are many other international travelers, some eager to get out West as soon as possible, scornful of the
kitschy roadside attractions of the Midwest. Yet the author and his family find much to savor across Illinois and Missouri: the quaint classic Standard Oil Gas Station in Odell, Ill., originally constructed in 1932, when it sold gas for 20 cents a gallon, now lovingly restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the first truck stops for the ubiquitous 18-wheelers; some haunted stretches
famed for car accidents such as Zombie Road, Mo; the eye-poppingly massive
portions of food served in local establishments; larger-than-life billboards, not to mention the Gemini Giant (Wilmington, Ill.); old-fashioned motor court motels;
and fantastic bridges like the Marsh Rainbow Arch Bridge, in Kansas.
The great push West excites the family, especially once they hit the wind
turbines of the Texas panhandle and the rural ghost towns largely abandoned. They reach the exact midway point of
Route 66 at the MidPoint Cafe, in Adrian, Texas; stay at the fabled Blue Swallow Motel, in Tucumcari, N.M.; and vault into
the arid last stretches from Arizona’s Barringer Meteor Crater through the Mojave Desert of Calif.
And as a mixed-race family they are shocked to learn of a not-so-welcome side of the history of the Mother Road: namely that African Americans could not stay overnight in many of the towns along the route from the 1930s through
the ’60s (“sundown towns”) and relied on Victor Hugo Green’s “Green Book” to help them find available convenience and gas stops.
Taking in the sights, chatting up fellow travelers and business owners and learning from them the wild tales of life’s
second acts, Matthews’ ambling along Route 66 becomes a delightful way of
slowing down time.