Prologue
When I began writing this story, I thought I had some idea of what it was about. I was wrong. In my life of writing I’ve discovered that there are times when a story, like architecture, is carefully designed, erected, and furnished. Then there are tales that take their own way, and I find myself being dragged along after them like a white-knuckled water skier behind a speedboat.
This tale is the latter. My plan was to write about the changing, perhaps fading, of the American identity. The perfect metaphor of this change was a road, a dying road with many names—the Will Rogers Highway, Main Street America, the Mother Road—the infamous Route 66.
That’s what I thought I was writing about. But the road I followed took me somewhere else. Or, more correctly, to someone else. It was near the end of my journey that I met a dead man.
Back to Route 66. I wouldn’t be the first writer to take on the legendary highway. Hundreds, maybe thousands of articles have been written about Route 66, and even some greats, like Steinbeck and Kerouac, have contributed to the collection.
It has also been celebrated in film and song. The eponymous television series, Route 66, starred some of the biggest actors of all time, including Burt Reynolds, William Shatner, Tuesday Weld, James Caan, Robert Redford, and Ron Howard.
In music, the 1946 Bobby Troup song “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” has been performed by myriad musicians including Nat King Cole, the Rolling Stones, and Depeche Mode.
In its heyday, Route 66 was far more than asphalt. It was a path that Americans trekked as pioneers to a new world of opportunity, imaginary or otherwise. It was the American dream.
I began my journey on a Friday afternoon in early fall. I was living in Chicago at the time, which is the beginning of the route.
I knew from my research that the road was about 2,500 miles, give or take a few towns, so when I left my home that day, my plan was to drive 250 miles a day, completing the journey in about ten days. What I didn’t know then was that Route 66 doesn’t surrender itself that easily; rather, it must be hunted down, sometimes with the tenacity of a detective. There are two reasons for this.
First, there’s not just one Route 66. During its active years, parts of the road changed multiple times.
Second, sections of the original highway now lie beneath new roads, homes, and developments. There are places where metropolises, like Chicago, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City, have grown up around the highway with hundreds of new roads fragmenting the route into pieces like a mosaic. Sometimes it gets confusing. Sometimes downright ridiculous. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the route actually crosses itself and you can stand on the corner of Route 66 and Route 66.
Even where the road hasn’t faced urban development, there are remote, forsaken places no longer traveled where the road has died and been reclaimed by nature, with vegetation growing up through its deteriorating, cracked asphalt.
Route 66 runs through eight states—Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—and each of these states regards (or disregards) the route in its own way. Varying colors of signs mark the path—blue, brown, black, and white—while in some places, weary of the constant road sign stealing by nostalgic collectors, states have simply painted the Route 66 shield onto the asphalt.
It took me two weeks to reach Needles, a city on the eastern border of California on the edge of the Mojave Desert—four days longer than I thought my entire journey would take me. By then I was no longer bothered by the difficulty of the way. I felt a fondness for the road, like a wildlife photographer tracking the last of a dying species. But I also knew that I was near the end of my journey and I still hadn’t found my story.
Needles was the first California town that the Okies—fleeing the famine of the Dust Bowl to the supposed paradise of California—encountered. This is where Carty’s Camp, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was located.
Sitting on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, Needles, like its northwestern cousin Death Valley, is the kind of place that sets national temperature records. There are days the temperature reaches 130-plus degrees.
I suppose that’s why I noticed him—the man who was to become my story. The first time I saw him he was sitting alone at a booth in the famous Wagon Wheel Restaurant. Judging by the large, dusty pack next to him, it appeared that he was hiking through this hell. He was dark featured, though I couldn’t discern his ethnicity. He was deeply tanned and unshaven, disheveled but handsome in spite of it. Or maybe because of it.
His clothes were wet with sweat, with myriad salt lines staining his shirt, not only under his arms but across his chest and trim stomach as well. The temperature that day was 119 degrees, hot enough to tax the air conditioner of my rental car. Out of curiosity, I had rolled down my window just outside of Needles. It felt like I was driving through a convection oven. I couldn’t imagine walking through it carrying a pack. Actually, carrying anything besides water.