I read The Grapes of Wrath. I saw Easy Rider. Like everyone else in America who fantasized about the open road, I thought I knew exactly what driving Route 66 would feel like. Liberating. Exhilarating. Unpredictable.
The two-lane highway—commissioned in 1926 and completed in 1938—was the first of its kind in America, an east-west artery linking Chicago to Santa Monica, California via countless rural towns spread across three time zones and eight states. Over the 2,448-mile road, down-and-out Oklahomans escaped the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; it fostered one of the greatest westward migrations in American history, and inspired characters both real (Woody Guthrie, Will Rogers) and fictional (Sal Paradise, Ma Joad).
As the Mother Road exploded in popularity after World War II, enterprising business owners in nothing towns responded by dreaming up absurd roadside attractions to advertise along the route. (“Say, Marge—I know how we can get those families to stop: Let’s put a giant brontosaurus outside our geode shop!”) But by the time the route’s celebrity was cemented in the American conscience, its demise was well underway. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956 meant that chunks of Route 66 were already being replaced with shiny, new four-lane interstates inspired by Germany’s Autobahn. By 1985, Route 66 was fully decommissioned.
Yet to many, Route 66 remained synonymous with the most precious American paragon: top-down, wind-in-your-hair freedom. Out there on those long, empty stretches of seemingly lawless road, our country’s love affair with cars dovetailed perfectly with the machismo of the American West. Though the businesses that lined the route often catered to families, the road still attracted its share of Jim Stark and Johnny Strabler wannabes. The romanticism of driving into the sunset was too powerful a narcotic to ignore—and promised the sort of never-look-back escape that fueled office drones for generations to come.
But how would it feel driving Route 66 today? There was only one way to find out.
In the fall of 2016, as part of a larger cross-country road trip, my partner and I drove numerous segments of Route 66 through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma, popping on and off the Mother Road as time and geography allowed. We drove most of these sections west to east instead of east to west—a sin beyond redemption, argue some Route 66 diehards, because of its westward-ho heritage.
Our first stop was Santa Claus, Arizona—one of the route’s more popular sights back in the day. Here, the kiddos could rattle off their holiday wish lists on Santa’s lap in the Christmas-themed microtown, while their parents tucked into poinsettia tomato soup and Kris Kringle rum pie. Today, Santa Claus is a ghost town, inhabited by tumbledown buildings and families of rattlesnakes. The only clue that it was ever a merry yuletide destination was a faded sign nailed to the side of a peeling red-and-white striped building: This Is It! Santa’s Land Office.
Route 66 began to show glimmers of life around Kingman, Arizona. We explored the Arizona Route 66 Museum, with its neon signs and hair-raising dioramas of mannequins re-enacting the hardships of the Dust Bowl exodus. When we stopped for pictures with the 14-foot-tall moai sculpture Giganticus Headicus in Antares, Arizona—a Route 66 newcomer, erected in 2004—we had the whole thing to ourselves. But by the time we reached Hackberry General Store, a former service station and garage in the ex-mining town of Hackberry, Arizona, about 10 minutes away, it was swarming with tourists—most of them European, Japanese, or South Korean. It’s a popular stop, thanks to an assemblage of decaying old jalopies parked around the property, its proximity to I-40, and its prominent re-creation in the 2006 Pixar film Cars.
The exterior of the general store, once operated by Mother Road artist Bob Waldmire, was decorated with cow skulls, vintage petrol signs, and rusted gas pumps. Inside was a patchwork of new and old license plates, roadside artifacts, and bumper-sticker tourist schlock. Aside from a pack of grizzled bikers who rolled up dramatically in a torrent of polished chrome, many of the visitors we watched taking pictures here didn’t seem to care much about the history of Route 66; they were just hunting for compelling backdrops. Hackberry’s visuals were indeed a treat—how often does one spot a tableau with blooming cacti and a rusty Model T in the wild?—but the photo staging still felt...intrusive.
Stylized vignettes and kitschy architecture were everywhere along Route 66. In Tucumcari, New Mexico, we spotted a Mexican restaurant wearing a giant sombrero on its roof (La Cita), a souvenir shop with a teepee for a facade (Tee Pee Curios), and the gorgeously restored, family-run Blue Swallow Motel, which has helped travelers catch their z’s since 1939. (We didn’t stay the night but we were pleased to see that the motel still offers guests “100 percent refrigerated air,” rotary telephones, and metal lawn chairs.) Tucumcari was also the town where we ate one of our best roadside meals: Watson’s BBQ, under the same roof as Tucumcari Ranch Supply. The first thing our waitress asked us was the same thing she asks everyone: “Which way you headed—east or west?” The chopped brisket plate with two sides, homemade bread, a cookie, and a drink for $11.95 was a steal, and we enjoyed loafing around the property, admiring all the Route 66 memorabilia.
At the bustling Russell’s Travel Center in Glenrio, New Mexico, we found a monster gas station with a diner-style cafe, arcade rooms, showers for truckers, and yet another Route 66 museum. Inside were Coca-Cola signs, sock-hop fashions, life-size cutouts of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, statues of Betty Boop and Elvis, and more beautiful classic cars. The place was a dream for Route 66 fetishists, as evidenced by the dewy-eyed boomers in dad jeans wandering the aisles. But for us Gen-Y road trippers who didn’t live through the ’50s and ’60s and had already seen half a dozen Route 66 museums before this one, it felt like déjá vu—a Nick at Nite highlights reel wrapped in nostalgia and tied with a neon bow.
And that’s really the trouble with the 21st-century incarnation of Route 66: Drive it long enough and all those auto museums, no-tell motels, throwback burger joints, and made-in-China tchotchke shops start to blur together. Driving it didn’t feel any more liberating or exhilarating than any other long, sparsely populated stretch of back road in America—and it certainly didn’t feel unpredictable. Most of the businesses along Route 66 these days are pretty commercialized, canned, and safe. There were exceptions, of course, but it was getting harder and harder to shake the feeling that the road was 50 years past its prime—an animated fossil come to life for the sole purpose of peddling more T-shirts.
When we arrived at the famed Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, shortly before sunset, there were at least 25 other people there, many of them shaking up cans of spray paint they had packed for the express purpose of leaving their mark on the landmark’s half-buried Caddies. Some visitors kept a respectful distance from the hulls; others were climbing them like jungle gyms or using paint scrapers to chip off illicit souvenirs. All we took away were photos and an even deeper sense of disillusionment.
Things turned around at our last major stop along the route: Erick, Oklahoma. That’s where we met eccentric Okie and self-described “redneck hoarder” Harley Russell, who'd been entertaining passers-by at his Sandhills Curiosity Shop for more than 30 years. His store was jammed to the rafters with antique signs, musical instruments, and highway ephemera, none of which was for sale. Russell was both a character and a caricature, telling bawdy jokes, gargling whiskey, and shouting “Hell no!” every chance he got. He took a shine to us and, after chatting for about an hour, invited us back to his “redneck castle and insanitarium” for a house tour. In hindsight, meeting Russell was probably the most memorable experience we collected along Route 66, but it was far from the cinematically windblown, wild lonely West experience we expected when we first set out.
Although there are several hardworking preservationist groups that would argue otherwise, the Route 66 of popular imagination is dead, the road itself a time capsule of a bygone era. But that’s really beside the point. The road was never what mattered: It was the idea behind it—the siren call of the open highway, the hope for a brighter future, the very essence of freedom—that inspired so many Americans to climb behind the wheel and head west.
That sense of optimism is in perilously short supply these days, but you don’t need to travel to Route 66 to channel it. Pick up any scenic byway anywhere in the country—the Pacific Coast Highway in California; the US-550, or “Million Dollar Highway,” in Colorado’s San Juan mountains; the scenic Hwy-61 running along the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota; and the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina all spring to mind—and just drive. What Route 66 symbolized lives within us.