Route 66

 
 

After I turned 40 (many years ago), I desperately longed for a simpler time, a time before computers, smart phones, video games and apps controlled our every waking moment.  A time when families actually sat down at a table, dined together over a home cooked meal, and communicated face to face in real time, without the incessant disruption of beeps, whistles or ring tones.

 

Heading southeast from the south Rim of the Grand Canyon, I turned off the interstate onto Route 66.  What I found was a surreal, Disneyland-like place that time had forgotten; a myriad of vintage motels, restaurants, and gas stations that the interstate had long passed by.  

 

 To the east of Flagstaff, there was a three mile wide crater created by a crashing meteor over 20,000 years ago.  I had never seen anything so other-worldly.  Walking along the rim of the crater, trying to fight the wind from blowing me into the mouth of the crater, it was a strange experience to feel so small. 

 

Heading west, every so many miles there were unusual signs beckoning drivers to find out what “IT” was at the Jackrabbit Trading Post. 

In Holbrook, there was a motel with rooms shaped like wigwams.  The sign outside the Wigwam Motel posed the question, “Have you slept in a wigwam lately?”   With vintage automobiles placed in the parking lot in front of the wigwam-shaped rooms, it looked like something from an alternate universe.  If it had not been for visions of stained, lumpy & spring mattresses, I might have spent the night there. 

Then I happened across a corner in Winslow, Arizona with an image of a girl in a flatback Ford painted on a brick wall. 

The town of Winslow seemed to accept its immortalization courtesy of a song made famous by The Eagles.  Tourists were eager to have their photo snapped while “Take It Easy” blared from a loud speaker outside a store across from the corner.  

 

Continuing west through Seligman, I came across the Snow Cap Diner.  Buses filled with tourists were eager to photograph this living monument to nostalgia and kitsch, including me, who is drawn to a good vintage gas pump.  Across the street was the Mother Road motel, down the road the Road Kill Café.

 

 

 

 

 

   

Further west in Hackberry, there was an old filling station serving as a Route 66 Visitor Center (Hackberry General Store).  Outside, vintage Mobil gas pumps, Coca Cola signs, automobiles and Greyhound Bus terminal signs kept watch. 

It was not hard to imagine what life must have been like back in the days before the interstate was built, in the age when families got into a large automobile and took a road trip to no place in particular.  A time when going out to have a burger and a triple scoop milkshake brought to your car by a carhop was the entertainment of the evening.  I am old enough to remember pharmacies when they had soda & ice cream fountains, drive in theaters, drive in restaurants, full service gas stations, and going for drives in the family station wagon or vacationing up and down the east coast via automobile. 

The places I remember from my childhood fell prey to the advancement of the modern age.  Soda fountains long removed, drive in theaters replaced by condominiums or shopping malls, full service gas attendants replaced by self-service gas pumps ready to swallow your credit card.  I often wish I had been born a little earlier, circa mid-1950’s, so that I could have experienced a simpler time when Route 66 was the main street of the lives of many people.  I can still read books and look at vintage photographs and be thankful for the people who fought hard to save the few reminders from the wrecking ball of advancement.  Now if there were only a way to force the shut down of maddeningly loud technology and 24/7 disruptions for just a day or two in order to enjoy the silence.