The Mother Road

 

If Highway 66 is our Mother Road, the United Sates is in deep economic trouble.

The little towns all follow the same pattern: economic activity right off the interstate, with at least one hotel and a gas station/convenience store where everyone buys cheap snacks and iced drinks when they stop for gas, then Business 40, route 66, which swings through the old empty downtown. Along the road, small houses are rotting into the ground, cracks in the stucco, dead cars in the driveway, overgrown weeds in the yards. The vintage motel signs are still there with glimpses of their neon glory, but they are no longer lit at night and the motels are closed. In Winslow, every motel door had a red sign posted on it—four closed motels in one small town. In other places, the buildings were just…gone, leaving behind a concrete slab. The downtown buildings remain, on neatly gridded streets, but they are all closed, boarded up, businesses long closed. Gallup took the problem one step further and had bars on all of the doors and windows, like an urban ghetto. There may be a Dollar General near the interstate, but there are no diners, no banks, no grocery or hardware stores, no dentists or doctors, no local economic activity. As you loop closer to the interstate again, there is another gas station, another hotel, another truck stop.  And the pattern repeats.

Tucumcari was one of the starkest contrasts between what was and what is. The town  was once a glory spot along the Mother Road, where motels and bars lined the street and flashed neon lights into the desert darkness. When I came through 25 years ago, the businesses were not all open, but the buildings were still standing strong. Now…they are gone. We spent the night in the Blue Swallow, an historic landmark and a glory of unchanged motel, complete with neon sign and chenille bedspreads, tiled tiny shower and windows that open (unto the neighbor smoking a cigarette in the early morning). There was a small cluster of three old restored motels left in town. But we walked down the street to the grocery store and then through the old downtown and the rest of the town was, literally, falling apart. The sidewalks were crumbling, the roads were breaking into asphalt chunks, and there were no businesses open for the three blocks along Main Street.  There were some amazing old buildings, but nothing in them. And no one. The town, off of the main highway, was silent—half the population of the late 1950s, when it peaked.

 In contrast to the small dying towns, a few places are booming. Flagstaff’s population has more than tripled in size in the same time. The downtown is packed with people, with shops and places to eat, with well-maintained sidewalks and streets, lined with expensive new cars. They even have a vegan Indian restaurant. It is clean and orderly, with a nicely updated land development code that encourages mixed-use development and ADUs, signs of wealthy communities everywhere. There is no dead zone driving into Flagstaff; the sprawl is lively with businesses of all types and new housing. All of the economic development along Route 66, for Needles to Amarillo, is focused in Flagstaff.

John Steinbeck saw it coming in 1937, when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, sending the Joad family, tractored off their land by big agricultural corporations, onto the narrow highway west to California. Remember, the Joads—and many other sharecropping families—were not done in by the Dust Bowl but by the industrialization of agriculture, the ability of a tractor to do the work of twenty men and not require food or wages when it was not in use. He also describes the small independent gas station owner, trying to stay in business against the fancy new stations nearer the towns, with their snazzy new pumps and freshly painted signs. Even then, no one wanted to shop at the small, dusty local dealer. The proprietor and his wife were thinking about moving west themselves. Results, not causes, he observes. The restlessness, the desire to move on, is the result of some deeper cause, which he is struggling to understand. He never does, quite. Maybe history would have been different if we had not had a World War that pulled us out of the economic depression propelled us into a long period of prosperity for many, although not all of us. Maybe we would have confronted the causes of this inequality sooner, rather than later. Maybe we would have been a better country if we had.

But here we are. Mark and I are driving across our country, remembering its vast beauties and even vaster inequalities as we loop through small towns, visit museums curated by Native Americans and African Americans, considering how history changes depending upon who is telling it. And we are asking a few big questions: What has happened it our country, to our Mother Road? And is this road symbolic of our country as a whole, where we are going as a nation? Can the American Dream, founded on the ideal that everyone can have enough, still be reached? And, if so, how?