a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I’m not, for crying out loud. Don’t be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life. You have to admire how these people shamelessly try to get your attention as you drive by, whether they’re trying to feed you a hamburger or a savior.
We merge onto I-270, so to bypass St. Louis. We cross the Mississippi on a long, pocked suspension bridge that’s older than either of us. The dirty water roils beneath, licks up at us like liquid earth. I’m relieved when I see the sign:
WELCOME TO MISSOURI
Old as I am, I still get a thrill from that. Yet after this brief pleasure, some schnook in a big blue SUV, the kind everyone drives nowadays, cuts us off.
“John! Watch out!” I cry, sure that we’re going to smash into his rear end. I crush my foot to the floorboard, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for the impact.
John slams on the brakes and veers right. I jerk forward; my seat belt locks tight against my chest. Sunglasses and guidebooks fly from the seats. I hear a cupboard snap open in the back and canned goods hammer the floor. I open my eyes to find John staring absently at the taillights of the oblivious driver ahead. “We’re all right,” he mutters.
I told you, John is an excellent driver.
A few miles later, we come up behind the big blue truck again when it has to slow for traffic. When he hits the brakes, I see that someone has written something in the dust on his back window, directly on the third taillight they put on the new cars. When he hits the brakes again, the words flash at us:
DRIVEN BY DICKHEAD
After we finish laughing, we make it back onto 66.
Every once in a while, I see something that looks like it’s from the old days of the highway—a sun-scorched streamline filling station or chalky ramshackle motor court with a half-lit VACANCY sign. More often than not, though, there are only ruins, or simply a faded and rusted sign off the road in front of an empty field. They conjure up strange, random memories for me—the few dusty, deafening, rattletrap journeys I took with my parents ages ago to leaden towns like Lansing, Michigan, or Cambridge, Ohio. (There were no vacations back then, only purposeful visits to sullen relatives, always for deaths or the unhappy work that followed them.)
The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way. It makes you wonder if something inside us knows that our lives are going to pass faster than we could ever realize. So we run around like chickens about to lose our heads.
Which makes our little two- or three-week vacations with our families more important than ever. I remember so much about our trips together: the tap of moths around a Coleman lantern as we played cards at a picnic table; constructing olive loaf sandwiches on the top of a cooler while John drove us through a Colorado spring snowstorm; reading the Arizona newspapers by brilliant moonlight on the shores of Lake Powell; stashing comic books in the trunk of our old Pontiac for Kevin, doling them out one at a time to keep down the whining and boredom; the cool gray formations of the South Dakota Badlands, rising from the earth like stone mammoths; eating chuck wagon barbecue in a giant teepee in Jenny Lake, Wyoming; the chugging penny slots at the oldVegas Stardust; and so many more I can’t even describe. As for the time that elapsed between those vacations, that’s another thing altogether. It seems to have all passed breathlessly, like some extended whisper of days, months, years, decades.
At Stanton, I direct John into the parking lot of Meramec Caverns. Ever since we started this trip, we’ve been seeing signs for
We merge onto I-270, so to bypass St. Louis. We cross the Mississippi on a long, pocked suspension bridge that’s older than either of us. The dirty water roils beneath, licks up at us like liquid earth. I’m relieved when I see the sign:
WELCOME TO MISSOURI
Old as I am, I still get a thrill from that. Yet after this brief pleasure, some schnook in a big blue SUV, the kind everyone drives nowadays, cuts us off.
“John! Watch out!” I cry, sure that we’re going to smash into his rear end. I crush my foot to the floorboard, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for the impact.
John slams on the brakes and veers right. I jerk forward; my seat belt locks tight against my chest. Sunglasses and guidebooks fly from the seats. I hear a cupboard snap open in the back and canned goods hammer the floor. I open my eyes to find John staring absently at the taillights of the oblivious driver ahead. “We’re all right,” he mutters.
I told you, John is an excellent driver.
A few miles later, we come up behind the big blue truck again when it has to slow for traffic. When he hits the brakes, I see that someone has written something in the dust on his back window, directly on the third taillight they put on the new cars. When he hits the brakes again, the words flash at us:
DRIVEN BY DICKHEAD
After we finish laughing, we make it back onto 66.
Every once in a while, I see something that looks like it’s from the old days of the highway—a sun-scorched streamline filling station or chalky ramshackle motor court with a half-lit VACANCY sign. More often than not, though, there are only ruins, or simply a faded and rusted sign off the road in front of an empty field. They conjure up strange, random memories for me—the few dusty, deafening, rattletrap journeys I took with my parents ages ago to leaden towns like Lansing, Michigan, or Cambridge, Ohio. (There were no vacations back then, only purposeful visits to sullen relatives, always for deaths or the unhappy work that followed them.)
The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way. It makes you wonder if something inside us knows that our lives are going to pass faster than we could ever realize. So we run around like chickens about to lose our heads.
Which makes our little two- or three-week vacations with our families more important than ever. I remember so much about our trips together: the tap of moths around a Coleman lantern as we played cards at a picnic table; constructing olive loaf sandwiches on the top of a cooler while John drove us through a Colorado spring snowstorm; reading the Arizona newspapers by brilliant moonlight on the shores of Lake Powell; stashing comic books in the trunk of our old Pontiac for Kevin, doling them out one at a time to keep down the whining and boredom; the cool gray formations of the South Dakota Badlands, rising from the earth like stone mammoths; eating chuck wagon barbecue in a giant teepee in Jenny Lake, Wyoming; the chugging penny slots at the oldVegas Stardust; and so many more I can’t even describe. As for the time that elapsed between those vacations, that’s another thing altogether. It seems to have all passed breathlessly, like some extended whisper of days, months, years, decades.
At Stanton, I direct John into the parking lot of Meramec Caverns. Ever since we started this trip, we’ve been seeing signs for
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