GETTING MY KICKS
Mooring-bound on The Mother Road
The best thing that ever happened to Route 66 was that it died.
In 1985 the Mother Road was banished from the roster of U.S. highways. It was still there, but the government no longer acknowledged its existence. That effectively killed Route 66, but it also unexpectedly revived people's interest in it. Route 66 has flourished in its afterlife, a luxury usually only enjoyed by gods and zombies.
[author unknown, but a good one]
[author unknown, but a good one]
- See more at: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14537#sthash.yUKa8Y4r.dpuf
There have always been a number of routes, all blue highways, to carry you northeast from St Louis to the Michigan state line. But until the early 1970s there was only one expressway, The Mother Road, and her name was Route 66.
Today you can use a combination of several interstates to whisk you through the endless expanse of Illinois cornfields. "Whisk " being a relative term. But for me, the favored route has always been and always will be The Mother Road. Combined occasionally with her bastard son, Interstate 55.
My association with 66 predates memory, for this was the route my father used to get us to Odell, Illinois, the tiny community that was home to his beloved family farm and the nearby ancestral house "in town."
It was a trip that loomed inescapably en route either to or from any other more interesting destination. You want to see Lake Michigan? Odell is right on the way. Boston? Ditto. Only the year we went to Yellowstone did we elude Odell, but I’m certain we made up for it later.
Imprisoned in the scratchy backseat of my father's army green '53 Buick, I became all too familiar with the landmarks of Route 66. Between St Louis and Springfield, a grain elevator perched right on the road side. To the north, a long stretch of telephone poles, leaning at angles -- a prairie Golgotha that ran for miles until we reached an old barn-made-billboard by the addition of a Meramec Caverns stencil.
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| cricket hackmann photo |
I did love the billboards. They promised a high life that my family would never take part in. The Tropics Restaurant . The Hi-Ho Lounge, so enticing with its neon blinking bubbles effervescing from the rim of a martini glass. Funks Grove, home of distinctive maple "sirup." My favorite was the series of ads for 50th on the Lake, a fancy Chicago motel. Air conditioned! TVs! Swimming pool! The graphic was vintage 1950s commercial art, a tank suit clad girl, her head egglike in a white swim cap, body folded into a jack knife dive and eternally suspended over a waterscape of Style Moderne wavelets. She remained in place till at least the late '60s, long after she became a camp figure in the advent of mid-century modern angularity.
Odell is roughly the halfway point between St. Louis and Holland. When driving alone, I stop for the night in the nearby larger town of Pontiac, where, curiously, there is a Route 66 museum that I have never visited. At this stage of my journey, I will have exited 55 just north of Bloomington at Towanda. From here on north, 66 exists in its original state, with one major difference: it's been converted to a two-lane road. Its other two lanes, the western half of the roadbed, have been abandoned. They lie moribund, slowly consumed by nature, as grass and weeds push through the concrete.
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| To the left, dying western roadbed of Route 66. This section is in better condition than many. At right is the ribbon of remaining , two-way 66. |
And I especially like watching the small towns on this stretch -- Towanda, Lexington, Chenoa--take back their own stretches of 66. They can't repave and maintain the entire thing, but they can each do a little something to preserve their heritage. Towanda, for example, has planted young trees along its portion, placed benches and interpretive signs along the way.
Why? Because Route 66 is now revered as a symbol of America. People from all over the world come to immerse themselves in the experience, perfectly willing and eager to get out of their cars in the blazing Midwestern sun and stroll a few yards along the Mother Road. This very road that I, as a fidgety fourth-grader and later a blase young teen wanted to get quickly behind me, has been adopted by my twenty-first century counterparts and elevated to an icon.
Finally, the drive is over. I check into my Pontiac motel, rest up, then make a run north to the farm. And here I see the most dramatic change to the Route 66 landscape in all my years. Wind farms are hot in central Illinois; all that wind sweepin’ down the plain means big dollars for the energy industry. Forget the hawks, now it’s turbines turning lazy circles in the sky. Our farm is one of the few in the area lacking these installations; our choice.
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| See them back there? Turbines on the March. Debra Larson photo. |
Standing beside the remains of our old barn, in the preternatural country quiet amid fields of beans and corn, I find these massive cartwheeling blades just the least bit menacing. Ah, well. Perhaps in the long run they will help stabilize global warming, and in the meantime, I’ll get used to them, just as I've adapted to today's version of the Mother Road. Like the new Mooring, it is the familiar old friend ... even as it isn't.
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