The Route 66 Pac Tour

The Route 66 Pac Tour

Riding the Mother Road

I'm pushing my bicycle up one of the 23 steep switchback curves hacked into the side of a rocky basalt plateau that for centuries has been known as La Bajada ("the descent," ironically enough). I'm not adventuring in a Central or South American jungle -- at the top of this hill is a mesa that overlooks Santa Fe, NM. I and a score of other PAC Tour riders are tracing the western half of Route 66, from Ocean Beach in Santa Monica, Calif., to the Big Texan Steak House in Amarillo, Texas.

Call it "America's Main Street," as Cyrus Avery did when he dreamed it up. Call it "The Mother Road," as John Steinbeck did, when he wrote about the perilous journey of the Joads to a promised land called California. Or call it "the highway that's the best" as Bobby Troup did when Nat King Cole needed a catchy new tune. The two curious ranch dogs that cheerfully accompany us up this dirt and gravel road won't care. They have no idea that they're trotting up what once was the main road to the West. Today, what remains of this stretch of the highway would defeat any citified SUV. But Route 66, in spite of the kitsch that sometimes threatens to overshadow the kicks, still has a lot to say.

La Bajada was actually part of Route 66 for only a few years, from 1926 to 1933. The road was so steep and the 23 hairpin curves so severe that early automobiles were forced to ascend in reverse because of their gravity-fed gas tanks. Eventually, the road was rerouted in a concession to practicality. Later, the route bypassed the state capital of Santa Fe completely, as the result of political backbiting (a lame-duck New Mexico governor's inspired revenge on his successors). And, as we discover while riding our bicycles along almost-forgotten roads that are no longer accessible to cars or even motorcycles (some judicious fence hopping is required if you want to see every remaining stretch of the Mother Road), bypassing is a recurring theme of old Route 66.

Everywhere I ride on Route 66, I see the remains of a vanished world. The peeling ruins of once-thriving towns. Bridges that no longer go anywhere. Faded advertisements for "Ice-Cold Drinks" and "100% Refrigerated Air." Hollow gas pumps. Dusty, gravel roads that vanish under airport runways or bury themselves under the always rumbling interstate.

Once a desperate exodus from the dust bowl followed this trail, and I keep hearing the words of an old folk song in my mind: "How can you keep on moving, unless you migrate, too?" Later, the highway became a 2,000-mile asphalt theme park, where post-War Americans could tour the great and not-so-great wonders of the southwest with big cars and cheap gas and a night at the Wigwam or the Apache Motel.

What surprises me most about Route 66 in its decline, though, are the flickers of life amidst the desolation -- like tentative shoots of green after a forest fire. In Seligman, Arizona, the Snow Cap ice cream stand delights with both wit and a killer chocolate malt. At the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, ("Here It Is" the sign states matter of factly), you can still buy a genuine rubber tomahawk. And the motels: The meticulously restored Blue Swallow Motor Court of Tucumcari, the glamorous El Rancho of Gallup, New Mexico, where movie stars stayed while filming countless westerns, and the former Harvey House railroad hotel called La Posada in Winslow. And you can still stay in a wonderfully snug wigwam in Holbrook, Arizona -- restored by the son of the man who built it.

Sadly, though, most of the tourists I see at these delightful stops along America's most historic highway are not Americans. The names in the guest book at the Bagdad Cafe, in the starkly beautiful Mojave desert, are French or Japanese. The tour busses that stop at the pueblo in New Mexico are full of Germans. The Americans? I guess they're cruising the Interstate in gas-guzzling RVs. But way up there, it's hard to hear the stories of the old road.

I'm climbing La Bajada 75 years after the birth of Route 66. In all those years, the road has been as much an idea as a highway. The notion that the United States was a place where people could "keep on moving" -- whether to flee the dustbowl or to gawk at the Grand Canyon. It was the quality of the country -- the landscape, the people -- that gave the journey its meaning. Boarding a plane in L.A. and alighting in Chicago gets you from one place to the other, but you don't learn much about what lies between.

By and large, the old road is still there, and many of the stories still wait to be heard. But not forever. Americans who want to see where we came from -- and how we got there -- should travel the old road today. And the closer you can get, the better. That's why a car is better than a motor home. A motorcycle closer than a car. A bicycle perhaps best of all. Even if you have to push it up La Bajada.