Route 66 Is More Alive in Oklahoma

Route 66 is more alive in Oklahoma than in California. The highway came off the national maps decades ago, but nobody told the road it was retired, and in Oklahoma it stayed on the job. What remains in California is mostly the end of the story: the pier at Santa Monica, the sunset, the place where the road gives out. Oklahoma still has the middle of the story, and the middle is where ordinary life happens.

Where the road still goes to work

The road comes in from Kansas, cuts southwest across the green corner of the state, picks up Tulsa, then runs due west through red earth toward the Texas line. It enters Miami, Oklahoma, as a main street. It crosses the Arkansas River at Tulsa as a working boulevard. West of the city it bends through Sapulpa, Stroud, Chandler, and Arcadia, then Oklahoma City, then El Reno and Weatherford and Clinton and Elk City and the long string of depot towns that had no other reason to exist.

In Arcadia the old round barn still stands in a field of winter wheat, big as a weather vane turned wrong. Between Tulsa and Catoosa a concrete whale as long as a bus still surfaces from the grass beside the road, and kids climb on its tail while their parents fill the tank at a station the highway built. In Clinton a museum keeps the postcards and the old gas company road maps, but the life of the road is not in the museum. It is in the man who runs the feed store and complains about his back, in the diner where the waitress calls everybody honey, in the vet's parking lot crowded on a rainy morning. The interstate runs parallel, straight and impatient, but it does not enter these towns. It only passes them, and so the old road is left to do what it has always done: take people to school, to work, to the county seat, to the house where their mother lives.

The song from the forties rhymed off the towns, and it made sure Oklahoma City was called mighty pretty. But a song is memory. What keeps a road alive is the business of getting somewhere, and in Oklahoma the old road still carries that business. A road that is only remembered is a roadside attraction. A road that is driven is a road.

The argument for the coast

But California can answer. The whole idea of the highway was to end at the Pacific; it sold itself as the road to the sunset. The story Americans keep of the great westward migration is a story of arrival, set in the valleys and orchards of California, and the road that carried the Dust Bowl families is remembered from the driver's seat, facing west. The strongest images of Route 66 are western ones: the desert, the mountains coming down to the sea, the beach at the end of it. And California still holds long empty stretches of the original pavement across the Mojave, where the road looks almost exactly as it did when a nation first rolled west, and where a driver can feel the full distance of the journey.

Except that a road preserved in the desert is a corpse kept perfect. California's long Mojave stretches survive because nobody needed them once the interstate came, and the towns along them folded up and blew away. What California keeps, it keeps as a monument. A monument asks to be admired. A working road asks to be used. In Oklahoma the same highway is patched in a hundred colors, worn thin by farm trucks, rerouted around modern needs, argued about at county commission meetings. That is what aliveness is. It is not the mile marker that says what happened here. It is the pothole somebody is always planning to fix.

So the old road is most alive where it is most ordinary. In Oklahoma it is part of the furniture of daily life, a street full of weather and work and weather-beaten signs. The ocean end of the road is beautiful and final, but final things are over. Out west of Weatherford, when a July thunderstorm moves up from the south and blackens the wheat, and a pickup hurries along the old highway toward Elk City ahead of the rain, no postcard will ever carry that moment. The road is doing what it was built for, and it belongs to the man driving it.