Tour Americana! Part Three (The West)

I arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona as the sun was setting and after finding a motel on Route 66, I headed downtown to get a drink. I gave myself a quick walking tour and then ducked into one of the many sports bars and I sat at the bar and read The New York Times on my iPhone.

It got dark early and when it did it became very cold. Although the high temperature that day had been in the 60s, the low dipped down to around 28 degrees, which I thought was delightful. Downtown there was a mixed crowed of college students and retirees on the streets. There was a large number of high schoolers as well and they gathered at the town square to hear a local band play. It was too cold for me to linger, though, so I kept walking.

Flagstaff has a city ordinance that keeps its streets dark at night as a courtesy to the Lowell Observatory, which is nearby. The darkness seemed to enhance the coldness which, combined with the town’s frontier architecture and nearby alpine mountains, made me feel more like I was in Alaska than Arizona. I liked Flagstaff a lot.

My mother’s parents met in Flagstaff, incidentally, but I don’t know much about the circumstances and I don’t know if they ever returned.

All the motels are located along the northern side of Route 66. Railroad tracks run parallel to the southern side, and if you stay in one of the motels, prepare to have your sleep interrupted at irregular intervals by the thumping of machinery and the high shriek of the conductor’s horn. Katherine, when I was talking with her on the phone that evening, asked me what the noise was. “You can hear that?” I asked.

The next morning, I woke up early and went into town for breakfast. I looked at the map and saw how close I was and determined that I would make it all the way to Los Angeles that day. I was on the road a little after eight.

Arizona along Interstate 40 is a mostly flat and barren desert and after a few hours I was getting bored. I decided, without much forethought, to take a detour. A few miles south of Kingman, I pulled off the Interstate and got on Route 66.

The glory days of this storied highway are long past but I am pleased to report that it lives on in the hearts and minds of many a bearded motorcyclist and they were pretty much my only company on the lonely two-lane road. The pavement itself is narrow and cracked. There is no shoulder. Its two lanes, one in either direction, aren’t very commodious even for a motorcycle, and my Cadillac felt like a quarterback in a laundry chute as it thundered down the road.

It started out as flat and dull as the Interstate. I had been hoping for some roadside attractions, like a diner or a gas station, but there was nothing. There were some pretty serious mountains up ahead but they didn’t impress me much. I was looking for signs of life.

It was boring and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The road, which had been straight as a rod, became more curvaceous and irregular. Then, very quickly, it became impossible. Without realizing quite how I got there, I found myself hugging the side of a mountain and terrified for my life. There was no quardrail. The highway seemed to have become narrower and it curved at ninety, one-fifty, and nearly one-eighty degree angles every hundred yards. I could barely manage five miles an hour. Any faster and I would plunge to the most pointless death imaginable.

Moreover, I was alone. The motorcyclists had long since passed me and I was now on my own. There were few roadsigns but those I saw mentioned a town called Oatman which was about five miles away.

They were surely the longest five miles I had ever driven. Route 66 was horrifyingly switchback the entire way. Moreover, as I was driving west, I had the privilege of being on the edge of the mountain rather than the inside. Even though there seemed to be no one on the road, I could hardly straddle the lanes since every few yards I was rounding a corner into god-knows-what. I sweated through my shirt and sat on the edge of the seat and after forty minutes or so I traversed the hellish five miles.

And then I arrived at Oatman. It basically meant rounding a corner and then finding myself in the company of aged motorcycle anarchists and their sunburnt women, Arizona mountain men, bearded survivalists, and packs of burros roaming the street.

Oatman is an old mining town that began as a tent camp in 1915. Aside from the t-shirts and touristy knick-knacks, not much seemed to have changed since its founding. I got out of my car and walked around, careful to avoid the burro shit clumped along the street. There were leathery motorcycle geezers everywhere, drinking beer at two in the afternoon. The largest—and oldest—structure in town is the Oatman Hotel where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard improbably honeymooned (he liked to gamble with the old prospectors).

I stayed for a little while and took a few pictures. It was a strange experience. The town is literally in the middle of a mountain, nestled between peaks. Its eastern approach had been treacherous, and its appearance suddenly along the road had been startling. And welcome—I was glad to simply see some other living humans.

The rest of Route 66 as I took it leading back to the Interstate was mercifully straight—or at least manageably so. It took me less than an hour to reach the California boarder, in a town called Needles. I stopped there and put some gas in the car and thundered on toward the coast.