The Shadow Catcher

Beyond Victorville I lose The Mother Road as I-15 heads toward Barstow. 66, also called “The Main Street of America,” used to wend from here toward the settled towns north of Victorville, but the Interstates were plotted to cut to the chase and cut out the Main Streets. At Barstow 66 will cross my path again, intersecting I-15 to turn toward Daggett, now a ghost town, Ludlow, Needles and on to Arizona. So much of Route 66’s lore is now about its role as a “historic” road, a ghost road, decommissioned from its active status as an official U.S. “Route” in 1985. Yet it never trespassed on Nevada, a state renowned for ghost towns. Bypassed, converted or overpaved by newer roads along its 2,600-mile stretch between Santa Monica and Chicago, 66 is now, in parts, CA2, CA110, I-210, I-10, I-15, I-40, I-44, I-55. “Please help us save this invaluable piece of Americana before it is only a memory,” reads a brochure from the National Historic Route 66 Federation that I pick up at a gas station on the Interstate in Barstow. It makes me think of Curtis, driving out through the unpaved desert to “help us save” the Indians before they were “only a memory.” Well, hell. What’s the whole of our experience if not “only a memory”? My father and mother are “only a memory” to me right now, but so is my daughter’s childhood, and my own, and she and I are both alive — what’s so regrettable about something being “only a memory”?

Unless of course we’re talking about a race of people.

Or the soul of a marriage.

Or love.

But a road? Can we justify nostalgia for a road? Far younger than the Silk Road or the Via Appia, Route 66 was a road whose working existence spanned less than fifty years, roughly twice the average life span of celebrity. What was celebrated about Route 66 was, first of all, its place in the memories of those who came to California from Oklahoma and the Panhandle during the Dust Bowl years, like Steinbeck’s Joads; and then, for later generations, what was celebrated about Route 66 was not only that there was a song about it but that there was a TV show about it, too. The song (…get your kicks on Route 66…) was written by Bobby Troupe who was from my home-town and whose father owned the best music store there. Bobby and his chanteuse wife Julie London always made the front page of the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal when they came to town in the 60’s, Julie’s dramatic bosom generously displayed in whatever outfit she was wearing. I can’t remember whether Bobby’s Route 66 song was the theme song for the Route 66 TV program, but I do remember the Corvette and all the driving around through western scenery and that it costarred George Maharis, who, like my mother Mary, was a first-generation Greek American. His family came from Corfu and owned a restaurant and Mary watched the show each week because she had a crush on him. Neither of my parents ever traveled farther West than Chicago so their image of Route 66 derived from what they saw on television. In black and white, like a Curtis photograph.

Instant vintage.

What my parents knew about the real Route 66 approximates what I can know about Theodore Roosevelt by looking at Curtis’s photograph of him. Did he have yellow teeth? Russet highlights in his hair? Indigo coronas around the pupils of his eyes? Except for paintings of him, every image that I’ve seen of Teddy has been in black and white, just like the images of the West on television back when all the broadcast world was shades of gray. When I was still in high school, no fewer than sixteen shows a week were Westerns. Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry in the 40’s, Roy Rogers in the 50’s, and then in the 60’s there were dozens of them—The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Palladin, Tales of Wells Fargo, Death Valley Days, Big Valley, Bonanza, The Virginian, Broken Arrow, Cheyenne, Cimmaron City, Rawhide, The Lawman, High Chaparral, Laramie, Colt 45, Maverick, Bat Masterson, Wanted: Dead or Alive.

Cowboy shows.

Cowboys and Indians.

My first concept of a walking, talking Indian was Tonto on The Lone Ranger—ever wise, ever loyal, deferential to his kimo sabe, never one to waste a word, never one to smile. And you might ask yourself, Who was that masked man? but did you ever ask why, at the height of post-war consumerism and suburban expansion with look-alike streets and look-alike houses, why the legend of the cowboy was so popular?