Americana and Dreams
No Country for Old Men
For the 4th, an on the occasion of the cascading disasters in the country, here, a piece I wrote in the fall, while my dad was dying on Route 66. I have not grown more optimistic about the country in the interim. xoxox
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The little town of Tucumcari, New Mexico, is but a few square blocks. A broad, spartan landscape in the middle of limitless dusty horizons. The Main Street runs about two dozen dilapidated brick and rotted wooden facades from the turn of the last century: empty storefronts, furniture hops, a Salvation Army depot, a Shriners club. The more modern main drag through town is clustered with elaborate motel signage, a plasterworks “teepee” selling curios, and a sky-high sombrero atop a Mexican restaurant. Here, 1950s Chevys in various states of preservation, from high sheen fetish objects down to rusted-through hulks, sit up on blocks, or sink into weeds growing through the asphalt.
Believe it or not, this mile or so stretch of road is probably the epicenter of what remains of the old Route 66, the last flickering testament to the fabled throughway from the midwest of America to the wild western frontier where it once ushered travelers and dreamers, escapists, and strivers to the great Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. In the last fifty or so years, this more analog, mom-n-pop sort of artery has been replaced by the nation’s superhighways — those monolithic heavyweight hardtops crowded with white semitrucks ferrying frozen meats or Prime deliveries across the country. And the changes have rendered this single-stop-light-throughway an aging ruin.
