As dusk closed in on the valley around us, I stood with both feet parallel on the center stripe of a two lane road that disappeared over the horizon and into California. Out of habit, I looked over my shoulder once every few moments to make sure I wasn’t in danger of being flattened by a vehicle flying around the blind curve behind me, but deep down I knew better – on that evening, the western border of Arizona belonged only to us. I crouched low, nearly touching my chest to the pavement, lifted my phone, and took a picture of the last rays of sunlight before they disappeared on the west side of the mountains ahead of us. I had never been a “sunset person,” certainly not the kind who ever felt compelled to stop and photograph one. But there I was, in the middle of a highway, doing just that.
My dad waited patiently in our rented Nissan on the side of the road while I indulged my inner Ansel Adams. The sun sank lower and the car’s shadow grew longer and longer before vanishing completely. I sat back down in the driver’s seat as darkness and a warm May breeze blanketed the desert, anxious to get to our next scheduled rest stop, somewhere near Barstow. Over the previous four days we had covered a couple thousand miles and were about to cross into our eighth state. I put the car in drive and we continued on into the night.
The inspiration for this drive came when my wife was four months pregnant with our first child. Parenthood had been a long time coming for us, but as excited as I was, I questioned my dad-worthiness. In my worst moments, I can be a prick; in my best moments, I’m prone to solitude and moodiness. As my wife’s belly grew along with the pile of little pink baby things in our Chicago apartment, so did my anxiety.
With new responsibilities looming, I felt a deep and admittedly selfish desire to be spontaneous and carefree. So I decided to do something that I had always dreamed of doing: following Route 66 from start to finish. There was also a slightly more noble reason for me wanting to take the trip – the open road has always held a mystical power over me and, like a soothsayer, I believed that it would coax clarity from my troubled mind as I contemplated fatherhood. On that same train of thought, I decided to invite my dad along for the ride so that I could shake a few kernels of fatherly wisdom from the man who had managed to raise three boys who all still loved him.
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We began the first day of our journey at 66’s ceremonial starting point, Lou Mitchell’s restaurant on Jackson Boulevard in Chicago with breakfast in the shadow of the Willis Tower and finished the day with chicken fried steaks at roadside log cabin barbeque joint called the Missouri Hick. Between the two, we encountered a treasure trove of Americana.
The first Route 66 mecca outside of Chicago was a twenty-foot-tall spaceman statue in the deserted parking lot of the former Launching Pad Café in Wilmington, Illinois. The route boasts many such “giants,” fossils from an era when fiber glass behemoths advertised everything from hamburger huts to muffler shops. When I had seen the crowd of Mother Road trekkers at Lou Mitchell’s earlier that day, I had wrongly assumed that each stop in our guidebook would be packed with people. Fortunately, this was not the case; at the spaceman, as with most of the drive, my dad and I were completely alone.
In Odell, Illinois, we pulled off the highway and toured a well-preserved 1930s-era service station, complete with the original red, glass-topped gas pumps. Just outside of Pontiac, Illinois, we walked along portions of the original 1930s road slab that were inaccessible by car. At the Cozy Dog drive-in in Springfield, I ate the only good corn dog I’d ever had.
We flew through Missouri and a sliver of Kansas, trying to stick to as much of the original route as possible, which meant driving in a serpentine pattern much of the time to avoid the conveniences of the interstate highway system. That also meant that the navigator couldn’t take his eyes off of the directions in our guidebook for more than a few miles at a time without missing a crucial turn, which, in spite of our best efforts, we managed to do several times, ending up on some of the most obscenely lonely backroads that I had ever seen. As the distance between us and home grew, I thought about how to tell Dad that I was terrified of becoming a father and ask for his help, but the conversation always sounded like a made-for-TV movie in my head. Real fathers and sons don’t talk like that, so it didn’t come naturally. Instead, I sat quietly and watched the towns pass.
In Oklahoma we took a detour into Commerce and stopped at Mickey Mantle’s childhood home. It was a simple white wood frame house on a bare lot, but to us it was a holy site. Dad called me over to a rusty tin barn adjacent to the home and pointed to a spot on the side of it. The metal was pock-marked with baseball-size dents; the barn had been the Mick’s backstop, where his father and grandfather pitched batting practice to him in the evenings after dragging their bones home from the nearby zinc mines, before each of them dropped into an early grave. I lingered around the invisible home plate next to the man who had taught me how to hit a baseball and listened to the ghosts rustle the tall grass.
Two days into our drive I realized that we hadn’t turned on the radio once. We talked about the landscape, about sports, about work and family. Still I had trouble expressing what was really on my mind. No matter what, I imagined that it was going to be an awkward conversation. Finally, somewhere around Amarillo, I stared straight ahead at the horizon and said it: “I’m scared shitless. I don’t know if I’m cut out to be a dad.”
I saw him think for a moment and look down, choosing his words carefully. “I didn’t know what I was doing when you came along, but we figured it out,” he said sincerely. “There aren’t any secrets, but if I could do it, so can you.” It was a nice sentiment, but I knew better. There was more to it than that, but I realized that my dad probably wasn’t any better at answering the question than I was at asking it.
West Texas into Tucumcari, New Mexico, was the part of the drive that I had most looked forward to. I had logged those miles with Dad many times before from our home in Corsicana, Texas, set to the soundtrack of the Eagles and James Taylor, cruising along in his cramped Ford pickup on our way to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where he taught me to fish for trout in the same cold streams around Tres Ritos, New Mexico, where his father had taught him. There was something intoxicating about that stretch when I was a kid, the way that the table-top landscape converged with the sky in every direction. It was, and is, a desolate, depressing corner of the world, but for some reason I have always loved it. It had been years since we had traveled that way, but the happy anticipation that I felt as a kid came rushing back to me.
The road took us through an unending succession of decrepit desert towns whose lifeblood had been siphoned off by the interstate, slowly over time, until their hearts dried out and blew away in the wind. All of them were filled with the same neon-crowned roadhouses and crumbling motels and no-tells. A nice couple took our picture standing on THE corner in Winslow, Arizona, and we walked the edge of a meteor crater. We dodged tourists and peered over the south rim of the Grand Canyon and ate our weight in patty melts and French fries at a place called Miz Zips in Flagstaff. But all the while I kept waiting for a bigger revelation.
I wanted comfort, first and foremost – the comfort of knowing that I had finally taken that long dreamt-of trip, that I had lived my life, had done and seen it all, and could return home and plant myself firmly into familial bliss with no regrets. But most of all I wanted the comfort of knowing that I could raise a kid who would grow to love me like I loved my own dad. What had he done right, and how could I make sure that I did it for my daughter, too?
On the fifth and final day we departed Barstow early in the morning. From the Mojave Desert in the morning to the Pacific Ocean in the afternoon, Route 66 saved the best for last – if you don’t count the length of suburban sprawl between San Bernardino and Pasadena. God, how I wished that we hadn’t sworn off interstates during that part of the drive.
We hit West Hollywood just as early afternoon rush hour began, and crawled through Beverly Hills into Santa Monica. My back ached from days in the cramped sedan and my patience was thin, even in the presence of my dad’s Buddha-like calm. I white knuckled the steering wheel and swore at other drivers under my breath all while he quietly looked out the window.
Finally, mercifully, we turned onto Colorado Avenue for the final push to the Santa Monica Pier. We parked the car and stumbled through the crowd of gawkers on the pier until we saw it: A tall white sign emblazoned, “Santa Monica – 66 – End of the Trail.” We huddled together underneath it and I snapped our photo while others waited for their turn. But I didn’t want to move out of the way; I had thought about that spot on the boardwalk for more than twenty four hundred miles. We had earned that moment under the sign. But still it felt anticlimactic. The drive had been fun, but I had hoped for more – a vision quest of sorts – and I had failed.
We walked down from the pier onto the beach and looked out at the ocean. By that time it was nearing five o’clock in the afternoon; my mom was due to land at LAX at six. She and my dad were going to spend the rest of the week together in Los Angeles while I headed back east to meet my wife in Palm Springs before flying back home.
“We should probably get going,” I said.
Dad looked at his watch. “Not yet,” he answered. “There’s always time for burger and a beer, don’t you think?” There’s always time. I thought about that as we ordered our food and sat down at a picnic table to eat. Dad had always made time for my brothers and me when we were young, which is why we made time for him once we got old. It wasn’t the sage-like advice or magic bullet of parenting that I had hoped to discover, but it was a good start.
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