SANTA ROSA, NM – Santa Rosa. Now there’s a name I can easily place with a face.
Mr. Charles and the Charles family were all very close with my family while I was growing up in Garden City, NY. During my early childhood he worked for W.R. Grace & Co., owners and operators of cruise ships. For my seventh birthday Mr. Charles gave me a framed print of the Grace Line cruise ship Santa Rosa. I hung it on a wall in my bedroom and used to stare at it while lying on my bed, dreaming of steering it out to sea. He also gave me my first Swiss Army pocketknife.
Today I find it happily ironic that many years later here I am in Santa Rosa, NM, 2,000 miles away from home and with a Swiss Army pocketknife in my rucksack.
The single greatest pleasure of driving Route 66, in my opinion, is following the road as it twists and winds through the main streets and residential areas of dozens and dozens of small towns along its Chicago-to-Santa-Monica pathway. Opportunities abound to meet citizens of those towns. And every once in a while you meet people whose names will remain forever connected with the place you’re passing through. Losing this singular pleasure of the road to speed and efficiency today is a sad and troubling development. There was no such thing as red state or blue state America during the heyday of Route 66.
During my drive through Missouri earlier this week I stopped for lunch at the Bell Restaurant in Lebanon.
If the restaurant looks at all familiar to you it’s probably because Barack Obama stopped by there for some pie during his 2008 campaign for president, not long after making his off-the-cuff “cling to guns and religion” remark. Wesley, an aging kitchen worker at the Bell who has no teeth and a hard life written in his eyes, was there that day. His pal Frank, a stocky, white-haired man who runs a small ranch and used to haul grain along Route 66 during the ‘60s, joked that Wesley will forever remind you he was there that day.
The restaurant was filled with cigarette smokers the afternoon I met Frank and Wesley, and both men had their packs out and on the counter. But neither man lit up while I sat smokeless next to them. Frank hopes the Yankees meet St. Louis in the World Series and told me Route 66 would start to get even more exciting once I was further west, and he’s been proven right on at least one account. Wesley is thinking about going back to church and will forever remind you he met Barack Obama at the Bell Restaurant in 2008.
From now on in my mind it’s Lebanon, Missouri: Frank and Wesley.
This morning it was Amarillo, Texas, jeez it’s cold! Gray skies and a crazy wind chill were not in the forecast shared by the hotel clerk last night. The disconcerting duo might have put a real damper on my mood had I not had the Cadillac Ranch to visit directly outside of town.
Here it is, seen from I-40 just outside Amarillo.
And here is how Route 66 Adventure Handbook author Drew Knowles describes the Cadillac Ranch, the brainchild of artist Stanley Marsh 3 [sic]:
Ironically, the construct, which was assembled by an art co-op calling themselves the Ant Farm, came along too late to be contemporary with Route 66 in the region. Instead, it was placed in a field beside I-40, the highway which had supplanted U.S. 66. That said, no trip through the Texas Panhandle is complete without taking a walk out into that field to absorb some of the energy contained in those upended Cadillacs, which are said to be positioned at the same angle as the sides of the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
Wind and cold? What wind and cold? I parked and departed the warm Mini and dove right in with my camera.
Judging from the discarded spray-paint cans here and there, it appeared as though the Cadillac Ranch is continually evolving. But its vibe remains a positive electrical charge.
Wild, huh?
On the way to Vega, TX, I snapped a couple of roadside photos.
And then motored the Mini into tiny Vega itself.
The jolt of the Cadillac Ranch 30-plus miles departed, I decided it was time for a second cup of coffee. So I stopped by Roosters in Vega, a onetime gas station that is now a comfy café looking right at home on the Texas Panhandle.
Greg, the café’s pleasant, swarthy-faced owner, poured my coffee-to-go. A few customers, mostly women, sat around tables. After paying, I asked him where the restroom was. He looked out a nearby window and replied, “Out there.”
“Um, okay,” I said to chuckles all around.
“Just kidding,” Greg let on. “It’s in the back.”
I’m reasonably sure I’m not the first or last victim of that prank.
Several minutes later, Greg invited me to have a seat at the table where he was now seated himself with three women, two graying and the other his wife, I assumed. Outside the chill and clouds persisted; what was my hurry? So I thanked him and sat down for a spell.
One thing I’ve discovered over numerous road trips is that when you’re going solo, people are almost always willing to open up to you if you show you’re a good listener.
Imogene, the taller and more angular of the two older women, had some fascinating stories. Tracing her time in Vega back to the Great Depression, she recalled that a segment of Route 66 running through town remained unpaved in its early years. Farm boys, she explained, would make a few dollars using their tractors to tow motorists over the unpaved portion on wet days.
“It’s said that all of us Depression-era kids from the Texas prairie are tall because of all the red meat our parents fed us,” she added. “There weren’t many carbohydrates in our diets in those days.”
Greg brought out some photos of the building as a long-abandoned gas station and of the renovation. Many locals contributed time and donated items to the project.
Imogene wishes she could have been a young adult in the 1920s and highly recommended I read Beryl Markham’s West With the Night and check out Marguerite Harrison’s 1920s documentary, “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life.”
Her friend Wanda, who used to work for the newspaper The Vega Enterprise, handed me a small Lone Star State flag as a souvenir of this occasion. Greg put his arm around his wife and grinned.
From now on in my mind it’s Vega, TX: Imogene, Wanda and Greg.
Route 66 Dispatch 