My daddy tells a story — repeated in this one — of traveling to California in the early 1920s on an unpaved road that later became first Route 66 and then Interstate 40. It got me thinking about how fast the US highway system developed after cars became widely available.

By Nancy Jane Moore

photograph by Nicholas_T

    We’d planned to make Flagstaff by nightfall, but an hour outside Gallup one of the solar panels on the bus roof started to flap around. Emily and Jo climbed up to check, and discovered several more loose panels.

    It was too hot to sit inside while they fixed it, so the rest of us put up sun shades and rested by the road. Not a cloud in the sky, nothing but cactus in any direction, so hot and dry that every time you took a deep breath, moisture dried up all the way down into your lungs.

    I sat with Irene, who was teaching me another story.

    Irene’s our oldest member – over sixty now. But crowds grow real quiet when Irene tells a story.

    I’m the youngest by a good ten years: I turn twenty next month. And I’m a guitar picker, not a storyteller. But Irene wants me to learn to tell. It didn’t take me long after I joined All Star Traveling Revue to figure out no one ever says no to Irene.

    “It rained for days and days,” I said, sing-song.

    “You have to put more feeling into it,” Irene said. “You have to make people know what it feels like when the roof is leaking, and every time you run outside you get soaked to the bone, and you can’t imagine ever being dry again.”

    “I’d like to feel like that.”

    “No, you wouldn’t.” But Irene knew what I meant. I’ve never seen that kind of rain. The places I know get a little drizzle, and everybody’s grateful. There are parts of the country where they get too much rain instead of too little, but we never go there. They don’t get enough sun to power the bus.

    “You’ve got to make the audience feel wet when you tell that story. You’ve got to make them shiver, even if it’s 97 degrees and hasn’t rained in seventeen months.”

    So I thought back to a time in Austin when they’d had a little rain and we went swimming in Barton Springs. The water was icy cold. It’s the only time I remember being wet all over. “They didn’t think they’d ever be dry again.” I shivered.

    “That’s more like it.”

    We got back on the road in early afternoon. “We could stop in the Painted Desert,” someone said.

    “Yeah,” I said. I’ve never been there.

    “Not enough people there to do a show,” Jo said. She was driving. “We’ll go as long as there’s sun. That way we’ll make Flag tomorrow.”

    Sun powers the bus’s generator directly. We’ve got batteries that run a stove, a computer, a few amps, but we haven’t got one big enough to run the bus. We don’t drive after dark.

    I sat up in the front, staring out at the expanse of concrete. The road is crumbling, helped along by cactus and other plants too tough for even drought to kill or cement to stop. An obstacle course. No one ever stays in one lane.

    It’s desolate here, but not the desperate desolation you get driving east from Denver across the Great Plains. It’s not as flat, and things here are the way they were meant to be. The plains weren’t supposed to turn into desert, but this place has been bone dry for a thousand years.

    The first vehicle we’d seen all day came along about an hour before sunset. Jo was struggling to see in the setting sun. I cupped my hand over my eyes and moved to get a better angle. “Looks like a car.”

    We stopped. Common courtesy. Though we all checked to make sure we had weapons handy. We’re friendly, but we’re not fools.

    The car held two grown women with three little kids in the back seat. Boxes and suitcases were tied onto everything but the solar panels. The women got out; the kids stayed in the car.

    Jo and Irene got off the bus. I tagged along behind. “Where you heading?” Jo asked.

    “Central Texas. We hear there’s work. Heard anything?”

    “We haven’t been there since spring,” Jo said. It was November. “But they had rain. Might be work.”

    “You musicians?”

    “Musicians, actors, storytellers.”

    “There a living in that?”

    “So long as we travel. Every place needs entertainment.”

    Irene was making friends with the kids, telling a funny story. I heard giggling.

    Jo said, “What do you hear from out west?”

    “Things got pretty bad after that last earthquake in L.A. Lots of refugees heading everywhere else in California. Jobs dried up.”

    “Along with everything else,” the second woman put in. “Things seem better in Arizona. They said in Flag there was snow in the Grand Canyon.”

    I’ve never seen snow. “Oh, Jo, can we go see it?”

    “Maybe.” Snow is water.

    “We almost stayed in Flag. The water wasn’t too pricey and there was work. But we got family in Texas.”

    Jo nodded. “Be careful in New Mexico. They haven’t had much rain.”

    Irene yelled up to the bus windows. Someone threw down a bag. She took out a couple of rag dolls and a little box and gave them to the kids. They squealed, delighted.

    Jo frowned – we sell those toys – but no one tells Irene no.

    The car went on east. We drove thirty miles and pitched camp near some Anasazi ruins.

    “Funny to think,” Emily said over dinner, “that highway used to carry thousands of cars at a time. Now we travel all day and only see one other vehicle.”

    “Thousands of people? That’s crazy. There’s not that many cars anywhere.”

    “Look how big it is. Had to be a lot of cars once.”

    “Emily’s right,” Irene said. “Used to be everybody had a car, everybody drove this highway.”

    Irene remembers.

    “But oil got pricey and water got pricier, and none of the car makers adapted ‘til too late. That’s why the only vehicles left are mish-mashes like ours.

    “Here’s the funny thing, though. People have been traveling this pathway for a long time, probably back before the Navajo and the Hopi lived around here. It’s the natural path. But this big highway didn’t get built until the 1960s. And it’s been falling apart pretty much my whole life – I doubt it’s had any repair in fifty years. This huge highway was a good road for ninety years, maybe less.”

    I was surprised. You look at a big road, and you think it must have been there for all time.

    “My daddy used to tell a story. Seems when his grampa was a little kid, five years old, his parents moved from Texas to California.”

    “Was that the Dust Bowl?”

    “No, earlier than that, when times were flush. 1923, 24. They drove on this very road, except it wasn’t even paved back then, much less wide and divided.

    “They met another car on the road. The folks in it had been in California and were headed back to Texas. Just like us, they stopped and chatted. Nobody else coming; it didn’t matter that they blocked the road. Just like now.

    “They were driving one of the first cars ordinary folks could buy, a Model T Ford. The future looked bright. With cars, people could go anywhere, live everywhere. Nothing was too far away anymore.

    “So people built these all these highways and the cities grew to super size. But when the rain stopped falling, the cities died. In another hundred years, this highway will be gone. Though there’ll probably be some kind of road. Your kids” – she pointed at me – “might even be driving down it.

    “Our grandparents and their grandparents built a major civilization around the automobile. And it lasted a hundred and twenty five years.”

    We all got quiet. Even I know a hundred and twenty five years isn’t long, not for civilizations.

    Finally I said, “So what do we do about it?”

    Irene smiled – a big smile, the largest I’d seen in some time. “Why, we start over, child. We try again. It’s going to be harder, because we haven’t got the resources to be careless this time. You have to pay real attention to build something that’ll last longer than a hundred and twenty five years.

    “That’s why we’re out here, telling stories and singing songs, letting everyone know that there is more to life than just surviving. That’s our job.” She paused. “Getting the rebuilding started, that’s your job.”

    She hooked me, then and there. Youth always knows it can do something better than those who came before. Besides, you don’t say no to Irene.

    Now, fifty years later, I’m not so arrogant. I know I failed more than I succeeded.

    But the road’s still here – just two lanes of concrete now. We jackhammered out the rest, let the land take it back.  

    A group in New Mexico sent some old spaceships up to bring spent comets down for water. It’s expensive – makes gold look cheap – but it made the Southwest livable again. Nobody wastes it, not this time around. We at least learned that much.

    The Southwest is still desert and it’s still hot, but people are making lives here again instead of just passing through or withering away. The road is too busy for people to stop and chat in the middle of it, but not so busy that people don’t pull off to the side and visit.

    You can’t have civilization without a road, but you can’t let the road take over all of civilization. That’s what we aimed for when we rebuilt it.

    I think Irene would approve.

copyright 2009 by Nancy Jane Moore