Day 8, pt1: Oklahoma Civic Lesson

Inside the Oklahoma state building: art.

Incidentally, Route 66 is no longer a continuous ribbon of highway. There are big brown signs, known to all motorists as an indicator of a culture point of interest, that will lead you off I-40 and onto Historic Route 66 throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. Unlike the interstate which pounds itself into the earth and lets nothing except enormous geographical features get in its way, Route 66 rolls like a carpet across every rise and dip in this imperfect landscape. If a creek suddenly bends because it always has since the Pleistocene, Route 66 will bend too, abruptly.

No one's really seen to keep it up. The tar is cracking in places. And sometimes it just ends. I was flying down one portion in Texas when all of a sudden the tarmac ended and I was rumbling across white chalky gravel, kicking up a huge cloud, stones rattling underneath. When I couldn't see where the road picked up again and so backed up and retraced the 8 miles to get back on the interstate.

Sometimes, thinking you're about to go off the steady truck laden interstate and enter a rambling time vortex of hot rods, you find yourself on a cracking blacktop less than a 100 yards from the interstate. You can wind up spotting the ABF truck that cut you off 5 miles ago or pace alongside the same red Jeep Cherokee, this time with prairie grass between you. Other times you suddenly veer off south rather than bulldoze through a looming hill and then you are in the dusty backroads of Route 66. Cracked motel windows, empty two tank filling stations, roadside restaraunts and tire repair shops now weathered, pealing and forsaken. A glance into a yellowing diner window will reveal a scene that looks like everyone suddenly evacuated because someone yelled Fire! and never came back.