What’s out there? A Route 66 road-trip begs the question, but hidden in this query is how we came to possess “what’s out there.” It’s the same ideology that inspired Kerouac’s On the Road, and movies like, Thelma and Louise, Bagdad Cafe, Cars, Easy Rider, and others.
Many T-shirts, bumper stickers, keychains, and signs don half his line, “66 is the Mother Road.” In a succinct phrase, freedom and possibilities are encapsulated in the cross-country road-trip that is distinctly American. We can presume this is what happened when John Steinbeck’s famous line from The Grapes of Wrath was severed in half. But what’s lost when we capitalize on nostalgia? We tend to cherry-pick anecdotes, stories, and memories that paint a more harmonious picture of the once-and-current world we’re driving through. The Route 66 signage, road-stops, and souvenir shops are dedicated to a distant past, one that can be remembered through bumper stickers from each stop along the way. Or one might venture into Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, or any other nearby bustling, inhabited city. One might find themselves at the Blue Swallow Motel, a Route 66 staple in Tucumcari, New Mexico, about 40 miles from Glenrio. Of course, there are more lively towns and stops along Route 66. They instead find themselves on “Best Ghost Towns Along Route 66” lists, where road-trippers-likely clutching Kerouac’s On the Road or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath -stop along the way to catch a glimpse of quaint simplicity frozen in time. Their pictures and videos depict buildings in which a slow decay of stucco and cement give way to adobe infrastructures and left-behind artifacts.Īll in all, there’s not much left in Glenrio nor is there much in any of the other abandoned and dilapidated towns and cities along Route 66. Today, it serves as a tourist attraction along Route 66 for those who are seeking a nostalgia-latent adventure along the “Mother Road” or “Main Street of America”-nicknames that date back to the Great Depression. Then, in the late 1950s, construction began on I-40, and by 1975, Glenrio was effectively a ghost town, as the new highway bypassed their town altogether. The highway dwellers kept the town going with stops for gas, snacks, and a break to stretch their legs. Glenrio was a tourist and traveler stop along Route 66 after the migration of the Dust Bowl Crisis died down in the late 1930s. The gas stations were on the Texas side because the taxes were slightly cheaper. The bars were on the New Mexico side as the Texan side was in a dry county. Straddling New Mexico and Texas along Route 66, the town used to operate under two state jurisdictions. Glenrio has been a ghost town since the late 1980s.
0 kommentar(er)
