Route 66 Still Kicks by Rick Antonson

Author:Rick Antonson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2012-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Dust Bowl

Highway

“The past decade’s been a tough time to be an American. I meet people from all over the world traveling here. They don’t understand us. Many don’t want to understand us.”

—Chris, traveler

A merica conspires with its promoters to distort reality. The conspiracy is called kitsch, and it has its place. Of interest to anyone who reads about Route 66 is the Cadillac Ranch, that head-butt of art. Here, latter-day versions of Monsieur Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac’s namesake, are buried waist-deep in the earth. When the French officer founded the fort of d’Etroit around 1700, he could not have envisioned the horseless carriage, let alone Detroit’s Cadillac Automobile Company—to say nothing of this ranch.

It is not that the land on which this attraction is located lacks other purposes. It sits beside a viable farm. This, in the name of public art, is a confirmation that Route 66 is a highway without any fashion sense. It has gained such prominence that its photograph graces many articles and books about Route 66—and it is not on Route 66!

Saps that we are for making fun of such temptations, Peter and I left Amarillo on Highway I-40. Exit 60 brought us a row of fence posts dotted with dozens of unmatched running shoes and leftover gym boots (part of the public art). The brightness of the morning lit the ten vehicles in their careful positioning, stuck in the mud up to their rubbers. They sat in a well-crafted nosedive posture. Trunks and back seats were angled out of the ground to coincide with the angles of the Egyptian pyramids, it is said. Ten tilted Cadillac cars mooned the sky—it is as though Salvador Dali had collaborated with Monty Python.

Cadillac’s first fling with fins occurred in 1948. That year’s model is represented among the tail-light display, which also includes Cadillac coupes and sedans up to 1964, when consumers’ weariness of the gimmick and public taste dictated the fins’ demise.

Graffiti blazes over the cars. The above-ground portion of these vehicles is periodically repainted with a base color, and the graffiti competition begins anew. To the credit of the organizers, they keep a tight rein on continuity in this installation. Each car is painted in keeping with a loose thematic approach; the current rendition included strong swirls of reds and greens, and splashes of yellow with blue highlights. Variety is what this display is all about. An earlier version had pink as the base color; another had blue waves. This exhibition is not evolving toward anything.

It would have been silly for Peter and me to have missed this. And the absence of other visitors meant that we had the display to ourselves, perhaps because the previous night’s rains had left the ground inhospitably slippery. We sloshed through a courtesy corral gate, down a hundred yards from the road toward the pagan idols, and walked freely about this latter-day Stonehenge.

One may ponder the star-linked, bumper-to-sky symbolism or consider the religious significance of the spacing between the vehicles, but the truth is stranger.

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