Copyright

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-12995-9
Copyright © 2011 by Billy Connolly
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
Copyright

1 Get Your Kicks

2 Winding from Chicago
3 A Royal Route
4 It Starts in Illinois, Let Me Tell You Boy
5 Travel My Way, Take the Highway
6 Go through St Louis; Joplin, Missouri
7 You Haven’t Seen the Country ’til You’ve Seen the Country by
Car
8 Springfield, Illinois … Springfield, Missouri too
9 Oklahoma City Looks Oh So Pretty
10 You’ll See Amarillo …
11 Albuquerque and Tucumcari, Make New Mexico Extraordinary
12 Flagstaff, Arizona, Don’t Forget Winona
13 You’ll Wanna Own a Piece of Arizona
14 Get Hip to This Timely Tip, When You Make That California
Trip

Appendix
Get Your Kicks

It was a moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I’d been travelling
along Route 66 for a few days, and I couldn’t resist a quick detour to
Arthur, a small community nearly two hundred miles south of Chicago.
‘Population 800’, it said on the sign at the edge of town. Beside it,
another sign warned drivers that the roads might be busy with horse-
drawn carriages. And with good reason: this was Amish country.
I didn’t know what to expect. I’d always quite liked Amish folk;
although, to be honest, I knew very little about them. It was just
something about the look – the horse-drawn carriages, the hats, the
plain, modest clothing, the way they carried themselves – that always
led me to think they were really rather nice people.
I parked my trike outside a simple house that backed on to a large
workshop. Waiting inside was a furniture-maker with the best haircut
I’d ever seen – like Rowan Atkinson’s pudding bowl in the first series
of Blackadder. Beneath the mop of hair was Mervin, a man with a thick
beard, no moustache and a slow, soft grin.
Mervin makes the most outstandingly great furniture: the kind of stuff
that will last for ever; the antiques of tomorrow. He showed me around
his workshop, then we stood in his office while he answered every
question I asked with total honesty. I could tell immediately that this
delightful, decent man was being absolutely straight with me. He had
nothing to hide. Men like Mervin have a ring of truth about them.
‘Why do you all grow beards and you don’t grow moustaches?’ I
said.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to grow a moustache when everybody just had
a beard and no moustache,’ said Mervin. ‘We like to be the same and
share and be equal.’
How humane. In this age of individualism, what a delight to find a
community of people who strive for equality and lead their lives
according to whatever is best for everyone. We talked some more and
Mervin explained the rules of the community, although the way he told
it, those rules didn’t seem like restrictions but simple guidelines for a
better, more harmonious way of living. With no sign of frustration about
what he wasn’t allowed to do, Mervin totally accepted the boundaries
of his life. Then he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride on his buggy.
You know those black Amish buggies? I’d always fancied a ride on
one of them, but first we had to get Mervin’s horse out of the stable and
hitch it to the front of the wagon. Now, I’m a wee bit frightened of
horses – not terrified, just a wee bit wary. So I lurked behind Mervin
until he’d got the beast out of the stable, then I led it to the buggy and
Mervin showed me how to hitch it up. We climbed into the buggy and
off we went. After about two minutes Mervin said, ‘Here … ’ and
handed me the reins. I was in charge. I was in seventh heaven. Riding
along in an Amish buggy, with an Amish guy, waving to Amish people.
It was a wonderful moment. It might sound ludicrously inconsequential
– and I suppose it was – but it pleased me so, so much.
Once we’d ridden in the buggy for a while, Mervin invited me and the
whole film crew back to his farm for something to eat. And we’re not
talking a bag of crisps here. An amazing meal was prepared by
Mervin’s wife and mother, dressed in traditional long dresses, while a
group of little girls, so beautiful in their bonnets, sang wee songs to
themselves, completely oblivious to us.
Not everything that I experienced with Mervin was quite so idyllic,
though. While we were in the buggy, he told me about a family tragedy
that was so distressing it took my breath away. I’ll not tell you any more
about it until we come to that part of the story. All I’ll say now is that it
broke my heart. Yet Mervin had a stoicism about him that had kept him
sane in the face of a terrible event. If something similar had happened
to me, it would have haunted me for the rest of my life, and it might
have changed me for the worse. But Mervin had an acceptance that
allowed him to remain a lovely, honest, happy man.
Without any doubt, the time I spent with Mervin was one of the
highlights of my life. I’ll remember that afternoon clip-clopping through
Arthur, Illinois, for ever. There wasn’t much to it, but I think of my life as
a series of moments and I’ve found that the great moments often don’t
have too much to them. They’re not huge, complicated events; they’re
just magical wee moments when somebody says ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re
really good at what you do’ or simply ‘You’re a good person’. I had one
that day with Mervin, the Amish furniture-maker.
The peace and simplicity of Mervin’s little community stood in stark
contrast to what I’d seen over the past few days along Route 66 – that
mythical highway forever associated with rock’n’roll, classic
Americana and the great open road. Most people, including me, would
think of wisecracking waitresses and surly short-order cooks in classic
fifties diners. Grease monkeys with dirty rags and tyre wrenches. Gas-
pump jockeys and highway patrolmen. Oklahoma hillbillies in overalls
and work boots. Stetson-wearing Texan ranch owners and cowboys at
a rodeo. Idealistic hitch-hikers following in the footsteps of Jack
Kerouac. Eccentric owners of Route 66-themed tourist haunts. Native
Americans in the Navajo and Apache reservations of New Mexico and
Arizona. Maybe even a few surfers, hippies or internet entrepreneurs in
California.
I’d already met a few of them, but when I’d set out from Chicago a
few days earlier, my greatest hope had been to make a connection
with someone just like Mervin. I’d thought back to similar trips I’d made
in the past, like my tour of Britain and my journey across Australia.
Every journey had involved visits to historic sites, explorations of
beautiful landscapes, and planned meetings with locals and various
dignitaries. The itinerary had always been tightly scheduled, as it has
to be when shooting a television series. But in every case the best
moments had resulted from an unexpected encounter with an
interesting character – like the time ten years earlier when I’d made a
television series called Billy Connolly’s World Tour of England,
Ireland and Wales.
I met dozens of fascinating people and visited scores of locations
between Dublin and Plymouth, but the highlight came when I visited the
grave of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, at the parish church of
St Peter in Bournemouth. I suppose you could say I’m a bit freaky,
because I’ve always been fond of graveyards. Many people think of
them as morbid, sad places, but to me they’re monuments to great
lives lived and they provide a connection to our ancestors and
heritage. They’re full of stories about people. And the story of Mary and
her fantastically talented husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is
as good as they come. Which was why, one sunny day, I was standing
beside her grave with a television camera and a furry microphone
pointing at me.
Just as I was telling the tragic story of how Percy Shelley drowned in
Italy, a stooped figure appeared in the graveyard. Dressed in black,
clutching a can of strong cider, and with a dirty green sleeping bag
draped around his shoulders, he approached us with an admirable
disdain for the conventions of television productions. Oblivious of the
tramp’s approach, I continued to talk to the camera, relating the story
of Shelley’s cremation on a beach. I’d just mentioned that Shelley’s
friend Edward John Trelawny snatched the poet’s heart from the
funeral pyre and passed it on to Mary, who then kept it in a velvet bag
around her neck for thirty years, when the old fella stopped beside me
and pointed at the grave.
‘Frankenstein, wasn’t it?’ he interrupted.
For a moment I didn’t know what to say. Then I caught on. ‘That’s
right,’ I said. ‘Mary Shelley.’
 ‘Her husband was a poet, wasn’t he? Shelley … ’
‘Yeah, Percy Bysshe Shelley.’
Climbing on to the grave, the wino sat cross-legged on top of it and
swigged from his can.
‘Do you like Shelley?’ I asked. ‘Or have you just chosen to sit there?’
‘I studied him at school.’
It was soon obvious that this was a bright guy who had fallen on hard
times. We rabbited away about Shelley and Shakespeare – if you give
people a chance, they shine – and then he told me he came from the
Midlands.
‘The Black Country?’
‘Nearer Birmingham … You haven’t got a cigarette on you, do you?’
‘I don’t. I don’t smoke cigarettes.’
I liked this man. He was very straightforward. So I offered to get him
some. ‘What do you smoke?’
‘Just ten. Ten cigarettes,’ he said.
So I walked off to a nearby shop and bought him a packet. When I
got back we had a long chat. He was pleased with the fags and I was
tickled to have made contact with such a lovely, open man. It was
another of those wee unexpected moments that I’ll always remember.
Something similar happened in 2009 when, during the making of
Journey to the Edge of the World – my voyage through the North West
Passage, deep within the Arctic Circle – I met Brian Pearson, the local
undertaker, cinema owner and bed-and-breakfast proprietor. A former
dishwasher, lord mayor and taxi driver, Brian was a complicated man
who reminded me of plenty of people I’d known as a kid. He was well
read, self-educated, but had a kind of grumpiness because he could
see things turning to shit all around him. And his mood wasn’t helped
by the fact that nobody tended to listen to him. Sat behind the wheel of
his hearse, he drove me around the streets of his small town, relating
stories about what really went on in his community. I spend a lot of time
on my own – even when I’m with people I often feel like I’m alone
because I think differently to most of them – so I’m always thrilled when
I manage to connect with another human being. That afternoon, I felt a
real connection with Brian, an interesting and interested man.
So when I was preparing to spend six weeks travelling across the
heartland of America, from Chicago to Santa Monica, I told myself that
if I had one encounter that equalled the tramp at Mary Shelley’s
graveside or Brian Pearson, then the trip would have been more than
worthwhile. Less than a week into my journey, I’d met Mervin, and
everything I’d hoped for had come true.
My journey along Route 66 began long before the first wheel turned on
tarmac beneath me. About a year after making Journey to the Edge of
the World, various television companies approached me with a load of
ideas about where I could go next. None of their suggestions
appealed, but then I mentioned to one of the producers at Maverick
Television that I had always wanted to travel along Route 66. They
leapt at it – after all, Route 66 is the most famous road in the world.
Everyone’s heard of it. My interest in it goes back to when I first heard
Chuck Berry belting out one of the best rock’n’roll records of all time:
‘(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66’. Ever since, I’ve wanted to travel the
length of Route 66 – just for my own enjoyment, without a film crew in
tow, as a holiday. It’s the grooviest road in the world.
Of course, many other roads have been made famous by songs.
There’s the road to the Isles and the road back home. There’s Abbey
Road and the Yellow Brick Road. And, as a Scotsman, I know all about
taking the high road or the low road. But that song’s all about being
dead. (I don’t mean to insult Scotland here, but it’s true. In ‘Loch
Lomond’, a dying soldier is talking to one of his comrades. The ‘high
road’, travelled by the healthy soldier, will be slower than the ‘low road’
that the dying man’s spirit will be able to take.) ‘Route 66’ is about
being alive. It is rock’n’roll. From Nat King Cole and Chuck Berry to the
Rolling Stones, Dr Feelgood, Depeche Mode and even Dean Martin,
it’s a classic. And because of the song, Route 66 has become one of
those magical places that you’ve always longed to see if you’ve got
any interest at all in rock’n’roll music and being alive.
None of the other songs urged people to hit the road simply for the
pleasure of getting their kicks from watching the miles go by. With its
exhortation to travel from Chicago through St Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma
City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow and San
Bernadino to Los Angeles, the song is an open invitation to anyone
seeking adventure to find their thrills and spills on a California road
trip. Who could resist? Not me, that’s for sure.
But it’s more than just the song. Route 66 is special for many
reasons. In America, all other routes, north–south and east–west, are
pronounced ‘rowt’. It’s rowt this and rowt that. But thanks to the song,
Route 66 has remained Root 66. And it’s steeped in a potent mix of
histories – of America as a nation and of rock’n’roll as a cultural force.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Route 66 appeals to everyone.
Americans, Europeans, Australians, Japanese and Southeast Asians,
you’ll meet them all along its 2,278 miles. It attracts car enthusiasts,
motorcyclists, guitar players, people with long hair, silly people and
dreamers. I hadn’t quite realised the extent of this popular appeal until
a few days after it was announced that I was going to ride its full length.
From then on, people started telling me that they’d always longed to do
the same thing. ‘My wife and I have been saving up for five years to do
Route 66,’ wrote one guy. ‘I hope you have a good trip,’ wrote another.
‘For me, it was the trip of a lifetime.’
Like the Silk Road or the salt and spice roads through Africa, the
Pan-American Highway or the Trans-African Highway, Route 66 is one
of those wonderful trails that will always exist. It’s been called a road of
dreamers and ramblers, drifters and writers. Well, I want to be part of
that. I want to sit on my bike and ride Route 66. I want to go to Santa
Fe and New Mexico. And I want to sing the song as I head down
through the plains of Illinois and Missouri, the Oklahoma and Kansas
prairies, the Texas Panhandle, the deserts and mountains of New
Mexico, Arizona and California. I want to sing along with Chuck Berry,
the Rolling Stones, Nat King Cole and all the other guys who have
recorded Bobby Troup’s fabulous song. And when I do it, I want to be
singing at the top of my lungs as the miles pass beneath my wheels.
More than anything, I want to reconnect with old small-town America.
Like a lot of Britain, much of it has been smothered under a beige
blanket of franchised coffee shops, fast-food palaces, faceless
shopping malls and edge-of-town superstores with uninspiring,
unimaginative corporate brand names above their doors. That’s not
real America. It’s the creation of blue-suited marketing and advertising
executives. Real America is to be found in all those small towns that
have been bypassed by the freeways. That’s where I hope to find the
fragments of thirties, forties and fifties Americana that I love. Funky
neon signs enticing travellers to pull in at motels and diners. Or the
giant oranges that used to lurk along the highways of California, selling
ice-cold, freshly squeezed juice to thirsty motorists. At one time there
was a chain of them across the state and they did a roaring trade. In
the days before air-conditioned cars and express freeways, a single
stand could easily go through six thousand oranges in a week. Now
there’s just one left on Route 66 – and I want to see it before it’s too
late.
Representing freedom, migration and the empty loneliness of the
American heartland, Route 66 is one of the essential icons of America
– not just for Americans, but for anyone who, like me, is fascinated by
the United States. Snaking across eight states, its concrete and
asphalt was a ribbon that tied the nation together and enticed millions
of Americans with a romantic ideal of adventure and an exodus to a
better life.
To some, it’s the ‘Mother Road’ immortalised by John Steinbeck in
The Grapes of Wrath – an escape route for thousands of farmers and
poverty-stricken families fleeing the barren dust bowl of Oklahoma and
Kansas for the promised land of California during the Great
Depression. To others – me included – just the mention of its name
always evokes the birth of rock’n’roll and Chuck Berry urging us to ‘get
our kicks’. To the beatniks and hipsters, it epitomises the great
American open road eulogised by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. To
the generation of baby-boom Americans that I know, it will always be
associated with a 1960s television series, called Route 66, in which
two young men travelled across America, seeking adventure and
getting caught up in the struggles of the people they met. And, like my
grandson, many of today’s youngsters know it from Cars, the Pixar
animated film that was conceived as a way of making a documentary
about the road and which features several businesses and residents
along the route.
When I thought about it, it struck me that in many ways, roads like
Route 66 are as significant to American culture and social history as
cathedrals and palaces are to European history. For a young nation
founded on exploration and migration west, these great arteries of
transportation became a major agent of social transformation. They
did more than just move people; they changed America. Among all
those highways, Route 66 was the everyman’s road that connected
Middle America with southern California, a strip of hardtop that led to
the birth of those icons of Americana I like so much: diners, motels and
road food. Route 66’s 2,278 meandering miles inspired thousands of
cross-country road trips. And what fun it must have been to travel its
length. Taking its travellers from Chicago on Lake Michigan to Santa
Monica on the Pacific Ocean (and vice versa), it traversed prairie,
open plains, desert, mountains, valleys and countless rivers and
creeks. What a trip.
Now that much of it has been bypassed by faster, cleaner and more
sterile interstate highways, the Mother Road has become, for me and
countless others, a historically significant relic of America’s past. To
those of us for whom it was once small-town America’s Main Street,
Route 66 represents a simpler time when family businesses, not
corporate franchises, dominated the landscape and neon motel signs
were icons of a mobile nation on the road.
One of the things that fascinates me is that by following the rutted
paths of Native American trails in some parts, Route 66 could even be
said to pre-date the arrival of white colonists in the New World. And the
road as we know it today can trace its origins to the great migration
west beyond the Mississippi in the nineteenth century. When I set off
from Chicago, I’d be riding along a route with a pre-history that began
in 1853, when the American government commissioned a survey to
build a transcontinental railway for military and civilian use. But when
the survey was complete, rather than investing in steel tracks, the wise
guys in Washington chose to construct a network of wagon trails. Even
in those days, it seems to me that the American instinct was to
empower the individual to make his or her own way in life. In 1857 a
wagon trail costing $200,000 was extended from the New Mexico–
Arizona border along a line close to the 35th parallel as far as the
Colorado River and linked into other trails to create a route between
the Arkansas River in Missouri and the furthest reaches of American
expansion into the southwest of the country.
 Fifty years later, when the first motor cars started to chug along
American dirt tracks, the Washington wise guys’ attention turned to
creating a hard-surfaced road right across the United States. At that
time, the main coast-to-coast road was the ramshackle Lincoln
Highway, which followed a northerly route from New York to San
Francisco, but few people made the trip and even fewer could afford a
car. In 1912 the federal government started building a road from
Washington, DC to St Louis along the Cumberland Road, an old
wagon trail. From St Louis, it was extended along a path following the
old Santa Fe Trail to Albuquerque in New Mexico before veering
southwards to Flagstaff in Arizona. Called the Grand Canyon Route,
the road then passed through Ashfork and Seligman to Topock on the
Colorado River, where cars were loaded on to railway trucks and
transported to Needles in California. The last section of road ran
through the Mojave Desert to San Bernardino before heading due
south to San Diego.
Except for a few minor diversions, all of that route from St Louis to
San Bernardino followed what would later become part of Route 66.
Then in 1914, Henry Ford, that genius of mass-manufacture, applied
the methods he’d seen in the Colt Revolver factory to making cars.
Within a decade of Henry Ford inventing his Model-T, the number of
registered vehicles on American roads had leapt from 180,000 to
more than 17 million, and motoring had become a means of
transportation for the masses. For American families and businesses,
the automobile promised unprecedented freedom and mobility. By the
early 1920s, they were demanding a reliable road network on which to
drive their newly acquired vehicles. In response, the federal
government pledged to link small-town USA with all of the metropolitan
capitals.
At last Route 66’s hour had come. In the summer of 1926 the first
interstate highway connecting Chicago to the West Coast was finally
authorised. Officially designated Route 66, it ran from Chicago to Los
Angeles, linking the isolated, rural West to the densely populated,
urban Midwest and Northeast. Chicago had long served as a central
meeting and distribution point for goods and people moving to the
West, so it made sense for it to be the starting point. A large part of the
new highway followed the old Santa Fe Trail and Grand Canyon Route.
Cobbled together from existing roads and designed to connect the
Main Streets of remote local communities, much of it was in poor
condition. Speeds above 20 m.p.h. were rarely possible in Oklahoma,
Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, where the road was often little more
than a dirt track cleared of the largest boulders. Nevertheless, by
running south to avoid the high passes of the Rocky Mountains, Route
66 was the first road from the Midwest to the Pacific that was passable
all year round.
By 1929, the whole of the Illinois and Kansas sections, two-thirds of
the Missouri section and a quarter of the road in Oklahoma had been
paved. Even bikers like me would have been happy with that. But
across all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and non-metropolitan
California only sixty-four miles had been surfaced. Nevertheless,
businesses in the numerous small towns along the route prospered as
local entrepreneurs built service stations, restaurants, motels,
campgrounds and entertainment attractions.
When the Great Depression gripped America in the early 1930s,
more than 200,000 people escaped from the dust bowl states of
Kansas and Oklahoma. Strapping their belongings on to their flatbed
trucks, they set off along Route 66 with dreams of a better life in the
promised land of California. President Roosevelt’s New Deal
programme increasingly eased their way, as thousands of unemployed
men were set to work on the road as part of a nationwide investment in
public works. By 1938, all of the Mother Road was surfaced with
concrete or tarmac, making it America’s first transcontinental paved
route.
The highway experienced its heyday over the next two decades. As
soon as America entered the Second World War in December 1941,
Route 66 became the primary transport route for millions of GIs and
mile-long convoys of military supplies, and a string of new military
bases soon sprang up along its length, particularly in New Mexico,
Arizona and California. Meanwhile, an unprecedented movement of
people began as several million more Americans headed west to work
in weapons and munitions plants, with the vast majority of them making
the journey along the Mother Road.
 After the war, the road remained as busy as ever. Millions of
Americans, among them thousands of soldiers and airmen who had
done their military training out west, exchanged the harsh climate of the
‘snowbelt’ for the easy living of the ‘sunbelt’. With more leisure time on
their hands, millions of others spent their vacations on road trips and
sightseeing. Catering to the holiday traffic and migrating masses, the
motels, campsites, cabins, diners, petrol stations, mechanics, tyre
dealerships and souvenir shops multiplied. The most iconic Route 66
landmarks – those neon-lit diners, gas stations and motels that I love –
all date from this period.
However, the Mother Road’s huge popularity sowed the seeds of its
own downfall. Like many of the roads that were constructed in the
1920s and 1930s, it was too narrow and structurally antiquated for the
fin-tailed gas guzzlers and vast ‘humping to please’ trucks of the
1950s. President Eisen hower had been impressed by the German
autobahn network he’d glimpsed during the war and his government
decided that the nation needed a similar network of multi-lane
highways, as much for military purposes (this was the height of the
Cold War) as for use by commercial freight and private vehicles. So,
starting in the late 1950s, sections of Route 66 were replaced by four-
lane interstate highways until, by 1970, travellers could drive the entire
distance from Chicago to Los Angeles along Interstates 55, 44 and 40
without ever coming into contact with small-town America. In fact, the
interstates made it possible to drive coast to coast without even
speaking to another human being. Stop, swipe your credit card, pump
some gas, buy a snack, then floor the pedal to the metal until the next
stop.
Life was slipping out of the Mother Road and in 1979 the Route 66
designation started to be removed from the hodgepodge of Main
Streets, farm-to-market roads and rural highways that had once linked
the two seaboards of America. Thousands of businesses that had
relied on it withered and died. Some entire towns ceased to exist. The
death knell for Route 66 itself finally sounded in 1985, when the Mother
Road was officially decommissioned.
Yet Route 66 refused to die. Realising its social significance in
America’s short history, a band of enthusiasts kept interest in the road
alive. In 1990 the US Congress passed a law that recognised Route
66 as a ‘symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their
legacy of seeking a better life’. A few years later an official
preservation programme was enacted by the National Park Service,
turning Route 66 into a de facto national monument.
Now it was my turn to set out on the legendary Mother Road and fulfil
the dream of a lifetime. As I packed my bags and left home, my only
hope was that I would experience proper emptiness – that sense of
being the only human alive for tens or even hundreds of miles around. I
wanted to be in the middle of nowhere, totally on my own, enveloped by
silence, like those scenes in the movies when you see the homeward-
bound GI step off the Greyhound bus into a vast empty plain beneath a
big blue sky.
I had made it clear to Nicky Taylor, the show’s producer, that
although I would obviously have a documentary crew in tow, I was
determined to travel with no preconceptions about what was lying
ahead of me. I told Nicky I wanted to keep the experience as pure as
possible. Even if it drove the crew doolally, I wouldn’t allow myself to be
barracked into visiting places that didn’t interest me. There was no
way I was going to take part in stunts or make detours simply because
they’d look good on television. I didn’t want set-up meetings with
weirdos and professional eccentrics, the kind of people whose entire
existence depended on promoting Route 66.
I wanted this to be a personal journey of discovery. I wanted to
experience every mile as it came upon me. When I woke each
morning, I didn’t want to know what I would be doing that afternoon, let
alone the next day. What would happen would happen. The
serendipitous nature of the trip was everything to me. Planning ahead
would kill the adventure and the excitement. If that happened, there
would be no point leaving home.
A few days later, I was standing on a fishing boat on Lake Michigan
in front of a spectacular view of Chicago. Spread out across the
horizon were the Willis Tower (still known by most people as the Sears
Tower), the Hancock Center, with its two pointy spires, and dozens of
other skyscrapers. You might wonder what I was doing on that boat.
Well, I was there to have a good look at Chicago before setting off –
like getting the target in my sights. It wasn’t my idea and, to be honest, I
found it a wee bit pointless. But these things have to be tried. Nothing
ventured, nothing gained.
Personally, I am not a boaty man. The rising and falling on the swell,
the false horizon and the diesel fumes combine to do me no good at
all. They make me bitchy. And on that windy, overcast afternoon in late
April, I was even bitchier than usual because, for some reason, I was
pissing like a racehorse. I’d gone about twelve times by the time I had
to shoot the first segment for the programme, introducing Chicago. But
in the midst of all this, I heard something that made me forget my foul
mood. The skipper told me he’d recently caught twenty-nine salmon in
a single day. In Lake Michigan, of all places! I’d always thought that the
lake was so polluted that nothing could possibly live in it.
To an ageing hippy like me, the skipper’s news was a bolt of joy.
Then he told me that commercial fishing has been banned on the lake.
Another wonderful thing. Sometimes old idealistic eco-heads like me
can get kind of depressed when we switch on the television and are
confronted by programmes about people killing crabs or hauling in
swordfish or hoovering the bottom of the sea in Alaska. Those
fishermen tend to be portrayed as macho heroes who do a very brave
and wonderful job, but to my mind they are vandals. So when I heard
that they are no longer allowed on such a vast expanse of water as
Lake Michigan, my heart sang a wee song. After all, it wasn’t so long
ago that Lake Erie, another of the Great Lakes, was officially declared
dead; and the Cuyahoga River, which flowed into it, was declared a
fire hazard. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than a river
being a fire hazard? But it happened because they poured tons of shit
– logs, oil, old tyres, paint, flammable chemicals and, literally, shit –
into it. The muck decomposed and created methane and other
flammable gases. Then, in June 1969, the inevitable happened and
the Cuyahoga did indeed catch fire, devouring two bridges in
Cleveland – a city that people started to call the ‘Mistake by the Lake’.
What in the name of God were we doing to ourselves?
Fortunately, the fire sparked so much public indignation that a legal
framework for protecting watercourses and lakes – the Clean Water
Act – was passed three years later. And now salmon were back in
Lake Michigan, which would never have happened without that piece
of legislation. We have our arses kicked on a daily basis by people
who don’t know what they are talking about, so it’s lovely to hear
something that makes me feel a wee bit proud to be a member of the
human race.
By the time we were heading back towards shore, I’d totally shaken
off my grouchy mood. It was still choppy on the lake, but now I was
feeling good about the world and excited about the journey ahead. I
was going to have lots of fun. Meet lots of people. See lots of things.
And tell you all about it. So come with me. Join me on Route 66. We’ll
get our kicks together on the Mother Road. Come on, I dare you.
Winding from Chicago
First things first. If I was going to travel the length of Route 66, I needed
the right kind of transportation. A sleek saloon car would have been
too dull; a 4×4 too plush. In many people’s eyes Route 66 requires
either a convertible or a fat Harley-Davidson. But neither seemed right
for me.
I did my time on bikes in my youth, but I felt that like most other things
of joy, the motorbike had become lifestyled and corporatised, a
packaged form of rebellion of which I wanted no part. So, with the
Chicago skyline looming in the distance, in a dirty backstreet
squeezed between semi-derelict buildings and empty spaces strewn
with boulders and rubbish, I met my steed. One hundred horsepower of
mean, throbbing heavenliness: a Boom Lowrider LR8 Muscle.
Officially, it was a trike, but for some reason I’d never been able to say
that word. I’d always said ‘bike’. Whatever I called it, though, it was a
thing of absolute beauty.
Water-cooled and fuel-injected, it had a 1.6-litre, four-cylinder Ford
Zetec engine and it rode like a dream. Most of it was fairly standard,
but I’d removed the leg guards and some tan-coloured panels along
the side of the black seats, added a pair of extra headlights and
adjustable suspension, and replaced some parts with chrome or
polished stainless-steel equivalents. It looked the business.
Now the thing about trikes – especially a modern, low-slung one like
the LR8 – is that my arse is only about eighteen inches off the tarmac. I
reckon it’s partly for this reason that they have such a profound effect
on people in their nice, safe, grey cars. I’d watch them as they drew
alongside me, gawping, mouthing, ‘Shit, look at that!’ and wishing they
were me. It happened countless times every day. Sometimes they
lowered their side windows and leant out. Then the questions start.
‘Oh, man, where did you get that thing?’
‘What kind of engine does it have?’
‘Jeez-sus! What’s that thing you’re riding?’
 I just make shit up. When they ask, ‘How many cylinders?’, I say,
‘Eight,’ then smile when they shout, ‘Wow! No way, man!’ (It only has
four.) But the trike is so outlandish to most people that I could make
almost anyone believe almost anything. Compared with anything else
on the road, it looks like a three-wheel Batmobile. It’s a joy, it’s funky
and it’s designed for showing off. A total poser’s machine. Some
people mightn’t like that, but I don’t give a shit what they say, because I
love it.
My trike was like a cross between a hot-rod car and a chopper bike,
but in fact it had all the disadvantages of a motorbike and none of the
advantages of a car. I couldn’t squit through a static line of traffic like a
motorcycle – I was stuck in the queue with the cars. But while I was
sitting there, waiting, I couldn’t listen to Radio 4. There was no heater,
so I’d freeze my bum off; and if it rained, my crotch would get soaking
wet. But that was also the great delight of a trike – I’d be at one with
nature, out in the fresh air, smelling and feeling and hearing my
surroundings, immersed in the landscape. A motorbike offered the
same sensation, but on a trike I could enjoy all that and lean back and
relax. Maybe that’s why bikers hate them so much, particularly those
Harley-riding weekend bikers (which, incidentally, is another reason
why trikes appeal to me).
One final thing I had to make clear from the very beginning of the trip
was that a bike was like a horse. It’s my bike. The production company
might have bought it at enormous expense, and the film crew might be
filming me on it, but it wasn’t our bike. And it certainly wasn’t their bike.
It was my fucking bike. So, if anyone fancied sitting on it, they had to
ask me fucking nice. And if they dared to swing their leg over my bike
without asking permission, they would get a very old-fashioned look
from me. At one point in the trip one of the girls in the crew climbed
aboard to turn off the lights and my immediate thought was: Fuck! She
never asked me!
But you should see the looks I got from people when I parked it. They
gazed at it enviously and I knew what they were thinking: Oh, I can
picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on,
singing along to ZZ Top’s ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ or the opening line
from ‘Born to be Wild’ by Steppenwolf – ‘ Get your motor running … ’
The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget
Viagra, get yourself a trike!
Before I took the beast out for the first time, I did something I’d never
done before. I strapped on a helmet. That’s right, I bought myself a
crash helmet. I’d always thought I was the last person on earth who
would do something like that. I didn’t know whether it was my age or
the age we lived in, but before I left home, I’d done a bit of serious
thinking. Now, some American states allowed bikers to ride without a
lid while others didn’t, but I wasn’t going to go splitting hairs over it. It
wasn’t like I wanted to be on some kind of bloody crusade. I’d always
enjoyed the freedom of wearing only a wee leather hat. After all, I had
three wheels, so it wasn’t like I was going to fall off. But then I started
thinking that somebody might thump into me. Don’t be a bloody penny
pincher, I thought. Just wear a helmet. Then my wife said, ‘Wear a
helmet,’ and that sealed it.
I’ll repeat that. I thought, Wear a helmet. My wife said, ‘Wear a
helmet.’ So I did.
Actually, that’s a complete lie. I didn’t even consult Pamela about it
this time. But she’d always thought I should wear a helmet, even on my
own trike in Scotland. So I decided all by myself: Cut out the crap, Billy.
Get a helmet.
Then I thought of two more good reasons for wearing a helmet.
Gary. And Busey.
In 1978, Gary Busey was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of
Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story. He also appeared in A Star is
Born, Top Gun and Lethal Weapon. But in December 1988 he had a
bike accident. He fractured his skull and suffered permanent brain
damage because he was not wearing a helmet. In time, he recovered,
but life was never the same for Gary.
So, I found myself in a Chicago motorbike store, looking for a
helmet. The choice was overwhelming. First up was a whole-face
helmet, like the ones that assassins wear. It was easy to decide
against one of those because the camera crew and viewers needed to
see my face when I was riding my bike. But that still left hundreds of
open-face helmets. I asked someone in the store for advice.
 ‘Does this look okay to you?’ I said. ‘Is it the right fit?’
‘Yeah,’ said the guy.
Then I realised he was carrying a bag of groceries and didn’t have a
clue what I was talking about. He’d just wandered in on his way back
from the supermarket.
Eventually I found someone who actually worked there and was
instantly reminded that most Americans are brilliant salesmen. Not only
did this guy sell us a helmet; he ran out and bought cheeseburgers and
soft drinks for all the crew, told jokes, had a laugh and made us all feel
absolutely welcome. A great representative of an extraordinary
country.
I’m one of those guys who looks slightly odd in a helmet, so I had to
be careful about exactly which model I chose. I tried on one that was
very popular with American bikers – it looked a bit like a Third Reich
helmet. I was relieved when it didn’t fit, because I thought the Nazi look
was much better left under the bed. In the end I settled on a black
open-faced number with a visor. And to my surprise, having bought it, I
didn’t feel any less cool. I was even looking forward to wearing it. It was
fitted up electronically so I could hear music on the trike, which was
brilliant, like having a jukebox wrapped around my head. And it was
rather comfortable, as long as I didn’t put the visor up. If I did that, it
caught the wind, so I decided that I’d either have to remove the visor or
keep it down at all times. No visor, I suspected, was going to win, and
I’d wear the helmet with my fishing glasses. ‘Wait till you see them,’ I
told the crew as I tried them on with the helmet. ‘They will blow you
away. They’re yellow, kind of amber, polarised lenses with silver
sides.’
I checked myself in the mirror to see how the helmet looked with the
glasses. Pretty groovy, I thought. Windswept, interesting and much
better than I’d expected. The salesman tried to sell me a pair of
motorcycle gloves, but I’d already decided I’d go to a cowboy shop.
Cowboys do much better gloves than motorcyclists. The problem with
most motorcycle gloves is they do this thing, the go-fast look. Well, I
don’t like it. I prefer it more casual, because a trike’s different from a
bike. Bikes are for going fast, making a lot of noise and all that. A
trike’s kind of laid back. As I’ve said, it’s a posing machine. And I knew
exactly what I wanted to wear on my hands while I posed: tan-coloured,
deer-hide cowboy gloves. Oh yes.
Sorted with helmet and gloves, it was time to christen the trike. I’d
been looking forward to this moment, but taking the beast out for its
virgin ride was a nightmare. It had a different gear-box from mine back
home, so I couldn’t find the gears instinctively. But once I’d studied a
diagram and learned how to go through the gears, it became a joy;
although, for some reason, I still needed to know Serbo-Croat yoga to
get it into reverse. I liked to think the soul of the bike didn’t want to have
a reverse gear. It just wasn’t right – bikes shouldn’t go backwards. So I
thought the bike was fighting it all the way. But once I’d worked it out, I
was as happy as a clam. And, as you know, clams are very happy
things.
With the camera crew ahead of me in a car, we did a big tour
around the outskirts of Chicago so that I could get used to the trike. It
was fantastic to see the city looming up all around me, like in a
science-fiction movie. Then I rode into town and it was just great. The
trike ran like a cuckoo clock.
The only downside was the weather. It was a dodgy-looking day,
with the weather neither one thing or the other. One of those greyish,
yellowy, funky, funny days. Every time I phoned someone in Scotland,
they told me they were in the middle of a searing heatwave and I
seethed with envy. That morning, I’d seen a weather report from
Britain. It was mid-April and seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, and
everyone was running around in their underwear. I love the British
fervour for throwing off our clothes. And the first people to disrobe are
always the ones with the grubbiest underwear, like the guys I knew in
the shipyards who put on long johns in September and took them off in
May. Meanwhile, we were freezing our balls off in Chicago.
As I rode through downtown Chicago, past the famous water tower, I
tried out the communication link with the director, Mike. It worked like a
dream, and it was great to show him that I could talk straight to the
camera from the bike. It meant that I didn’t need to stop at a location
before explaining it to viewers. I was dead against television that
spoon-fed information to people. If I said, ‘There’s a water tower over
there,’ as I drove past, I could then talk about it later, knowing that the
viewers would remember it. I didn’t have to stop, lean against it, point
and labour the point that I was talking about a water tower. We shot a
piece about the city from the bike as we drove along with all the other
traffic flying around us, before eventually arriving at the shiny black
monolith that dominates the Chicago skyline.
For twenty-five years, the Sears Tower in Chicago was the tallest
building in the world. But it was overtaken in 1998 by those cheeky
upstarts in Malaysia with their twin skyscrapers, the Petronas Towers.
So these days it was just the tallest building in America, but that was
more than good enough for me when I visited it. Built as the
headquarters of Sears Roebuck and Co., the tower used nine exterior
frame tubes of different lengths, from 50 to 110 storeys, bundled
together to provide strength and flexibility, avoiding the need for
interior supports. It was said that the architect conceived this
technologically innovative building when he watched someone shake
cigarettes out of a packet.
Officially, the building was rechristened the Willis Tower in 2009, but
it would always be the Sears Tower to me. Willis, a London-based
insurance broker, leased three of the tower’s 110 floors and gained
the naming rights to the whole shebang until 2024. The name-change
was not a popular move. Time magazine said it was one of the top ten
worst corporate rebrandings, while CNN reported that many
Chicagoans were refusing to acknowledge the new title.
Whatever its name, though, the tower was a beauty and I loved it.
Riding up in the lift – or, more appropriately, the elevator – a recorded
message reeled off some very impressive statistics about this 1,450-
foot ‘modern marvel’. In just seventy seconds we shot past the height of
the Great Pyramid, the Seattle Space Needle, the Gateway Arch in St
Louis, Moscow State University, the Eiffel Tower and so on until we
emerged 103 floors above ground level. There were still another five
storeys above me, but this was the viewing floor, which has the most
spectacular views, if you like that kind of thing. All of Chicago, a large
chunk of Lake Michigan and a fair bit of the State of Illinois were
spread out around the tower. It was stunning.
Much of what made the view so spectacular was there because of
the events of four days in 1871, when Chicago was devastated by a
massive fire. At that time, the entire city centre, stretching over four
square miles, was built of wood. Eighteen thousand properties were
destroyed, 300 people died and 90,000 were made homeless. Only
the water tower that I’d ridden past earlier in the day was left standing.
It was remarkable to think that all of central Chicago was rebuilt around
that tower. Nowadays, it served as a monument to the Great Fire of
Chicago. (Incidentally, on the same day that the fire broke out, not far
from Chicago, a forest fire killed even more people, but few people
ever mentioned or remembered it.)
Once the fire had burned itself out, Chicago’s mayor, a guy called
Roswell Mason, sent out an all-points bulletin. He said: ‘Tomorrow, one
hundred thousand people will be without food and shelter. Can you
help?’ It worked like magic. People responded unbelievably well.
Millions of dollars flooded in, and the cash enabled the city authorities
to rebuild Chicago from scratch, something that had never been done
on such a large scale. Architects, builders and anyone else with a
good idea flooded in from all over the world. There was no rule book in
1871, no health and safety officers or building regulation inspectors, so
the rebuilding of Chicago was fast and furious.
But possibly the most significant factor in the whole process was
that seventeen years earlier, a bedstead maker in New York – Elisha
Otis – had designed a hoist for lifting heavy equipment around his
factory. Otis’s device had ratchets fitted to the sides of the hoist. These
ratchets, which allowed a platform to move up and down smoothly, also
snapped into action at any sudden downward movement, preventing a
lethal plunge. Otis immediately realised that he had something special
on his hands, so he urged the bed company to market his invention. At
an impressive public display at New York’s Crystal Palace in 1854,
Otis ascended on his hoist to the height of a house, then ordered
someone to cut the rope with an axe. The audience gasped as the
ratchets sprang into action and Otis remained suspended in mid-air.
Everyone was very impressed.
Three years later, Otis turned his invention into the first ‘safety
elevator’, which was installed for passenger use in a New York
department store. Of course, it was more than just a gimmick. By
transporting people rapidly and effortlessly upwards, it made multi-
storey buildings practical and safe for the first time. Thanks to Otis, no
one needed to fear the vertical abyss opening up beneath their feet as
they ascended a skyscraper like the Sears Tower in a high-speed lift. If
the steel cables hoisting up the cart snapped, they’d feel nothing more
than a slight wobble as the ratchets sprang into action. The lift would
stay put, suspended in mid-air until help arrived.
So, when Chicago’s leaders started rebuilding the city centre after
the devastating fire, they had the opportunity to build bigger, better and
especially higher. Land was expensive and scarce, so developers
went upwards not outwards. The Home Insurance Company Building, a
ten-storey office block completed in Chicago in 1885, was regarded
as the first true modern skyscraper. It was the first to use steel girders,
which were stronger than iron, and the first to hang an outer masonry
curtain wall on the load-bearing steel skeleton. Sadly, it doesn’t exist
any more, but there is a wee plaque commemorating it on Route 66.
Of course, at only ten storeys high, it would be considered a dwarf in
comparison with today’s skyscrapers, but after it was built it was clear
that the only way the city could go was up. In Chicago, the sky was the
limit.
Standing in the Sears Tower, there was a real sense of where Mr
Otis’s invention had taken us, particularly when I stepped into the wee
glass cubicle that jutted out of the side of the building, more than a
thousand feet above the ground. It was like a high version of the Pope-
mobile, and stepping into it was a real nerve-tickler, the creepiest
feeling I’d ever experienced. Looking between my feet straight down to
the street, something inside me insisted I shouldn’t be standing there. I
felt my heart pumping, my nerves tingling and my body shouting, ‘Don’t
do this. Please don’t do this. This is wrong. This does not compute. Go
back. Go back.’ I didn’t know what anyone hoped to achieve by
offering visitors the chance to walk into that glass box, except for a
celebration that they weren’t dead.
Like anyone who had ever stepped into that wee glass box, I really
had to fight the urge not to do it. And that fitted with something that had
always amused and amazed me about human beings. If you go up to a
baby and roar at it, the baby will show signs of being frightened and
will close its eyes. But then it’ll open its eyes and want you to do it
again. Well, it was the same thing with the glass box. The floor was
going ‘roar’ and I was going, ‘Again, again!’ for the same reason that
people freefall parachute. So, even though something kept nagging at
me to get out of the wee glass box right away, I stuck at it, not least
because the view was so remarkable.
Far beneath me, I spotted a line of yellow taxis turning into Adams
Street. Although it was just a regular Chicago street, it was also the
start of Route 66, from where I’d soon be heading out west. But before
I turned my trike towards California, I had to visit a few places in the
Windy City. Incidentally, the Windy City nickname is believed to have
come either from the propensity of Chicago’s politicians to make long-
winded speeches or from a New York newspaper editor’s accusation
that Chicagoans tended to boast about their hometown. It was
apparently not a comment on the notoriously nippy winds that blasted
from the plains and Lake Michigan through Chicago’s concrete
canyons. Chicago was not significantly windier than any other
American city, such as New York or Boston, although when the Arctic
wind came off the lake and blew down Michigan Avenue, it could cut
you in half.
Before leaving the Sears Tower, I made it up the final five floors from
the glass bubble to the roof. Standing on the very top of the building, I
stood like a dooley while a helicopter swooped from a great distance
and filmed me pointing to the west. Easy enough, but the highlight of
the roof visit was the story I was told of a guy who was painting the
antenna and was microwaved. It’s said that he cooked himself, losing
the use of his legs because of the sheer power of the transmitter. It had
the ring of an urban legend about it, but it still amused me.
One of the best things about the Sears Tower was that whenever I
saw the building again, I’d know I’d been on top of it. Having already
stood on top of lots of things, it added to the collection, which included
Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Both of them reminded
me of my daughter, who once said the nicest thing. She was on the
back of my Harley trike as we were coming over the Harbour Bridge,
driving towards the Opera House, where I was performing a gig.
‘God I love it here,’ she said. ‘I love being here.’
 ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘When you’re here, you know exactly where you are on the planet.’
I thought, Oh my goodness, so you do. It was absolutely true. Since
then, I’ve become more and more aware of how iconic landmarks
could do that to you – let you know exactly where you were on earth.
The Taj Mahal did it. The Empire State Building did it. The Houses of
Parliament and the Eiffel Tower did it. And so did the Sears Tower.
Most of the time we didn’t know precisely where we were, but those
buildings made us totally aware of our place in the world. It was no big
deal, just a wee jolly, but it pleased me no end.
Before leaving the tower, I looked out one last time from the roof and
gazed southwest. Seeing my journey laid out in front of me got me
thinking of what lay further along the road – Illinois, Missouri, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, then the
Pacific. Far below, I could see the thick artery of eight lanes of
Interstate 55 snaking through the conurbation – the most popular way
out of Chicago. Since the mid-1960s, it had been the official
replacement for Route 66. As I mused about starting the journey, I
heard the whine of a train horn in the distance. The loneliest sound in
the world, but also one of the most romantic, it beckoned me to venture
out into the vast plains of America and explore what lay along the
mythical highway. But first I wanted to go on another quick spin around
central Chicago, one of my favourite cities.
Whenever I’m in Chicago, I make a point of visiting Fort Dearborn.
Nowadays it’s just some brass plates on the road and pavement
outside Fanny Mae’s sweet shop on the corner of two city centre
streets. I always stop in the shop to buy a few sweeties. They do a
lovely plain chocolate caramel. If I could force one through the pages of
this book, I’d give you one. Those brass plates mark the point where
Fort Dearborn used to be located. For some unfathomable reason, I’ve
always had a romantic image of the fort, which I used to think was the
site of the last Indian battle on American soil. But I recently discovered
that it was actually the site of a massacre of French pioneers
conducted by Native Americans, supported by the British.
In the 1670s, French pioneers were the first Europeans to travel
along the Chicago River. They settled near its mouth and claimed a
large surrounding territory for France. About thirty years later, they
were driven out by Fox Indians during the Fox Wars, which continued
until the 1730s. At the end of the French and Indian War (the North
American portion of the Seven Years War between Britain and
France) in 1763, the area was ceded to Britain, which in turn lost it to
the United States at the end of the American War of Independence. As
a result, in 1776 the mouth of the Chicago River was resettled by a
new wave of pioneers. Among them was Jean Baptiste Point du
Sable, a Haitian farmer and trader who, as the first permanent resident
of Chicago, is regarded as the founder of the city. (In case you were
wondering, the city takes its name from shikaakwa, the Miami–Illinois
Indian word for the stinky, leek-like vegetables that can still be found
rotting along the banks of the Chicago River.)
In 1804 US troops constructed a log fort at the mouth of the river.
They named it after Henry Dearborn, the Secretary of War, and a small
settlement grew around it. The village didn’t last long, though. In 1812
war broke out again between the United States and the British Empire,
including Canada. General William Hull, the Governor of Michigan,
ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, but Potawatomi Indians
ambushed the evacuees, killing eighty-six and capturing sixty-two
soldiers, women and children, among them the commandant and his
wife, who were ransomed to the British. A posse of five hundred
Indians was sent to do the gig, so it was not a small skirmish. Those
troops and pioneers got wellied, and their fort was burned to the
ground. It was rebuilt in 1816, but it must have been a tough place to
live, as various wars with Winnebago and Black Hawk Indians
continued to rage. Most of the fort was again destroyed by fire in 1857,
and what remained was razed to the ground in the Great Fire of 1871.
I always liked to stand at the crossroads outside Fanny Mae’s for a
wee while, imagining flaming arrows flying overhead. On one occasion
a young woman came up to me, a kind of hippy girl, and asked what I
was doing. I told her I was thinking of Indians ambushing the pioneers.
‘Oh, you like all that kind of stuff about Chicago?’ she said.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Love it.’
‘Do you like architecture?’
 ‘Oh yeah. You bet.’
And it’s true – I do. The Michigan–Wacker Historic District in the
centre of Chicago, where Fort Dearborn used to stand, is an amazing
place for gazing at buildings. There’s a remarkable line-up of world-
class architecture on both banks of the Chicago River, such as the
gleaming white art deco Wrigley Building, chosen by William Wrigley,
the chewing gum magnate, to house his company. There are several
other stunning granite skyscrapers built in the 1920s and 1930s. But
smack in the middle of all that fabulous beauty is a glass monstrosity,
erected where another lovely white stone building used to stand. The
modern eyesore was built by Donald Trump and, in my opinion, it’s a
piece of shit, so I always just pretend it’s not there. It looks totally out of
place, and it makes me quite angry that Trump was allowed to build it.
He wants to be President, but I can’t help thinking that the whole
country would end up looking like a public toilet if he was ever elected.
Gazing at all of the surrounding buildings with the hippy lass, I
pointed at what looked like a big, skinny cathedral. ‘That’s my
favourite,’ I said.
‘Oh, mine too,’ she said.
So we started to walk towards the Chicago Tribune Building, and
on the way over she asked, ‘Do you have old buildings in Scotland?’
I’m still laughing about that question now, but at the time I just said,
‘Yeah.’
‘We’ve got buildings here a hundred years old,’ she said.
‘Ooh.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘in Scotland, there’s a place called New
Bridge. It’s called New Bridge because they built a new bridge there
… in the seventeenth century. Mind you, they’re still driving over the old
bridge.’
The girl looked kind of bewildered, then wandered off. I’m sure she
didn’t believe a word of it.
It was a short walk from the site of Fort Dearborn to the Chicago
Tribune Building and I crossed the river on one of the many bridges
that could be raised to allow tall shipping to pass into Lake Michigan.
On St Patrick’s Day, they dye the river green in recognition of
Chicago’s large Irish community. But the dye wasn’t really necessary,
as the river had a weird green tint to it all year round. Walking over the
bridge, I again had reason to doubt the origins of Chicago’s nickname.
The city might have more than its fair share of gasbag politicians and
boastful locals, but that morning it didn’t seem that way. My hair was
the clue: a horizontal haircut. Try telling me that Chicago wasn’t
windswept.
Approaching the Chicago Tribune Building, the first thing you notice
is the vertical stripes, which makes it seem much taller than its 462
feet. But move closer and it looks more like a Gothic King Arthur’s
Castle. This combination might sound incongruous, but it works
brilliantly. It’s a most attractive building, built as a result of a
competition held in 1922 to design the most beautiful office building in
the world. The architects won a $100,000 prize and the commission to
build the tower. If they held the same competition today, I think the
same architects would win again. They would certainly get my vote. I
love it. I know some breathtaking buildings are being constructed,
especially in Spain, but I don’t think any of them compare with the
Chicago Tribune Building. To me, it’s a thing of absolute beauty. But
there’s more to the building than just the original design, as brilliant as
that is.
The original owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune , Robert
‘Colonel’ McCormick, had been a war correspondent and he went to
Europe early in the First World War to interview Tsar Nicholas II, Prime
Minister Herbert Asquith and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston
Churchill. While travelling around Europe, he collected chunks of
historic buildings, including a lump of stone that had been blown off
Ypres Cathedral by the German artillery. Initially, he just kept these as
souvenirs, but then he instructed the Tribune’s correspondents,
wherever they were in the world, to start collecting pieces of other
famous buildings ‘by well-mannered means’. When the
correspondents arrived back in Chicago with their booty, the pieces of
masonry were implanted in the outer walls of the lower storeys of the
Chicago Tribune Building.
Now, walking around the tower, I kept spotting them, and it was
difficult not to exclaim whenever I saw a chunk: ‘Ooh, look, a wee bit of
Edinburgh Castle!’ or ‘Wow, a chunk of the Parthenon!’ Quite how the
correspondents managed to collect all of this stuff ‘by well-mannered
means’ was a mystery to me. Did they sneak up Edinburgh’s High
Street in the middle of the night with a sledgehammer and smash a
chunk off the castle walls? I didn’t know, so I suppose it was better not
to question their methods and just enjoy the result.
There were lumps of masonry from Tibet, the Great Wall of China,
the Taj Mahal, the Palace of Westminster, the Great Pyramid, the
Alamo, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Berlin
Wall, Angkor Wat – the list went on and on. In all, there are 136
fragments of other buildings implanted into the walls of the Chicago
Tribune Building. As I walked around the perimeter, I took a wee look
at each piece of Colonel McCormick’s grand haul: the Royal Castle,
Stockholm; the Ancient Temple, Hunan Province; Fort Santiago; St
David’s Tower, Jerusalem; a piece from the Holy Door of St Peter’s
Basilica in the Vatican; a wee bit of Pompeii; the Badlands, South
Dakota – that was a nice one; the Monastery of St Michael of Ukraine;
the Old Post Office in O’Connell Street, Dublin, where the Irish
rebellion started; the Temple of the Forbidden City, Beijing; a roof tile
from some Roman ruins; a tiny shard of stone from the Cave of the
Nativity in Bethlehem; a rock from Flodden Field in Northumberland,
where the English gave the Scots one hell of a doing; then, next to it, a
piece from the Tower of Tears in Amsterdam.
But my favourite is a fragment of Injun Joe’s Cave, a show cave in
Missouri on which Mark Twain based the cave he described in The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I’m a Twain fanatic, so I was really
disappointed when it wasn’t where I thought it would be. But then, at
the very last second, I came around a corner and there it was, my old
pal sticking straight out of the wall. Just seeing it made my day. The
smallest things can make me happy. I gave it a little rub, just to check I
hadn’t imagined it. Phew. I wasn’t senile like I thought I might be.
From my favourite building I walked a few blocks south down
Michigan Avenue, one of my favourite streets, past more magnificent
architecture to Millennium Park, which adjoins Grant Park, where
Barack Obama held his victory speech after winning the 2008
presidential election. Still marvelling at the fabulous buildings, I
reflected that Chicago was a very beautiful place – a stunningly good-
looking city – and Chicagoans generally seemed intent on keeping it
that way, making it more gorgeous as they went along. It wasn’t like
Edinburgh, where the city authorities were in the process of plonking a
big bloody tram system down the middle of Princes Street, the jewel in
the city’s crown.
It seemed to me that most of the world’s beautiful cities – Venice,
Rome, Paris, even Glasgow, which was a gorgeous Victorian city –
were constantly under pressure from cretins who wanted to build awful
eyesores, or demolish the beauty and replace it with car parks. I could
only assume that the people who found themselves in positions of
authority, which they achieved because they were desperate for
power, seldom had any aesthetic taste. Meanwhile, the people who
did have taste didn’t seek power. So cities were constantly under
threat because the tasteless people were always in charge. It
saddened me. But walking down the streets of Chicago really cheered
me up, because it was a living example of how a city could improve
and get better looking all the time.
Then I arrived at Millennium Park, which was the cherry on
Chicago’s icing. Close to the shore of Lake Michigan, right in the
middle of the city, this was a stunning park, but there was a huge row
about it when it was built. Although it covered only twenty-four acres, it
cost $475 million, more than three times its original budget, which the
people of Chicago funded through a combination of taxes and
donations. To make matters worse, it opened four years late, in 2004,
long after the New Year’s Eve it was meant to celebrate.
However, in spite of its shaky beginnings and huge cost, I thought it
was a triumph, and incredible value for money. It will last a long time
and Chicagoans will keep reaping its rewards. I only wished we had
something similar in Glasgow.
It reminded me of a story I once heard about a city that bought some
Jackson Pollock paintings. The authorities were harangued and
mercilessly ridiculed by everyone who thought the paintings were
worthless junk. Then, ten or twenty years later, the ridicule stopped as
those people who’d complained and grouched discovered what a
wonderful investment the city had made on their behalf. I hoped the
same thing happened with Millennium Park. It was already Chicago’s
second most popular tourist attraction, and the area around it had the
fastest-appreciating real estate in America. But what really mattered
was that it was such a life-affirming place, thanks in part to its
designer, Frank Gehry – probably the most important architect of our
age.
Built over rail yards and parking lots, the centrepiece of the park was
an ultra-modern, vast open-air concert venue that accommodated
4,000 in seats and another 7,000 on a huge lawn. A field of thick grass
sloped down towards the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a stage surrounded by
120-foot-high slices of brushed stainless steel that looked like ribbons
fluttering in the wind. Above it all, a spider’s web of criss-crossing
pipes housed hundreds of loudspeakers, suspended above the
audience to distribute the sound as effectively as inside a concert hall.
It was unbelievable.
Nearby, there was a great sculpture by the Indian-born British artist
Anish Kapoor. Although called ‘Cloud Gate’, everybody knew it as ‘The
Bean’. If you saw it, you’d know why: it looked just like a 66-foot-long,
33-foot-high, shiny, metallic jelly bean. Created using a huge number of
stainless-steel plates weighing more than 110 tons, ‘The Bean’ had
been polished to such a fine degree that I couldn’t see a single seam.
Jesus only knows how Anish Kapoor managed to do it. But what
everyone loved about The Bean was the way it stretched and distorted
views of the Chicago skyline behind you when you stood in front of it.
And when I walked underneath it, I saw myself multiplied, repeated and
stretched.It was like looking into a psychedelic kaleidoscope.
The area around ‘The Bean’ is extremely beautiful, and when we
filmed there it was full of people, even though it was a very cold day. A
mass of really happy visitors were taking photographs, wandering
around, and smiling and laughing when they saw their reflections in the
sculpture – surely that was proof of its value. Young and old alike were
tickled by it. People even did little dances to see how their reflections
would move. It struck me that ‘The Bean’ had a quality like the
International Camera Dance Movie that for years I’ve been
threatening to make. My plan would be to take a movie camera out of
its case, put it on a tripod in an urban area, and just leave it running.
Children would jump up and down in front of it. Adults would stop and
stare. And whatever country they came from, people’s reactions would
be the same. ‘Ooh,’ they’d say in their native tongue, ‘look – a
camera.’ Then they’d shimmy around in front of it, moving in for a
closer look. You might think I’m indulging in my habit of digressing, but
there’s a point here. Just like ‘The Bean’, and in the nicest possible
way, my movie would have no point whatsoever. They’re both just fun
and interesting and they make us smile. And a lot of good things have
no point at all.
So, if you ever get the chance, have a look at the views of Chicago
that are reflected in ‘The Bean’. There’s no point to it, but just go and
see if it has the same effect on you as it has on everyone else. I bet it
does.
A short walk from ‘The Bean’ is something else that would blow
anyone away. Called the ‘Crown Fountain’ and designed by the
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, it’s a pair of 50-foot-tall glass towers that
display video images of a thousand Chicago residents in what looks
like a big picture frame. I won’t even pretend to know how they
superimposed the images on to the 50-foot-high glass towers, but it’s
fascinating to watch as the giant faces smile for a few minutes, then
pucker their lips all kissy-kissy while pipes send out large streams of
water, giving the illusion that the water is spouting from their mouths.
Kids absolutely love it, me included.
Of course, there’s always uproar when a government or a council
spends public money on something like this, as if art wasn’t worth the
effort of spending money. But then a government will go and spend
billions on nuclear missiles and hardly anybody lets out a squeak.
What’s wrong with the world? You get an atomic submarine that’s
good for nothing but maiming and killing, and people almost applaud
the thing when it comes into harbour. But spend a few dollars on a
beautiful work of art and people are outraged. ‘The Bean’, the ‘Crown
Fountain’ and the other parts of Millennium Park are a joy, yet people
always moan about how much it all costs. The park is a lovely place to
be, dynamic and relaxing at the same time. It’s great. And you know
what? I think it’s a snip at $475 million.
From the park, it’s a very short hop, skip and jump across Michigan
Avenue to the original start of Route 66 at the corner of Jackson
Boulevard. It’s traditional for Route 66 travellers to have their final meal
in Chicago and their first on Route 66 at Lou Mitchell’s, which has
been at 555 West Jackson Boulevard since 1923. It’s a nice enough
place that does an all-day breakfast and very good Danish pastries,
but I had an appointment to keep around the corner.
Although the junction of Jackson and Michigan was the original
starting point in 1926, it’s no longer the place where most people
begin their journey. There are two reasons for this. First, in 1933, after
the World Fair freed up some land to create Grant Park, the start was
moved a few blocks to the east – to Lakeside Drive on the edge of
Lake Michigan. Then, in 1955, the City of Chicago turned Jackson
Boulevard into an eastbound one-way street, making it impossible to
head west on the original Route 66. As a result, the start was moved a
block north to Adams Street, another one-way street, but going in the
opposite direction.
If all of that sounds complicated, it’s nothing in comparison to what
happened to the rest of Route 66. Throughout its history, the Mother
Road was more akin to a meandering river than a fixed road: its
source and destination remained constant, but its route frequently
changed to suit local circumstances. So shifting the start from Jackson
to Adams is a very apt harbinger of what will follow in the miles ahead.
I arrived on Adams Street without my trike, as I still wasn’t quite
ready to begin. First, we had to shoot some publicity stills beneath a
sign that marked the start of Route 66. I’ve never been a big fan of
having my picture taken. To me, it’s as bad as going to the dentist, a
kind of root-canal vibe. The photographers are usually really nice guys,
but I can’t help feeling – when I’m doing something with my face, my
eyes, or the angle of my head – that the snapper is thinking, Is this how
this prick sees himself? I know it’s probably just paranoia, but I can
never get shot of it, so I always find the whole process kind of
awkward, and I’m usually very glad when it’s over.
That evening, I was especially glad when we finished because it was
bloody freezing, so much so that I went out and bought some thermals
afterwards. Something weird was happening to the weather in the
Midwest of America in late April 2011. To the east, west and north of
us there were typhoons, hurricanes and probably fucking tsunamis by
the dozen. I had no idea what was going on, but it did occur to me that
it might be the end of the world.
The next day I was back at the corner of Adams and Michigan, now
dressed in my leather jacket and leather chaps, with a nice big crutch
cut out of them – just what I needed to let in the freezing-cold air. I
pulled on my helmet and threw a double-six to start.
Leaving early in the morning, I didn’t need to be told it was a Sunday
– it’s a strange day all over the world. I’ve got a theory that if you were
unconscious in a coma for twenty years and you suddenly woke up,
you might not know where you were, but you would know if it was a
Sunday. It’s got a particular vibe to it, just like Friday night – my
personal favourite. I think that Friday night feeling comes from the days
when I had my welder’s wages in my back pocket, all aftershave and
shoeshine, going dancing at the end of the week at the Barrowland or
the Dennistoun Palais in Palermo shoes with inch-vents on the jacket
and sixteen-inch drainpipe trousers. Happy days.
Riding off on the magic trike to the sound of a busker playing a
saxophone – of all things, it sounded like ‘Careless Whisper’ by
George Michael – we soon left Millennium Park and the Art Institute of
Chicago behind us. I’d wanted to pop into the Institute to see a specific
painting, Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ – the one with the guy in his
overalls holding a pitchfork, standing next to his daughter. But we never
made it, mainly because of all that weird weather. And it was still weird
now – we were heading straight towards tornadoes. I dearly hoped we
wouldn’t run into one. I’d seen a tornado once before, and it was more
than enough to last me the rest of my life.
A Royal Route
I was travelling light. My golden rule for any trip is to clear out my mind
before I leave home. Empty it so that it’s wide open to every
experience during the journey. It’s like travelling with an empty suitcase
that I can fill with things I find along the way. I don’t understand why
anyone would want to gather up all the things that surround them at
home – pictures and mementoes and life’s little luxuries – and take
them on the road with them. The only things from home that are
essential to me are my banjo and an iPod packed with banjo music
that I listen to when I’m on my trike.
Riding through the centre of Chicago, almost every time I stopped
someone called out to me, like the taxi driver who wanted to know what
I was riding. ‘It’s a trike,’ I said. Then a young lad on a skinny bike
remarked on the quietness of my engine. ‘It’s got four cylinders,’ I
replied. This makes it a lot quieter than the single-and twin-cylinder
Harley-Davidsons that usually cruise the streets.
A woman crossing the road yelled, ‘Hey, Billy!’ I nodded and smiled
at her. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked as she whipped out a
camera and took my picture.
‘We’re making a film about Route 66. That’s why I’m in Chicago.’
It was nice to be recognised by fans and passers-by. It made me
feel all famous and warm and cuddly.
At the end of the block I passed under one of the most iconic sights
in Chicago – the cast-iron legs of the elevated train system. Or the ‘El’,
as Chicagoans call it. Nelson Algren, the novelist who wrote The Man
with the Golden Arm, called it Chicago’s rusty iron heart. It works like a
subway system, transporting people far away from the traffic of cars,
buses and trucks on the roads, but it’s above the ground rather than
below. I think it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s like the Forth Bridge to me –
all rivets and girders and proof of how clever men can be. And it has
the same impact as a red London bus or a yellow New York taxi. As
soon as you see any of those things in a movie, you know exactly
where you are. Usually there’s a car chase going on under the El. Or
people running along with guns, with one guy on the road and another
way up above him on the El, trying to hide, legging it up and down
stairs, or sprinting along the tracks and past queues of commuters,
shoving them out of the way.
I wish we had an El in Glasgow. We almost did once. In the 1930s a
guy called George Bennie built a prototype rail system called the
‘railplane’ at Milngavie, just outside the city. It was on legs and rails,
just like the El, but the cars hung from an overhead monorail and had
propellers powered by on-board motors at each end of the carriage.
They looked like cigar tubes. Bennie reckoned his trains could travel at
up to 120 m.p.h., but he couldn’t find someone to finance his great
idea and build it in Glasgow. That was a shame, because we
Glaswegians could have had something like the El, but even more
swanky. Sydney’s got something similar now – the overhead railway –
and it’s hugely popular. It makes the traffic flow better and people like it
because they can get to work easily. It’s comfortable, it’s funky and it
looks great.
Because I like the El so much, I’d persuaded the director that we
ought to film something about it before we set off on Route 66. But
when we went to do it I was a wee bit disillusioned because the
director took us far down the line, where the El runs along rails at
ground level, not suspended above the street. What I didn’t realise was
that it’s difficult to get permission to film on the inner-city section that I
like. But then the director told me he had a wee trick in mind. We
boarded a train a long way out of town and I interviewed a supervisor
called Jackie, who is some kind of expert on the system and its history.
While I asked her all about her job and the El, the train started to rise
above the streets, and before I knew it we were back in the centre of
Chicago. I got off the train and walked down the stairs, with the crew
filming me all the way. Result.
It made me very happy, not because we’d found a cunning way to
bypass the restrictions, but because I like to celebrate the
achievements of the human race. I like to show people at their best.
And I think you often see people at their absolute best in engineering.
Of course, the El is a staggering feat of engineering, especially the
riveting. There must be a zillion rivets in Chicago, and most of them
are on the El. Whenever I see something like the El, or a big ship or an
impressive bridge, I get so proud of my species. Which makes a
change. It’s our fault that the jungle is on fire, although I never set fire to
a jungle in my life. It’s our fault that the spotted lemur has got nowhere
to live, even though I couldn’t pick out a spotted lemur in a police line-
up. I’m a nice guy. I want the world to be beautiful. So I like to point out
the beauty of human creations, like the El, to give the human race a
nudge, as if to say, ‘Just look what we can achieve if we put our minds
to it.’
Thinking about celebrating the beauty of mankind’s creativity got me
thinking about another of my pet theories, which is that newspaper
obituaries should be closer to the front because they are often stories
about the great unsung heroes of the world. I realised this when a pal
of mine died some years ago. I read his obituary; then I read all the
others in the paper that day. And I thought: My God, these are
extraordinary people. How come I’ve never heard of them? They had
found cures for diseases or helped children and innocent people
escape from dictators all over the world. But we rarely took any notice
of them because they were old. If we saw them in a supermarket, we’d
never give them a second thought.
So I’m on a little one-man crusade to bring the obituary closer to the
front of the paper. Let’s sing a bit louder about the unsung. Rather than
spending all our time watching stupid people doing stupid things and
being filmed by other stupid people on reality TV shows, why don’t we
spend a few minutes each day reading about good people doing good
things? I’m not being a hippy. It’s just that we’ve got to improve
ourselves as a species or we are absolutely doomed.
I was thinking about all of this as I passed under the El. As I slipped
between its massive iron legs, a train hurtled overhead, as if to say:
‘Look what you’re capable of. Look at this.’ It really is a magic noise –
the sound of trains right in the middle of town. I bet the wee boys in
Chicago just love it. I reckon they’re crazy about it. But not everyone’s
as jolly and happy about the El as I am. Way back in 1892, the New
York Academy of Medicine claimed that ‘the elevated trains prevented
the normal development of children, threw convalescing patients into
relapses and caused insomnia, exhaustion, hysteria, paralysis,
meningitis, deafness and death. And pimples on the willy.’
I’m sure you can guess which of those ailments I added to the list.
Continuing on down Adams Street on the trike, I was enjoying every
yard of it. The concrete canyons, where you have to look straight up to
see the sky, are really amazing to ride along. But I was soon twisting
and turning to follow Route 66 out of the Windy City, passing down
streets and avenues with names like Ogden, Cicero, Nerwyn, Harlem
and Lyons. I think a lot of people are a bit disappointed when they
discover that Route 66 isn’t just one long, straight road but all broken
up into various chunks and sections.
Not so long ago, in the days of prohibition, these outer parts of
Chicago were once undershot with a spider’s web of tunnels used by
gangsters and bootleggers to distribute their wares to the
speakeasies. Chicago is such a beautiful town these days – good and
interesting and clean and lovely – and the city authorities now seem
very embarrassed by all that Al Capone stuff from the 1920s and
1930s. When you ask them about it, they say, ‘Well, it was a long time
ago. It was a period we’d rather just put behind us … blah-di-blah-di-
blah.’ But the truth is that the prohibition era was one of the most
interesting periods in Chicago’s history, which is why we stopped to
investigate it. I reckon you have to go to a speakeasy if you’re in
Chicago, so we did.
The American government made a criminal mistake in the late
1910s, when it bowed to pressure from the Anti-Saloon League and
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and enacted legislation to
shut down boozers everywhere. Can you believe it: every bar in
America was shut. For thirteen long years, until 1933, it was illegal to
make, sell or transport alcohol. As a result – you know everybody
needs a wee drinkypoo – speakeasies sprang up everywhere.
Everyone imagines every speakeasy had a wee hole in the door.
You know, knock twice, wait for the wee hole to open just a whisker,
whisper, ‘Joe sent me,’ and sneak inside. But there were thirty
thousand of them in New York alone – twice the number of bars there
had been before the ban on booze came into effect in January 1920 –
so there was no such thing as a standard speakeasy.
The one we visited in Chicago was on Wabash Street, not far south
of Adams Street and the start of Route 66. It’s now a very good
restaurant called Gioco, but you can still see remnants from its
prohibition days, when the front was a restaurant but the rear was a
boozer that became more and more secretive, and much more
interesting, the further back you ventured.
Something many people don’t realise about that period in America
is that, in the midst of all that prohibition, you were allowed to brew a
hundred gallons of beer and fifty gallons of wine in your own house, but
you couldn’t sell it. No one was allowed to distil hard liquor, but that
didn’t stop the bootleggers. They called it bathtub gin in northern cities
like Chicago. In the rural southern states it was known as moonshine.
Even though people were allowed to make all the beer and wine
they could possibly drink at home, they still wanted to go out for a
bevvy. Just like now, they enjoyed mixing and doing the how-do-you-do
when they were drinking. Seeing a good business opportunity, a guy in
his twenties called Al Capone, with a big scar on his face and a white
hat, convinced the authorities to let him sell non-alcoholic beer.
I mean, what a lame story.
Capone made thousands of barrels of non-alcoholic beer and
delivered them to the speakeasy on Wabash Street, among others. As
soon as the police had inspected the non-alcoholic hooch, Al’s mates
would show up with big veterinarian syringes – the type that you usually
shove into a cow’s bum – full of ethanol. Pure alcohol, in other words.
The ethanol was sourced from all over America, but the bulk of
production took place in the countryside. Capone used Route 66 to
transport the moonshine from rural areas to Chicago in false petrol
tanks. The ethanol would be injected into the barrels and – Ta da! Off
we go! – happy days were back again. If the cops turned up when the
speakeasy was in full swing, there were escape routes through which
the VIPs could make a swift exit. The rest of the clientele would have to
face the music. And probably stop dancing.
Prohibition was hugely counter-productive. It actually increased
alcohol consumption and promoted crime by igniting the bootlegging
moonshine and beer wars fought by the Chicago gangs. Capone
became the biggest and most notorious gangster in America when he
took over the running of the Outfit – the syndicate of Chicago
organised crime gangs. He was a major villain – in addition to
bootlegging, he was involved in prostitution and bribery of government
figures – yet he didn’t lurk in the shadows. On the contrary, he became
a highly visible public figure. Many Chicagoans even admired him,
seeing him as a self-made success story. And Capone responded by
giving some of the money he made from his illicit activities to charity,
creating the image of a modern-day Robin Hood.
He kept plenty of the cash for himself, though, and lived
ostentatiously. He held meetings in the Jeweler’s Building, a forty-
storey neo-classical office tower in the heart of Chicago with an
automated car lift that jewellery merchants used to make safe transfers
of their merchandise. Capone would drive his car into the lift, rise to
the top floor, and enjoy a few drinks in Stratosphere, the speakeasy
with the best views in town.
But on St Valentine’s Day 1929 Al Capone made a big mistake. He
sent his boys down the road to wipe out seven Irishmen. Disguised as
policemen, Capone’s gang showed up with machine-guns and mowed
down their Irish rivals. (Curiously, one of the Irish gangsters wasn’t a
gangster at all, but a doctor. He was a kind of hoodlum groupie – he
liked to follow the gangsters around town and act tough.) When the
press published pictures of the massacre, the people of Chicago
thought Big Al had gone too far and started to turn against him. Eliot
Ness and his ‘Untouchables’ in the Bureau of Prohibition took a look at
Capone’s activities, but they found it impossible to link him to any
serious crime, let alone the massacre. He’d covered himself pretty well
and had the police in his pocket. Then they had the bright idea of
taking a look at Capone’s tax records.
Here’s a thing. In 1927 Capone had made $106 million, but he
hadn’t filed a tax return. So they hauled him in for that. He was fined
fifty thousand dollars and sent away for eleven years, most of which he
served in Alcatraz. While in prison, he contracted syphilis, which
affected his physical and mental health to such an extent that he was
no longer able to run the Outfit. By 1946, he had the mental capacity of
a twelve-year-old. Eventually, at the age of forty-seven, he died
following a stroke and a heart attack brought on by the syphilis.
Amazingly, Al Capone left us with a legacy that has nothing to do
with booze. One of his charitable donations was a million dollars to
provide milk for schoolchildren. But he insisted that a use-by date must
be put on each bottle because he’d always hated the sour milk he’d
been forced to drink as a child. It was the first time that anyone had
had this idea, and it set a standard that’s endured to this day. Isn’t that
the strangest thing?
The side-effects of prohibition weren’t all bad, particularly its
influence on the music industry and specifically jazz. Because it was
the music of the speakeasies, jazz became very popular very fast, and
it helped integration by uniting mostly black musicians with mostly
white crowds. Chicago played its part in the development of jazz, but it
played an even bigger role in rock’n’roll, which you could say was
invented by black men (and women) in a little room in South Chicago,
where Muddy Waters and all the other greats – including Chuck Berry,
Bo Diddley and Etta James – made their first records.
That room was the recording studio of Chess Records, a legend in
the blues and rhythm’n’blues world. In 1928 two Jewish brothers,
Leonard and Phil Chess, arrived in Chicago as Polish immigrants.
They started a few bars and by the 1940s had a nightclub called the
Macomba Lounge. One of the singers who performed there was a
certain McKinley Morganfield, who boosted his earnings by busking
around South Chicago during daylight hours. He was better known to
everybody by his nickname – Muddy Waters.
The Chess brothers already had an interest in a record label called
Aristocrat, so they used it to record Muddy’s raw singing style, which
perfectly reflected the spirit of the Chicago blues bars. The recordings
were a great success, and soon Leonard and Phil were able to buy out
their partners in Aristocrat and change the company’s name to Chess
Records.
Muddy’s increasing fame drew other young Mississippi bluesmen to
Chicago, such as Little Walter Jacobs and a twenty-stone farm worker
named Chester Burnette, who soon became known as Howlin’ Wolf. In
their footsteps followed Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, John
Lee Hooker and Willie Mabon. All legends.
 In 1955 Muddy introduced the Chess brothers to a twenty-eight-year-
old singer and guitarist who was on holiday from St Louis. He sang
‘Ida Red’, a song he’d written himself. Leonard and Phil liked the song
but suggested a new title. Renamed ‘Maybellene’, it was the first of
many Top Forty hits for the guy from St Louis – Chuck Berry – who
went on to write and record a string of hits that became signature
songs of rock’n’roll: ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and
‘Sweet Little Sixteen’.
The studios and offices of Chess Records were based at several
locations in South Chicago, but the most famous was immortalised by
the Rolling Stones in their song ‘2120 South Michigan Avenue’.
Nowadays, it’s home to Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. It’s in
a rundown neighbourhood that probably has never seen better days. It
has that air of always having been a bit on the skids, but it’s a real
place with a proper sense of identity and a community that holds
together when times are tough.
Walking up to the old Chess Records building produced a strange
sensation in me. In a nondescript street with a wee garden on one
side, initially it felt like a non-event. But then I noticed some iron figures
set into the garden railings – like a guy playing guitar, who just
happened to be Chuck Berry. Wandering along a wee bit further, I
spotted another, recognised the guitar, and realised it was Bo Diddley.
Before I knew it, I was standing outside the birthplace of rock’n’roll.
As soon as I stepped through the door, I knew I’d arrived
somewhere special. It’s holy ground – the Taj Mahal for anyone who
likes rock’n’roll. Hallelujah central. And they let me in even though I’m
about as black as snow. Then the funniest thing happened. Me and
several of the crew all went very quiet and treated the place like a
church. Nobody said ‘Ssshhh!’ or anything like that. A silence just fell
upon us when we realised we were standing in the actual building
where they recorded all those fantastic songs.
There’s a wee museum with some posters on the wall from the old
Blues Caravan tours. I remember those posters from when the tours
came to Scotland in the sixties. They always looked great and the line-
ups were terrific. I mean, can you imagine a show like the one I spotted
on one of the posters: Jimmy Reid, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker,
Big Joe Williams, Curtis Jones and the Taylor Blues Band, all on the
same bill? Even wee Mississippi John Hurt was there. And Memphis
Slim. My God – what a night out. We used to love it whenever they
came to town.
From the museum, I moved on into a large whitewashed room at the
centre of the building. It was the room where all those hits – ‘Johnny B.
Goode’ and the rest – were recorded. I touched a key on a piano, just
to be sure I’d definitely touched something that one or more of the
greats had once touched. Then I imagined Etta James and Bo Diddley
singing, and Chuck Berry duck-walking across the floor, and all the
others creating magic in that little room. Some of Ronnie Wood’s
drawings were hanging on one of the walls, but it was still quite hard to
believe that the Rolling Stones had made an album in there. Can you
imagine how that little room must have rocked over the years? I felt
precious and churchy and I’m sure you would too if you visited Chess
Records. It’s a very special place.
I’d made my pilgrimage to Chess Records earlier in the week, before
leaving Chicago on Route 66. But on the Sunday of my departure, a
couple of hours before I left Adams Street, I returned to the
neighbourhood for a unique experience. It had been a long time since
I’d been to church on a Sunday morning, but now I was heading to
Quinn Chapel, two blocks south of the old Chess Records building and
an equally famous place in music and social history.
Quinn Chapel is the oldest black congregation in America. Services
have been held there since the 1850s, when its congregation
consisted mostly of freed slaves and abolitionists. When slavery was
still a fact of life in the southern states, the chapel was a safe house on
the Underground Railroad, a secret network of travel routes that were
used to guide slaves to free states and territories in the northern
United States and Canada. In the years since then, a succession of
black leaders and luminaries such as Martin Luther King, Booker T.
Washington and Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became a
leader of the abolitionist movement, have spoken from the pulpit at
Quinn Chapel.
On its own that would be hugely significant, but Quinn Chapel is also
where gospel music really began in America. I’ve always loved gospel
singers, especially Ray Charles and Etta James. So I’d been looking
forward to experiencing a service of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, but I was very nervous before entering the chapel because I’m
as close to an atheist as you can get. I think I am, anyway. It’s probably
better to say I don’t believe in religion. So I was nervous in case I
offended the congregation by being a disbelieving voyeur sitting
among them. Even though they didn’t know it, I knew it. I’m not
religious, but I’m not against people who are, and I don’t believe in
telling people that they’re wrong. It’s not the right thing to do. All of this
was bothering me terribly, but as soon as I got into the church, a big
whitewashed hall, I was so overwhelmingly and pleasantly surprised
that I forgot all about my qualms.
First of all, there was a choir to one side of the altar and a girl
standing front and centre, where the priest or pastor would normally
stand. She was half singing and half talking, in that Aretha Franklin soul
way. I nearly cried. My lip went all wobbly. I’m not joking, I had to tell
myself to get a grip because there were a lot of people around me,
singing, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah’, and I didn’t want to draw their attention.
I found a few empty seats and sat down to listen. Beside me was a
chair with a Bible on it. After a while, a man in a light fawn suit picked it
up, sat down beside me and started reading the Bible and mumbling.
The service continued with more singing, more gesticulating and
waving and praying, and I must say it pleased me greatly. A wonderful
woman sitting behind the pastor was going, ‘All right, all right’ –
agreeing with everyone – ‘Yes, sir … yes, sir. All right. Yeah.’ Then the
man in the fawn suit turned to me. ‘Would you like a Bible?’
I didn’t like to say no.
He went off to get me one, returned, then pointed to his own so that I
could find the appropriate page. I’m not a Christian now, and when I
was a Catholic I didn’t know the Bible – we used a missal to guide us
through the mass (Catholics and the Bible have a funny relationship,
but that’s another story for another time). But I could follow the pastor’s
preaching. I was enjoying it and having fun with a little girl and her
young brother who were sitting beside me, faffing around and getting
them to laugh and joke and jest with me.
 It was delightful. And what amazed me – even though it shouldn’t
have, because it’s happened so many times when I’ve been among
black communities – was the kindness and generosity of spirit shown
to me.
The previous day I’d been to the oldest cigar store in America. It’s in
the centre of Chicago, next to the El. The crowd inside was mostly
black and they were all watching the Chicago Bulls playing basketball. I
had a shoeshine, bought my cigar and sat down. I’m not much of a
basketball fan, but it was a very good game. One of the crowd of black
guys recognised me while another thought I’d been in Monty Python.
(It’s a recurring disappointment for me in America. Maybe the
association is because I did The Secret Policeman’s Ball with some
of the Pythons and that was a big hit in the States.) The guys were
cracking jokes and having fun, then one asked if I’d like a drink.
‘No, I don’t drink,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to smell it, if you don’t mind.’ It
was Maker’s Mark, a Kentucky bourbon whiskey, and I had a sniff. ‘Oh
… memories. Memories.’
The guys all laughed and smiled. Then one of them stood up, came
over and handed me a ten-inch-long Bolivar cigar. A Havana .
‘Welcome to Chicago, Billy,’ he said.
I nearly fell off my seat. Such friendliness, such overwhelming
bonhomie and joie de vivre. And for nothing. All I had done was walk
into the shop. And they had shown me such outstanding hospitality and
kindness.
So I should have known better than to be surprised at the
homeliness that was shown to me in Quinn Chapel as everyone who
came near me shook my hand, wished me a good day and said they
were glad I was there.
As I said, I’m not a believer any more and I don’t think I ever will be
again. I used to be quite a sincere Catholic when I was a boy, but it
hasn’t stood the test of time for me, especially when a child dies and
some fool says, ‘Jesus wanted him for an angel.’ I just want to lash out
when I hear something like that; I want to get violent. I think religion’s
time has come and gone. They’re having a lot of fun just now throwing
bombs at each other, aren’t they, all the peace and love merchants.
That said, the spirit and the sheer enthusiasm in that room persuaded
me that if I was going to be religious again, that might be the religion
I’d go for. I certainly came out feeling much, much better than when I
went in.
It was just a joy watching that congregation of people at their best,
worshipping as they saw fit. And what they saw fit, I saw fit. I wasn’t
jealous of their faith, but I admired it. I thought a wee bit of it would do
me some good. It took me back to when I was a boy, when I had faith.
And although that’s gone now, visiting Quinn Chapel and being among
a congregation of good people doing good was a happy experience, a
wholesome thing to do. I’m glad I did it.
Chess Records and Quinn Chapel border on to a neighbourhood of
Chicago called Bronzeville, which in the early twentieth century
became known as the Black Metropolis after half a million African-
Americans fled the oppression of the South and migrated to the city in
search of industrial jobs. The city authorities confined the new arrivals
to this borough, which extended over a very small area between 29th
and 31st streets. The conditions were extreme at times. For instance,
twenty thousand people were housed in four twenty-two-storey
buildings within very close proximity to one another. However, this
mass migration brought music into the area. Bronzeville was a haven
for jazz, blues and gospel. The great Louis Armstrong’s trumpet ignited
the borough’s many jazz clubs. Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy created
electric blues here, while Quinn Chapel and the Pilgrim Baptist Church
gave birth to gospel music.
Ever since then, Bronzeville has continued to bustle with celebrities,
intellectuals, musicians and artists. The Regal Theater, located in the
heart of the area, was demolished in the 1970s, but in its heyday it
played host to the cream of twentieth-century American music. Nat
King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Dinah
Washington, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington performed there
frequently. The Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the
Jackson 5, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie,
Louis Jordan, Solomon Burke, Dionne Warwick, James Brown, the
Isley Brothers, John Coltrane – the list of performers at the Regal is
like a Who’s Who of soul, rhythm’n’blues and jazz. What would anyone
have given to be present at the Motown Revue in June 1962, when
‘Little’ Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Mary Wells
and the Marvelettes and Marvin Gaye were on the bill? What a line-up.
But until the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights Act was passed,
travelling through America was frequently fraught for African-
Americans. Restricted to segregated zones in the South and often
discriminated against in other areas too, their journeys along
America’s highways – including Route 66 – were far from simple.
Some motel and restaurant owners welcomed black Americans;
others blatantly discriminated against them.
In 1936 a postal employee from Harlem, New York, came up with the
idea of producing a guide to integrated or black-friendly
establishments. Although initially it focused on businesses in New York
State, Victor Green’s guide was such a success that within a year its
coverage had spread nationwide. Under a banner of ‘Now we can
travel without embarrassment’, The Green Book was particularly
helpful to African-Americans who travelled through what were called
‘sunset towns’, which publicly stated that ‘Negroes’ had to leave by
sundown or face arrest. Known unofficially as ‘The Grapevine’, the
book became the inspiration for that fantastic song, ‘I Heard it through
the Grapevine’, recorded by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,
Gladys Knight and the Pips, and of course, in its definitive version,
Marvin Gaye.
I went to meet Preston Jackson, an artist and activist who lives and
works in Bronzeville, whose family made it across America using The
Green Book. I’d intended to ask him about his family’s experiences,
but we ended up talking more about the effects of growing old – like
those single hairs that grow out of your ears or eyebrows – and the
absurdity of Pat Boone singing ‘Tutti Frutti’. This lovely, intelligent,
committed, talented man had come to the same conclusion as me and
thousands of others: when Boone recorded ‘Tutti Frutti’, that paragon
of clean living didn’t have a clue that the song was about prostitution
and gay sex. (The original opening lyrics were: ‘A wop bop a loo mop,
a good goddamn!/Tutti frutti, loose booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You
can grease it, make it easy’!)
Preston has remained militant in the most gentlemanly, pure way.
He’s a good man with a very good heart who cares deeply about the
culture of his people and he tries to portray it through his art. He
showed me his sculptures, many of which portrayed Harlem in its
heyday and the years of its decline. We chatted about all sorts of
things. Then, at the end of the meeting, my nemesis caught up with me
again.
As I mentioned earlier, in America I am often mistaken for one of the
Pythons. Don’t ask me why, as I don’t look anything like John Cleese,
especially when my long, grey hair is down, as it was that day.
Nevertheless, it often happens. People will come up to me and say,
‘Excuse me. Are you John Cleese?’
Or they’ll say, ‘I love your work.’
‘Oh, thanks very much,’ I’ll respond.
‘So how are the other guys?’
‘Who?’
‘The rest of the Monty Python crew. Eric? Michael?’
And my heart sinks.
Sometimes I tell them I’m not John Cleese. ‘No, I’m a Scottish
comedian,’ I say. ‘My name’s Billy Connolly.’
‘Oh? Incognito?’ And then they do the nudge, nudge, wink, wink
thing.
As it happened, earlier that day I’d told the crew about being
mistaken for John. I could see that some of them only half-believed me.
After all, no Brit would confuse my Glaswegian brogue for John’s
clipped English vowels. But then, as I came downstairs from Preston’s
gallery, a big black guy tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Are you John Cleese?’
‘No, I’m Billy Connolly.’
‘Oh … incognito?’
Nicky, the producer, just exploded. The truth was revealed before
her very eyes.
Now I was back on my trike, heading southeast on Route 66, gradually
coming to the edge of Chicago. It’s always weird when you leave a
city. No matter how much you like the place, the outskirts always suck.
You go from these gigantic palaces in the sky, like the Chicago
Tribune Building and the Sears Tower (which I could see in my mirrors
for ages) and then the surroundings get more and more shabby and
rundown. The Windy City is a brawny kind of place, and here at its
fringes are the factories, slaughterhouses and foundries on which it
built its industrial might and reputation. The road darts between
warehouses and over railroad tracks and makes a few turns. Then,
suddenly, we were out in the countryside, joining Interstate 55 for about
eight miles (it was built directly over Route 66 here, so you can’t avoid
it) before leaving it to rejoin old 66. Even here, out of town and in the
proper outdoors, it was a bit shabby, largely because it was reclaimed
mining land and there was still a kind of messiness to it. And the
weather didn’t help. It was another grey and windy day. Although I like
rain and what it does, I was starting to feel we really hadn’t been
blessed with good weather since arriving in Chicago. A bit of sun
would have been welcome, especially now that we were on Route 66.
Everybody’s image of the Mother Road involves bright colours – red
and yellow, white and blue – rock’n’roll, hamburgers and hot dogs,
Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. But I was getting rained on all the
time and somehow it didn’t fit.
A few minutes later, I entered Romeoville, a town about thirty miles
southwest of Chicago. Nestling between urban areas, this part of
Illinois was mostly agricultural country, and Route 66 was flanked by
wide-open plains that looked like potato fields, only occasionally
broken up by sparse lines of trees or telegraph poles. Much of the
produce from these fields used to be shipped from Romeoville along
the Des Plaines River, which passes through the town, and the Illinois
& Michigan canal system. Nowadays, nearly all of it goes by road.
Romeoville used to be called Romeo when it was part of a twinned
community with Juliet, a few miles further down Route 66. That
romantic association ended in 1845, when someone realised that
Juliet was most likely a misspelling of the name of the French pioneer
Louis Jolliet, who first explored the area in the 1670s. The town
decided to change its name in honour of him, but it still didn’t get the
spelling quite right. It’s now known as Joliet. Meanwhile, jilted by its
twin, Romeo acknowledged the busted romance and became
Romeoville. Nowadays, it plays very much second fiddle to Joliet,
which is the first significant city beyond the sprawl of Chicago.
 You might have heard Joliet mentioned in television crime
programmes. It used to be a quarry town, nicknamed ‘Stone City’.
Much of that lovely white stone seen on skyscrapers like the Wrigley
Building in the heart of Chicago came from Joliet’s quarries. But these
days the town is most famous for its prisons. They are the biggest
industry in town. Imagine prison being your biggest industry – holy
moly! – but that’s one of the strangest things about America. The Land
of the Free incarcerates more of its people than any other country on
earth.
Joliet’s most famous prison, the Joliet Correctional Center, is known
to millions of Blues Brothers fans as the lock-up from which Jake
Blues is released at the beginning of the movie. It is also name-
checked in Bob Dylan’s ‘Percy’s Song’. But it closed in 2002 and all
the prisoners were moved to a much larger maximum-security facility,
the Stateville Correctional Center, a vast compound on the edge of
town that used to have a death row and conduct executions by lethal
injection. It’s the kind of isolated place in which the US government is
hoping to house some of the terrorist suspects who are currently stuck
down in Guantanamo Bay. There’s another clink, the Will County Adult
Detention Facility, on the other side of town, so you could say Joliet is
book-ended by slammers.
Driving through the outskirts of town, I passed an ice-cream parlour
with a couple of Blues Brothers figures on its roof. Gimmicks like
those two figures have been features of Route 66 ever since its
heyday, when restaurants and motels would go to extraordinary lengths
to attract the attention of passing drivers.
There’s not much more to say about Joliet. It’s a pretty wee town with
a river flowing through the middle, but, based on my experience, no
people in it – except for one guy running along a pavement. I hope he
hadn’t escaped from prison.
It Starts in Illinois, Let Me Tell You
Boy

A few more miles through the tall-grass prairies of Illinois, I arrived in

Wilmington, turned a corner and came face to face with a wonderful
sight – a twenty-eight-foot-high green spaceman in a silver helmet who
advertised a drive-in restaurant called the Launching Pad.
Big guys like him are still common sights on Route 66. Some
travellers make a thing out of trying to spot as many of them as
possible. Originally, these giants were designed to catch the eye of
potential customers who were driving past so that people would say,
‘Gee look, a giant. Let’s go and eat there.’ Later, when the interstates
bypassed a lot of the communities on Route 66, even bigger giants
were built, to catch the attention and wallets of people cruising past.
The owner of the Launching Pad bought his spaceman at a
restaurateurs’ convention in 1965 for three thousand dollars. Which
begs the question: what kind of person lugs a twenty-eight-foot
spaceman to a convention? I always thought conventions were held in
hotel suites, and I can’t imagine anyone dragging a twenty-eight-foot
astronaut into the Glasgow Hilton, no matter how much I stretch my
imagination. But this fella had bought his giant spaceman for three
thousand bucks and good on him, the entrepreneur that he was. I just
wonder what he said to his wife when he brought it home. ‘Darling, I’ve
got you a present … ’
When that fella bought the big guy, it was just a big semi-naked
model. Someone used to make a standard roadside giant – they all
had the same trousers and always held their hands out in front of them.
So the owner of the Launching Pad held a competition to give his giant
a name and decide how he should be dressed. A ten-year-old girl won
the contest with her suggestion of Gemini – after the Gemini space
programme, which was all the rage at the time. They made a big
space helmet and a rocket, which they put in his hands. The helmet
made him look a bit like a giant welder, but maybe that’s just me.
Strangely, two rockets have been nicked from his hands so far,
although I can’t imagine what the dirty swines do when they steal a six-
foot polystyrene rocket. It’s rather tragic. Did they take them home and
play with them?
As far as luring people off the interstate, the Gemini Giant would
certainly work for me. I can just imagine my kids when they were
younger – ‘Dad, take us there. I wanna go to where the rocket man is.
Take us there, Dad. Come on, Dad, come on.’ I’d cave in. And
anyway, I’ve always loved that kind of thing myself – that part of
America that’s always viewed as big and vulgar, but which really
appeals to me. Things like the biggest chair in the world, the biggest
frying pan and the tallest thermometer. I love all that. There’s something
of the sideshow about it, something Coney Island, that tickles me. It’s
fun and Americans know what fun is. After all, they’ve got the only
constitution in the world with the word ‘happiness’ written into it.
American adults believe in having fun. They’ve got more toys than us
Europeans. If you go into an American’s garage, you’ll find a four-
wheeled vehicle and a three-wheeled vehicle and bicycles and boats
and dirt bikes and a motor home. I’m in total agreement with them. Life
is supposed to be fun. It’s not a job or an occupation. We’re here only
once and we should have a bit of a laugh. So these big men by the
side of the road totally appeal to me.
Wilmington itself is a nice enough place. There’s a dinosaur model
on top of a tyre garage and a few other remnants of Route 66’s heyday
in the main street, such as a boarded-up drive-through restaurant.
Pushing on, heading for Pontiac, I was cruising happily when my
eyes darted from the road and right there, in a diner’s car park in
Bramlington, I spotted Elvis, James Dean and Betty Boop. Yelling at
the crew, who were driving ahead of me in the truck, I pulled over. The
Route 66-themed, 1950s-style joint – the Polk-a-Dot Drive-In – was a
charming place, but this was Easter Sunday and it was closed. In
Britain it would have been open, but they take the Christian thing more
seriously in these parts. Outside the diner, lined up along a wall, stood
those three fibreglass, slightly larger-than-life-size effigies. There was
space for one more, which I later discovered had been occupied by
Marilyn Monroe, with her white dress billowing in the classic pose from
The Seven-Year Itch. I had some fun with Elvis and Betty. I cleaned up
her skirt and posed and jived around in front of them, making a fool of
myself, before moving on down the road.
After just two miles I came to Godley, a tiny place with a population
of less than six hundred but a racy history. Not so much a town as a
single street with a collection of buildings on either side, Godley has a
geographic quirk that shaped its destiny. The left side of the main
street, which crosses Route 66, is in one county and the right side is in
another. You might think that’s nothing special, but in the 1930s, when
the Illinois coal mines and stone quarries were in full swing, it made
Godley the hottest destination for miles around on a Friday night.
Loaded up with their end-of-week pay, the miners and quarrymen
would head for Godley, knowing there was a brothel there that had a
unique way of evading the law. Some enterprising resident had turned
a railway carriage into the brothel and parked it on the line. The lads
would turn up and get down to drinking and shagging their earnings
away. If word came down that there was going to be a raid, a shout
would go up and all the lads would interrupt their activities to push the
carriage into the neighbouring county. Once across the county line,
neither police force could do anything about it. The crime had been
perpetrated in one county, but they were now in the neighbouring
county, so unless they got down to business again, they were back to
being law-abiding citizens.
Driving through Godley, I could barely concentrate on the road, I was
laughing so much at the mental image of all those bare-arsed men
diving out of bed to push the carriage into the next county while the
hookers looked on and the two counties’ police forces scratched their
heads, unable to do anything about it. The thought of a bunch of mad-
shagging train-pushers made my heart sing. There’s something
wonderful – and very pragmatic, in that typically American, no-
nonsense way – about a brothel on wheels. And to think the little village
was called Godley. It should have been called Godless.
At first glance, Pontiac is just an ordinary town, like hundreds, maybe
even thousands, of others in the Midwest of America. Located smack
bang on Route 66 and built around a town square with a county
courthouse on one side, it’s like so many small towns portrayed in so
many Hollywood movies. It was even used as the setting for
Grandview, USA , a 1980s romantic comedy starring Jamie Lee
Curtis, Patrick Swayze and John Cusack. Time magazine called it one
of the best small towns in America. You can imagine the kind of place
– there are shops and restaurants around the square, and the
courthouse has a clock tower, just like the one in Back to the Future.
It’s the kind of place where you can picture that whole American
Dream thing happening – people setting up in Pontiac and making
successes of their lives in a modest, wholesome way. Those sitcoms
of the fifties and sixties suddenly come alive when you’re in Pontiac;
you realise they were based on real life. Then, in June 2009, the town’s
local government did an amazing thing. It invited 160 artists to paint
nineteen murals in the town in just four days. The council put up the
artists, fed them and gave them booze, and the whole thing turned into
a huge party. And, if you ask me, it was a huge success.
The murals were painted by a group of artists called Walldogs,
which is what the commercial painters of old were often nicknamed.
The group’s members came from all over the world, and their paintings
aren’t anything like those ghastly murals that look half like graffiti and
always give me the pip. These murals are handsome replicas of the
advertisements that used to be painted on the sides of businesses at
the turn of the twentieth century. They are very detailed figurative
paintings, beautifully executed, and they make the town look smashing.
Residents of Pontiac stumbled on the idea of having their lovely
town bedecked in murals after they had commissioned a Route 66
mural for the centre of the town. It was a simple image – the Route 66
highway shield – but it immediately drew visitors to the town. The
nineteen murals painted in 2009 have been even more successful,
doubling tourist numbers. I’m not surprised.
I went for a walk round Pontiac to have a good look at the murals.
They were all a delight, but I was most tickled by the one for the Allen
Candy Company. It appeared to have been painted by several artists
(the signatures read: ‘Roy, Noah, Brad, Teddy and Jackie’), and
apparently one of them had owned a dog that died the week before the
mural was painted. So the artist had the dog cremated and mixed its
ashes in with the paint. Now the dog is part of the mural. I loved that.
There’s more to Pontiac than the murals. They’ve also had funky
wee cars inspired by Route 66 – each about the size of a kiddie’s
pedal car – placed around the town. With the cars dotted all over the
place and bolted to the ground, I had to watch my step, particularly on
street corners. On the steps of the courthouse there’s a particularly
weird car with a windswept Abraham Lincoln sitting in the back seat.
Long before he became President, Lincoln had tried his first case as a
lawyer in Pontiac. It was a strange thing to imagine as I strode around
the town, dodging the wee cars and other artworks and admiring the
murals.
Some of the cars were painted in rainbow colours. One, a wee
beauty called ‘Pussy Footin’ around Downtown’, had a leopard-skin
pattern. Another, with big sunglasses and a cheesy smile, was called
‘InCARgnito’. Then there was a brightly coloured van called ‘Vincent
“I’m not a Van” Gogh’ that had a reproduction of one of Van Gogh’s
paintings on it.
There are also pyramids and all sorts of nonsense, such as a pair of
man-sized footprints in the concrete pavement next to a set of doggie
paw-prints, so that it looks like some guy was just there, walking his
dog. It’s terrific that a town will go to such lengths to cheer itself up.
When you see so many towns falling into the abyss with pound shops
and charity stores everywhere, it’s lovely to see one making the effort
to tart itself up a bit.
Before I give the impression that Pontiac is a wee bit of heaven on
earth, I ought to get something off my chest that bothered me right from
the start of the trip. It’s not something unique to Pontiac, but by the time
I reached the town it had become really hard to ignore. If this book
inspires you to travel along Route 66 and you’re hoping to eat well,
think again. There’s not much decent or wholesome – or even
particularly healthy – food to be found along the Mother Road. There
are plenty of pancakes and burgers and shakes and fries, but after a
while it becomes a very monotonous diet.
The night before I toured Pontiac, I visited a restaurant and ordered
the broasted chicken. I only had it to see what broasted was. I soon
discovered it meant broiled and roasted, or what most people would
call burned. Maybe I should have known better when I saw the menu. It
had pictures of the food, which is always a dead giveaway (unless
you’re in Japan, where the food is invariably fantastic, even though the
restaurants often have wax replicas of their dishes in the window). If
you’re on Route 66 and you stop at a place where the menu has
pictures of the grub, you’d be well advised to carry on until you find
somewhere better. Unfortunately, along Route 66, there aren’t too
many better places. I know it sounds deeply snobbish, and I probably
shouldn’t say it, but the amount of fat and sugar and junk eaten in
Middle America is scary. That’s why everyone’s getting obese.
However, there’s a silver lining to every cloud. In this case, we have
the inventor of one of the staples of unhealthy fast-food cuisine – the
Cozy Dog – to thank for also creating one of the greatest artists
associated with Route 66 – Robert Waldmire. Route 66 attracted a lot
of poets, writers, painters, wanderers and all sorts of scallywags who
were just in love with the road and made it their whole life. Bob was
one of them. He was due to paint a mural in Pontiac in 2009, but he
died before he could carry out the commission. Now a bunch of artists
are going to get together and paint one in his memory.
Bob grew up watching the Route 66 traffic pass by his parents’
restaurant in Springfield, Illinois (which was where his father, Ed, came
up with the Cozy Dog, of which more later). In 1962 Ed took the whole
family on a road trip along the 66 to California. Bob, who was already
an accomplished artist at school, was hugely inspired by what he saw
and fell in love with everything to do with the Mother Road – the motels,
diners and truck stops, and particularly the Arizona and New Mexico
deserts. He decided he wanted to spend his time travelling the route,
but first he went off to university, where he spotted a fellow student’s
illustration of the local town. Wishing to do something similar for his
hometown, Bob had a brainwave: he would get local merchants to pay
him to include their businesses in his poster.
Bob appears to have been completely different from his father. He
was a hippy type, a big, bearded vegetarian who ate ‘not dogs’ rather
than hot dogs. His illustrations are very like those of Robert Crumb,
very intricate and detailed, with little buildings in the plan of a town, all
seen from above. He’d include all the details, like telegraph poles and
street signs. They’re very, very good.
His first poster was a great success, both critically and
commercially. Bob made even more money from selling it to local
residents than he’d made from getting the businesses to pay up front
to be included in it, so he set off to visit college towns, repeating the
formula as he travelled. This one idea changed his life for ever.
Provided he lived relatively cheaply, he could travel back and forth
across America supported entirely by his illustrations. Best of all, it
meant that Bob, who hated the cold, could spend winters in his
beloved desert, drawing the buildings, towns and landmarks of Route
66. These drawings became famous icons of the road themselves, as
did the orange 1972 VW campervan in which he travelled. When Pixar
made Cars, they based Fillmore, the VW bus character, loosely on
Bob Waldmire.
 Some of Bob’s best work was his set of four large and highly
intricate state posters of Route 66 winding through California, Illinois,
New Mexico and Arizona. Filled with hundreds of drawings of scenic
vistas, sketches of the wildlife and historical attractions, they also
contained short philosophical comments, quotes from literature and
pleas for peace, non-violence and sound ecological practices, many of
them quietly rebellious. ‘It is estimated that Lake Mead and Lake
Powell [two massive reservoirs created by the damming of the
Colorado River] evaporate more water per year than the multi-billion-
dollar central Arizona project will provide annually,’ it said on the
Arizona poster. And on his New Mexico poster: ‘The state has a cradle
to grave affair with nuclear technology – the atom bomb was born here,
nuclear wastes are buried here.’
But, personally, I think Bob did his best work when he turned his pen
on hunters and really went to town. ‘The campaign to “control” the
coyote is more like a war of extermination,’ he wrote in small print on
his poster of Silver City, Arizona. ‘The Steel Jaw-Leghold Trap …
Scourge of the Earth.’ However, a hunting shop spotted the comments
and threatened to sue Waldmire. Fortunately, he managed to get the
law on his side and avoid court.
While I was in Pontiac, they were displaying Bob’s old converted
bus in which he used to spend the winter travelling through the
southwestern states. It’s one of those yellow American school buses
with corrugated sides, but Bob added solar panels, rainwater
collectors, a solar oven, a sauna and solar shower, and all sorts of
gizmos so that he could live off-grid when he was in the desert. From
the outside, it looks a bit ramshackle, but it’s an absolute dream
machine. It’s even got a veranda and an observation deck on the back.
I was so jealous.
It was a bit of a squeeze to get in the bus, but well worth the effort.
With his old shoes still lying near the steering wheel by the front door,
and all his bits and pieces dotted about on shelves and tables and
walls, it’s the cosiest place. All of Waldmire’s wee favourite things are
still in there – ornaments, pictures, photographs of Mahatma Gandhi
and Martin Luther King, key rings and things that other people would
consider junk – so it’s like stepping into Bob’s dream world. I don’t
know what would have happened in an emergency stop in this bus.
Everything would have ended up beside him on the floor, I imagine.
All in all, the bus is an amazing thing. A great way for an artist to live,
going away for four or five months every winter, a real free man. Before
visiting it, I was kind of reluctant to go and see it. I wondered what the
hell I’d have to say about a school bus in which a guy buggered off to
New Mexico every winter. It seemed a limited subject. But when I got
there I was delighted. It made me wish I’d known Bob Waldmire
personally. He seemed like an amazing fella. And Pontiac is all the
better for having his bus parked there.
Outside the town, there’s another Route 66 landmark that’s worth a
look if you’re passing. In 1926 Joe and Victor ‘Babe’ Seloti built a
diner and petrol station on the road that would become Route 66 in a
couple of months’ time. They named it the Log Cabin Inn. Close to the
railway line and built of cedar telephone poles, it seated forty-five
customers. The interior still has the original knotty pine walls. After the
war, Route 66 was widened to four lanes and moved to the west side
of the Log Cabin, which left the back of the restaurant facing the road,
so Joe and Victor took a wonderfully pragmatic approach to their
problem. First they jacked up the building. Then, using a team of
horses, they turned it round to face the new road and dropped it back
on to the ground. Business continued as usual.
Pushing on from Pontiac, past Normal, through Shirley and McLean
(neatly separated by Funks Grove, famous for its maple ‘sirup’, made
since the 1820s by successive generations of Funks), I arrived in
Atlanta. This is another lovely town, the highlight of which is a slightly
strange story that makes the Seloti brothers’ ingenuity seem like
child’s play.
It reminded me of an old joke from Scotland about a railway station
in the Highlands where people got off the train with their suitcases only
to discover there’s nothing there. The village was away down the road,
so they walked and walked with their cases until they finally reached it,
exhausted.
One of them asked a local, ‘How come the station isn’t closer to the
village?’
And the local said, ‘Well, we thought it would be much handier if the
station was closer to the railway line.’
That’s an old music-hall joke, but – believe it or not – life imitated
comedy in Atlanta. The town began its existence as Newcastle in 1854
and was happily minding its own business until a year later, when the
railway came to town. Or rather the railway didn’t come to town – for
some reason, they laid the tracks more than a mile away from
Newcastle. That worried the residents, who thought they’d miss out on
all the passing trade, so they uprooted the whole town, lock, stock and
barrel, and hoiked it up to the railway line. When they’d finished, they
renamed it Atlanta. I find this an absolutely wonderful, inspiring story.
It’s a very American, let’s-get-up-and-do-it kind of thing.
A lot of old Atlanta is no longer standing, but it still has its
outstanding 36-foot-tall clock tower, which dates back to 1908 and is
one of the few in America that continues to be wound by hand. I met a
guy called Bill Thomas, the owner of a café called the Palm Grove.
Like a lot of places on Route 66, the Palm Grove had crumbled after
the interstate bypassed Atlanta, but Bill had brought it back to life,
partly through his championship-winning pie-making skills. He’d
promised me a piece of his award-winning pie, but first I had to wind
up his wee clock. I’m not belittling the Atlanta clock when I call it wee.
It’s just that I’ve wound up Big Ben, and when you’ve done that, every
other clock in the world is wee.
Bill fixed a crank to the mechanism and let me at it. ‘How many
cranks will it take?’ I asked.
‘About fifty-three total. And Billy, see what you’re doing? Right up
here.’ He pointed to a weight on a wire. ‘ That’s what you’re actually
lifting.’
‘It’s exactly the same method as Big Ben, although it’s smaller
scale.’
‘And see this? You want to stop.’ A white mark on the apparatus had
reached a bar. ‘Stop. You’ve done it.’
‘Oh, glory be.’
Then, because I’d wound the mechanism correctly, he declared me
an honorary ‘Keeper of the Clock’. I even got a certificate.
‘Lucky me!’ I said.
‘It might help with the police or in a bar or something.’
 ‘And you’ve spelled my name right and everything. Thank you very
much. Now, to the pies.’
I’d really enjoyed it. And my new status as an official clock-winder of
Atlanta has improved my CV no end. I’m sure I’ll pick up loads of work
in that field as I wind my way through life from now on.
Bill’s café was a delight. He had worked very hard to make it look
like it might have done in the 1930s. I had the last piece of peach pie. I
nearly went for the apple, but I thought: Oh come on, be original. My
super-duper favourite is key lime pie, especially from diners on the
road. I also like coconut cream and banana cream, but Bill
recommended the peach. As soon as I took a bite, I could appreciate
why he’d won awards. It was delicious. The crew wolfed down
blackberry, strawberry, apple and all sorts of other pies. A wonderful
time was had by all.
Over the road from Bill’s café stood another Route 66 giant – exactly
the same size as the Launching Pad’s spaceman, but this time holding
a big hot dog in place of the rocket. In the time since I’d seen the
Gemini Giant, I’d found out a bit more about these massive figurines.
Most of them were made in the 1960s by International Fiberglass, a
company based in Venice, California. The first, designed to hold an
axe, was made for the Paul Bunyan Café on Route 66. Most similar
statues along the road came from exactly the same mould, albeit
without the axe, which explained why they all had their hands held out in
front of them. The one with the huge hot dog had spent thirty-eight
years outside a restaurant in Cicero, Illinois. Then, in 2003, someone
from Atlanta spotted it for sale on eBay and cheekily asked the seller if
he could have it for nothing.
‘Fine,’ said the seller. ‘Come and get him.’
So the giant with the big hot dog arrived on permanent loan in
Atlanta, Illinois. And the seller, whoever he is, booked his place in
heaven.
I’d already had a great time in Atlanta, then things got even better.
Having broken the banjo badge I usually wear on my lapel, I went into a
shop to buy a new one. It was a funky wee shop, full of esoterica and
built with Route 66 travellers in mind. The owner, Gene, who was a
really friendly guy, had heard I was on a bike and asked me about it.
 ‘Actually, I’m on a trike,’ I said.
‘Can I see it?’
I let Gene sit on the trike – because he asked me nicely – then he
invited me to his home. He said I could visit any time I liked and that
he’d take me up in his aeroplane. I’m very tempted to return to Atlanta
just for that. We returned to his store and I bumped into a woman from
York. She’d been following me around because her sister was a huge
fan, and she asked for an autograph. When I’d finished writing a wee
note and signing it, she thanked me, then dug something out of her
bag.
‘Here’s some decent tea,’ she said, holding out four Yorkshire
teabags. ‘You’ll have trouble getting a decent cup of tea as you go
along Route 66.’
I don’t recall ever meeting so many nice people in such a short
space of time. Atlanta was an absolute joy.
My next stop was Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln lived before
going to Washington, DC as the sixteenth President of the United
States. For the first time since leaving Chicago, I was back on an
interstate. Riding in torrential rain, it was quite heart-stopping at times,
especially when passing trucks. With the spray and the shit flying
everywhere, it was tough going. And as I’ve said, I’m a poser, so I don’t
believe in riding in the rain. I don’t want to be wringing out my
underwear every time I stop. I’ve seen some guys who are even
prepared to ride in the snow, but that’s a different trip. That’s pure
sado-masochism. I like the fun of bikes. And this was no fun.
But I made it to Springfield. It was a totally crap night by the time I
reached the hotel, but I told myself that something good would come of
it. I’m a great believer in carrying on and not stopping just because it’s
raining.
Ahead of me, less than a hundred miles down Route 66, a tornado
had struck Missouri. Watching the television news in my hotel room
that night, I saw a bus sitting on top of the airport building in St Louis.
Outside the room, thick branches were flying past the window. I
couldn’t foresee any kind of lush day hanging out in the sun, covered in
suntan oil, coming up any time soon. Ever since we’d arrived in
Chicago, the weather had taken a turn for the weird, but I was
determined to make a go of my Route 66 trip. It will be good, I kept
telling myself. It will be fun.
Travel My Way, Take the Highway
I’d stopped in Springfield to see Lincoln’s home and tomb, but to be
honest I wasn’t looking forward to visiting either of them. In America,
Lincoln is often portrayed as a leading opponent of slavery, but having
recently read about him, I’d started to doubt how much liberty he was
really willing to grant the slaves. Everyone assumes he wanted total
freedom, but I wasn’t so sure. Although he was anti-slavery, I
suspected he wasn’t too keen on former slaves and other black
Americans having the vote. So I was in two minds about one of
America’s most revered statesmen, frequently referred to as the
greatest President in American history.
Going to Lincoln’s house, a charming and handsome – but still quite
modest – painted-frame building in a shady residential neighbourhood
with wood-plank pavements, started to change my mind. It might sound
ridiculous to describe it this way, but Lincoln’s house was a really
human home. He came over as a father, a man who had been a good
dad to his children and a good husband to his wife, quite apart from
being the President of America and leading his country through one of
the bloodiest civil wars in history.
Lincoln was born in poverty to a Kentucky farming family. With
illiterate parents and only a year’s formal education, he had few
prospects, but while working as a storekeeper and postmaster he
developed a love of reading and a keen interest in politics. In 1834 he
was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, and two years later he
passed his bar exams to become a lawyer. Seeking work in his new
profession, in 1837 he arrived in Springfield, the state capital of Illinois.
A wee while later, he met Mary Todd, and they married in 1842. The
next year, the couple’s first son, Robert, was born, and in 1844 they
bought a little house, painted white with green shutters, from the
Reverend Charles Dresser, who had performed their marriage
ceremony. Over the years, the Lincolns enlarged the house to a full
two-storey Greek Revival-style home for their growing family. By 1853,
the couple had four sons, although only Robert reached adulthood,
married and had children of his own. The others died of pneumonia,
tuberculosis or yellow fever, spread by flies from the Washington
swamps.
The Lincoln home has been declared a national historic site and
forms part of a small national park dedicated to the President. Four
blocks of a section of Springfield that used to be quite rundown and
occasionally dangerous have been restored to something approaching
their mid-nineteenth-century prime. Lincoln’s house is the centrepiece,
and you can walk right through it. You can even inspect his outside loo.
Around the house, several other buildings have been equally well
restored. Most of them were once occupied by friends of the Lincoln
family.
It’s always very strange to visit a place where a great person used to
live. When they’re dead and gone, it’s hard to imagine them inhabiting
the space. And yet you can touch things that they’ve touched. Lincoln’s
house is particularly peculiar in that way because it’s such a historically
important place. In 1860 the Republican Committee arrived in his front
room and offered him their nomination for President. I stood on the
exact spot where Lincoln stood, all six feet four of him, when they made
the offer. He pondered what to do, saying, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ At the
time, he was on the court circuit and still a member of the State
Legislature, so I suppose he was quite comfortable with that. I like the
fact that he clearly wasn’t one of those hell-driven careerists. That’s
probably what made him such an outstanding leader of his country. He
knew that accepting the presidential nomination would launch him from
the relative anonymity of Illinois to national fame. Of course, we all
know what happened to him in the end, though.
Walking around the house, I started to feel great warmth for the man.
There were little bits of paper on the desk where he worked. And the
dining room where the family used to have their meals still had the
stand on which Mary, who did most of the cooking, placed the cakes
she made for them. I’d imagined a huge dining room to entertain great
dignitaries, but, like everything about the man, it was very modest and
homely. Upstairs, the bedrooms were just as interesting. I especially
loved the wallpaper, an intricately patterned design that was possibly
made by a French company. It said so much about Lincoln and his
wife. I bet they were a really modern couple for their time.
But the kitchen was my favourite room in the house. With a wood-
burning stove – a bit like an Aga – it must have been like hell in there,
with smoke and flames everywhere. When they moved to Washington,
Mary wanted to take the stove with her, but someone put their foot
down and said, ‘No, come on, behave yourself.’ But I could see why
she wanted to take it with her: it’s absolutely beautiful.
The more I learned about Abraham Lincoln, the more I liked him. In
the parlour, where the family spent a lot of their time, the kids would roll
around and play on the floor, and Abe would either read or roll around
on the floor with them, while Mary would do a bit of sewing and
stitching. Apparently Lincoln was very fond of his children and liked to
spoil them. One of his kids once had a birthday party and Lincoln
invited sixty children, so the place must have been in uproar. He was
often seen pulling his kids along the street in a cart, something that
was considered very unmanly and feminine in those days. I liked the
sound of that because I remembered pushing my own son around in a
pushchair in Glasgow. It was the delight of my life at the time, but even
then people responded to me strangely and often looked at me as if I
was a bit of an odd hippy. They’d say, ‘Aren’t you embarrassed?
That’s a woman’s thing to do.’ So I could only imagine how the
residents of Springfield must have reacted to Lincoln in the nineteenth
century.
Another thing I like about him is that he lived in a sort of suburbia, a
modest neighbourhood. He was born in a log cabin, so the Springfield
house must have been a huge move up for him, and it was the only
house he ever owned. He moved straight from Springfield to the White
House in February 1861. Four years later, it was boom, goodnight
Vienna, when John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, shot
him in the back of the head.
Lincoln was a giant and I came away from his old home in great
admiration of the man. And I’ll retain that admiration, I think.
Clearly, I’m not the only one to hold Lincoln in such high regard. For
evidence, you only need to look at his tomb, built in Springfield after
that stumer shot him. (‘Stumer’ is a Scottish word that really appeals to
me. I don’t know where it comes from, but I like to think of it as a cross
between ‘stupid’ and ‘tumour’. It means you’re no good for anything.)
The centrepiece of Oak Ridge Cemetery, Lincoln’s final resting place
is surrounded by towering oak trees in a gently rolling landscape. His
117-foot-tall granite tomb also contains the bodies of Mary and three
of their four sons – Edward, William and Thomas.
Although relatively modest by the standards of presidential tombs,
this is one of the most revered places in America – and rightly so. It’s
worth a visit just to see the sculptures of Lincoln, both inside and
outside the tomb, the most impressive of which is a large bronze bust
of the President at the entrance. A facsimile of a marble bust that
stands in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, the bronze was created
by Gutzon Borglum, who also sculpted the vast Lincoln figurehead at
Mount Rushmore. Many visitors rub the nose of the Springfield bust for
good luck. It’s not encouraged, but I’ve never done what’s encouraged,
so I gave it a rub.
Inside the building, other bronze statues portray Lincoln in various
stages of his life. Some include excerpts from his most famous
speeches. Walking down a circular hallway to a marble burial
chamber, I was confronted by the sombre words that Edwin Stanton,
Lincoln’s Secretary of War, uttered at his death: ‘Now he belongs to
the ages.’ Stanton’s next words after the assassination – ‘There lies
the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen’ – aren’t
displayed in the tomb, but I think they would have been quite
appropriate. Standing in the chamber, there’s a very real sense of the
terrible human cost of the American Civil War, almost as if Lincoln
died yesterday.
A red marble marker stands above the underground vault where
Lincoln’s coffin lies. People have twice tried to steal the body, so the
vault has now been reinforced with concrete and steel to foil grave
robbers. God only knows why anyone might want to steal it. What
would they do with it? Put it on eBay?
One of the things that sums up Lincoln for me is that he spoke for
less than three minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National
Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where four and a half months
earlier, the Union armies had decisively defeated those of the
Confederacy. Before the President’s concise, powerful and deeply
moving speech, Edward Everett, a former Secretary of State, had
talked for two solid hours. Everett’s seldom-read, 13,607-word oration
was slated to be the main event of the day, but Lincoln’s ‘few
appropriate remarks’, which summarised the war in just ten sentences,
is now recognised by everyone in America as the Gettysburg Address.
He began the speech with a reference to the American Revolution of
1776: ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on
this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.’ Then he invoked the
principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and redefined
the Civil War not merely as a struggle for the Union but as ‘a new birth
of freedom’, which would bring true equality to all of America’s citizens,
ensure that democracy remained a viable form of government, and
create a unified nation.
Now one of the best-known speeches in American history, Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address was greeted first by a stunned silence and then by
wild, prolonged applause for the man who was guiding the nation
through the Civil War and preserving the Union. He was a fantastic guy
and a true lover of freedom. His assassination did nobody any good.
John Wilkes Booth simply killed a very good man.
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, I had arrived in Springfield
swithering, as we say in Scotland, between whether Lincoln was a truly
great guy or just an ordinary guy made to look great by history. By the
time I left, I was in no doubt. To abolish slavery and to keep the Union
of America intact were two extraordinary achievements. I ended the
day wishing I’d had the chance to meet Lincoln. I think he would have
been a friend of mine. I reckon I would have liked him and I hope he
would have liked me.
In a few hours I’d completely changed my opinion of the man. And I
kinda like that. I’m not locked closed on everything.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I climbed on to my trike,
headed out of the cemetery, passed the Illinois State Capitol Building
(built from Romeoville limestone) and arrived at the home of the Cozy
Dog, one of the birthplaces of fast food.
This was the place where Bob Waldmire, that fabulous artist who
lived on a bus, grew up watching the traffic on Route 66. His father, Ed,
invented the Cozy Dog after visiting Oklahoma and eating a speciality
of the state – a corn dog – which is a sausage baked in cornbread. Ed
liked it, but thought it took far too long to prepare. He mentioned it to a
pal, but then the Second World War intervened and he thought no
more of it.
A few years later, when Ed was stationed in Amarillo, Texas, with
the US Air Force, his pal wrote to say that he had developed a batter
that would stick to frankfurter sausages, allowing them to be deep-
fried. He sent some of the batter to Ed, who tested it in the air force
kitchens, creating a thickly battered hot dog on a stick. Ed called them
‘crusty curs’.
These meat lollipops became hugely popular on the air force base
and around town, so when Ed was discharged in 1946, he decided to
set up a restaurant to sell his creation. But his wife thought ‘crusty cur’
was a terrible name and suggested Cozy Dog instead, possibly
because it was like a hot dog in a blanket. Their Cozy Dog restaurant
in Springfield was the first fast-food joint on Route 66. For the first time
in history, big groups of people were driving long distances and they
needed places to grab a quick bite to eat. Cozy Dogs could be
prepared in advance, so the customers could grab one and then just
keep driving.
Incidentally, did you know that it took a wee while for anyone to come
up with the idea of putting a frankfurter in a bun to make a hot dog?
The story goes that a Bavarian sausage seller called Anton Ludwig
Feuchtwanger had been selling frankfurters with a pair of white gloves
so that his customers could eat the hot sausages in comfort. But when
the customers started keeping the gloves as souvenirs, Feuchtwanger
responded by serving his sausages in rolls. Nobody seems to know for
sure whether he first tried this at the 1893 World’s Fair: Columbian
Exposition in Chicago or the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in
St Louis. Whichever it was, Feuchtwanger is credited with inventing
the hot dog, although I can’t believe that nobody thought to put a
frankfurter in a bread roll between the thirteenth century – when the
sausages were invented in Germany – and 1893. By the way, if you’ve
ever wondered why a hot dog tastes the way it does – with that unique
flavour that no other sausage or meat has – well, the answer is
coriander. That’s the secret ingredient. Tell your friends. And tell them
who told you.
The people at Cozy Dogs were terrific and the souvenirs were great,
but something was not sitting well with me. Then I realised what was
bothering me. In 1996 they’d moved from their original location. I knew
the building didn’t look like the kind of restaurant that would have been
built in the 1940s or 1950s, the kind of roadside eatery that a young
Bob Waldmire would have sat outside, watching the world drive past. It
fed into my irritation about parts of America rejecting Americana. They
used to build roadside diners and restaurants that were very funky, but
now they’ve stopped doing that. Instead, they build plain little brick
sheds that all look like public toilets. The Cozy Dogs had a plainness
about it that I found kind of sad. What a shame.
As for the Cozy Dog itself? Well, I guess it’s an acquired taste. But
the chips are to die for, and the decor inside the restaurant is brilliant,
so it’s still well worth a wee look. I just wish they sold vegetarian ‘not
dogs’. Considering the restaurant’s association with Bob Waldmire,
they really ought to have them on the menu. They’ve got his artwork up
on the walls, so they should sell his favourite snack.
Leaving Springfield, the weather immediately improved. The sun came
out for a wee while for the first time since I started my journey. The rain
had been belting down non-stop and I was getting a bit bored with it. I
don’t mind weather if it changes all the time, but constant rain and
greyness really get to me. And I’m speaking as someone who comes
from Scotland. So I know of what I speak.
I was making my first detour off Route 66 since leaving Chicago,
and rode for what seemed like thousands of miles across vast empty
plains of wheat, corn, soya bean and potato fields. Known as the
Prairie State, Illinois has some of the most fertile soil in the world. The
cold winters allow it to replenish itself, while the long, warm summers
and reliable rainfall produce ideal growing conditions. The state
produces enough soya beans each year to fill the Empire State
Building more than fifteen times.
My destination was the largest Amish community in Illinois. As I
approached Arthur, about ninety miles due east of Springfield, it soon
became obvious that I was entering a religious community where the
way of life had changed little since the current residents’ ancestors had
settled there some 150 years ago. About ten miles from town, there
was a road sign I’d never seen before: a black silhouette of a horse
and buggy on a yellow background. The sign warned that the local
people lived and farmed in a unique way, one firmly based on
centuries-old traditions and practices. Then I rode past a field in which
the soil was being ploughed by horse.
About four thousand Amish people live in Arthur, where they humbly
follow their community’s strict but simple rules. Each family traditionally
owns around eighty acres of farmland, which is used to feed the family
and the wider community. They use only horse-drawn machines with
metal wheels, and their main crops are wheat, oats, clover and corn.
However, this pastoral way of life is changing for the Amish, who are
struggling with ever-increasing land prices and decreased demand for
home-grown, non-mass-produced food. In response, some members
of this resourceful community are turning their hands to other skills,
such as furniture-and machine-making, in order to supplement their
agricultural income. Tourism is also becoming an important part of the
Amish existence, as the cottage industries and country shops continue
to thrive.
That’s why I found myself pulling up outside a large, plain wooden
shed and offices that served as the workshop of Mervin, the Amish
furniture-maker I mentioned at the start of the book. I liked Mervin from
the first moment I met him. He has an easy smile and a gentle manner,
as well as that fantastic pudding-bowl haircut. Dressed in a plain shirt,
dark trousers and button braces, Mervin was very welcoming and
offered to show me around his workshop. He answered every question
honestly, such as when I asked how he took orders from customers,
given that the Amish weren’t meant to use modern appliances like
telephones.
‘We’ve got a phone that we use to take orders,’ he said. ‘We’re not
allowed to have phones for ourselves, but they’re all on the outside of
the building.’ He indicated something that looked like a payphone,
bolted to the side of his office. As an Amish businessman, he can
receive calls from people who have no other way to contact him, but he
can’t phone out, except in an emergency. ‘More and more of them
have their own phones,’ said Mervin, referring to the other Amish
residents of Arthur, ‘since more of them run businesses in the area.’
In my ignorance, I’d always thought that Amish communities didn’t
extend any further than Pennsylvania, but Mervin explained that they
had spread across large parts of the United States. Originating in
Switzerland, the Amish are a Christian group who migrated to America
in the early eighteenth century in search of freedom to practise their
religion as they pleased. Although I was right in thinking that they
initially settled in Pennsylvania, which is still home to one of the largest
Amish communities in the world, some families eventually travelled
further west in search of more land.
For years, the Amish lived very enclosed lives, almost entirely self-
sufficient and spurning contact with the outside world. But times have
changed, and Amish furniture-makers, renowned for their old-
fashioned, high-quality woodworking skills, now sell their goods
outside the community in order to survive. Mervin showed me how his
team of cabinetmakers made every piece by hand in a large joinery
workshop that he’d set up in 1996 after working for another Amish
carpenter. Surprised to see some power tools in the workshop, I
asked Mervin whether the Amish way of life allowed him to use
electrical machinery.
‘No, all the tools in the shop are run off hydraulics and air,’ he said.
For instance, Mervin’s saws and sanders were hydraulic, rather than
electric. ‘We’ve got some electric lights and appliances. We’re
allowed to have some electrical power, but we run it off diesel
generators. We’re not allowed to have it come off the line, so we
produce it ourselves.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked. ‘Because it would connect you to the outside
world?’
‘Not just that,’ he said. ‘Mostly it’s to stay away from as much
modern stuff as we can.’
‘It seems to be working well for you. You seem to be managing
pretty well without it.’
‘Yeah.’
 Mervin asked if I would like to have a go at putting a cabinet
together, but I turned down his kind offer. ‘I’m too clumsy,’ I said. ‘I don’t
want to waste one.’
The wood is mostly imported from Canada, although a small amount
comes from the northeastern US states and the South. Mervin said the
most important member of the team was the man who cut the wood. ‘If
he doesn’t get it right,’ he said, ‘then it’s real difficult for the guys who
put it all together.’ Clearly, the man who cut the wood was doing his job
extremely well, because the finished products were all beautiful, with
an astonishingly smooth finish. Such well-made pieces of furniture are
surely destined to become the antiques of tomorrow.
In his showroom, Mervin showed me an entire kitchen that had been
constructed in his workshop. With excellent craftsmanship and
fantastic attention to detail, it was splendid, top-of-the-line stuff – the
kind of furniture you buy only once, because it lasts a lifetime. I’d dearly
love to have something like it in my house.
Mervin had a charming, very practical, down-to-earth attitude to
making furniture. ‘Who designed this?’ I asked, pointing at one of the
kitchen cabinets.
‘We see it,’ he said, ‘and then we just make it.’
It was at this point that Mervin suggested we should go for a ride in
his horse-drawn buggy, something I’d always wanted to do. He
showed me out to the yard, then directed me into the stable so that I
could bring out the horse. As I explained earlier, I’m a wee bit wary of
horses, but Mervin helped me lead out a lovely chestnut. Very gently,
Mervin attached some tackle to the horse while I continued to pepper
him with curious questions.
‘As we were driving here I noticed that many Amish were waving at
us from their buggies. Is that normal?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mervin. ‘We think that if you don’t wave, you’re stuck
up.’
‘Really?’
Mervin laughed. ‘That’s the way a lot of people feel. It’s like: try to be
friendly to everybody.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
Mervin then attached the horse to a black buggy, which, like Mervin’s
furniture, was a beautiful example of skilled craftsmanship. It had two
sliding panels on each side, so the passengers could travel either
entirely enclosed and protected or with the sides open.
‘She’s a little worked up today,’ Mervin warned as he adjusted the
horse’s reins.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked, even though the horse seemed perfectly calm
to me.
‘A few strangers about. She’s not so used to them.’
As he fixed the horse, he told me that most Amish families owned a
buggy or two, all of them made by local craftsmen. A larger model
typically costs around seven thousand dollars. We set off and Mervin
explained that he learned how to control a buggy as a kid. Then he
showed me the ropes.
‘It’s not hard at all,’ he said, as I took the reins.
‘Not with you here, it isn’t,’ I replied.
We pootled along for a little while, chatting idly.
‘You know what I find very impressive, Mervin? You keep talking
about the rules for this, the rules for that, and the rules for the other. You
seem very comfortable with it.’
‘It’s something you get used to, you know.’
‘From the outside, people think it’s kind of fanatical. But up close
you seem very happy with what you’re doing.’
‘It’s nice to keep your family together and just kind of do your own
thing.’ We plodded on a bit further in silence, then he said: ‘I guess, as
far as the rules and stuff go, it’s … ’
‘Do you find comfort in it?’
‘Oh yeah, oh yeah.’
‘You certainly seem to,’ I said. ‘You seem to be a very happy man.’
‘Yes.’
‘Another thing. On the way here we stopped at an Amish restaurant,
and when we were among Amish people there, I thought they would
keep themselves separate, but they made a point of saying “hello” and
“good morning”.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Mervin nodded, then turned to me. ‘So, you got any
children, Billy?’
‘Four girls and a boy.’
 ‘How old are they?’
‘The youngest one’s twenty-two and the oldest is forty-one.’
‘All still living with you?’
‘Well, two of them still live with me.’
‘I see.’
‘The rest are out working in different places.’
Mervin interrupted our conversation to explain that if I wanted the
horse to go a little faster, I should give her a gentle tap and click my
tongue. ‘There you go,’ he said, showing me how.
‘How many children have you got?’ I asked.
‘Five. We had six but the youngest one passed on,’ said Mervin. He
hesitated before continuing. ‘We had an accident when he was
fourteen months old.’
‘Oh, fourteen months. That must have broken your heart.’
‘It was kind of a sad situation. I was out in the barn and I was using
the skip-loader to move a hay-bale and I backed over him.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yeah, and … so it was kind of sad.’
I looked at Mervin. He was telling me about this tragedy in such a
quiet, calm, matter-of-fact way that it broke my heart. He’d simply
accepted that it had been God’s way. Whether I agreed with that was a
different story, but he accepted it and that was the whole cheese.
‘It’s been twenty … The second of April. It was twenty years ago, so
it was kinda … ’
The anniversary had just passed, a couple of weeks before. ‘Oh, my
goodness me,’ I said.
‘You know, it’s still tough.’
I nodded. ‘That must have taken a bit of getting over.’
‘Yeah. We still think about it a lot.’
‘I bet you do.’
‘But, you know, life goes on and … you’ve just got to make the best
of it sometimes.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘It’s one of those things.’
‘Yeah.’
We sat in silence for a few moments, watching the countryside
slowly slide past and listening to the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves.
‘We had a lot of rain lately,’ said Mervin, ‘and we got water across
the road here.’ He explained how you get the horse to cross a deep
puddle. ‘If she runs, that’s fine; but if she wants to walk, let her walk.’ It
seemed like a good approach and the horse took us through the
water.
Next we took a spin around the fields, a vast, flat landscape with little
protection from the elements. Winters here are long and hard, but
Mervin said they were bearable and I could understand why. Sitting
behind a horse clip-clopping down the road was a lovely way to travel,
and I seemed to have got the hang of it.
‘It’s not hard at all,’ repeated Mervin.
‘It’s very nice. I would love to go into town like this.’
We both cackled.
‘And when you’re young and single,’ I said, ‘is this how you go out
with your young lady?’
‘Yeah, we can. They get those gatherings and then they’ll sometimes
end up taking the lady home and getting acquainted and so forth.’
‘Is that allowed? Are you allowed to be alone with your girlfriend? Or
do you need a chaperone?’
‘It’s allowed.’
‘And do you do that thing here where you … Is it called rumspringa?’
‘Yeah, they call it rumspringa.’
Rumspringa literally means ‘running around’, which is an apt
description. It’s the period between the ages of sixteen and eighteen
when adolescent Amish kids decide between being baptised and
officially joining the Amish Church or leaving the community. It’s also
when they look for a spouse. It’s a rite of passage, and maybe a time
for sowing a few wild oats. Some Amish communities allow their young
men to purchase small ‘courting buggies’, while some families paint
their yard gate blue to indicate that a daughter of marriageable age
lives there.
It seems a very sensible system to me. By recognising that
adolescents need to rebel and defy their parents, it allows a degree of
misbehaviour to be tolerated. Some of the kids turn their backs on
Amish practices, wearing non-traditional clothing and styling their hair
differently (they call it ‘dressing English’), driving vehicles, drinking or
taking drugs and engaging in pre-marital sex. Up to half of them may
temporarily leave the community or eschew the traditional practices,
but almost all eventually return and choose to join the Church.
I told Mervin I thought the rumspringa was a very sane thing to do.
‘Yeah, but there’s some things that go on that I don’t really like or … ’
‘That you don’t approve of?’
‘Some of the kids get carried away.’
‘Of course.’
‘And people’s people, you know? People’s people.’
‘Do people get disappointed if the youngsters don’t come back?’
‘Some do. That varies from family to family. It might be more
disappointing to one person than it is to another.’
‘It all seems very basic and understandable to me.’
‘Well, we just try to be simple, you know? A lot of them get it out of
their system and then … ’
‘Settle down?’
‘Yeah. We’re all humans, just like the rest of them.’
I like that attitude. There’s something very accepting – and very
Scottish – about it.
I was intrigued how Mervin met his own wife, so asked: ‘How would
an Amish guy find an Amish wife?’
‘Well, a lot of them have activities going on. Or, like what I did, I met
her, my wife, at a certain place and got acquainted. Then we started
dating each other. I’d take her places.’
‘Did you meet in a sort of community thing, a dance or a get-
together or something like that?’
‘I was probably where I shouldn’t have been.’
That made me laugh.
Mervin told me that the various Amish communities across America
all have the same basic rules, but with some variations, according to
geography. ‘You know, because you live in a certain circumstance, a
certain rule doesn’t work.’ A few are allowed to have mobile phones or
to fly on aeroplanes because they are considered necessities.
Occasionally, Mervin will take a train into Chicago for business
purposes, but in his community aeroplanes are still forbidden. I’d love
to have seen him with his hat and beard striding through the Windy
City.
‘In this area we don’t fly,’ he said. ‘But it’s one of those things –
maybe one community needs something where another one doesn’t.
When I was younger, I asked one of the bishops how we should decide
what’s appropriate and he said it’s important that everybody agrees to
whatever we’re doing.’
‘That seems to bind everything you do. With the Amish, everybody
has to agree.’
Mervin nodded. ‘You know, it varies. It’s not all one hundred per cent.
Just everybody tries to do their part. It makes it easier for everybody.’
‘I like the way you combine resources. If someone’s got cancer and
the treatment is expensive, you all take part in paying for it. I think that’s
a wonderful thing.’
‘I really appreciate that, too. Helping each other binds people
together. It’s kind of the key thing.’
‘Visitation’ is another big thing among the Amish. It’s all about
maintaining their community. They’ll gather at each other’s homes to
drink coffee and eat popcorn. Alcohol is not permitted, but Mervin said
the youngsters often have a drink anyway. ‘They go through that age
when it’s an attractive thing, even though it’s not allowed.’ Weekends
and holidays are spent dropping in on friends and relatives. ‘If
someone needs visiting, maybe they’re sick or they need company, we
go see them.’
In their spare time, many of the Amish folk fish for bass or sing in
choirs, particularly on Sunday evenings, when all the generations
congregate together. They go to church at least every fortnight, often
visiting other churches in the district, although communion is only ever
taken in their local church.
Mervin and I kept talking until, about half an hour later, we arrived at
the family farm and he invited me into his parents’ house. Mervin
himself lived next door.
‘Your stomach getting empty?’ he asked. ‘Are you ready for lunch?’
‘Absolutely.’
After several days of eating rubbish on the road, it was a delight to
sit down to some proper home-cooked food, prepared by Mervin’s
wife and mother. They were both dressed in long, plain dresses,
pinafores and bonnets. Near by, a small girl, no more than two years
old, wandered around, also dressed in traditional Amish dress and
bonnet, a dummy in her mouth. I listened as the family chatted in what
sounded like a combination of English and High German.
Mervin invited the director, the producer and the rest of the crew to
join us as we sat down to a huge spread, including chicken, ham, pie,
salad, vegetables, potatoes, noodles, corn and bread. It all tasted
wonderful.
After dinner, Mervin showed me how the gas lighting in his parents’
house worked. It gave out a lovely glow. Then he asked where I was
going next.
‘St Louis. It’ll take about two and a half hours.’ I told Mervin that the
throttle on the bike was a bit tight and made my thumb sore. ‘So it’ll be
a little painful by the time we get to St Louis, but all in all it will be good
fun … if the rain stays away.’
As we prepared to leave, I told Mervin that this had been one of the
nicest days of my life.
He just laughed.
‘Going around with you in the buggy was delightful. I’d like to thank
you very, very much. It’s been such a pleasure meeting you.’
‘You’re welcome. Appreciate you stopping in.’
‘I’m very happy. You’ve made me very happy.’
I rode away from Arthur thinking it had been the best day’s filming I’d
done in a long, long time. Mervin is a lovely man. A complete man. He
knows exactly who and what he is, and what he does. He makes
beautiful things, and he makes them extremely well.
It’s lovely to know that there are still people in the world who are
making wonderful things. I’d thought that when it came to furniture-
making, maybe the best days were over. But they’re not. There are still
guys like Mervin making fantastic things that will be handed down in
families from generation to generation. It fills my heart with joy.
And Mervin is not just a master craftsman – he laughs easily and can
take a joke. At one point I’d asked him to put on his Amish hat. I’m sure
plenty of guys would have refused, not wanting to conform to some
outsider’s stereotype. But Mervin immediately agreed and plonked his
hat on his head with a big smile.
I still know very little about the Amish way of life, but it seems very
humane to me. I don’t know of any other religion that has that. The fact
that most of them choose to come back and live that way after the
rumspringa says a lot. And there’s a wonderful social side to it. For
instance, I really liked the way that Mervin and many of the other Amish
guys grew beards but not moustaches, just because they all wanted to
look the same as each other. Like, for instance, when I asked Mervin,
‘Why no moustache, why just the beard?’
‘Nobody else has moustaches,’ he said, ‘and we like to all be the
same.’ That’s a lovely sharing concept which really appeals to me, and
it’s not phony.
Being Amish is not for me, because I’m too long in the tooth and set
in my ways, but if I could have my time again, I’d be proud to be Amish.
I think I would have made a pretty cool Amish guy, with my hat and bib
and brace overalls, making beautiful furniture. I would have settled for
that.
My day in Arthur left me with a similar feeling to when I’d visited
Quinn Chapel. It’s nice to see people happy in the knowledge of who
and what they are.
The weather was still crap – there were even reports of more
tornadoes in St Louis – but I was content now. It was what it was, and
as much a part of the journey as the road and the people I’d meet
along it. Everything doesn’t always have to be in primary colours. But I
must admit, I could have done without the permanently wet crotch.
Go through St Louis; Joplin,
Missouri
I arrived in St Louis to find I was staying in the Moonrise Hotel’s Buddy
Ebsen Suite, which was strangely appropriate, as Buddy was the
reason why I was on the journey. A movie star in 1930s Hollywood,
Buddy later played the dad in The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most
successful sitcoms of all time. I used to watch it at home in Glasgow in
the 1960s and delight in its bluegrass banjo theme song. It made me
rush out and buy a banjo, thereby kick-starting the whole long story that
took me out of the shipyards, into playing in folk bands and from there
to comedy, movies and ultimately a television series about riding a
trike along good old Route 66.
If it hadn’t been for Buddy Ebsen and the other guys in The Beverly
Hillbillies – and Earl Scruggs, who played that theme song – I would
never have written this book. So it was kind of nice to be in Buddy’s
suite. It put a big smile on my face when I went into the room and saw
pictures of him all over the place.
The journey to St Louis had been longer and harder than I’d
anticipated when I left Mervin’s place in Arthur. The rain battered down,
drenching me until I was freezing wet and shivering. Then, mercifully,
Mike, the director, offered to take over on the bike. He rode twice the
distance that I did and was nearly drowned by the spray of passing
trucks. It was terrifying. Driving along on a three-wheeler with your arse
eighteen inches off the floor as forty-ton trucks come whooshing past is
not fun. It’s not a game for children at all. But Mike did it, and we all
arrived in St Louis to tell the tale, so I was a happy boy. It felt like a
good day’s hard work.
We had arrived in St Louis by crossing the Mississippi on Poplar
Street Bridge, the route since 1966. In the 1920s Route 66 took the
McKinley Bridge, a three-arch structure, across the river, but in the
1930s, Route 66 was diverted on to the Chain of Rocks Bridge,
allowing travellers to bypass St Louis. It soon became a well-known
landmark on the road west, so I decided to take a look at it. But good
intentions can result in tricky outcomes, and when I arrived at the
bridge with the film crew my first thought was: What am I going to say
about this? It was just a wee bridge over a wee river. How would I
entertain the great British public with that? Some of them would have
bigger bridges in their back gardens.
Then the crew took a run up the road to investigate and discovered
we were at the wrong bridge. A big, proper bridge was just around the
corner. Relief all round.
Straddling the border between Illinois and Missouri, the Chain of
Rocks Bridge follows a line of large rocks, which at one time could be
seen stretching across the Mississippi like a giant’s stepping stones.
But the rocks created rapids, making that particular stretch of the
Mississippi extremely dangerous to navigate, so in the 1960s a low-
water dam was built across the river to raise the water level. Now you
can see all the rocks only during extreme low-water conditions. On the
day I visited the river was very high, so we couldn’t see any of them –
not that it detracted from the fabulous bridge.
Standing in front of the bridge, you can see why it has become an
icon of Route 66. It has eleven truss sections that look like they’re
made out of giant Meccano pieces, and it bends by twenty-four
degrees about halfway across the river. The construction company had
purchased land on each side of the river, but the parcels were not
directly opposite each other. Initially they planned to build the whole
bridge on a diagonal, but the US Army Corps of Engineers objected to
that plan on safety grounds. So they built the first section, which
crosses the major navigation channel, straight across the river from the
Illinois shore. Then the remaining part was built at an angle to meet up
with the Missouri shore.
Now decommissioned and out of use for motor vehicles, the Chain
of Rocks Bridge takes only bicycles and pedestrians these days, but
we had secured special permission to drive my trike across it. Built in
1929 as a toll bridge, at first it wasn’t very successful, mainly because
it didn’t connect easily to downtown St Louis. Soon after opening the
bridge, the company that built and operated it went bankrupt, so it was
handed over to Madison, Illinois, the city at its eastern end. In 1936 it
was included in Route 66, and traffic numbers soared. By the time it
was closed in 1970, the city had made seven million dollars profit from
it. Not bad, eh?
For years a wee mystery surrounded the bridge. Every year a huge
bouquet of flowers would appear on it. Nobody knew what these
signified until 1959, when someone noticed an envelope attached to
the flowers. Inside, they found a tragic wee note dedicated to Todd
Costin, who had worked on the bridge and had fallen off in 1929, just
before it was completed. Engineers had predicted that there would be
ten fatalities during construction, but only Todd was killed. He was
dragged to the bottom of the Mississippi by the weight of his tools.
In the mid-1970s Madison City wanted to demolish the bridge, but a
recession put paid to that when the market price for scrap iron
collapsed. At the time, the cost of demolishing the bridge would have
been several million dollars more than its scrap value. So the bridge
was left to rust, largely forgotten until a local bicycle group
rediscovered and renovated it to create what might well be the longest
pedestrian and bicycle bridge in the world.
The bridge is still in a pretty rusty state, but I like it. It has a rural,
funky, southern feel to it. And it was lovely rumping along it on my bike,
with the metal rattling and the noise of the engine echoing all around
me. At the far end of the bridge, I arrived in Missoura. Did you notice
how I went all local there? We know it as Missouri, but all the locals say
Missoura. And it’s St Lewis, not St Louie – you have to pronounce it
that way if you don’t want them thinking you’re a square.
From the bridge, I had a good run of a few miles down the road with
a helicopter following me, which is always a gas. I feel like such a star
whenever I do that, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. I was scared to look
around for the helicopter, so I just leaned back on my trike and posed. I
was being moody and bikey and overtaken by trucks, and it was a jolly
day – the kind of day when I feel like I’m being successful at what I do.
Usually I don’t actually know what I’m doing. It’s the same on stage – I
do what feels good, but I don’t know how it looks. I don’t practise in
front of mirrors and I don’t look at rushes. Instead, I rely totally on how it
feels … and as long as it feels good, that’s fine by me.
It can be weird, because people tell me that my movement on stage
is getting funnier and better, but I’ve still got no idea what I’m doing. All
I know is that they’re laughing while I’m poncing around. And I don’t go
and look at other people, in case I inadvertently steal their moves, so
I’ve not even got anything to compare it to. I also avoid watching other
comedians, because I know I’ll just absorb their material and then think
it’s mine later.
A lot of comedians who are accused of stealing stuff don’t
intentionally nick it. They just become a sort of comedy black hole,
sucking in material. They see and hear so many funny things when they
go to clubs, performing with other guys, and everything they hear goes
straight into their mental filing system. Months or even years later, it’ll
pop out and they’ll swear it’s their own idea. But actually they heard it
ages ago in some obscure club in Chicago or wherever. Then the guy
who actually did come up with it gets mad – and quite rightly so. But
we all pick things up by mental osmosis, and comedians are no
different to anyone else.
To avoid this problem, I go completely by feel – a bit like reading
Braille – whenever I’m on stage or making a television show. It’s a
weird and frightening process because I never know how I’m doing.
And making the series about Route 66 was no different. I was sure the
director and half of the crew thought I was fishing for compliments
because I kept asking them how it was going, but I genuinely didn’t
know.
So it was a gamble, but quite an exciting one. I knew it could
backfire. I could have spent these seven weeks doing a live tour,
where thousands of people would have paid good money to see me
and would have given me a warm welcome. But one night of television
would reach millions of people. Which meant I had to be good, even
though I hadn’t scripted a single word beforehand. So, before arriving
at each location, I immersed myself in my research notes and just
hoped it would all come out in the correct order. As on stage,
whenever I remembered something interesting, it would just plop out.
There was no preconceived plan. But it seemed to work, and it always
gave me a boost when I saw the crew laughing. That was my quality-
assurance test.
St Louis is a rather beautiful city, with lovely people. In fact, every town
I’d passed through up to this point had been beautiful, clean and tidy.
America really is a country of small towns, most of which are
handsome and well kept, although some are stultifying in their dullness.
Driving through them, the streets are often empty, with nobody walking
along, something I’ve never encountered in Britain. Whenever I
stopped to eat or have a pee, I’d meet charming people in the shops
and restaurants, but on the street the towns and villages were
invariably completely dead. It lent a sadness to these places – like the
locals had all given up their streets to the car.
Before riding back into the centre of St Louis, I visited an area that
one of those tornadoes I’d seen on the news had torn apart only a few
days earlier. Riding towards it, there was no sign of anything out of the
ordinary, but then we turned a corner and arrived in the district of
Bridgeton. God Almighty . With wind speeds up to 200 m.p.h., the
tornado had cut a swath half a mile wide and twenty-one miles long
through several counties in and around the city. Within that zone – total
devastation. Three feet outside the zone – everything perfect and
orderly. From a distance, it looked like a big machine had cut a valley
clean through the town. Houses had been decimated, leaving only the
foundations and enormous mounds of crap. Huge trees had been
uprooted, just pulled right out of the ground, showing the awesome
power that the tornado must have possessed. Officially, it had been
designated an EF4, the second-worst type of tornado. I couldn’t
imagine what the worst type must be like. We sometimes get wind
speeds of about 100 m.p.h. in Scotland, but when you’re talking double
that, well, that’s just fantasy land for me. It must be so terrifying to have
your house turned to scrap around you.
The first thing I noticed in Bridgeton was the amazing silence. There
was an awe and drama about the place. Churches were missing their
roofs. At the Ferguson Christian Church, they’d been watching Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ when the storm showed up. As the
congregation watched Jesus being whipped, the roof was ripped off,
frightening the bejesus out of them. They must have thought they’d
been sent for. Meanwhile, the house next door and a big Buddhist
temple further down the road were left untouched. I didn’t think for a
moment that it meant anything significant, but it still amused me a lot.
The second thing that struck me was the cheeriness of everyone.
The police, the fire service, the victims – they were all in a good mood.
I visited a house in which only the concrete basement, where the family
had hidden from the worst of the storm, was intact. A friend was
helping them sort through the detritus, looking for valuables and
anything of sentimental value. I introduced myself and asked a few
questions about the house, or what was left of it.
The friend pointed at a pile of wood and rubbish. ‘This was the deck
and the pool.’
‘This was the deck and the pool?’ It was a complete mess.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They were down in the basement.’
I looked. ‘This was their basement?’
‘Yes. Where the refrigerator is lying.’
‘They were down there? And they came up to see this?’ I pointed at
the devastation.
‘Actually, I think he stuck his head out of that stairwell right there and
just kind of looked around and said, “Our house has gone.”’
As we were chatting, Bridget, the daughter of the house, turned up.
She was in great shape, just pleased that she and her family had
survived unhurt.
‘Were you here when it happened?’ I said.
‘No. I had just recently moved out of the house, about three weeks
ago.’
‘Good timing!’
‘Well, I left about half my stuff here. I hadn’t completely made it out of
the house, so … good timing for me, but bad timing for my stuff!’
She was incredibly jolly. And yet, all around us, it was total chaos, as
if vast garbage dumpsters had been turned upside down either on the
houses or beside them.
‘I can’t imagine how it must have felt,’ I said. ‘What was the noise
like?’
‘My dad said it sounded like a freight train was going right through
the house. He said that the instant his ears popped, he knew it was
coming. It was the pressure of the tornado.’
‘Is that when he was still up here?’ I pointed to where the deck had
been.
‘As he was going down the steps. He made it down just before it hit.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘My dad was standing at the top of the steps, watching the news,
looking out the window. My mum was already in the basement. My
uncle called and said, “There’s a tornado that landed in Bridgeton. You
guys need to be downstairs!” No sooner had he gotten down the steps
than it hit.’
Her father sounded just like me – the type who ignores advice until
the last possible moment. As soon as he locked the basement door
behind him, it started to shake. Looking up the stairs, he could see
debris flying everywhere.
Then Bridget told me that her father had recently been diagnosed
with colon cancer, and he was recovering from surgery. On the day that
the tornado hit, he was on a portable chemotherapy pump.
‘Oh my God!’ I said again.
‘It makes him feel pretty sick, but he’s been out here digging and
doing his thing.’
Bridget explained that they had a couple of days to sift through the
wreckage before everything would be bulldozed away and the clean-up
operation would start.
‘So you’re just going through all this rubble, hoping to find precious
things?’ I said.
‘Yes. We’ve found a couple of very, very valuable things, like my
engagement ring. It was at my parents’ house, sitting on my night
stand, and she found it in the rubble.’ Bridget pointed towards her
friend. ‘When she found it, we all cried. Everybody did.’
‘Oh my God!’ Of course I hadn’t known she was engaged. What an
amazing story. ‘I’m going to touch it for luck.’
‘It had travelled about seventy-five feet, so it’s definitely one of the
luckiest pieces of jewellery I know. And my wedding dress survived,
too. It has a little bit of mud on it, and a small hole in one of the seams
on the side, but all that can be fixed before I get married.’
I told Bridget that I thought her community’s optimism was
extraordinary.
‘In the first few days my parents were very upset. But now my mum’s
talking about wanting a new big front porch. She’s already designing
the new place. This was just a one-storey home and they’re discussing
whether to make it taller instead of having it so long. They might go for
a two-storey home.’ Apparently, she was also planning a whole new
deck area and a veranda.
‘You’re all insured, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘We had full coverage on the house.’
‘I love thinking about your mother redesigning.’ It made me laugh.
‘The first thing she said was “I want that big front porch.” She likes
the big country style.’
‘I know what she means. I’m married to a woman like that.’
It’s such an American thing to be so pragmatic and optimistic,
always looking at what the future might bring, rather than reflecting on
what has been lost in the past.
‘This was our party place for all our friends,’ said Bridget. ‘There
was a pool and a hot tub in the yard, and a trampoline. So they’re
planning somewhere to continue having parties.’
Remarkably, no one was killed by the tornado. In fact, not so much
as a pet had been reported missing. But I wondered what it must be
like to live in a place where tornadoes are a permanent threat.
‘Have you had tornadoes here before?’ I said.
‘Not anything like this,’ said Bridget.
‘About 1967 was the last one that was equal to this,’ added
Bridget’s friend. ‘And it was two miles down the road. I was a kid and I
remember that one; it was on my fifth birthday. I spent it in the
basement waiting for a tornado to pass.’
‘You wouldn’t need to blow your own candles out that time!’ I said.
‘No, I didn’t even have a cake that day. And people died in that one.
It was really severe.’
She told me that they got lots of tornadoes, but their routes were
unpredictable, so the outcome was always a bit of a lottery. In fact, St
Louis is one of the most active urban areas for tornadoes in the United
States. Every April, on average, 163 tornadoes will strike America,
most of them in Tornado Alley. In this zone cold, dry air from Canada
and the Rocky Mountains meets warm, moist air from the Gulf of
Mexico and hot, dry air from the Sonoran Desert. When they collide,
the air streams create rotations, like the swirl of cream being stirred
into coffee. In storms, when the air streams are fast and powerful, the
rotations can turn into tornados. Tornado alley stretches from the
Eastern Plain of Colorado and the Texas Panhandle, through
Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri, and up to Nebraska and South
Dakota. But this year, by 25 April, they had already experienced 292
tornadoes. And everyone was nervous, because May usually has twice
as many as April.
They were right to be worried. A fortnight after I’d visited Bridgeton,
one of the worst tornadoes in American history, a mile-wide whirlwind,
struck Joplin, Missouri, killing 138 people. At the same time, Arizonans
were fighting some of the largest wildfires they had ever known; and
the greatest flood in US history was spreading down the Missouri
River. Meanwhile, Texas was suffering its eighth year of ‘exceptional’
drought in the past twelve years. Something very weird was happening
to the weather.
The next day, we took the trike to a garage to get the throttle fixed. It
was now so stiff that it made my thumb and forefinger ache. It was all I
could think about when I was riding along, and that was dangerous. My
mind ought to have been on the road, not my throbbing thumb, when I
was flying up an interstate or bumping along Route 66. With the bike
out of action for the day, I took a taxi down to the Gateway Arch.
The world’s tallest man-made monument (they really like
superlatives in America), the arch is America’s symbolic gateway to
the West. Four million people visit it each year. They just want to touch
it or gawp at it or be near it.
According to those who know about these things, it’s an inverted
catenary curve – the kind of organic shape that forms naturally when
you hang a piece of string between two points. The designer, Eero
Saarinen, also designed the Tulip chair and the TWA Terminal at JFK
Airport in New York (that’s the funky, space-age one). He came up with
the design of the Gateway Arch by dangling a twenty-one-inch length of
string between his fingers, held seven inches apart, and scaling it up
from there. Saarinen said he chose the shape of a dangling necklace
in tribute to the great explorers, hunters and trappers of the West. As
most people know, those pioneers always wore a wee single-strand
pearl necklace and a twinset underneath all their rawhide gear, just in
case they were ever invited to a tea dance in the outback. (Okay, I
made that up. But they did always make sure they had a wee black
dress in their saddlebag in case of emergencies.)
A lot of people rave about Saarinen’s Tulip chair, but the Gateway
Arch is surely his finest piece. I’d seen it maybe half a dozen times
before, but always from a distance, between buildings. It’s a bit like
Paris and the Eiffel Tower – you keep seeing it from unexpected
angles. But when you get to see it properly, it’s a thing of amazing
beauty. My only slight disappointment was that I’d always thought that it
straddles the Missouri River, but in fact it stands alone, on the west
bank of the Missouri. But that doesn’t detract from how magnificent it
looks.
The 630-foot arch was gleaming in the sun when I arrived. There
were nine hundred tons of stainless steel standing in front of me, the
most used in any single project in history. It fascinated me that they did
the surveying during construction overnight, when it was cooler, so that
expansion of the metal would be minimised. They built the arch as two
separate legs, and then joined them together at the top. And do you
know what the margin of error was for the base of each leg at ground
level? One sixty-fourth of an inch. One sixty-fourth of a bloody inch.
Any more than that, and the two legs would not have met at the top. It
made me imagine the builders finishing the two legs to find that they’d
built them perfectly, but a foot apart. Can you picture it? ‘Excuse me,
mate, you wouldn’t happen to have a twelve-inch piece of stainless
steel on you? We’re a bit short up here.’
I descended into the basement to take a lift all the way to the top.
When I say lift, I mean a strange little pillbox that goes sideways as well
as up and down, which of course it has to do as the top of the Gateway
Arch is not directly above the base. Designing it presented a unique
challenge for some of civil engineering’s finest minds, who knew that
no conventional lift would be able to carry passengers all the way to the
planned observation deck at the pinnacle of the arch. They suggested
that two or more lifts would be needed, with passengers hopping from
one to the next on their journey to the top. Nobody wanted that – it had
to be a single-lift design. But after a lot of scratching of heads, the
Harvard-and Yale-educated engineers drew a blank. No one could
work out how to put a single lift into a structure that didn’t rise in a pin-
straight line.
Then a young man came forward. A lift repairman by trade, his only
qualification was a high school diploma, but he reckoned he had
designed a lift that could ascend the whole parabolic structure. When
he’d finished explaining his idea to a room of architects and
engineers, he asked if there were any questions.
‘Yes,’ said one of the audience. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m thirty-four,’ he said. And left it at that.
A few years later, the mysterious lift repairman’s design was
adopted and installed in each leg of the arch.
It’s a very curious lift. Officially, it’s called a cantilever railway. I
climbed into a tiny cabin, almost bending double to get through the
door. Four adults can just about fit into one cabin, which at first goes
up diagonally in one direction. Then there is a lot of clanking and
grinding of gears and the little wagon rises in the opposite diagonal
direction. It was kind of weird, a bit like being on an underground train,
except moving in a different direction. I couldn’t see much, aside for
some rivets and girders, but I quite enjoyed that. As I’ve said before, I
like engineering. I like things that are built to be beautiful and to show
off the skill of the human race.
The trip took about four minutes, near the end of which the little pod
appeared to go straight up for a short time before resuming its strange
zigzag movement and arriving at the top.
I’d been in a few other monuments in my time, like the Atomium in
Brussels and the Walter Scott Memorial in Edinburgh. And I’d always
wanted to go inside the Statue of Liberty, but never managed it,
although I can tell you a story that will make you jealous. Once, on Elton
John’s birthday, he took me on a trip around Manhattan in a helicopter
and we flew around the statue. Then we hovered right in front of her
face and had a good look. Are you jealous yet?
Anyway, back to the arch. At the top, there’s a small observation
capsule with a great view. I’ve always loved being up high, so it was
fantastic to gaze down at the State Capitol Building and the riverboats
far below on the Mississippi. I was a bit disappointed that no one
asked me how to spell Mississippi, because it was one of those words
that they tested us on again and again at school. Back in those days,
I’d never have dreamed that one day I would be at the top of a huge
monument looking down on it. Isn’t life the strangest thing?
Just as I’d done from the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago, I gazed
west, contemplating where Route 66 would take me next. Whereas
Chicago had been the central distribution point for goods coming from
and going to the West, St Louis was often the starting point for people
moving westwards. This was made possible when President Thomas
Jefferson bought fifteen US states and two Canadian provinces from
the French in 1803. Doubling the size of the United States, the
Louisiana Purchase included all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri,
Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, as well as parts of Minnesota
that were west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota, nearly
all of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, the
portions of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado that lie east of the
Continental Divide, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi, including
the city of New Orleans. In addition, it contained small portions of land
that would eventually become part of the Canadian provinces of
Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Jefferson commissioned two Virginia-born veterans of the Indian
wars in the Ohio valley, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to survey
all the rivers and land west of St Louis. Accompanied by a fifteen-year-
old Shoshone Indian girl called Sacagawea, they crossed the Rocky
Mountains and reached the Pacific Ocean in present-day Oregon,
claiming all the territory that lay beyond the nation’s new boundaries for
the United States. This led to the biggest migration in history, as
people from all over the world first arrived on America’s East Coast,
then moved west.
While up in the observation deck, I met a nice family from
Newfoundland. I’ve never met a Newfie I didn’t like – they are fabulous
people from a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world – and these
Newfies didn’t disappoint. They even knew who I was, which made a
pleasant change from being mistaken for John Cleese.
From the Gateway Arch, I headed to St Louis station, to see its own
famous arch. I took a taxi again, but a huge parade was blocking off
several streets, so I was forced to continue on foot. On the way, I
passed a park known as the Citygarden, which was chock-a-block with
some fabulous sculptures. I was fascinated and went to have a closer
look. Some girls were trying to squeeze inside one of the sculptures, a
giant man’s head lying sideways on the ground. It would have been
great to film them as they messed around, but by the time we’d set up
the camera, they’d moved on. Not to worry – before long, some other
children were climbing all over it.
This art was so alive. Most towns have statues of dowdy characters
with big moustaches, dressed in frock coats and covered in pigeon
shit. They’re the great and the good of the town, but nobody gives a
toss about them. People swan straight past, even if they’re Robbie
Burns or Robert Tannahill, rather than some general or lord mayor.
Abstract and modern sculptures are so much more accessible. People
are drawn to them and like to touch them. I love the fact that abstract
art can do that for people, entitle them to go up and touch it. To me, it
gives the art a life of its own. If I was the artist, I would be absolutely
over the moon if I saw those kids reacting to my work in that way.
As I walked through the park, I saw another bunch of kids treating a
big red abstract sculpture like a slide, whizzing down it on their bellies.
Another statue had water squirting out of the ground and the kids were
running through it, getting soaked. It made me so happy. It was such a
joy to see these inert statues brought vividly to life.
I spotted a sign as I was leaving. It warned that playing in or near the
water and sculptures was inherently dangerous, but it didn’t say, ‘Keep
Off!’ It just asked visitors to exercise some caution and common sense
when they let children loose on them: ‘Treat it and one another with
respect, thereby maintaining an atmosphere which provides enjoyment
for all.’ It was that easy to get people to behave responsibly. Much
better than the usual threats of ‘Clear off or we’ll call the police, you
scoundrel.’ What a wonderful place. A public garden with spectacular
landscaping and internationally renowned sculpture in a completely
open, accessible setting – what more could anyone want?
After that delightful, unplanned detour to the Citygarden, I must admit
I was dreading my planned trip to the railway station. I was on my way
to see its ‘whispering archway’, but I was wondering what on earth I
could say about a station, no matter how beautiful. Even Grand Central
Station in New York is difficult. You say it’s stunning. Then what?
However, I was very moved by some of the details of this station,
such as that two million soldiers passed through it every month in
1943. I wondered how many of them returned home after being
shipped over to Europe and Asia. All those goodbyes and cheerios
and tidings of ‘good luck’ and ‘look after yourself’. And the arch turned
out to be quite interesting, too. Most whispering galleries work on the
horizontal inside a dome. For instance, at St Paul’s Cathedral in
London, you whisper against the wall and the sound goes round
horizontally. But this one goes up the wall, across the ceiling and down
the opposite wall in a channel. Apparently no one realised it carried
whispers until a workman hit himself with a hammer and swore. One of
the other workmen on the other side of the arch heard the expletive
distinctly. Now some guys say to their girlfriends, ‘Stand there. There’s
something I want to tell you. I want you to hear this.’ Then they shoot
over to the other side of the arch and whisper: ‘Will you marry me?’
Lovely.
I tried it out and it works perfectly. But I had nothing more to say
about it, so we packed up the camera and went for lunch.
Entering a Japanese restaurant, I looked up at the television to see
The Last Samurai. It stars Tom Cruise, Timothy Spall … and me. We
asked the manager to rewind to the beginning and then we all watched
it, something I’ve never done before. Usually I don’t even go to the
premiere of a film in which I’ve appeared. If can get away with it, I’ll
sneak away. But enough time had passed since I’d filmed this one, so
it was fun to watch. All in all a rather jolly time was had in St Louis.
The next day, we collected the repaired bike and I was itching to get
back on the road. But first I wanted to stop off at a soul food restaurant
run by a remarkable woman.
Robbie Montgomery used to be one of the backing singers for Ike
and Tina Turner – an Ikette – shaking her tail feathers and singing
fabulous soul songs such as ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. That meant
she’d got to know everybody. She’d sung with Mick Jagger and lots of
other sixties and seventies stars like Dr John, Stevie Wonder, Barbra
Streisand, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker. When
she’d been starting out, restaurants on the road would often refuse to
serve black performers, so Robbie and others in the band would cook
dinner in an electric skillet in their motel rooms. Eventually forced to
quit singing because of a lung disorder, Robbie turned to her second
love, cooking soul food. She opened a restaurant, and after many
years and a lot of hard work, she now owns two fantastic restaurants
called Sweetie Pie’s, one of which is in South St Louis.
It was a real privilege to meet a woman I’d previously admired in a
soul revue. Now seventy years old, she is still very beautiful, with a
shock of white hair tied back under a chef’s hat.
‘I never thought I’d stand this close to you,’ I said. ‘The only time I
ever saw you before, you were … ’
‘Shaking my tail feathers?’
We both laughed.
‘That was my favourite,’ I said. ‘Shaking the tail feathers!’
‘Really? Well, the tail feathers broke. I can’t shake it any more. I’ve
gotten too old for that now.’
It was very easy to laugh with Robbie.
‘Well, welcome. Are you going to come on in?’ she said.
‘I hear I have to stand in line like everybody else. That’s demo cratic.
I don’t need special treatment. I don’t seek it, I don’t need it.’
‘Oh, good.’
Robbie’s dishes, learned at her mother’s hip, are best described as
from-scratch cooking. The menu features recipes like baked chicken,
ox tails, candied yams, macaroni cheese and peach cobbler made in
the traditional way.
‘White people call it home cooking,’ she said. ‘Black people call it
soul. We call it comfort food. Or we call it Mississippi-style cooking,
because these are all my mom’s recipes and she was born in
Mississippi, like me, and she taught me to cook.’
I was really looking forward to my first taste of soul food, but I was
nervous about sitting there – the only white guy in the restaurant. It was
nothing to do with race. I just didn’t like being the only guy who didn’t
understand what was on the menu. But Robbie guided me, and it was
just darling.
‘It’s Sunday,’ she said, ‘so most people have collard greens and
candied yams; and if you like meatloaf, that’s your choice.’
‘I like meatloaf,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t had it in such a long time.’ I’d
never had candied yams or collard greens. I’d only read about them in
William Faulkner books. They were fantastically good, but the
experience was made so much better by being able to sit and talk to
the woman who had sung such sensational songs. We talked a lot
about music, food and life in general, and Robbie was the best
company. It was a great start to the day.
So far on Route 66, my meetings with black people – from Preston
Jackson in Bronzeville and the Quinn Chapel congregation to Robbie
here in St Louis – had been a joy and a constant surprise to me. If I
was black in America, I think I’d be angry at the way black people have
been treated over the years. And I’m not just talking about slavery.
From the Civil War through to Vietnam and Iraq, black people have
fought for America, then returned home to bloody shoddy treatment.
Yet they seem unfazed by it. Their experiences haven’t broken their
niceness. On this trip I was constantly amazed and pleased by their
attitude. I know that sounds hellish – like I was a fucking explorer – but
I’d expected them to be angry, and they just weren’t. There was a
quality to black people in America that I found unbelievably impressive,
especially when I was talking to Robbie. I was glad to meet her, and I
was even gladder that I ate her food. It was unbelievable.
All that said, though, my macaroni cheese would smash Robbie’s
out of the park. But my macaroni cheese would smash anybody’s out
of the park. I’ll take on anyone. And I do a mean fishy pie, too.
You Haven’t Seen the Country ’til
You’ve Seen the Country by Car

Leaving St Louis, I stopped off at Jefferson Barracks, the oldest

operational military base west of the Mississippi River. Established in
1826 on land obtained as part of the Louisiana Pur chase, these
barracks assisted and supported the westward expansion of white
settlers by keeping hostile Indian groups at bay.
Exactly 150 years before I visited, Missouri was torn apart by the
Civil War, an appalling event that left 625,000 Americans dead, more
than perished in the two world wars combined. Missouri endured more
than a thousand battles and engagements between 1861 and 1865.
On the day that I passed through, a Civil War re-enactment group was
recreating the Camp Jackson Affair, which set Missouri on the violent,
turbulent path to war between the opposing Confederate and Union
armies. On 10 May 1861, Union forces clashed with civilians on the
streets of St Louis – at least twenty-eight people were killed and
another hundred injured. The incident polarised the border state of
Missouri, leading some citizens to advocate secession with the
Confederacy and others to support the Union, thereby setting the stage
for sustained violence between the opposing factions.
Eleven southern Confederate states fought twenty-five northern
Union states, but even today nobody can be certain why they went to
war. This very complex issue sells millions of books in America every
year, and thousands of academics dedicate their lives to studying it.
To Abraham Lincoln, the President at the time, the conflict was entirely
about slavery; but a recent poll in America found that two-thirds of
people think it was actually about issues to do with how much power
the federal government had over individual states and that it had
nothing to do with slavery at all.
Whatever the true cause, I was enjoying the smell of cordite at the
re-enactment. Held over two days in a green, rolling Missouri field, it
involved several hundred participants in grey and blue coats watched
by several thousand spectators. Like some other scheduled stops on
the trip, I must admit that I hadn’t been looking forward to this one. I
didn’t expect to have a good time with people who re-enacted battles
during their weekends. But I was proved wrong yet again. The re-
enactment was beautifully executed, although it was hampered by one
fatal flaw: none of the re-enactors wanted to die, because that meant
lying on the battlefield for hours on end until the entire shooting match
was over. I spotted only one dead guy. He was lying face up and was
so still that I wondered if he might actually be asleep. There were far
more wounded guys, limping off the field. The bastard that I am, I
watched them closely to make sure they kept playing their part right to
the end, but I didn’t spot any who gave up hobbling when they thought
no one was looking.
It was all very impressive, but I still didn’t have a clue what to say to
the camera crew about it. I made a few comments, and an American
guy standing next to me started to laugh, so I felt reassured that I’d not
overstepped the mark by making fun of the Civil War. He seemed like
a good guy, so I asked him to explain exactly what was going on.
 ‘This battle kept St Louis in the Union,’ he said. ‘So the Unionists
are supposed to win, I guess.’
‘Well, they have to in the end, don’t they?’
‘The bit about America losing 625,000 Americans, that’s the
tragedy. I heard you talking about it.’
‘That’s right. And we keep doing it. We keep sending people to war.
Young, healthy, bright people.’
‘In England you send them on honeymoons, right?’
This guy had a sense of humour. A couple of days earlier, Prince
William had married Kate Middleton and now everyone was talking
about where they might be going on honeymoon. You couldn’t escape
it – even in the middle of America. ‘I don’t know why you’re so
interested in it all,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you have a war to get rid of them?’
He laughed, then nodded at the re-enactment. ‘This is the first time
I’ve ever done this.’
‘Me too.’ One of the re-enactors suddenly put his hands in the air.
‘Oh look, he’s surrendering and he’s a bluecoat!’
The bluecoats were Unionists, whereas the Confederates
traditionally wore grey. Not the easiest of colours to tell apart at the
best of times, but what made it even worse was that the Confederate
Army struggled to find grey material, so some of their soldiers wore
dark blue. Unsurprisingly, this led to considerable confusion. For
instance, during the Battle of Shiloh, some of the Confederate forces
fired at their own soldiers. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, the Union
then ran out dark blue cloth, some of their old uniforms faded to grey
as the dye washed out, and many Unionist troops were given grey
jackets to wear over their blue shirts. No wonder so many soldiers
died.
After a few hours, the re-enactment ended with no sign of who had
won. Several of the participants recognised me and wandered over for
a chat. They told me they’d all made their uniforms themselves and had
been very accurate about the details, to the point where one of them
had a period pipe that he kept smoking, staying in character
throughout. They were great fun. I couldn’t have asked for better
company.
From the re-enactment, I drove directly to Jefferson Barracks
National Cemetery, a military graveyard on the banks of the
Mississippi. More than 220 generals from the Civil War spent time at
Jefferson Barracks and many of them were laid to rest in the cemetery,
which covers more than 330 acres. Established after the Civil War, it
contained nearly 160,000 graves by 2005. Since then, several
thousand more have been added.
There wasn’t much I could say about this place. The sight of all the
graves said it all, really. Every grave was identical – each one a
uniform size in an indistinguishable serried rank. Tombstones in
civilian graveyards are often engraved with poems and little one-liners,
but there’s none of that in military graveyards. Just the bare details:
name, regiment, date of birth and date of death. Occasionally, the
tombstone would have a few additional words, such as ‘Loving Father’
or ‘Dear Brother’, but more often it was just the basic facts in row upon
row of tombstones, rolling over hill and dale.
To me, it seemed a wee bit obscene to make something so horrible
look so neat and tidy. I know that’s a very cruel thing to say, because
I’m sure the people who designed the cemetery did it with the very best
intentions, but it reminded me of the National Memorial Arboretum in
Staffordshire – a monument to all the British forces killed on duty or as
a result of terrorism since the end of the Second World War. When it
was opened, a commentator on television explained that some of the
walls listing the dead had been left blank. Apparently, there was space
for about ten thousand more names to be added. When I heard that, I
thought: Does this bastard know something I don’t?
What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war
sentiments are ever displayed. It’s as if war is fun or noble, when
actually it’s all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers’
stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they
never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there’d be less of it. I
remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting,
waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at his top
row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn’t put that on
the recruitment posters, did they? But that’s what war is to me. And I
don’t care who we’re fighting, I don’t hate them enough to do
something like that to them.
 Maybe all of this hit me particularly hard at the Jefferson Barracks
National Cemetery because I visited it shortly after Osama bin Laden
was nailed and America was rejoicing in a huge wave of triumphalism.
I found all of that rather horrifying – that delight in death and that
attitude of ‘Why don’t we just kill the bastard?’ We have to move
beyond that kind of thinking or we’re doomed as a species.
Fortunately, my mood, which had got more than a bit dark at the
cemetery, immediately lightened as I rode west from St Louis and
Route 66 entered some of the most pleasant, verdant country along its
entire length. Scenic wooded drives through hills and valleys, far from
the superslab of Interstate 44, gave a tantalising impression of what
riding the road must have been like in its heyday. But the weather was
still remarkably turgid and dreich (a Scottish word for dreary) as I
pulled up at my next stop, a wolf sanctuary in Eureka, Missouri.
I’ve always had great respect for wolves. Many years ago, when I
was a boy, I read that the wolf’s fierce reputation was the creation of
writers who had never even seen one. Sitting in London, Birmingham
or Manchester, they wrote about the call of the wild with little or no
experience of it. If they’d seen these magnificent creatures, they would
have realised immediately that they’re terrified of humans. Absolutely
terrified. There’s no chance at all of that cartoon image of them
sneaking up behind you and tearing out your throat with their vicious
teeth. The wolves I saw at the sanctuary couldn’t get far enough away
from us.
Tucked away in a wooded area, the Endangered Wolf Center is
home to forty animals from five different species, including the two
most endangered species of wolf – the Mexican grey and the red,
which used to be native to Missouri. Only around a hundred red wolves
exist in the wild and they’re all in North Carolina. As for the Mexican
grey, there are only about fifty left anywhere outside captivity.
A lovely young lady called Regina showed me around, explaining
that their mission was to breed wolves in captivity and then release
them into the wild. ‘We’re unique in that aspect,’ she said. ‘We don’t
pat the animals, we don’t talk to ’em, we don’t play with ’em. We want
them to keep that fear of humans, so when they go into the wild, they
stay away from people.’
They had already released some Mexican grey wolves in the New
Mexico–Arizona border area – the only spot where they can still be
found in the wild. Some red wolves had been released in the Alligator
River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina.
‘Sarah Palin likes to shoot wolves from helicopters,’ I said.
‘Yeah. In Alaska and a few other areas, that’s their practice.’
‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’
‘It’s different management styles. These guys, you definitely don’t do
that with them’ – she pointed at one of the red wolves – ‘because there
are so few left. They’re the most endangered mammal in North
America, so they’re very protected.’ We both watched the wolf, which
was bright red with big ears and exceptionally long legs that made it
walk funny, like it was wearing high heels.
In addition to the wolves, the sanctuary houses some brilliantly
coloured African wild dogs – all yellow, white, grey and brown. Fucking
great, they are. Superb hunters and killers with massive strength in
their jaws, second only to the hyena, they’re also hugely social animals.
When they wake up in the morning, they all greet each other like
they’ve never seen each other before. Then, in the afternoon, they have
a wee kip, wake up, and do it all over again. They really seem to love
each other.
The final two species in the sanctuary are maned wolves from South
America, which have manes of black hair, like horses, and swift foxes
from North America. All of them are kept for education, research and
breeding purposes.
‘Swift foxes?’ I said. I’d not heard of them before.
‘They are,’ she said. ‘Their name kind of gives away what they do.’
I laughed.
‘They are the fastest animal we have here. About forty miles per
hour.’
‘Really?’
‘They’re pretty fast. So whenever we have to give them their
vaccines and catch ’em, it’s a challenge.’
I told her that I’d always liked wolves.
‘Yes. They’re a creature that really touches your heart. One of my
favourite things about working here is that I get to work with species
that are going to be released into the wild.’
‘They’ve been lied about for so long, you know. Fiction writers have
written such nonsense about them for years.’
‘That’s true. Kids grow up listening to Little Red Riding Hood and
The Three Little Pigs and stories about werewolves and they become
scared of wolves. But the old cliché – that they’re more scared of you
than you are of them – is true.’
Then she asked if I’d like to help feed a deer to one of the wolf
packs. I could see several wolves lurking among the trees in the
distance, looking very nervous. The dead deer had been donated by
the Missouri Department of Transportation after it was hit by a car.
Instead of going to waste, it would give the wolves a welcome taste of
their natural prey.
The warden handed me a long stick. ‘It’s your protection stick,’ she
said. ‘The wolves won’t come up to you, but if you feel threatened, you
can wave it. But like I said, they’re gonna be at the back of the
enclosure.’
A protection stick. I liked that. ‘I’m sure wolves are terrified of white
sticks,’ I said.
‘You’d be surprised.’
There were six animals in the pack – an alpha male, a female and
their cubs. As well as an occasional deer, the wolves were fed a dry
mix made specifically for them and they could hunt raccoons, possums
and even any turkeys that wandered into their enclosure.
‘Do those animals just stray in not knowing?’ I asked.
‘Yep, they don’t know there are wolves in there, so it’s quite a shock.
And these guys get to practise their hunting skills.’
The deer was frozen stiff. ‘Will they be able to eat this?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. Think of the wolves in Yellowstone. They come across deer
that have been killed by the winter cold. They’re still able to get in there
and break apart the carcass and get the healthy, nutritious stuff.’
After dropping the deer in the enclosure, I watched from a distance
as the wolves approached it very warily. The alpha male took the first
bites, eating the best meat; then the female tucked in. Finally, they let
the cubs come in and eat, too.
 ‘In the wild,’ said the warden, ‘the entire pack helps take down a
deer or an elk, and they all have their roles. One of the cubs distracts
the deer or the elk and then the alphas come in and take down the
deer from the rear, by the neck. Then the rest of the pack helps bring
’em down. You’ll actually see ’em kind of take roles when they’re
chasing. One will chase for a little bit and then take a break, then the
next one’ll chase until they get ’em down. And they all help. So when
they say it’s a family pack, they really mean that every animal works to
get the dinner.’
When wolves hunt, they’re successful only about 10 per cent of the
time. A well-placed kick from an elk can break a wolf’s leg or jaw. And
there are no vets in the wild. It would be like us going to the
supermarket and being chased out with a baseball bat nine times
before we were able to buy any food. And the one time that we
managed to buy anything, the food would be kicking and fighting us the
whole time.
I looked up to where one of the wolves was watching me, the warden
and the camera crew. ‘Look at that one – on top of the shed.’
‘He’s checking you out. We think we’re being quiet, but these guys
have amazing hearing. They can hear from several miles away. One of
the ways they communicate is by howling, which they can hear up to
ten miles away, depending on the wind speed. So even though we’re
quiet, they can hear us. They can smell us, too. When you’re out there
hiking, they can hear you coming before you even know and they’ll take
off running.’
‘They’re really wishing we weren’t here, aren’t they?’
‘They are. They’re ready to go for dinner and we’re making ’em
nervous.’
‘You can see them coming round and saying, “Oh God, they’re still
there.”’
‘They’re very shy. And that makes them tough to study out in the wild.
You want to observe their behaviour and learn about them, but they
know you’re there before you even know you’re there, so they run
away. But being shy helps them survive.’
We watched the female wolf circle the deer cautiously. Tall and
weighing about forty-five pounds, she was very light on her feet. All
legs, like a supermodel, she backed off the deer when she sensed that
the alpha male was returning for another wee snack. Then he peed on
the deer, marking it as his own.
Wolves have the most awful reputation for crowding and circling
hikers, pulling them down, tearing out their throats and killing them in a
fevered bloodbath. Well, it’s all a load of bollocks. There’s no recorded
instance of wolves attacking humans in history. They’re the most
delightful, tender creatures, and the people working with them at the
sanctuary are lovely. They’ve dedicated their lives to looking after
these beautiful animals and I’m full of admiration for them.
I also think we could learn a little about social interaction from those
African wild dogs. The French have learned it already: they all shake
hands in the morning, as if they are being introduced for the first time. I
really like that, and was inspired to try it myself. So, at breakfast the
next morning, I shook hands with one of the crew. Maybe he was
surprised, but I can be quite human when I try.
My journey continued through green farmland, across little bridges over
creeks and past red-brick and wood farmsteads, for about thirty-five
miles to Stanton, site of one of the best-known and most hyped
attractions on Route 66: the Meramec Caverns. So far, I’d travelled
nearly four hundred miles along Route 66, and most of that distance
had been regularly punctuated by large billboards advertising these
limestone caverns, often accompanied by a painting of the outlaw
Jesse James. The billboards draw over 150,000 visitors each year to
the caves, so they’re clearly doing something right.
The Meramec Caverns are a weird combination of phenomenally
beautiful and utterly awful. They’re a wee bit showbiz, with neon signs,
souvenir shops and a moonshiner’s cabin outside, all of which I thought
was pretty unnecessary. They were first opened up in 1722, when a
French miner met an Indian who told him the caverns contained seams
of gold. The miner found no gold, but he discovered lots of saltpetre,
an essential component of gunpowder. During the Civil War, the Union
Army used the caves as a saltpetre plant, but it was discovered and
destroyed by Confederate guerrillas, among them Jesse James.
Years later, Jesse and his brother and partner in crime, Frank,
reportedly used the caves as their hideout. One legend claims that a
sheriff staked out the caves, waiting for Jesse and his gang to emerge,
but they found another exit and sneaked out that way.
By the early twentieth century, hundreds of tons of saltpetre had
been extracted, creating vast underground chambers. In the 1920s the
locals started to hold dances down there. One of the largest caves was
named ‘the ballroom’ and it still has a tiled floor and a stage. Bands
and their audiences would drive their cars right into the caves and
dance the night away. Later, the likes of Dolly Parton played concerts
there. The sheer size of the place is quite breathtaking. It’s so high that
I didn’t even feel like I was underground. There’s no sense of
claustrophobia at all, and it has a kind of magnificence.
In the 1930s a guy with big ideas called Lester B. Dill set about
tarnishing that magnificence. He bought the caves, explored the full
extent of the underground system, and claimed to have found artefacts
belonging to the James boys. It’s entirely possible that Dill added more
than a wee bit to local legends about the caves being the James
Gang’s hideout, and he certainly knew a good marketing opportunity
when he stumbled across one. But in my opinion he didn’t need to
push the James angle, because the caves would be much more
remarkable without all the hype. For instance, in one of the caves
there’s something that looks like an art student’s attempt to sculpt a
vast Scottish clootie dumpling. In fact, it’s the world’s largest
stalagmite, and it’s very impressive and beautiful.
But Dill just couldn’t stop himself when it came to promoting his
investment. While sightseers were in the caves, looking at the
stalagmites, stalactites and supposed Jesse James relics – as well as
genuine Pre-Columbian Native American artefacts that were found
later – Dill hired wee boys to tie adverts on to the visitors’ car
bumpers. In one fell swoop, he had invented the bumper sticker, so you
know who to blame the next time you’re stuck behind a particularly
offensive one on the motorway.
I loved the stalagmites and stalactites, and I particularly liked the
huge pendulum in the main cave. It was supposed to rotate in concert
with the spinning of the earth, but the ball at its end was the wrong
weight – it should have been a thousand pounds heavier – so it didn’t
work. To compensate, someone would just give it a shove every now
and then to get it going. Fantastic – the idea of a wee guy whose job it
is to slink along when nobody’s looking and give it a big push.
However, the climax of any visit to the caves is a light show that has
to be seen to be believed. To the accompaniment of a musical
soundtrack that culminates in ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a fella flicks
switches on a board to light up various stalagmite and stalactite
sections in garish colours, ending with the American flag
superimposed on one section of rock. I couldn’t understand why
people thought something as staggeringly beautiful as a cave needed
a light show to improve it.
Sometimes there’s a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any
tackiness I’ve ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns
are the pinnacle of that tack.
Relieved to be moving on, I rode through the village of Bourbon,
where the huge water tower, built in 1853 and labelled with the small
village’s name, has delighted countless tourists and passers-by over
the years. (Bourbon called itself a city, but with just over 1,300
residents and occupying little more than one square mile, and no
cathedral or university, it’s a village in my book.) A few miles further, I
arrived in Cuba, Missouri, where I spent the night.
I woke the next morning feeling depressed and fed up. I didn’t think I
could take another shitty, grey, rainy day, freezing my bollocks off on
the bike. Route 66 wasn’t meant to be like this.
Then I opened the blinds and let out a big ‘Oh yes!’ The sun belted
into the room. It was a glorious, warm, bright day. My mood
immediately changed. I was even upbeat about the itinerary for the
morning: a visit to the world’s biggest rocking chair. Another bit of tack,
I thought. But it might be a laugh.
The rocking chair is in the town of Fanning, right alongside Route
66. And would you believe it, it’s the most beautifully made, smashing
piece of (giant) furniture. It was the brainchild of a funny, big man called
Danny Sanazaro, and it really is vast: forty-two feet tall with thirty-one-
foot rockers, each of which weighs a ton. Standing beside it would
make anyone feel like they’d woken up in one of those 1950s B-
movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man. In the grand Route 66
tradition, Danny commissioned it to persuade drivers and riders to
stop at his store. It was designed by a local acquaintance with no
formal engineering training, and built by the owner of a local welding
company. The designer’s plans were off by only a fraction of an inch,
Danny told me. The chair was formally unveiled on April Fool’s Day,
2008 – a particularly nice touch.
Unfortunately for Danny, apparently there’s a sixty-foot chair
somewhere in Italy. But when I visited, the back of his rocker still
boasted ‘World’s Largest’, not ‘America’s Largest’, so I guess that
news of the Italian titan hasn’t reached Fanning yet.
Danny let me climb up on a ladder to sit on the seat so that the
camera crew could film me saying that I was going to stay up there until
someone made the biggest coffee table in the world and brought me a
cup of tea. It had been a long time since a piece of furniture had made
me so happy. I spotted one great failing, though: it didn’t actually rock.
After climbing down, I had a pootle around Danny’s store, which also
included a taxidermy place and an archery range. He invited me to
have a wee arch and showed me how to fire an arrow. I scored rather
well, although that worried me a bit. You start off shooting at targets,
like the ones they use in the army with a soldier running towards you
with his gun blazing. Then, after about a hundred shots, you think: I
wonder how it would be with a real guy who shoots back? I’ve never
done it, but it crossed my mind.
When I’d finished firing arrows, Danny and his wife, Carolyn, invited
the whole crew back to their house and gave us the best barbecue I’ve
ever had. Standing on their raised deck in golden evening sunlight,
looking out over the treetops in the valley below, they cooked the most
tasty, juicy fish from the river, which they called suckers. We’d been
joined by their son Laine, who did all the cooking, and Carolyn’s twin
sister, Cheri. The twins were identical blondes and really stunning.
‘Did you have fun growing up identical?’ I said.
They both nodded.
‘I used to be in a band with a guy who had an identical twin,’ I said. ‘It
was almost spooky.’
‘We had a lot of fun with it,’ said Carolyn.
 ‘Oh, I bet you did. Did you have fun with guys?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We still mess with Danny. He’ll grab her ass’ –
Carolyn gestured at Cheri – ‘and she’ll go along with it.’
She said that they often catch suckers, which look similar to trout, by
spearing them in the river at night. The boat is fitted with a big light on
the front to attract the fish. ‘It’s fun,’ she continued. ‘It’s just a big party.
You light a big fire down there and you kill ’em and then you clean and
you eat ’em right there on the river.’
‘That sounds amazing,’ I said. ‘God, what a lovely place.’
Below us, the woods seemed to be teeming with wildlife.
‘I was just watching a deer over here.’ Cheri pointed into the woods.
‘It’s gone now, but we see turkeys and deer and coyotes, all kinds of
stuff out here.’
‘Most people don’t know the turkey’s an American animal,’ I said.
‘They nearly chose it to be the national bird. Somebody insisted on the
bald eagle and they went for it, but it could have been a turkey. Of
course, you never think of a turkey as being a beautiful thing because
it’s got that kind of Christmassy, overfed look about it, but the wild one
is a thing of beauty, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, it is,’ said Carolyn. ‘It’s nothing like the white, tame turkey. No,
the wild ones, they’re pretty.’
‘And all the Christmas ones, they never have sex. They can’t; they’re
the wrong shape. Fancy living without sex and then you die at
Christmas. What a party.’
Carolyn and Cheri offered to take me out on a hunting trip the next
morning. They pointed at a ridge where they said there were many wild
turkeys. They’d been hunting since they were little girls, when their
father had made them a turkey call – a piece of wood that they would
strike to attract the birds.
‘I was with a woman, away up in the Arctic,’ I said, ‘and she was
hunting for moose with a bow. The guy with her had a sort of
megaphone and he would go whoaaa. And you could hear the moose
answering, whoaaa. It was the most thrilling thing. It got nearer and the
whoaaa got louder. But I won’t tell you how the story ends. It was a
disaster. You would hate it.’
‘Did she get it?’ asked Cheri.
 ‘No, she didn’t. One of the crew did a terrible thing.’
‘Oh?’
‘The director farted … ’
‘What did you say when he did that?’
‘Well … there was no more whoaaa, you know.’
Danny, the twins, his son and all the crew cracked up with laughter.
‘But the hunter made a living from manipulating people’s bodies.
She was a naturopath or something. And she cured the director. He
had been sick for days, making these terrible noises and running to the
bathroom every five minutes with that funny run. You know the one, with
the knees together.’
‘Squeezing it in, yeah.’ Carolyn was giggling again.
‘She did all sorts of things with him. She knew things about the body
I’d never seen in my life, you know? Asian opposition muscle stuff. And
she messed around with him and made him better. She told him what
not to eat, what definitely to eat, and what to eat less of … ’
‘Lay off the beans, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘God, I hope that don’t happen in the morning,’ said Cheri. ‘I’m in
show business, so I’ve never farted. When you’re in show business,
you have a de-farting operation. Some people get a new nose at the
same time. You can have the wrinkles taken away and be de-farted all
on the same day.’
There was little danger that the barbecue would cause any
problems. As well as the sensational fish, Laine cooked the best
mushrooms I’ve ever tasted in my damn life. Actually, they were the
only barbecued mushrooms I’ve ever tasted, but that didn’t make them
any less stunning. The previous night, I’d eaten in a barbecue
restaurant – oh fuck, what a disappointment that had been. Again I’d
seen just how dodgy the food could be in the middle of America. On
the whole, it was edible, but eating fast food almost every day was
really taking its toll. I’d begun to think there was something wrong with
me, like I’d left a bit of my body behind … or added a bit. Fast food is
okay once or twice a week; but it’s a fucking disaster for your digestion
if you eat it every day. So it was doubly delightful to share a proper
barbecue with Danny and his family.
Up before dawn the next morning, I found myself crashing through
woods before I’d even had breakfast. In semi-darkness – with lights,
cameras and a non-farting director in tow – I was following Carolyn and
Cheri on a turkey hunt. I reckoned I could hear the turkeys running
away. There was a turkey noise – buck-buck-buck-buck-buck-buck –
that I think translated roughly as: ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here, boys.
There’s a crowd of people with cameras and sound equipment
coming.’
After stumbling through the woods for a while, we reached a turkey
blind. A camouflaged canvas tent, it was large enough for three of us to
fit inside. We peered through a netted slit, watching for wild birds. It
was freezing and we sat there for an hour or two while one or other of
the twins wandered around with the turkey call. Whenever she stopped,
all I could hear was the sound of real turkeys getting further and further
away, which delighted me, as I don’t know how I would have reacted if
we’d killed one. I like eating them, but I’m not in the killing business.
Even when I go fishing, I don’t use barbs on my hooks, so I know that
the fish will be unharmed when I release it. I’m fine about people who
go fishing and eat whatever they catch, but to catch something, kill it
and not eat it is a very bad thing. I’m not a fishmonger, I’m an angler,
and I don’t like to kill things. And I think that hunting with guns fitted with
telescopic sights gives the human a deeply unfair advantage over the
animal. When you’re hunting with a bow and arrow or a crossbow, at
least you’re really at the sharp end. You have to be very good to hit
anything, and you have to get in close, which demands a bit of
cleverness.
Going turkey hunting reminds me of a joke that my daughter Kara
claims I told her years ago, although I can’t remember doing so.
‘How do you keep a turkey in suspense?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’
I wish it was my joke – it’s quite a good one – but I think Kara must
have confused me with someone else.
Incidentally, do you know what the Scots call turkeys? Bubbly jocks –
because that’s the noise they make when they’re chatting away.
Bubbly jock, bubbly jock. We’ve got some great names for other
animals, too. Frogs are puddocks, sparrows are speugs, owls are
hoolits and a linnet is a lintie, which is lovely, I think.
‘Oh, have you heard Margaret’s big lassie?’
‘Aye, she’s a lovely big lassie.’
‘Have you heard her singing? Sings like a lintie.’ That always
pleased me: sings like a lintie.
After the turkey hunt had thankfully ended in abject failure, I left Fanning
and the gorgeous twins and had a lovely run on the proper Route 66,
away from the interstate. As I’ve said, much of the original route has
now disappeared. Some stretches of it hit dead ends while others
simply run out of tarmac. And, of course, many miles have been
widened, paved over and turned into interstates, leaving no choice but
to travel on the freeway.
So, with the sun shining properly at last, it was terrific to bump along
the real Mother Road, with railway tracks to my right and the interstate
on my left. Rolling agricultural country stretched far into the distance as
I entered the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Above me, jet planes
were playing noughts and crosses with their vapour trails in the sky. I
passed a field dotted with bunches of flowers. It was a graveyard, but
all the gravestones had been laid flat on the ground, so, from a
distance, the commemorative flowers looked like a really peculiar
crop.
A train passed me, so I waved. I think we all have a duty to wave at
trains. This doesn’t apply to planes or cars, but trains always get a wee
wave from me, partly because I love those huge American
locomotives, but mainly because I always hope to see a hobo looking
out of one of the carriages. Apparently there are still loads of them
around, catching goods trains across America, although I’ve never
seen one.
This was God-fearing country, the buckle of the Bible Belt. At one
crossroads, I stopped to wait for the traffic lights to turn green and
spotted churches on three of the four corners. I passed a big billboard
that featured a single word – ‘Jesus’, it said. This got me wondering
why certain areas tend to be more evangelistic than others. I reckon it
might be the lack of choice of things to do in small towns and
agricultural communities. Churches don’t loom quite so large in the
sights of people living in Manhattan, Los Angeles or Chicago.
The previous day, I’d lain on my bed and watched a woman on
television saying she had ascended into heaven and fought demons.
According to her, the demons were red and black dragons, and God
had given her a sword to slay them. The icing on the cake came when
she told the viewers that she could teach them how to slay demons,
too. All they had to do was buy her CD for twenty-five dollars. It
sounded fanciful. And what a bunch of ninnies who fork out twenty-five
dollars. Do you know what always strikes me as ironic? Jesus was
such a pleasant person and he had some intelligent, earth-shaking
views. So why are so many of his followers such ninnies? There
seemed to be a church every five yards in Missouri, and some of them
were monstrously huge. I didn’t get it. Everyone I’d met in this state had
been bright and likeable, but clearly a lot of them are gullible, too.
I stopped for a lunchtime pizza in an ordinary wee place. A woman
was sitting in the restaurant with two boys, and one of them asked,
‘Are you Billy Connolly?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I saw you in The Last Samurai. Could I have a picture taken with
you?’
‘Sure.’
‘Is that your trike?’ He pointed out of the window.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s a beauty.’
‘Come on out and have a look at it.’
I showed him around the bike, then he said, ‘That’s my pickup over
there.’
It was a lovely green truck, old and very beautiful, so I complimented
him on it.
‘Yeah, I love it.’ Then he pointed across the street. ‘And that’s my
church, over there.’
It was one of those gigantic Midwestern churches, the type where a
TV evangelist fraud might preach. God, you’re so nice – and you
seemed smarter than that, I thought. That might sound arrogant, but I’ve
watched those preachers for years on American television. Almost to a
man, they’re frauds. They’ve got that politician look about them – two
haircuts a day, whitened teeth, all that crap – and they talk a load of
bloody nonsense. They’re very selective about the Bible. None of the
bits that hammer slavery ever get mentioned, but they’re very keen on
quoting the bits that hammer homosexuality. Oh yes.
Riding on, I was confronted by a typical example of why Route 66
was dying. Half a mile to my left, Interstate 44 surged through the
landscape, sucking all the businesses towards it, like iron fillings to a
magnet. On 66, lying in the shadow of the freeway, every business
seemed to be crumbling. I could sense the local communities trying
different things to attract any passing trade, but it was no good. The
choice for the motorist was between whooshing along, seeing very
little and contributing nothing to the local economies, or creeping
along, seeing lots and keeping the local communities alive. A lot of
people were still trying to keep the Mother Road alive, with murals and
other tourist attractions, but almost every driver was in a hurry to get
where they were going. You needed a lot of time on your hands to take
Route 66. So it was collapsing. It was a shame, but it was a fact. I’d
already seen hundreds of closed shops and decrepit businesses, and
we were still only in Missouri.
Following what was left of Route 66 wasn’t easy. The roads
chopped and changed, and eventually I got lost, so I stopped at an old
store, the Mule Trading Post, to ask directions. That was a stroke of
luck, because it was run by a nice old fella and was full of bits and
pieces of junk and memorabilia. It also turned out to be a bona fide
Route 66 landmark, so I was closer to the Mother Road than I’d
thought. I bought some badges and key rings from the old boy and we
chatted about fly fishing. I really liked him, but I couldn’t stay for long.
Ahead of me were Springfield, Missouri, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, which
always made me think of that Eric Clapton song, ‘Living on Tulsa
Time’, and, of course, Gene Pitney or Dusty Springfield singing
‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa’.
The relentless road beckoned.
Springfield, Illinois … Springfield,
Missouri too
Rolling on, I passed Rolla – which modestly calls itself ‘The Middle of
Everywhere’ – and a string of places with evocative names – Doolittle,
Hooker Cut, Devils Elbow, Buckhorn and Laquey – until I arrived in
Springfield, Missouri, widely regarded in the folklore of Route 66 as
the road’s birthplace.
The Mother Road didn’t get its snappy name by accident. In 1925
highway officials in Washington came up with a plan for assigning
names to the 96,000-mile network of interstate highways that was
being constructed and linked across America. Those running east to
west would be given even numbers, while odd numbers would be
assigned to the north–south routes. The longest east–west routes,
stretching from coast to coast, would all end in a zero. But they
decided to make one exception – Route 60 – which would head
diagonally from Chicago to Los Angeles, crossing Routes 20, 30, 40
and 50.
Maps were printed and signs painted for the proposed Route 60,
running from Illinois to Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,
Arizona and California. But then the influential William J. Fields,
Governor of Kentucky, kicked up a fuss. Upset that none of the
prestigious routes ending in a zero would run through his state, he
persuaded the authorities in Washington to assign Route 60 to a road
from the Atlantic coast in Virginia, through various states – including
Kentucky – to Springfield, Missouri. As a result, the road from Chicago
to Los Angeles would now have to be relabelled Route 62.
Meanwhile, the owner of a restaurant and service station outside
Tulsa, Oklahoma, was following all of this with a great deal of interest.
Cyrus Avery was acutely aware of the impact of a busy road on
business. As chairman of the Oklahoma Department of Highways, he
had already successfully lobbied to ensure that the Chicago to Los
Angeles road would not follow the old Santa Fe Trail, which bypassed
Oklahoma. Instead, thanks to Avery, it would follow a lesser-known trail
from the California Gold Rush era that ran straight through his
hometown of Tulsa. Now, faced with the humiliation of losing the
prestigious Route 60 designation, Avery joined forces with a
counterpart in Missouri – A.H. Piepmeier. Telegrams flew between
Springfield, Tulsa and Washington, but Avery and Piepmeier couldn’t
manage to convince the federal bureaucrats to reverse their decision
to award Route 60 to the road running through Kentucky.
Then, during a meeting with Piepmeier in Springfield, Avery noticed
that the catchy number 66 had not yet been assigned to any road. He
swiftly fired off another telegram to Washington and this time the
bureaucrats were happy to comply with his suggestion. As the first
reference to Route 66 was made in that meeting in Springfield, the
town has since claimed to be the road’s birthplace. A few months later,
the US Highway 66 Association was founded. At its inaugural meeting,
Avery coined the name ‘The Main Street of America’ for the route, and
the mythologising began.
Springfield is an attractive little city, the third largest in Missouri, and
for the first time I felt that I was bordering the Deep South of America.
Towards Springfield’s centre, there are long avenues of large Victorian
homes. With wicker porch swings on covered verandas, some of them
look like southern plantation houses. It’s a relaxed, calm kind of place.
But if you’re a cowboy at heart, which I am, it’s also a hugely significant
place.
In 1865 a guy called James Butler Hickok was living in Springfield.
Tall, lean and muscular, with long blond hair falling to his shoulders and
two pistols shoved into his belt, Hickok looked like a Western hero
straight out of central casting, particularly with the lawman’s badge
pinned to his chest. We know him better as Wild Bill Hickok, although
quite how they got that from James Butler, I don’t know. Nevertheless,
in July 1865, Wild Bill did something that set a trend for decades to
come.
The final shot of the Civil War had been fired only a month earlier
when Wild Bill, who had fought on the Union side, came face to face
with his arch enemy, a Confederate veteran called Davis Tutt. Even
though they’d fought on opposite sides in the war, they’d originally
been gambling buddies, but had fallen out over a woman called
Susanna Moore. There were also suggestions that Hickok had dallied
with Tutt’s sister, possibly fathering her illegitimate child. Whatever the
cause, they now hated the sight of each other.
On 20 July, Hickok was playing poker when Tutt walked into
Springfield’s Lyon House Hotel. Wild Bill was doing well, so Tutt
started loaning money to the other gamblers and offering hints on how
to beat him. It made no difference – Hickok’s winning streak continued
and he had soon amassed more than two hundred dollars (several
thousand dollars in today’s money), much of it straight from Tutt’s
pocket. Remembering that Hickok owed him forty dollars for a horse
trade, Tutt insisted that he repay it there and then. Hickok shrugged
and handed over the money. Then Tutt demanded another thirty-five
bucks, for a gambling debt. This time Hickok disputed the figure,
saying he owed only twenty-five. A furious Tutt grabbed Hickok’s
watch, which was lying on the table, pocketed it, and announced that
he was keeping it as collateral. Faced with a room full of Tutt’s allies,
Hickok reluctantly agreed, as long as Tutt didn’t wear the watch in
public. That would have been a public humiliation, and retribution
would have to be sought.
‘I intend wearing it first thing in the morning,’ said Tutt, with a sneer.
‘If you do, I’ll shoot you,’ Wild Bill replied calmly. ‘I’m warning you
here and now not to come across that town square with it on.’
The following day Wild Bill came round the corner into Springfield’s
town square to find Tutt swanning around, asking people if they wanted
to know the time. Flaunt, flaunt, flaunt.
Wild Bill warned Tutt to cut it out, but Tutt ignored him. They
attempted to reach an agreement over the outstanding debt, but failed.
After a drink, they parted.
Later that day, shortly before 6 p.m., Hickok returned to the square,
this time with a pistol in his hand. Onlookers scattered, leaving Tutt
standing on his own in the far corner of the square.
‘Dave, here I am,’ shouted Hickok from a distance of about seventy-
five yards. ‘Don’t you come across here with that watch.’
Hickok had cocked his pistol and returned it to his hip holster. Tutt
stood his ground with a hand on his own pistol, silent. For a few
seconds, the two men faced each other down. Then Tutt pulled his
pistol from its holster. Hickok drew his gun too, steadied it on his
forearm and fired at exactly the same moment as Tutt. Wild Bill’s bullet
hit Tutt in the ribs, sending him staggering back on to the steps of the
courthouse, where he gasped, ‘Boys, I’m killed.’ He was dead right.
Meanwhile, Wild Bill escaped without a scratch. He span on his heels,
levelled his gun towards a crowd of Tutt’s supporters, and, cool as an
alligator, warned them not to interfere.
‘Aren’t yer satisfied, gentlemen? Put up your shootin’ irons or there’ll
be more dead men here,’ he said.
They took the hint.
This was the first recorded example of one of those face-to-face, in-
the-street, Hollywood-style gunfights – the quick-draw duels that are so
familiar from the movies. However, they were not as common as the
Westerns would have us believe. In fact, this was one of very few
occasions when such a gunfight happened. More often, cowboys shot
each other in the back. But Wild Bill’s story was quickly seized upon
and exaggerated by the dime novels of the time. He even went on to
act in a Buffalo Bill production – the forerunner of the Western movie.
Nowadays, a couple of brass markers in Springfield’s town square
show where Hickok and Tutt stood during the face-off. On the day I
visited, there was a huge building site in the middle of the square,
obscuring the line of sight between the two markers. But they were so
far apart that I started to grow suspicious about the whole story. I
reckon that Wild Bill must have arranged for a sniper on the roof of one
of the buildings, because it’s almost impossible to hit anything from
seventy-five yards with a handgun, especially the pistols they had in
those days. That’s why so many people were shot in the back, from
point-blank range.
Hickok was arrested for the murder of Tutt, then charged with
manslaughter, but he was acquitted at trial. As Tutt had initiated the
fight, been the first to display overt aggression and, according to two
witness reports, reached for his pistol first, Hickok was absolved of
guilt. He was even praised for giving Tutt several chances to avoid the
confrontation, rather than simply shooting him the moment he felt
disrespected – which was how matters of honour were usually
resolved in the Old West.
Hickok went on to become the law in various other Western towns.
Often his reputation alone was sufficient to persuade dusty cowboys to
think twice about disrupting the peace, but his fame was a double-
edged sword. To some reprobates, killing a man of such high repute
was a trophy worth pursuing. During the afternoon of 2 August 1876,
Wild Bill was playing cards in the No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota
Territory. For once, he’d abandoned his usual precaution of sitting with
his back to the wall, and somebody shot him in the back of the head.
Crack – straight through the skull. None of that quick-draw nonsense.
Boof. Dead. Bill was holding two pairs – aces and eights – a decent
poker hand. Ever since that day, it’s been known as the ‘dead man’s
hand’.
Back in Springfield, the square is now radically different from how it
was in 1865. When I visited, it appeared to have become a place
where people with nothing much to do hang out. I saw one poor guy
being moved along by the police. All he was doing was having a little
snooze on the pavement. I always find something like that sad, but
here it struck me as peculiar, too, because I’d met unparalleled
kindness since arriving in the city. The people had been unbelievably
friendly and helpful.
Earlier in the day, I’d been standing at a cash machine in a garage.
A very pretty black girl, probably only fourteen or fifteen years old, was
being served at the next counter.
‘Excuse me,’ she said.
‘Yes?’ I replied.
‘Your shoes are beautiful,’ she said. ‘Have a nice day.’ Then she
simply left the garage.
Isn’t that lovely? My shoes were beautiful – black and white with
tassels – but how often would somebody take the time to compliment
you on something like that? And everyone I met in Springfield was
exactly the same. Exceptionally friendly, those Springfielders and
Missourians – or Ozarkians, as they call themselves, because of the
Ozark Mountains.
I can’t tell you precisely where I went next, because it’s kind of a secret.
I’m not joking. I was off to meet a man called Rob Lurvey, a self-
confessed recluse who hasn’t received a letter addressed to his house
in more than forty years.
Rob has collected things all his life. As a boy, he started with
stamps, like everyone else, but then he diversified. He now has one of
the largest personal collections of guitars in the world, including more
than five thousand historical pieces. And he had an entire room
dedicated to the trusty banjo, with some dating back to the 1800s.
Rob’s collection wasn’t for sale or auction, and he didn’t want anyone
knowing where he kept it. So we weren’t allowed to film the approach
or the exterior of his warehouse. I thought that was fair enough, and I
couldn’t wait to see the collection.
Inside a nondescript warehouse, I met Rob, a man in his fifties with a
big, beaming smile. ‘You must be Billy,’ he said.
‘And you must be Rob. Lovely to meet you.’
‘You look just like yourself.’
That immediately broke the ice and we both laughed.
It was soon obvious that the stringed instruments were only a small
part of Rob’s collection. He also collected all kinds of memorabilia,
and especially anything to do with 3D – like stereoscopes and
Viewmasters and holograms. But I was primarily interested in the
instruments, so he took me to them.
Guitars, ukuleles, banjos, harps, zither banjos and mandolins – he
had them all. The first thing I saw was a long row of zithers – those
alpine instruments most of us know from the soundtrack of The Third
Man – hanging on a wall. Most of them were made between 1865 and
1905 by a company called Schwarzer that had been based in
Washington, Missouri. The company folded around the time of the First
World War because of anti-German sentiment in America. Rob told
me he was one of the few zither collectors anywhere in the world. ‘I
don’t know anybody else who’s crazy enough to buy them,’ he said.
I love the zither, though. ‘I’ve got a friend in Amsterdam who comes
to my stand-up shows and he can play one,’ I said.
Rob’s collection was so extensive that he even had consecutively
numbered zithers with their shipping records from the manufacturer.
He bought one in 2002 and the other in 2003, reuniting them after 113
years apart. Some of them were real beauties, like a Smithsonian
zither that had taken more than a year to make. It had more than five
thousand inlaid pieces of wood, carved ivory and gold plating.
‘Do you have people look for stuff for you or do you do it all
yourself?’ I asked.
‘I have people.’
‘Spies?’
‘Not really spies, but I’ve been going to shows since 1985, so most
everybody knows what I buy, and there’s people out there looking for
me all the time.’
At one time, Rob had twenty guys searching for a Gibson toy guitar
that was missing from his collection. He couldn’t even know for sure
that it existed – having seen it only in rough illustrations in books – yet
he’d spent more than two decades looking for it.
‘I was on my way to a national sports collectors’ convention in
Cleveland – I collect baseball cards too … ’ he said.
‘Of course you do.’
‘And we stopped at the Heart of America antique mall in Springfield,
Ohio. [Yes, there’s yet another Springfield.] It’s the largest antique mall
in America. I was with a friend who doesn’t care about collecting and
we got there when it opened at nine-thirty in the morning. I started
going through the mall and my friend was checking with me every two
hours to see if I was done yet, but I wasn’t.’
Rob’s eyes were sparkling with excitement as he continued to tell
the story.
‘I was getting ready to go down to the last wing and in a showcase
was this toy. I knew immediately what it was and so I immediately rang
the buzzer to get somebody there. Nobody would come. They were all
busy, I guess. But I wouldn’t leave. I didn’t want to take a chance of
missing this toy. They finally got to me about twenty minutes later and I
didn’t care what it cost. But I saw it was a hundred and ninety-five
dollars, so I asked if they’d take a discount. You gotta ask, you know?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Part of the gig, isn’t it?’
‘So they gave me ten per cent. I got it for one-seven-five. I’d been
looking for one of these for twenty-four years and I started to shake. It’s
like the Holy Grail. I just couldn’t stand it. It was one of the real thrills of
my life to finally find one. Other guitar people, they’d all known about it,
but nobody had ever seen one. They were all just amazed.’
The variety in Rob’s collection was astounding – the first double-
neck electric guitars, dozens of twelve-string guitars, obscure stencil
guitars. It was fabulous to see so many fantastically good instruments,
rooms and rooms and rooms of them, one after the other. I’d never
seen a music shop with that many guitars. It was absolutely amazing.
‘I’ve never met anyone like you before,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m out there. When people ask who I am, I say: “Well, I’m an
obsessive, compulsive, manic depressive, eccentric eclectic or
eclectic eccentric” – it depends on what day it is.’
Some parts of his collection were especially astonishing – like
dozens of almost identical versions of the same guitar, each with some
obscure, minute difference that only an obsessive fanatic like Rob
would notice.
To my great delight, Rob had something that he hadn’t identified yet,
but which I knew well. With only one string, it looked a bit like a banjo
and a bit like a ukulele, and it had a wee funny bridge. ‘It’s a one-string
fiddle,’ I told him proudly. Rob’s example was a toy version. ‘It’s played
with a bow vertically. They used to be popular in Victorian times. You
held it between your knees, there was a metal board going down and a
horn at the bottom, and you played it like a cello, but it just had one
string.’ It was wonderful to tell Rob, a man with such a vast knowledge
of stringed instruments, something he didn’t know already.
The fiddle produced a pleasant sound that I remembered from
childhood, because a busker used to play one in Byres Road in
Glasgow. He had fought in the Battle of Hill 60 on the Western Front in
the First World War, and I used to like watching him.
As I continued to look around the vast collection, something intrigued
me. ‘What’ll happen to all this, Rob, when you disappear?’ I said.
‘When you leave this mortal coil?’
‘It’s kinda set up right now to where my nephew gets everything I
have. I’ve got it set up to where he can keep it, he can sell it, or he can
donate it to one of several museums. One is the National Music
Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. It’s a really cool collection. Or the
Ralph Foster Museum, which is down in the College of the Ozarks –
it’s called the Smithsonian of the Ozarks. That collection down there
belonged to a guy named Ike Martin. When I first moved to Springfield,
I was in the cub scouts and we’d go down to Ike Martin’s music store.
In the basement he had this museum. And he’d collected everything.
He was really a big influence on my life. He collected arrowheads, he
collected guns, he collected just anything you can think of. He was kind
of the impetus for getting me started. I mean, I always collected stuff.
I’ve been collecting baseball cards all my life and coins and stuff like
that.’
Rob’s collection is truly unique and I really liked the guy. But that’s
nothing new – I tend to like people who collect things. I once met a
woman who collected ice-cream cones, and a guy in Scotland who
collected space guns. And I heard about someone who collected
matches with something wrong with them – like the Siamese-twin
matches with two legs and one head that sometimes pop up in
matchboxes. Over the years, he had apparently collected enough to fill
a frame. Something like a paperclip might be completely ordinary, but
if you meet someone who collects paperclips, and they proudly show
you their collection, it takes on a kind of majesty.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who used to collect bus tickets –
each one of which had a five-figure number running along the top. But
he didn’t collect just any old ticket – the five numbers always had to
add up to twenty-one. If they didn’t, he wasn’t interested. He had a load
of them in a shoe box. I think that’s the oddest hobby I’ve ever known.
Personally, I used to collect snow globes. I’ve still got hundreds of
them at home. In fact, if anybody has been inspired by this and wants
to start collecting something, I’d be happy to give you my snow globes
to get you started. Although, now that I think about it, one of my
daughters – Scarlet – would probably kill me if I did. I think she’s got
her eye on them.
Having collected the snow globes for years, I just decided to stop
one day. I do that kind of thing sometimes. I kept a diary for eight and a
half years and then suddenly stopped. My wife says it’s possibly the
most boring thing she’s ever read in her life. ‘Oh God, rain again today.
Hope it clears up tomorrow.’ Riveting stuff. I started to ask myself why I
was writing it. Was I hoping that somebody would read it when I was
dead? Or was I hoping to publish it so that people could see how
windswept and interesting I was? Then I decided I would rather have a
big book with random writings and collections of theatre tickets and
bus tickets and things I had done that day. So, if it was a boring day, I
wouldn’t write anything. I finished only one page of that before I got
bored shitless and didn’t do it any more.
After Springfield, I headed towards the Kansas state line, riding on
Route 66 out of sight of the interstate through rolling wooded hills and
wide-open green prairies. It was perfect country for leaning back,
enjoying the road and singing its fantastic signature tune to myself.
Although most of us associate ‘Route 66’ with Chuck Berry, or
maybe Nat King Cole, or the Rolling Stones, it was actually written by a
former marine called Bobby Troup. He’d made a bit of money writing a
few tunes for Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey and Sammy Kaye, so he
bought himself a second-hand Buick and set off with his wife for
America’s entertainment capital, Los Angeles. According to Troup,
they stopped for a bite to eat in a restaurant and his wife suggested he
should write a song about travelling west by car. At the time, they were
on Route 40 east of Chicago, and Troup didn’t feel at all inspired, but
the idea intrigued him.
A few days later, having joined Route 66, Bobby’s wife tapped him
on the shoulder and said, ‘Get your kicks on Route 66.’
‘God, that’s a marvellous idea for a song,’ replied Bobby.
He wrote half of the lyrics in the car, but then got stuck. A while later,
Bobby was working with Nat King Cole and played him the sections
he’d written. Nat immediately urged Bobby to finish the song. More in
frustration than anything else, Troup simply used the names of some of
the towns and cities he’d driven through during his trip: St Louis,
Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman,
Barstow and San Bernardino. (Winona is the only one out of
sequence, as it was included to rhyme with ‘Flagstaff, Arizona’.)
Somehow that list of places managed to encompass the allure, sense
of freedom and romanticism of the open road.
Nat King Cole recorded the song and it was a big hit, earning Troup,
who went on to write many more songs and star in movies and
television series, more than four million dollars in royalties. Over the
years, dozens of artists have recorded it, although they often change
the lyrics. In most cases they use a shortened version of the song that
omits a couple of verses and doesn’t mention a string of towns that
appeared in Nat’s original version – Tulsa, Albuquerque, Tucumcari,
Needles, Essex, Amboy and Azusa. All of these places still lay ahead
of me.
Approaching the Missouri–Kansas state border, my eye was caught
by a sign for a place called Precious Moments. Then, outside
Carthage, a town near Joplin, huge billboards started to loom up on
both sides of the road. They all featured pokey wee characters similar
to those ‘Love Is’ cartoons that used to appear in the British press. The
wee figures on the billboards would always be saying holy things to
one another under a ‘Precious Moments’ banner. My curiosity had
been well and truly piqued by the time I came to a sign for the Precious
Moments exhibition, so I pulled off Route 66 and went to have a look.
What I found, in my opinion, was absolutely horrific.
Riding through double gates, I entered a landscaped park with
hedge-lined drives that led me to a car park in front of a pink and
peach building. Inside was a gift shop the size of bloody Selfridges,
and scenes from the Bible depicted by the same little cartoon
characters I’d seen on the billboards. Each one conformed to that
gooey, soppy, syrupy idea that some Americans have of something
good. I wanted to scream.
Leaving the hideous building, I followed more hedge-lined paths that
weaved through the little cartoon characters – this time modelled in
stone and blowing trumpets, as if they were welcoming us to heaven.
Before long, I was walking towards a pink and orange chapel. Clearly
inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in Rome, it was highly
decorated inside, with the same little dinky-poo characters acting out
scenes from the Bible. Moses, for instance, had a wee roundy face
and a tear in his eye. It was nightmarish. The climax of the thing was a
whole wall, supposedly heaven, featuring hundreds of little boys and
girls in togas – all playing basketball or spinning hula hoops. Above, it
said: ‘No more tears’.
I was close to vomiting. But some people – usually fat adults in T-
shirts – were busy proclaiming how much they loved Jesus, so I kept
my mouth shut. The camera crew and Mike, the director, were standing
beside me, waiting to shoot something, but I just couldn’t bring myself
to do it. I’m not in the business of taking the mickey out of people, and
I’ve got no time for television shows that try to entertain by making fools
out of people. I’ve never liked it, and I wasn’t going to start indulging in
it now. Far be it from me to kick a person’s faith away from them, no
matter how sick it made me.
The funny thing was that Mike and I had entered the place feeling
quite jolly, laughing and smiling. But we exited in silence, like we’d
been to a funeral. It was very odd. Seeing the extent to which people
will twist religion was very weird and kind of scary. It was a side of the
Bible Belt that I just didn’t understand. The way they seemed to have
removed all of the dignity from religion was really quite creepy.
It would have been all too easy to stick the boot in. But then little
grannies and aunties, people who take their religion very seriously and
practise it with quiet dignity, would be wounded by someone like me
clumsily tearing into their faith. I admit that part of me was desperate to
get in there with my big swinging boot, but I was quite proud of myself
and the crew for just walking away that day.
After the bizarreness of Precious Moments, I needed something to
jerk me into a different mood. A few miles further down Route 66, a
sign announced that I was leaving Missouri and entering Kansas.
Galena lay ahead, then Tulsa – less than a day away if I rode straight
through. But with plenty of places to stop, it was going to take me
significantly longer than twenty-four hours.
The Mother Road only clipped the southeastern corner of the
Sunflower State. Blink and you’d be in Oklahoma, as the Kansas
stretch lasted a mere thirteen miles. However, every mile of it was
genuine, historical Route 66 hardtop because Interstate 44 completely
bypassed the state of Dorothy and Toto, leaving a perfectly intact
section of the old Mother Road.
There isn’t much to say about Galena, a perfectly nice but
unremarkable former mining town with an air of its best days being
long behind it. Like so many American small towns, nobody was in the
street. Not a soul. Riding down Main Street, I spotted the obligatory
church and, directly opposite it, a poker house offering Texas hold’em.
Apparently Galena had all the bases covered for anyone hoping for
redemption from the pressures of the world.
Whereas ‘Missouri’ comes from a Sioux word, ouemessourita,
meaning ‘those who have dugout canoes’, and ‘Oklahoma’ is Indian for
‘red people’, the origin of ‘Kansas’ is an Indian word that means
‘people of the wind’. It’s a sadly appropriate name for this part of the
world, as it lies in the heart of Tornado Alley.
As I continued to ride through the Sunflower State, I became slightly
despondent. I’d been assured that although Route 66’s passage
through Kansas was short, it boasted a surprisingly large number of
fried chicken shacks – fourteen in just thirteen miles – and all of them
teeming with customers buying up to five thousand chicken dinners a
day. I’d even been promised a Scottish connection, because fried
chicken was allegedly a traditional Scottish dish. This was news to me,
so I was determined to investigate. But do you know what? There was
nothing but a great big hole where I was expecting hustle, bustle and
the sweet smell of chicken fat.
Making a television travelogue can occasionally turn into a crap
shoot. And I hate it when that happens. I arrived at Chicken Annie’s in
Pittsburg, Kansas – a slight detour off Route 66, but I’m prepared to
suffer for my art – expecting to find hundreds of people wolfing down
their dinner. Instead, there were about four cars in the car park, and
inside it looked like the dining room in an old folks’ home. I’d
schlepped all the way over there only to discover it was the dullest
fucking place on earth. I’d been promised a string of chicken
businesses, all jostling with each other for trade, but when I stood
outside Chicken Annie’s, I couldn’t see any sign of a single shack.
There was one other chicken shop, but it was way behind some trees.
There was no fucking competition whatsoever.
I had this weird feeling, like I was spiralling downwards. I couldn’t
think of anything to say about the place, and I started to doubt
everything. Kansas was turning into a big disappointment. I’d not been
there before, and I doubted I’d return. As for the suggestion that fried
chicken was a traditional Scottish dish … that was bullshit, too. I’ve
never known a single Scot who makes a fuss over chicken. And I’ve
never seen a single Scottish cookbook that features recipes for fried
chicken. It was a non-story and it left me feeling a bit like the centre of
a doughnut. Empty.
The combination of Precious Moments and the chicken shack fiasco
meant I finished the day in a foul mood. But sometimes I find a kind of
comfort in being grumpy. There’s a feeling of righteousness, a sense
of being the great misunderstood, which is probably bollocks, but
comforting all the same. At least I knew it would pass, and that
something else would show up. Something interesting would stick its
head up, and I’d be intrigued by it. That’s the glory of Route 66 –
there’s always something new around the corner.
It would have been great to end the day with a feeling of a job well
done. If I’d achieved anything, I could have nipped upstairs to my room,
lain back on my bed and watched Ghost Finders on the telly before
falling asleep with a sense of satisfaction. I didn’t see that happening
tonight. But then I remembered Rob and his crazy collection. It seemed
so long ago that I’d met him, but it had only been that morning. I’d had
a good chat with him. I’d known my stuff and he’d certainly known his.
Maybe the day hadn’t been so bad after all. In fact, as long as I thought
about Rob surrounded by all his instruments in his anonymous
warehouse in the middle of nowhere, I felt pretty good.
Oklahoma City Looks Oh So Pretty

A sign by the side of the road, then a slight thud under the wheels as
one section of tarmac ended and another began. Those were the only
indications that I’d slipped out of Kansas. ‘You Are Now Entering
Oklahoma On Historic Route 66’, said the sign.
In many ways, Oklahoma is the heart and soul of Route 66. Although
Springfield was the birthplace of the road’s moniker, Oklahoma was
the home state of Cyrus Avery, the man who chose that name. And it
boasts more miles of original Route 66 than any other state.
Somewhat ironically, it was also the first state to bypass the Mother
Road, dealing an early death blow in 1953 when it opened the Turner
Turnpike (later part of the oppressive Interstate 44), which replaced
more than a hundred miles of America’s Main Street. Oklahoma is
also the state from which the characters fled in The Grapes of Wrath,
in which John Steinbeck coined ‘The Mother Road’ to describe Route
66, immortalising it as ‘the path of a people in flight’ from dust bowl
despair and starvation. It was also the first state to rec og nise Route
66’s historical and social significance. Enthusiasts established the
Oklahoma Route 66 Association to preserve and promote the road,
and they designed the ‘Historic Route 66’ signs that now punctuate the
landscape all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles, having been
adopted by most other states.
Route 66’s first miles in Oklahoma pass through fairly nondescript
towns and villages. First there’s Quapaw, another former mining town,
followed by Commerce, now semi-deserted, then Miami, from which a
magnificent section of original 1926–37 Route 66 – bumpy, gravelly
and only nine feet wide – stretches for two miles. A little while earlier,
having passed through a wee ghost town, I’d spotted a handwritten
sign by the side of the road: ‘Swamp Sale’, it said. Let’s have a look, I
thought. You never know your luck. I’m one of those guys who sees a
sign for a car-boot sale and thinks he’s bound to find a great guitar for
twenty bucks. Maybe watching all those auction shows on television
has done it. Whatever the reason, I was curious, so I pulled over and
went for a wander.
Near the entrance, dressed in dungarees and lounging on a plastic
garden chair, was a character straight out of The Grapes of Wrath.
Shading himself from the sun under the raised rear door of a people
carrier and some low trees, Vernon Willoughby looked kind of poor,
but happy. A well-worn blue vest barely held in an impressive belly, and
a greying beard framed his ruddy face. Around him, his family lazed in
the sun, waiting for someone to take a look at their wares.
‘Are you selling those chickens and all?’ I pointed at some birds in a
cage.
‘Yeah.’ Vernon had a twangy Oklahoma accent.
‘How much does a chicken cost?’
‘A lot of people sell ’em for fifteen dollars a piece when they’re
grown, laying eggs.’
‘Yeah? And you?’
‘Anywhere from eight dollars to fifteen dollars.’
‘Eight to fifteen?’
‘Yeah.’ Vernon spoke very slowly and deliberately. ‘And how much is
a duck?’
 ‘That’s for five. Because they grow quicker than chickens do.’
‘But the duck eggs are delicious, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where do you come from yourself?’
‘A little town called Quapaw over here in Oklahoma.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘66 runs right through it.’
I nodded. ‘I’m going to Tulsa and then Oklahoma City.’
‘That’s a good ride on that 66.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Long one, though.’
‘They’re all long. It’s too big, this country.’
As well as fully grown chickens, Vernon was selling some guinea
fowl and those wee yellow fluffy chicks. On another table there were
various ornaments and bits and pieces, presumably from his house,
nice items of Americana, a well-crafted wooden box, a ceramic buffalo
with the ubiquitous ‘Made in China’ imprinted on its base, and an
elephant-shaped incense holder. It all looked a bit desperate. A duck
for five dollars seemed like a bargain – they lay eggs for ever – but of
course I couldn’t buy one.
Further up the lane, another half-dozen stallholders were displaying
their wares. The first I came to shouted, ‘Whoa, no, no, no! Get the
camera away!’ He was a nice fella, but he was selling guns and knives
and didn’t want to be filmed. I was happy to respect his wishes. I’m not
one of those people who thinks everything about guns is bad. Not
everyone who’s interested in them is a potential murderer or a militia
man – just some of them. Many of them are simply into hunting and
collecting knives. The working knife is a big thing in America.
The next stallholder was similarly reluctant to be filmed. ‘No problem
whatsoever,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
So I moved on to another stall, where a large man called Olen
Robbins, dressed all in black and wearing black shades was standing
in front of a large black pick-up truck.
‘Yeah, go right ahead,’ Olen said when I asked if we could film him.
‘Where are you folks from?’
‘I’m from Scotland.’
 ‘Really? Well, welcome to the United States.’
‘Oh, I live in New York, but I’m from Scotland.’
‘You’ll find a variety of interesting stuff along old Route 66 and quite
a bit of history here.’
While I perused the items on his stall, Olen chatted away,
recommending a visit to Baxter Springs, back across the state border
in Kansas.
‘What’s a boot hunter knife?’ I asked, holding up a knife in a box.
‘It’s styled after the old riverboat gambler knives. It’s still mint in the
box. The gamblers carried that style of knife as they played cards on
the riverboats along the Mississippi.’
‘What’s that?’ I pointed at a black dagger with a Gothic inscription.
‘That is an old German piece. I acquired a small collection of
German military memorabilia from an elderly gentleman in Joplin, who
brought them back from Germany during the war. This is a type of
fraternal piece. We haven’t identified it exactly yet.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Absolutely.’
Picking up the dagger, I shuddered as I noticed a Nazi flag draped
over the front of the man’s stall.
‘And this old banner was from the same gentleman.’ Olen held up an
eighteen-inch pendant. It looked like some kind of fraternal medallion
on a ribbon. About the size of the palm of a hand, it had enamel inserts
with various signs and insignia. The stallholder turned it over and there
was a swastika on the back.
‘Oh my God.’
‘He liberated this banner from a building in Germany during World
War Two. I’ve had some difficulty translating it, but loosely translated it
was something that was presented to the government by this particular
guard corps that protected a castle in Germany, and it celebrates the
hundredth anniversary of that military unit.’
‘Yeah.’ I was starting to recoil from the items on Olen’s stall.
‘I don’t … I don’t really keep this kind of stuff,’ he said. ‘I do buy and
sell and trade it when I find it, but I’m not really a big fan of it.’
‘No, I’m not a fan of it myself.’
‘Due to the history behind it. But I’ve always picked up anything
unusual or unique. Of course, you may not wanna film that particular
bumper sticker.’
I looked at the sticker and read it out loud: ‘Obama Sucks’. Then I
looked at Olen.
‘It does kind of express the sentiments of a good deal of the people
in this country at this time,’ he said.
There was another bumper sticker on the stall: ‘Speak To Me In
English’, it said. Now I knew exactly where he was coming from, but I
didn’t react to it.
‘I like Obama,’ I said. ‘I think he’s great.’
‘Well, I know a lot of people from other countries think he’s
absolutely wonderful.’
‘What about the killing of Osama bin Laden?’
‘He’s taking full credit for that, but one thing that a lot of folks don’t
realise is that the interrogation techniques that they started using under
the previous President were responsible for gaining the intelligence
that led to his ultimate capture. And Obama wanted to abolish those
techniques, calling them harsh and cruel.’
‘What? Torture? You think torture’s okay?’
‘Well, no, I don’t agree that torture’s okay, but if someone’s gonna
kill a large group of people, I think you get the information out of ’em
however you have to in order to prevent the death of many.’
I wasn’t convinced.
‘He’s not greatly liked at this point, but his popularity did take a
bump for Osama. We’ll see.’
‘I think you’re jealous. I think if the Republicans had done it, you’d be
dancing in the street.’
‘Absolutely not. I’m an independent. I don’t follow the Republican
agenda.’
‘Were you a George W kinda guy?’
‘No, no.’
‘Are you a libertarian?’
‘Yes. I would say you’d have to lock me into the libertarian category.’
‘Small government and no taxes?’
‘Or low taxes, at least. I don’t think we can get by without taxes,
because we definitely need the services, but we’re taxed too much.’
 ‘Yeah. Everybody’s taxed too much.’
‘I would have to agree.’
‘Well, thanks for your time. Thanks for allowing me to rumble through
your stuff.’
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed the silver and gold market in the
country since you’ve been here?’
‘It’s rocketing, isn’t it?’
‘It plummeted last week.’
‘Did it? Last week?’
‘Do you know who George Soros is?’
‘Yes.’
‘He sold one of the largest hoards of silver, to my understanding, in
the country. It crashed the market.’
‘Why would he do a thing like that?’
‘That goes back to why a lot of people don’t like this guy.’ Olen
pointed at the ‘Obama Sucks’ bumper sticker. ‘They’re pals.’
I laughed. It was all I could do in the face of such unshakeable
beliefs. The Nazi banner said more to me than I felt he would have
liked it to say.
It always amazes me that, in the most religious corners of this
country, you often find little dark patches. You’d think that people who
like Jesus would be pulled to the left politically – they should be
attracted to the sharing aspect of society. But they usually seem to be
deeply suspicious of it, whether it’s socialist or Amish. Instead of
cooperation and sharing, they want small government, small taxes and
business to be left in charge of the country. They want business to tell
the government what to do, not the other way round.
Ultimately, as far as I was concerned Olen was just a fat little fascist
to me, so fuck him. He said he was a libertarian, but then they all say
that. A lot of weird crap hides under the banners of nationalism and
libertarianism. I’m not saying that nationalism is necessarily fascist –
that would be ridiculous – but fascists like to hide in that independent-
minded corner of things. And they do that corner a real disservice.
I moved along to some of the other stalls, which were reassuringly
closer to what anyone would expect to find at a car-boot sale in Britain:
people selling second-hand clothes, children’s pyjamas, unwanted
exercise gadgets, CDs by obscure musicians, DVDs, badges, toys,
tools and rusty garden equipment. Carol and Dave Archer, a charming
retired couple who spent their time travelling in a huge motor home
between their various children in Florida, Massachusetts and Kansas,
were selling seashell wind chimes and funky tie-dyed T-shirts. It was a
pleasure to meet that kind of American. They weren’t rich – they were
just sauntering along, getting by. I had the time of my life chatting to
them.
Mostly it was an absolute pleasure bumbling around the market,
stopping to chat to people. But one guy caught me having a pee
behind a tree and gave me a hard time. I wasn’t going to kill the tree –
I’m a healthy guy – but he insisted: ‘There’s bathrooms over there.’ So I
ambled over to two horrible portaloos. Have you ever looked in the
hole in a portaloo? It’s like gazing into the depths of hell. I couldn’t help
thinking that those portaloos were liable to do much more harm to the
environment than me having a quick pee behind a tree.
Moving off again, riding on through the Oklahoma countryside, I
caught a glimpse of the annual Cinco de Mayo celebrations. For
reasons that nobody seems able to explain, this victory of the
Mexicans over the French is a national holiday in America. Even more
bizarrely, this year they were celebrating it on 7 May. I stopped for a
chicken–pork pie. God, I loved it! I don’t get enough chances to eat
chicken–pork pie.
About a hundred miles further down Route 66, as the road widened
into four lanes, crossed two huge steel bridges over the Verdigris
River and approached Tulsa, a blue whale hoved into view. Given that
we were more than a thousand miles from either coast, that might
sound strange, but this was no ordinary blue whale. For a start, it was
made out of concrete. Smiling from its pond of water, it was the
creation of a man who simply wanted to bring a little joy and happiness
to his son and his son’s friends.
Hugh Davis was a zoologist who had travelled in Africa before
settling with his wife Zelta in Catoosa, on the outskirts of Tulsa. There
they opened a little zoo and reptile house beside a swimming hole on
the roadside of Route 66. The local kids used to splash around quite
happily in the swimming hole, but Hugh’s son, Blaine, kept bugging
him to build something they could dive off, because there were no
rocks or trees around the pool.
In typical dad fashion, Hugh said, ‘Sure, sure, I’ll get round to it, I’ll
get round to it,’ and did nothing for years.
But then, in 1972, when Blaine was drafted into the army and sent to
Vietnam, Hugh finally fulfilled his promise. He had a friend who was a
welder – the first giveaway that he might be a lunatic and could embark
on something seriously stupid. (I’m a welder; I know these things.) As
the welder set to work on a large steel framework, everybody’s first
thought was that Hugh must be building an aeroplane. But then Hugh
started to cover the frame with concrete. He mixed 126 sacks of the
stuff and pushed it into place with his hands. Once it had set, he
painted it all light blue.
On their wedding anniversary, Hugh unveiled his concrete creation
to Zelta. His lavish gift was a blue whale. In total it had cost him nearly
two thousand dollars, a lot of money in the early 1970s.
When I first drew up beside the concrete cetacean, I have to admit I
was a bit disappointed. Some kids were happily fishing off it, but the
whole place looked a bit forlorn. This is just a park with a blue whale
made of concrete, I thought. Who the hell cares? There was a wee
cash desk in a wee log cabin, and a bloke came out to explain what it
was all about. That happened quite often on Route 66: as soon as I
stopped anywhere, someone would turn up, say hello and start
chatting. They were usually very friendly, and this man was no
exception. Dressed in a straw hat, Hawaiian shirt, gold watch and big
glasses, he introduced himself as Blaine Davis – the fella whose
badgering had prompted his dad to build the whale nearly forty years
earlier.
Now about sixty years old, Blaine gave me a charming guided tour
of the whale. We walked across a lawn towards the water’s edge.
Then, like Jonah, I entered the beast through its mouth. Inside, there
was a ladder up to a space in the top of the whale’s head – a huge
room with a wooden floor where children could play and meet and
scheme in the way that kids love to do. It was the best kids’ gang hut
I’d ever seen. Obviously, Blaine himself didn’t play in it when he came
back from Vietnam, but I’m sure the local kids had a whale of a time in
it. (Sorry about that, but I couldn’t resist!) Hugh also rigged up some
plumbing which allowed the kids to be squirted down a slide and into
the pool. And there were some diving boards – one on the side of the
whale, a high one off its tail, and three more dotted around the lake.
Hugh and Zelta opened the whale to the public, and for a couple of
decades it was a popular local spot. Over the years, thousands of
people visited it and had a grand old time. It was so successful that
they eventually closed the zoo. But by the late 1980s, when litigation
culture was starting to get a grip on America, their accident insurance
premiums became prohibitive and they were forced to shut the whale,
too. By then, a lot of locals had swimming pools in their backyards
anyway, so they no longer wanted to come to the swimming hole.
The blue whale and the park around it fell into disrepair. Nature took
over, and for a while it looked like the Catoosa Blue Whale would
crumble to dust. But then some locals, people who had fond childhood
memories of jumping, diving and sliding off the whale, got in touch with
Blaine and asked if they could form a group to preserve it. They
drummed up sponsorship from a chain of hotels on Route 66 and set
to work. Nowadays, the whale even has its own Facebook page.
‘We had a big sit-down dinner here last Thursday night,’ said Blaine.
‘First time we’ve ever had one of those. Tables, chairs, steak cooked
right here on the site and everything. We had over a hundred people
here.’
I think it’s terrific that the whale has once again become a focus and
asset for the community.
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.
‘We had live music, a string quartet and everything, down here
playing music.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, yeah. We invited wine vendors from four different vineyards to
bring their wares out here and to treat people to wine and free food. It
was great.’
I love the idea of millions of people driving down Route 66 over the
years, glancing across at the park, and saying, ‘What the heck? Was
that a whale?’ And I was thrilled that the whale was probably having the
same effect on today’s passers-by, all thanks to the efforts and energy
of a group of community-minded locals. The whale is nothing but a
whole bunch of fun, which is what’s so great about it.
But that’s not what tickled me most about this wee park. Hugh also
made a toilet block to serve his customers. With no architectural
training, he based his design on some tribal huts he’d seen in Africa.
But instead of making the toilet block from mud, he fashioned it from
concrete. And, boy, has it stood the test of time. The building looks just
like an African village hut, but it’s as solid as a rock. Blaine told me that
whenever tornadoes rip through this part of Oklahoma, which they do
throughout April and May, he locks up his caravan beside the lake and
barricades himself in the toilet. It’s the only tornado-proof loo I’ve ever
seen. I love the idea that Blaine shelters in there while the tornado
passes by. What a tribute to his dad’s skill. I was terribly impressed by
it.
Incidentally, the section of Route 66 that runs through Catoosa is
called the Will Rogers Memorial Highway. I’m a huge fan of Will
Rogers – a cowboy, comedian, social commentator, vaudeville
performer and actor who was born to a Cherokee family in Oklahoma
and became known as Oklahoma’s favourite son – so I was tickled
that the road had adopted his name. He was a phenomenal talent, first
appearing in vaudeville shortly before the First World War. I’ve seen
films of him doing his lasso act from around that period and it’s quite
breathtaking. But he was also a philosopher, the type that I’d call
country-wise rather than street-wise. He travelled around the world
three times, made seventy-one movies (silent and talkies), wrote more
than four thousand nationally syndicated newspaper columns, and
became a world-famous figure. By the mid-1930s, the American public
adored him. He was considered the leading political wit of the age and
was the top-paid Hollywood movie star.
After the First World War, there had been plans to march the
returning troops past the White House in Washington. Rows of planked
seating (called bleachers in America) were erected, which sparked
huge arguments over who should get the best seats for the victory
parade. Someone asked Will what he thought of all the fuss about the
seating arrangements.
‘If you really appreciate what the soldiers did, let them sit in the seats
and we’ll march past,’ he said.
What a guy, eh? Wasn’t that a splendid idea? That was Will Rogers
all over. I once went to his house in Los Angeles and was really
impressed. He made good use of his fame, serving as a goodwill
ambassador to Mexico and briefly as Mayor of Beverly Hills. In print
and on radio he poked fun at gangsters, prohibition, politicians,
government policies and various other controversial topics but in a
folksy, down-to-earth way that was readily appreciated and offended
no one. ‘Lord, the money we spend on government,’ he said of
Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, of which he was a fervent
supporter. ‘And it’s not one bit better than the government we got for
one-third of the money twenty years ago.’
That kind of thinking was born in Oklahoma, and I can only urge you
to come and experience this part of the world for yourself. I’ve not
known friendliness and hospitality like it anywhere else, and I
guarantee you’ll experience it, too.
From Catoosa, I had a long ride ahead of me, and another storm
was brewing. The weather had been sensational for the previous few
days, and I’d hoped to be wearing fewer clothes as I continued to head
southwest. But I wasn’t so sure as I set off down the road towards
Oklahoma City.
Before the state capital, though, I had one more stop to make. I was
going to meet an oil baron.
Now, whenever I think about oil, what comes to mind is Libya, Iraq,
Saudi Arabia, Texas or big plumes of flame burning on North Sea oil
rigs. I’ve never thought of Oklahoma as an oil state. But here’s the thing
– less than a hundred years ago, Tulsa was the oil capital of the world.
In 1859 a driller seeking salt water struck oil, and fortune-seekers
immediately invaded the local Indian territory. Then, in 1901,
prospectors discovered vast oil deposits at Red Fork in southwest
Tulsa. Investors swarmed to the city, which in a matter of months went
from a cow town to a boom town. Four years later, an even larger oil
deposit was struck and Tulsa’s population grew to almost a hundred
thousand people. Four hundred oil companies were based in the city.
Propelling Oklahoma at breakneck speed into the twentieth century,
the black gold brought two daily newspapers, four telegraph
companies, more than 10,000 telephones, seven banks, 200 lawyers
and more than 150 doctors, as well as numerous other businesses, to
Tulsa.
Nowadays, Tulsa’s big industry is gas. However, oil still has a
presence, albeit in a less obvious way. It’s more like a cottage
industry, with ‘mom-and-pop’ oil companies producing just two or three
barrels a day.
White-haired and dressed in a light blue Lacoste polo shirt and
jeans, Wiley Cox (what a great name) is a very unlikely looking oil
baron. He described himself as ‘just about the smallest end of the oil
industry you’re going to get’ and had agreed to show me around his
oilfield. Anyone who has been to Los Angeles or some parts of Texas
will have seen those nodding metal donkeys at the side of the road,
steadily pumping oil out of the ground. They look like the kind of thing
boys made with their Meccano sets in the fifties. Wiley had four or five
of them and, with the recent escalation in oil prices, was making quite
a decent living out of them.
Wiley’s a perfectly pleasant man and he gave me the full guided
tour, but I couldn’t summon up much interest. In fact, as I listened to him
talking about oil and the process of getting it out of the ground, I almost
lost the will to live. That might seem ironic, given that there would be no
Route 66 without oil, but it just held no fascination for me.
So I said goodbye to him, got back on my bike, and headed for
Oklahoma City, which was still about ninety miles away. It was a harsh
ride: long, straight roads pointing all the way to the horizon. Whenever I
crested a hill, the road would stretch out in front of me again, as long
and as straight as the previous stretch. The monotony and emptiness
were quite extraordinary, and by the time I reached Oklahoma City I
was ready for dinner, bed and a long sleep.
The next day started with the promise of a big, fat, juicy steak. It’s one
of those things that horrifies almost any British person – the idea of
steak for breakfast – particularly if eaten the American way, which is
with a Coca-Cola on the side. A steak? For breakfast? What kind of
people are they? What kind of savages eat a hunk of meat dripping
with blood for their first meal of the day? But actually it’s fabulous.
Steak and eggs set you up for the day, especially when you’re going to
spend that day astride a trike, and possibly even more so when you’ve
not eaten steak for forty or fifty years.
I gave up red meat decades ago because I thought that was the
healthy way to go. But in the last year I’d started eating it again. My
daughter advised me to tuck in after reading a book that advocated
matching your diet to your blood type. Both of us are Type ‘O’, rhesus-
negative. According to the book, red meat is good for us. So, since the
beginning of the year, I’d been eating a bit of steak and quite enjoying
it. Now I was really looking forward to my steak breakfast at the
Cattlemen’s Steakhouse. But I’d forgotten it was Mothering Sunday,
and the place was jammed. There was a huge queue, so I went
elsewhere and had a hamburger instead. I was disappointed to miss
out on the steak, but it was a cracking good hamburger, and it set me
up for the long ride out to Stan Mannshreck’s cattle ranch.
Stan is a smashing guy and a really good laugh. I watched as he and
his hands rounded up twenty head of cattle under the golden morning
sun and drove them on to a huge trailer. Then, sitting in the cab beside
Stan as we drove the cattle to market, I felt like a proper cowboy. The
boys could have herded the cattle in the traditional manner all the way
to the market at the edge of Oklahoma City, but Stan didn’t want to do
that. Oklahoma had suffered a drought for most of the last fifteen years,
so his cattle were already underweight, and they would have lost even
more pounds on a long drive. But there was a silver lining to this
particular cloud: because of the drought, far fewer cattle were being
sent to market, so each animal fetched a much higher price than a
similar steer would have ten or fifteen years ago.
Travelling in Stan’s big trailer with the cattle in the back, occasionally
the smell wafted into the cabin. Holy Mother of Jesus! It was
something else.
Approaching the toll gate near the end of the interstate, Stan turned
to me and smiled. ‘Watch this girl. She’s been here a while,’ he said.
‘She’ll notice I’ve got cattle on the back. Just watch the speed with
which she shuts the window as soon as she gets the money.’
We pulled up at the toll booth and Stan handed over the cash.
‘See you, Stan.’ Va-voom, the window shot across.
 Stan told me that on a previous trip into town, one of the cattle had
peed and shat itself during the stop at the toll booth and it had squirted
straight through her window. After that, she wasn’t taking any chances.
We dropped off the cattle at the Oklahoma City National Stock
Yards, the largest feeder cattle market (dealing only in young, male
calves) in the world. Twelve thousand cattle might be sold there in
single a day. Since its inception, more than 102 million head of
livestock had passed through the iron gates.
The National Stock Yards form part of Stockyard City, a
neighbourhood of Oklahoma City that’s more like a self-contained
town. A bit like the Vatican, it rules itself, and it answers to the county,
not the city, which dearly wants to get rid of it because of the smell and
the effluent, the noise and the traffic. But it’s not going anywhere. Many
of the businesses in the area date back to 1910, when the Oklahoma
National Stock Yards Company began its public livestock market. At
its height, in the 1950s, Stockyard City’s meat-packing operations
employed about 10 per cent of the city’s workforce. When I visited,
though, it almost felt like a theme park. The fronts of many of the stores
– which catered exclusively to cattlemen, selling Western clothing –
were wooden and lit by gas. It was a lovely piece of period history.
Noisy and smelly, Stockyard City and the National Stock Yards are
well worth a visit. I loved all the mooing and seeing the cowboys riding
up and down. Anyone who went into the stockyards could see the
cattle arriving and being herded into pens. Poor things, they didn’t
know they were destined to be hamburgers or steaks soon, although
they seemed to sense that something sinister awaited them. But at
least the huge abattoirs that used to be right next door to the market
area had been relocated. Nowadays the cattle were transported by
truck to the slaughterhouses once they’d been sold.
The stockyards hold auctions only on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I
had to wait until the next day to see the auctioneer in action. In the
meantime, I decided to visit the place that, tragically, most of us now
associate with Oklahoma City.
On 19 April 1995, twenty-six-year-old Timothy McVeigh parked a
Ryder rental truck packed with nearly three tons of ammonium nitrate
fertiliser, nitromethane and diesel fuel outside the nine-storey Alfred
Murrah Building. McVeigh had built a cage inside the truck so that the
explosive mixture would blow towards the front of the building – he
really put a lot of thought into it – and shortly after nine o’clock in the
morning he detonated the bomb. The explosion decimated the
building, killing 168 people and injuring another 800.
About ninety minutes later, an Oklahoma state trooper stopped
McVeigh for driving without a licence plate. The trooper arrested him
for that offence and for unlawful possession of a weapon. However,
within days, McVeigh’s old army friend Terry Nichols was arrested,
and both men were charged with the bombing. McVeigh, a Gulf War
veteran with extreme right-wing views, was seriously screwed up about
the federal government and was a member of a militia movement. I
saw him interviewed after his trial and he expressed no regret about
what he’d done. He’d timed the bomb to coincide with the second
anniversary of the Waco siege, in which seventy-six people (including
twenty-four Brits) died when the headquarters of the Branch Davidians,
a weird Protestant sect, went up in flames. That tragedy, and an earlier
incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which the FBI had besieged the
home of another religious fanatic called Randy Weaver, had motivated
McVeigh to seek revenge. He was executed by lethal injection on 11
June 2001. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison for acting as his
accomplice.
The entire front was blown off the Alfred Murrah Building, which
contained the offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
– the body that had conducted the siege in Waco – as well as various
other government departments, such as Social Security. In the
aftermath of the attack, it was decided to demolish the building and
replace it with a memorial to the victims. It’s now a simple, quiet and
understated place, which makes it all the more moving. At its centre is
a large reflection pool of shallow water on black granite, at either end
of which are two large bronze gates. It’s quite beautiful. I spotted a bird
standing in the pool and the water hardly came up to its ankles. At one
end, the eastern gate is inscribed with ‘9:01’, which represents
innocence – the last moments of peace before the bomb exploded a
minute later. At the other end, the western gate is inscribed with ‘9:03’
to symbolise the first moments of recovery after the outrage.
 It really is an extraordinarily powerful memorial to the 168 victims.
The authorities encourage children to dip their hands in the water and
then pat one of the gates to leave a handprint on the bronze.
Eventually, the handprint will turn green and last for ever. I think that’s a
very touching idea.
To the side of the reflecting pool, 168 empty chairs, hand-crafted in
bronze, glass and stone, represent each of the dead. The nine rows of
chairs, each inscribed with the name of a victim, represent the nine
floors of the building. They’re laid out to correspond with where the
victims were found, with the greatest number clustered in the most
heavily damaged portion of the building. Nineteen of the chairs are
smaller than the rest, representing the children who were killed in the
bombing. Three unborn children also died; they are listed on their
mothers’ chairs, beneath their mothers’ names. At the western edge of
the field of chairs is a small column of five chairs representing the five
people who died outside the building. At night, each chair’s glass
name plate illuminates the darkness. This creates a kind of life for the
victims that will never go out. Like the Vietnam Memorial in
Washington, the abstract nature of the memorial seems to attract
people, maybe because it allows them to distance themselves from
the physical image of those who suffered and to concentrate instead
on their memory.
I had seen pictures of the Oklahoma City National Memorial in a
magazine and had been terribly moved by it, but of course it’s even
more moving when you’re standing within it. I was struck by how quiet
all the other visitors were. It was a very hushed place. Everyone
lowered their voice when they had a conversation and took the time to
take it all in. When they first opened it, there was a railing along the
side of the field of empty chairs, but people were constantly stepping
over it in order to place things on the chairs, in the same way as they
leave messages and flowers at the Vietnam Memorial and on
countless war memorials in Britain. Eventually, the authorities decided
to remove a section of the railing, thereby encouraging visitors to leave
even more tributes. This means that everyone is now free to walk
among the chairs, so I had a wander between them, reading the
names and the short biographies as I went. Names like Katherine
Louise Cregan, who was sixty years old and died in the Social
Security offices on the first floor. Or, on one of the smaller chairs,
Ashley Megan Eckles, who was only four years old. She also died on
the first floor. Walking between the chairs was a deeply moving
experience. It had a kind of Stonehenge feel to it. I wondered who
these people were – Mary Anne Fritzler, Laura Jane Garrison, and
Gabreon D.L. Bruce, who was only three months old. What lives they
might have led if it hadn’t been for that lunatic McVeigh.
On the north side of the memorial stands one of the most
extraordinary things about the whole place. In an orchard, one tree is
much older than all the others. This American elm, now known as the
Survivor Tree, was the only tree that threw any shade across the
parking lot outside the Alfred Murrah Building. Commuters would arrive
early to secure one of the prime parking spots shaded by its branches,
but otherwise it was largely taken for granted. When the bomb
exploded, the tree, which is now about a hundred years old, was one of
the few things left standing. However, it was heavily damaged by the
bomb, with most of the branches ripped off the central trunk. Later, it
was nearly chopped down as investigators recovered evidence
hanging from its few remaining branches and embedded in its bark.
The trunk itself was heavily scarred and blackened by the heat of the
blazing cars that had been parked beneath it. Few thought it would
survive.
But then, a year after the bombing, when victims’ relatives, survivors
and rescue workers gathered for a memorial ceremony by the tree,
they noticed it was starting to bloom. The Survivor Tree became a
symbol of defiance against the fools who perpetrate acts of extreme
violence against society, and it is thriving again. The authorities now
go to great lengths to protect it. For instance, when they were
constructing the memorial and needed to build a wall close to the tree,
one of its roots was placed inside a large pipe so that it could reach
the soil beyond the wall without being damaged. They’ve even dug an
underground space beneath it so that workers can monitor its health
and maintain its very deep roots. On a wall around the Survivor Tree,
an inscription reads, ‘The spirit of this city and this nation will not be
defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us.’
 That tree was a lone witness to what happened on the morning of 19
April 1995, and I found it particularly moving. Every year, hundreds of
its seeds are incubated, and the resultant saplings are distributed
around the country and planted on the anniversary of the bombing, so
there are now thousands of Survivor Trees growing all over America.
I found the memorial even more powerful than I thought it would be. It
provided another example of people at their best – creating something
wonderful out of something really horrific and terrible. For some
reason, I felt particularly sorry for the five victims who were outside the
Alfred Murrah Building that morning. There was an awful feeling of
really bad luck – of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The
other victims had no choice – they were in the building because that’s
where their jobs required them to be – but the five outside would have
evaded the blast if they’d arrived five minutes later or left five minutes
earlier.
Beside the memorial there is a small museum. One of its most
extraordinary exhibits is a tape of a meeting that was taking place in a
nearby building when the explosion occurred. You could listen to
people doing business, then whoomph – the bomb went off. But I
couldn’t bring myself to listen to it. I didn’t want to experience that.
I was very glad I made the effort to visit the memorial. I almost didn’t
go, because storms were forecast for that afternoon. But as soon as I
arrived, the skies turned very calm. That seemed strangely
appropriate.
The next morning I returned to the National Stock Yards to see Stan’s
cattle being auctioned. Keeping my fingers crossed that Stan’s beasts
would achieve the target price of about a thousand dollars apiece, I
took a seat at the edge of the auction ring. Surrounded by farmers,
cowboys, cattlemen and dealers in jeans, plaid shirts, boots and
stetsons, I waited for the action to begin while everyone else gabbled
on mobile phones to their bosses and clients.
Having been to a cattle auction in British Columbia a few years
before, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to repeating an experience
I’d already had, but this one was brilliant. Physically, it wasn’t that
different from the Canadian auction. In Canada the cattle were herded
behind the auctioneer’s booth by cowgirls, who were extremely good
at their job. In Oklahoma a couple of cowboys did the same job. But
here the auctioneers’ patter was something else. It was like listening to
bluegrass banjo music. I’ve seen and heard a lot of auctioneers in the
flesh and on film, but none of them could hold a candle to the
Oklahoma boys. It was as if they were speaking in tongues or in some
strange cow language. I couldn’t understand a word, but it was
absolutely smashing. The auctioneer would relate information about
the cattle at such a rapid pace, yet so lyrically, that I felt I could listen to
him all day.
‘One twenty-six Western, one twenty-five, one twenty-six Western,
one twenty-five,’ I thought he said, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. Maybe
that’s what I sounded like to English audiences when I first came down
from Scotland?
My only concern was that I could lose a lot of money just by twitching
at the wrong moment, so after a while I left and got back on the trike.
Driving along the interstate for a short stretch, I had to pull over
because I was getting scared. The wind was blowing me towards the
hard shoulder and I didn’t like it one little bit. So when I saw some
billboards advertising the Cherokee Trading Post, I seized the
opportunity to get off the road and investigate.
I mention everything that follows as a warning. If you decide to travel
along Route 66, and you find yourself passing signs urging you to visit
the buffalo at the Cherokee Trading Post, please take my advice.
Don’t do it. By all means fill up with their petrol or buy something from
the gift shop. I bought some key rings and badges for my
grandchildren, and if that’s the sort of thing you’re after, it’s the place.
But the buffalo will break your heart. And the campsite beside it will just
make you feel like poor white trash.
I’d seen buffalo before and they were majestic, amazing animals
with the most extraordinary eyes in huge, magnificent heads. But the
pen at the Cherokee Trading Post was like a concentration camp for
two miserable beasts that wandered around in their own shit, moth-
eaten and ill behind double lines of barbed wire. Near the pen was a
plastic buffalo with ‘In God We Trust’ painted on the side of it. To the
side were a couple of the worst totem poles I’d ever seen. I hate it
when people do that kind of thing in the name of ‘culture’. When they
commercialise culture just to make a quick buck. It happens in
Scotland, too, and this made me just as angry as when I see cartoons
of Highlanders with kilts that are too short and big red noses. Where’s
the pride in that?
Buffalo are magnificent creatures, genuine Indian culture is a
splendid thing, and both of them deserve much better than what was
on offer at the Cherokee Trading Post. Buy your petrol there, and
maybe even a key ring, but then get straight back in your car or on your
bike and head on down Route 66 without a backward glance.
I wish I’d done that.
Now, though, the end of Oklahoma was in sight. And ahead lay the
mighty high plains of Texas.
You’ll See Amarillo …
Within a few miles of reaching the Lone Star State, the landscape
started to look like Texas. I’d been rolling through the verdant hills and
pastures of Oklahoma for hundreds of miles. Then, as I approached
Texola – the last place in Oklahoma – the land flattened, the soil
became scrubby, and I crossed the Texas state line into a lonely,
empty, dusty nothingness.
Common wisdom has it that the 178 miles of Route 66 that run
across the Texas Panhandle – that square block of land jutting up from
the northwest corner of the state – is the most boring drive on the
entire journey, if not the planet. There’s some truth in that. Texas isn’t a
place that tolerates any deviation, and the road is as flat as a pancake
and almost uniformly straight right through the state. Water towers,
windmills, grain elevators, deserted towns and the whistling wind
provided the only relief from the thrum of tyres on the road.
Distances between places stretched out as if Route 66 had been
squeezed through a mangle, emerging flattened and with fewer
interruptions. Sixteen miles into the state, I pulled into its first town,
Shamrock.
Now, I always hesitate to criticise any town, as I grew up in one that
most people would describe as a slum. But Shamrock, Texas, is a
horrible place. Although it allegedly has a population of a couple of
thousand people, it was like a ghost town when I visited. And, God help
me, the hotel I stayed in was possibly the worst part of the whole place.
Lying on my bed that night, I gave my current situation some thought. I
didn’t want to give anyone the impression that Route 66 was a glorious
place where they could always get their kicks, because that patently
wasn’t true. The road was dying. Nevertheless, some wonderful people
were trying to keep it alive, and in some places they were succeeding.
In others, like Shamrock, they most certainly were not.
The next morning, I asked the waitress if I could have two fried eggs
over easy and some bacon. It seemed a fairly modest request, but she
just shrugged and said I could only have what was on the menu. The
choice was between some soggy old thing that looked like an omelette
or some wee shrivelled sausages – or both – served on a polystyrene
plate with white plastic knives and forks and a polystyrene cup of
coffee. Anyone who travels Route 66 needs to prepare themselves for
a bit of that on the road. And if, like me, they’re a bit spoiled, it gets
hellish.
After breakfast, I went to look at a rather beautiful art deco building
that had been restored. The U-Drop Inn – originally a restaurant and a
petrol station – was one of the icons of the road. Built in the early
1930s from a design scratched in the dirt beside a nearby motel, it
had a tall tower over the petrol station and a beautifully detailed café
that was called ‘the swankiest of the swank eating places’. It was also
the only café for a hundred miles, so it was highly successful in its day.
But like many of the establishments along Route 66, it sank into
disrepair with the demise of the road. Thankfully, though, it was
eventually recognised as architecturally significant and restored with
the help of a local bank.
Apparently the U-Drop was best viewed at night, illuminated by its
neon strips, but even in the day it was an impressive building from the
outside. But it was no longer a petrol station or a restaurant. It wasn’t
even a museum. They had tarted it up, then shut it to the public, which
confused the hell out of me.
I have a bit of a problem with art deco buildings in general. They’re
interesting when you drive past, but that tends to be the end of the
story. Take the Hoover Building in West London. Everybody raves
about it, but how many of them have been within five feet of it? They’ve
all seen it from a car, but then whoom, they’re past it. That’s fine – no
one needs to go up and lick it to like it. But art deco lovers get on my
tits. They’re the kind of people who read Lord of the Rings and like
movies about little ginky punkies attacking wanky wonkies. I wouldn’t
let my corpse be taken to a movie like that. And I feel pretty much the
same about art deco. It’s for dead people. You’d be amazed at the
number of funeral parlours that are art deco. That’s all I have to say on
the subject.
Moving on from Shamrock, I rejoined Route 66, which for most of its
distance through Texas runs beside the interstate as a service road.
The landscape, as flat and featureless as ever, rolled on. But the wind
– Holy Mother of Jesus – was something else. Several times I thought
I was going to be killed when side winds hit me, blowing me off course
like a big hand sweeping me across the road. I was really frightened a
couple of times, but after about half an hour we arrived in McLean
under a very hot, blazing sun.
McLean was my mother’s name, and although she had no claim on
McLean, Texas, I wondered if there might be a connection. Pulling into
the small town, I asked an old man in a truck if he knew where the
name stemmed from, but he didn’t have a clue.
‘I have lived here for fifty-three years,’ he said. ‘It used to be a good
town but it’s pretty dead now.’
I later discovered more than the old fella had learned over the
previous half-century. Until 1901, the area where McLean now stands
was nothing more than an unnamed cattle loading station on the
Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (nicknamed the Cry and
Pee, because of its initials). Then an English rancher, Alfred Row,
donated some land near the loading station, thinking it might make a
good site for a town. He was right – it grew quickly and within two
years it had several banks, a post office, a newspaper, a wind-
powered water pump, various stores and stables. By 1909, it was well
established as a busy loading point for the railway, handling crops as
well as animals, and requiring four telegraph operators to deal with
commercial communications. Three years later, Alfred Row visited his
relatives back home in England. For the return voyage, he booked a
passage on a ship making its maiden voyage. That ship was the
Titanic, and Alfred was last seen on an ice floe, frozen to death,
hugging his briefcase.
McLean continued to prosper after his death, profiting from the oil
boom in the 1920s and 1930s, and serving as the site of a camp for
German prisoners-of-war in the 1940s. Any escapees were easily
recaptured and were usually quite pleased to return after a few days on
the bare plains of the Panhandle.
In 1984 McLean was the last Texan town to be bypassed by the
interstate, and its sad decline began. Interstate 40 is about a mile
away, but it seems like another world. Much of the town is now
deserted. According to the mayor, who runs the Cactus Inn Motel, a
marvellous old place, the population is significantly less than the official
figure of eight hundred, although she was fully in favour of young
people leaving the town to improve their prospects.
Nowadays, many of the buildings in McLean are abandoned. Petrol
stations no longer pump gas, restaurants haven’t served food for
years, and plenty of houses have boarded-up windows and doors. On
one tumbledown shop – above a fading mural featuring Elvis, a Chevy
and a waitress on roller skates – a banner still proclaims McLean ‘the
Heart of Old Route 66’. I could imagine those days when the town was
booming, when solid lines of cars streamed in from New Mexico to the
west and Oklahoma to the east and the local petrol stations and diners
were open around the clock to cater to travellers and tourists. Now it’s
a very different story. The main street is littered with the wreckage of
the past and the concrete landscape is slowly being reclaimed by
weeds. For photographers, it’s a treasure trove of atmospheric
pictures of urban decay, but I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to
live there.
Nevertheless, McLean still has several places that make it worth a
visit. Next to the Cactus Inn Motel, the Red River Steakhouse serves
steaks that are so juicy and tasty that many of its clientele regularly
drive the hundred-mile round trip from Amarillo to eat there. It also has
charming waitresses and a fantastic atmosphere, so it takes some
beating. Inexpensive and mind-blowingly good, it proves that you can
find good food on Route 66, even though it can be a long search
sometimes.
McLean also has a lovely old art deco cinema, the Avalon, which
has been restored by a Route 66 association. (Sadly, though, just like
the U-Drop, it was closed when I visited.) And on Route 66 itself,
McLean boasts the first Phillips 66 petrol station to be opened in
Texas. Built in 1929, it served the town for more than fifty years, and
it’s now been beautifully restored by the Old Texas Route 66
Association. The bright colours of its freshly painted pumps were a
stark contrast to the faded splendour of most of the rest of the town. It
is apparently the most photographed petrol station on Route 66. It no
longer pumps gas, though.
 In what remains of the centre of town, McLean’s main attraction is
housed in a former bra factory that once gained the town the fantastic
nickname ‘Uplift City’. But it no longer specialises in lingerie; now it’s a
museum dedicated to barbed wire. That might sound daft, but barbed
wire – or the devil’s rope, as they call it – is a very important thing in
Texas. I’ve always thought of the Colt and the Winchester as the
tamers of the Wild West, but apparently barbed wire was much more
important in bringing order to the wilderness.
Invented by a man called Samuel Glidden, who made millions when
he became the Henry Ford of the ‘thorny fence’, it was highly
controversial at first. To the settlers of the American West, it provided
security and stopped cattle barons from driving their herds across the
settlers’ land. But many others wished Glidden dead because his
invention ended the era of free grazing on the range – which led to
absolute misery out there.
This was the land of huge drovers’ trails hundreds of miles in length.
I’d passed a famous one the previous day, the Chisholm Trail, which
led right across Texas and Oklahoma. There was also the Goodnight-
Loving Trail, named after the cattlemen who used it to move longhorns
from Texas all the way to Wyoming. For years, anyone could move
cattle along these trails. But then people got selfish and started
demanding fees, like tolls, to pass through their land. When that
happened, all hell broke loose, and people started shooting each
other. Anyone who put up a barbed-wire fence could stop herds in their
tracks and charge for the water. This prompted countless feuds, many
of which escalated into range wars, such as the Lincoln County War,
which culminated in a gunfight at Blazer’s Mill, a shootout that turned a
young cattle guard called William McCarty into a fugitive better known
as Billy the Kid.
With vigilante justice reigning supreme, much blood was shed and
many communities were torn apart by the range wars. Eventually the
lawmen settled the disputes, but by then the devil’s rope had changed
the nature of the West. So barbed wire already had a very unsavoury
history, even before pictures of a corpse hanging over barbed wire
and concentration camp inmates clutching barbed wire became
symbols of the First and Second World Wars.
 Within years of its invention, Glidden’s wire spanned the nation from
the Great Lakes to California, following a line very similar to that later
taken by Route 66. Although Glidden ruthlessly sued anyone who
infringed his patent, hundreds of rival designs were patented and many
of them are now on display in McLean’s museum. I’d never realised
there were more than two thousand types of barbed wire, and that they
even make barbed-wire jewellery and barbed-wire cocktail stirrers in
Texas. The names of the different types are intriguing: Half McGlynn,
Braided, Pitney, Evans, Elsie, Kitter and Ford. I’d always thought all
barbed wire was the same – a series of double twists of wire around a
long length of wire, seemingly designed to cut an L-shaped gash in
your shorts when you were escaping from the orchard with your jumper
full of apples and the farmer shouting, ‘Come back here yer bunch of
bastards.’ But in the museum there were all sorts of designs on the
walls, in cases and in cabinets. And people actually collect the stuff,
too. They even have their own magazine, imaginatively titled Barbed
Wire Collector.
There were lots of other novelties in the museum, like a hairy-arsed
road runner with barbed wire for a tail, and a wee covered wagon
made of spurred, rolled barbed wire by Sunny Mills of Amarillo.
Looking at the First World War barbed wire reminded me of a song
whose lyrics go something like, ‘If you want to see the captain, I know
where he is’. Then it continues for a few more lines of ‘I know where he
is’ before the refrain comes in: ‘He’s hanging on the old barbed wire’.
Each verse follows the same pattern, except the person changes – ‘If
you want to see the colonel’, and so on. It’s a bit of a boring song, but
imagine singing it in the trenches when your friend was hanging upside
down on the barbed wire. Grim times.
But by the time I’d scouted right around the museum, I had to admit it
was a rather limited subject. All anyone really needs to know about
barbed wire is that it can tear the arse out of your trousers, give a cow
a good fright, entangle a Yorkshire terrier for life, and is nasty stuff
made by greedy men.
Returning to the road and continuing my journey across the Texas
Panhandle, at least there was no chance of getting lost. Route 66
closely follows the interstate, occasionally joining the freeway for a few
miles at a time, and there were no other roads around to confuse me,
which made a change. Quite how anyone riding solo on a motorbike
through Missouri or Oklahoma manages to follow the road without
getting lost is a mystery to me. In some parts, the path of Route 66
chops and changes so much that I frequently found myself lost, even
with four of the production crew in a nearby car, all consulting satnavs,
maps, books and all sorts of crap. Now, in the vast emptiness of
Texas, at last I could relax and just follow the road.
Riding on, I passed several notable Route 66 landmarks. East of
Groom, I spotted a leaning water tower that was one of the most
photographed sights along the whole road – Texas’s version of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa. However, the Groom tower was purposely set
at an angle by the owner of a local truck stop who had bought it to
attract trade, so it was just another example of Route 66 tack in my
book.
A mile or so further down the road stood a 190-foot-tall white crucifix
that could be seen from up to twenty miles away on a good day. For a
while, the crucifix, which was surrounded by life-sized statues of the
Stations of the Cross, laid claim to being the tallest cross in the
western hemisphere. However, the residents of Effingham, Illinois –
which I’d passed nearly a thousand miles previously – put paid to
Groom’s boasting by erecting a cross that was eight feet taller.
(Although, in the typical style of American superlatives, neither was as
tall as the cross at the Valle de los Caidos in Spain, also in the
western hemisphere the last time I checked.)
After about an hour, I reached Amarillo, appropriately known as
‘Cow Town’. Near by, I passed a cattle ranch that has a larger
population of cows than most towns have people in this part of
America. Running alongside the road for several miles and stretching
far into the distance, it is home to 28,000 beasts. The impact of the
smell matched the scale of the operation, providing a succinct olfactory
answer to the question: is this the way to Amarillo?
Those steers’ ultimate fate was laid bare in Amarillo’s temple to
gluttony, the Big Texan Steak Ranch, a Western-style saloon
restaurant with a twenty-five-foot neon cowboy standing by the side of
the interstate. Here, the steak is free provided the diner eats it with a
baked potato, salad, dinner roll and shrimp cocktail in less than sixty
minutes. The catch is that the sirloin steak weighs in at seventy-two
ounces, about the same as nine regular steak dinners, and you have to
eat it on a raised platform under the gaze of the rest of the restaurant
… and the world, via a live webcam. A few people, such as Klondike
Bill, a professional wrestler, have managed two of the steak dinners in
an hour. But since the Big Texan initiated its challenge, fewer than
eight thousand of the fifty thousand who have attempted the single
dinner have succeeded. So it’s hardly surprising that the restaurant will
ship in anyone wishing to accept the challenge – a small fleet of white
stretch limos with longhorns on their bonnets wait outside to collect
contenders free of charge from any hotel in Amarillo.
It was immediately obvious that Amarillo was in a much better state
than many of the Texan towns I’d passed through earlier. It’s a rather
beautiful place, with a lot of impressive buildings and successful-
looking people in nice shiny cars, so I reckoned it was a good place to
stop.
The next day, riding through the west side of town, as Route 66
headed back into the wilds, I pulled over to have a quick look at what
some people call Route 66’s version of Stonehenge. Smack in the
middle of miles of empty flatland, on a giant, windswept wheat farm,
stands a line of ten Cadillacs that look like they have plunged from high
in the sky into the earth. For reasons best known to the artist, each of
the semi-submerged Caddies is arranged at a slant on an angle
exactly the same as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It might sound bizarre,
but I think it’s an outstanding piece of art.
The site belongs to a local wheat farmer, artist and philanthropist
called Stanley Marsh 3 (that’s the way he writes it), who enlisted some
mates who were part of an art collective called Ant Farm to build
Cadillac Ranch. Stan created it in the 1970s to represent the
American love of automobiles and freedom, and it has to be seen to
be believed. I had seen it in many books and brochures, but when I
saw the real thing with the sun shining on it, my heart missed a beat. I
fell in love with it.
What’s really great about Cadillac Ranch is that Stan encourages
people to graffiti on it, so it changes every day. Every now and then,
Stan resprays the Cadillacs in plain paint to create a blank canvas,
allowing the public to start again from scratch, drawing and writing
whatever they like on it. I came prepared with a spray can of black
gloss, but I was quite nervous. Having seen so many pictures of it, it felt
odd to be walking towards it. The closer I got, the more I thought it was
a cracking thing. It’s a fairly simple work of art – just a row of ten cars
poking out of the ground – but it changes shape in really interesting
ways, depending on how you look at it.
What really appeals to me about Cadillac Ranch is that it’s a big
two-fingered salute to the kind of people I really don’t like – the beige-
ists of the world, the kind of people who get all upset about artwork that
they can’t buy, hang on their walls or give to their Auntie Jeanie for
Christmas. When they see something like Cadillac Ranch, they don’t
know what to do with it. It brings out things in them that they find
disturbing. I like disturbing people like that. I grew old without growing
up and I’m very proud of it. I don’t give a toss what anybody thinks.
I’m so full of admiration for Stan and his creation. It was one thing to
have an idea like Cadillac Ranch, but quite another to go ahead and
build it.
But then, as I got within striking distance of the line of lovely,
multicoloured cars, their patches and streaks of paint gleaming in the
sun, I spotted something that made my eyes stick out on stalks.
‘To make love to me, I know it will never be Billy Connolly,’ it said.
What?
I read it again: ‘To make love to me, I know it will never be Billy
Connolly.’
How in the name of God had that ended up on the side of a
Cadillac? I thought that Stan himself must have done it. Then, looking
down the line of Caddies, I saw my name repeated again and again.
‘Billy + Amarillo.’
‘Billy C.’
‘Billy, see you Billy.’
‘Billy Dilly.’
‘BC.’
‘Welcome to the windy city, Billy C.’
It was freakish. I wanted to look at them sideways, see them from
different angles, just to get my head around them. That entire fantastic
artwork had been prepared specially for me. What a lucky chap I was.
And, God, this guy was good.
Cadillac Ranch had turned out to be the last thing on Earth I had
thought it would be: a shrine to me. Well … I was all pleased with
myself. How many people had an artwork on the Texan plains
customised for their benefit? Holy Moly. It left me speechless. It wasn’t
just fabulous. It was amazing.
With my spray can of black paint, I added a few touches of my own.
Just an exclamation mark on one set of initials and a few other bits and
pieces. It was great fun, but I soon discovered that I wasn’t a very good
graffiti artist. It’s not as easy as it looks. Ending up with dirty black
fingers covered in paint, I didn’t make too good a job of it.
From Cadillac Ranch, I rode round to Ant Farm’s studio, where
some of the artists were working on projects that Stan would later
install in various parts of Amarillo. One of the wonderful things that they
do is make road signs that are meaningless. They have slogans such
as ‘I have known a slut’, with the idea being that people should just
stumble upon them when they’re driving along or hanging out in a
public place. They call this the Dynamite Museum – the ‘only museum
in the world without walls’.
When I arrived, an artist called Drew showed me around and
suggested I should paint one of their rogue signs.
‘What do you want to paint?’ he said.
‘I have no real idea,’ I said. ‘I had a thought last night and the one I
came up with was, “She kissed me once but it melted”.’
‘For your sign? That is good.’ He smiled. ‘Are you going to draw a
picture or are you just going to do words?’
‘I can’t really draw.’
‘I can’t either.’
‘You can’t?’
‘So what inspired you to do the Route 66?’
‘I think it was just rock’n’roll. It seems to mean more to Europeans
than it does to Americans. It seems to have more sort of … magic.’
‘I think you’re right. I think it’s one of those things we just take for
granted. To Europeans, it is what they associate America with – wide-
open spaces and hitting the road. In America, it is our lifestyle, but we
don’t really appreciate it.’
In the end, I painted a cartoon of my face. Beneath it, I wrote, ‘I have
got biscuits’. It meant nothing at all, but then I started to worry that I’d
done what I mentioned earlier – unwittingly absorbed another comic’s
material. I was so concerned that I phoned my daughter, who works in
a New York art gallery. I asked her if she’d once shown me some T-
shirts, one of which might have said, ‘I have got donuts at home’.
Maybe that had been floating around in the ether and I’d just adapted it
a bit. But my daughter assured me that ‘I have got biscuits’ meant
nothing to her. Then I met the woman in whose garden my road sign
would be placed and she seemed delighted, so I was very pleased.
I think the rogue road signs are wonderful and ought to be expanded
worldwide. My original idea had been to paint a sign that said,
‘Beware of Route 666’. I’m glad I didn’t do that – it’s kind of dark and
strange. But I do wish I’d gone with ‘She kissed me once but it melted’.
I don’t know what it means, but I like it.
As I said to Drew, I was nervous about drawing, although I am an
artist. I’ll say that again: I am an artist. Once you admit that, you get
good. I admitted it a long time ago, and I got good. I had noticed some
rappers calling themselves artists – the kind of rappers who sold stuff
on the street in New York, just regular guys. They would ask, ‘Would
you like to buy my art?’ I thought that was a good stance to take. Gerry
Rafferty tried to instil the same sort of thing into me when we were in
the Humblebums – that what we did was art. Everyone else did junk,
he used to say, but we did art. And I believed that attitude was true.
I also really believe Lenny Bruce’s theory that a comedian is a man
who thinks funny things and says them, while an actor is a man who
learns funny things and says them. They’re as funny as each other, but
only one of them is a comedian. Going to bars and learning other
people’s jokes then telling them in other bars does not make you a
comedian – it makes you an actor … or a thief. It’s just being a rip-off
artist. But if someone thinks funny things and is brave enough to say
them on stage, then they have entered the world of art. Whatever that
might be.
I was mulling over all of this in the Ant Farm’s studio, but I have to
admit that I was starting to tie myself up in knots. I had entered that
realm that we Scots call wunnert. ‘Aye, he’s a wee bit wunnert,’ we
say. It means lost and wondering, and it was old Uncle Willy who got
wunnert: ‘Aye, you’ll get used to him, but he’s a wee bit wunnert, you
know? He might take a piss in a frying pan, but don’t worry about him.
He means well.’
It was clearly time to change the subject, and luckily I had the perfect
thing. Somebody had told me the funniest joke a few days earlier: ‘Why
do they give old men in old folks’ homes Viagra? To stop them rolling
out of bed.’ I thought that was the funniest thing ever!
After another fifty miles through the mind-numbingly flat and plain
landscape of this flattest and plainest part of Texas, I pulled up outside
a café in the town of Adrian. I had reached a point in the journey that
anyone who was fascinated by facts, figures and statistics – which I’m
not at all – would regard as highly significant.
A sign by the side of the road said it all: ‘Los Angeles 1139 miles –
Chicago 1139 miles’. I’d arrived at the exact midpoint of Route 66. It
was just like anywhere else along the journey, but at the same time it
was a funny position to be in. I’d been on the road for longer than I had
left to run. It had taken me four weeks to reach the midpoint, and I had
less than three weeks remaining. Arriving at the halfway point made
sense of the road and gave me a feeling of achievement.
The café – called the Midpoint Café, of course – is famous for its
ugly pies. Personally, I thought they should be far uglier than they were
– all big and lumpy and burned. Like a lot of things on Route 66, there
was a lot of talk, a lot of bragging, but not much when you got there.
Compared to many pies I’d eaten in Scotland over the years, these
were very good-looking pies. I had a cup of tea and a peach cobbler,
and was a wee bit disappointed that its ugliness didn’t come up to
scratch. Maybe they used to be properly ugly and now they were
concentrating on making them nice. That would be a mistake. I was
starting to like the shabby side to Route 66. Once I accepted that the
road’s best days were well behind it, it was much easier to accept its
limitations and get on with having a good time.
My next stop was the last town in Texas and the first in New Mexico
– it straddles the border. This was a particularly poignant destination
because, in its heyday, Glenrio was a thriving and hectic pit stop on
Route 66. Some of the scenes in John Ford’s film version of The
Grapes of Wrath were shot there, but it has never been a highly
populated place. At its peak in the 1940s, it had a population of just
thirty. But its famous motel had a big neon sign that proclaimed either,
‘First Motel in Texas’ or ‘Last Motel in Texas’, depending on how you
looked at it. And the busy post office straddled the state line, with the
depot receiving mail in Texas and the office distributing it in New
Mexico.
Then, one day in September 1973, Interstate 40 opened. That day,
Glenrio died. The stream of tourists who had flowed through the town
along Route 66 en route to California or from the Pacific coast towards
the American heartland dwindled to a trickle, then stopped altogether.
By 1985, that post office was the only business left open. It served a
population of two. Today, among a string of dead or dying towns along
hundreds of miles of the old road, Glenrio is the deadest of all. It now
has just one resident, a softly spoken mother of two, who lives among
the critters and the tumbleweed.
Roxann Travis told me she was in Glenrio on the day the highway
opened. Her father’s petrol station became an immediate casualty.
Now in her sixties, she is happy to live there alone in the house in
which she was born, and she has no desire to move on.
‘My dad moved house here when I was a baby and built the station
and the diner,’ she told me. ‘Every summer all the traffic would be lined
up the highway, both directions. It was very, very busy. He would have
us go wash the windshields and check the oil so they would be ready
to pump the gas and keep them moving through.’
Her mum and dad used to keep horses across the road from one of
their two petrol stations, but it was hard to get to them because there
were so many cars. A few years later, when Roxann was raising her
own kids, they could play ball on the road. Nowadays, you could take a
nap on it. You’d only be disturbed when occasional tourists, like me,
stopped by to gawp at the ghost town.
‘It must seem very strange to you,’ I said, ‘because you must see
your dad and your siblings when you look at this place.’
 ‘I do, yes. And it’s real sad to watch it crumble.’
‘So, how long did it take for the town to die with the coming of the
interstate?’
‘Four or five years, I guess. The Texas Longhorn – a café, station
and motel down there – was the last to go.’
For a while, Roxann lived in Glenrio with her husband, Larry, who
commuted to their business in Adrian – another petrol station. But in
1976 the gas station was raided and Larry was forced to his knees
and shot through the back of his head. The killer went on to murder a
second man the same day at another petrol station in the Texas
Panhandle.
‘How does it feel to live here all alone?’ I said.
‘I’m used to it. I’m fine with it. I like the peace and quiet.’
Roxann has six dogs to keep her company, but they make the noise
of twelve.
‘Do you get visitors? Do any of the old people who used to live here
ever come back?’
‘Not really, no, because some are scattered out in the country. There
was another house next door and they moved to Lubbock and they
never looked back.’
‘So, where do you get your groceries?’
‘I usually go to Amarillo, but for a short trip, if I don’t have that much
time, I’ll go to Tucumcari. That’s forty miles.’
‘Well, I really admire you. I really admire your guts. I don’t know if I
could do it.’
Roxann showed me some pictures of Glenrio in its heyday. With a
barbecue restaurant, various diners, a hamburger joint, several petrol
stations and motels, it was a buzzing, vibrant place.
‘They’re all sitting having their dinner and they look like they’re
laughing,’ I said, looking at one of the snaps. ‘They all look so happy
sitting eating their hamburgers. Little did they know what was going to
happen. It just happened in a flash really, didn’t it?’
‘It went downhill fast.’
‘What made you decide to stay?’
‘It’s home!’
We both laughed at the absurdity of it. Roxann is a lovely woman,
who doesn’t feel at all blighted by her situation.
‘But don’t you need other people round you to make it a home?’
‘My daughter comes every chance she gets. My son drives for a
trucking company and he stops by pretty often. And I like to read, do
my garden and sew and mess with the animals.’ Her daughter-in-law
couldn’t understand how she could live in Glenrio and wanted her to
move to a town, which she thought would be safer. But Roxann said, ‘I
don’t think town is safe. I feel safer out here. With my dogs, no one’s
walked in that yard in a while without me knowing.’
‘Well, you certainly seem very happy.’
‘I like it here. I plan to stay as long as I’m able.’
‘Why not? You could be the mayor as well, if you like.’
‘People tease me about that. I’m the mayor, the sheriff and
everything else.’
‘Postmistress … and, of course, you’re the entire police force as
well.’
For a while, Roxann shared the town with a young cowboy, who was
living in a deserted building, but he didn’t last long. Now the only
regular visitor was a cow that had broken out of a nearby ranch and
was harmlessly roaming the streets.
I thought she was a wonderful, brave woman with a brilliant attitude.
I’d found another friend.
As she said, this was her home. What more could anyone want?
Albuquerque and Tucumcari, Make
New Mexico Extraordinary

Glenrio took me into New Mexico, the sixth of eight states I would pass
through on Route 66. Extremely beautiful and more than a little
mystical, New Mexico is where Route 66’s origin in the cattle tracks
and wagon trails of the Wild West becomes obvious. Here, Route 66
looks more like a ribbon suspended from the vast, deep-blue sky than
a road built on the ground. Now the distances were truly vast, the
destinations remote and the rides long, hot and hard.
Almost perfectly square in shape, New Mexico has more history than
any other state along Route 66, with Native American Pueblo dwellings
dotted along the road. But it also has its fair share of the bizarre,
outlandish and freaky often found along the Mother Road. South of
Albuquerque, for instance, there’s a town named after a 1950s radio
quiz show. The programme’s producers offered to rock up and record
the next episode anywhere that was prepared to change its name to
the title of the show. That’s why some seven thousand people now live
in a town called Truth or Consequences rather than Hot Springs.
From Glenrio, I rode straight through to Santa Fe, a distance of
nearly 250 miles. Once again, I was buffeted by a side wind that was
beyond belief. It blew me all over the damn place. Sharing the road
with big rigs when there were side winds was a double-edged sword.
Sometimes I thought the wind would sweep me under one of them and
I’d be squashed into the tarmac. At other times, a truck would come
along and shield me from the wind. But this was a finely judged thing –
if a gust slipped under the truck, or between the truck and its trailer, my
shield would become a lethal hazard. I had to keep my wits about me
all the time.
Arriving in Santa Fe, I was booked into a hotel in which my wife and I
had stayed some years previously. It hadn’t changed a bit. Santa Fe is
a beautiful town. It’s full of tourist traps, but I don’t mind that. The stores
sell turquoise jewellery and all sorts of beaded things, some of them
outstandingly fabulous and very expensive, but that doesn’t detract
from the fact that it’s a lovely, relaxed and relaxing place. And the food
is great – a blessed relief after all the crap I’d been eating for weeks.
Strictly speaking, Santa Fe wasn’t even on Route 66 during the
road’s heyday. When the route was first designated in 1926, everyone
expected it to go straight through the town because it was the capital
of New Mexico and where the Pecos and Santa Fe trails met. And
indeed, for the first eleven years of Route 66, it turned northwest at
Santa Rosa, headed up to Santa Fe, then turned back down south to
Albuquerque.
However, in 1937, A.T. Hannett, the Governor of New Mexico, was
not re-elected and he blamed a ring of powerful lawyers and influential
landowners based in Santa Fe. As an act of defiance against this
cabal, he re-routed Route 66 directly to Albu querque, bypassing
Santa Fe altogether. With just a few months to go before the new
governor was inaugurated, Hannett forced the road builders to work
seven days a week, including Christmas, to construct a new highway
through virgin landscape. The road cut across public and private land,
showing complete disregard for ownership rights. By the time the new
governor was installed, it was too late for him to do anything about it.
Drivers welcomed the change, which shaved more than ninety miles off
Route 66 between Santa Rosa and Albuquerque, but in the end Santa
Fe benefited, too. The city grew on its own merits, without relying on
Route 66 traffic, so when the road was decommissioned Santa Fe
was unaffected, unlike most places along the route. Its isolation also
meant it developed in a unique way. It’s a beautiful city of adobe
buildings, with none taller than three storeys. I’d strongly advise you to
make the detour off Route 66 and have a look.
I’d come to Santa Fe to experience a miracle. At least, that’s what
I’d been told. I don’t believe in miracles or the supernatural, but I don’t
have a problem with anyone who does. So I was quite looking forward
to my visit to the Loretto Chapel, a charming former Roman Catholic
church in the shadow of St Francis Cathedral on the fringes of the
downtown area. The oddest thing about the chapel is that it has no
priests. Introduced to someone who was described as the owner, my
immediate thought was: What do you mean, ‘the owner’?
It turned out that the Loretto Chapel had been decommissioned –
it’s now a business that charges an entrance fee. But anyone can still
get married there, if they hire a priest, which seems kind of odd to me.
Anyway, it’s a very pretty place, built in the 1870s in the Gothic revival
style for an order of nuns called the Sisters of Loretto. At the top of the
church is a choir loft, a very nice and large one. But when the building
was finished and the nuns looked up at the loft, they noticed a quite
serious problem with it: there was no staircase, so they had no way to
get up there. Apparently, the architect had died suddenly when drafting
the blueprint for the building, and then the builders hadn’t noticed that
the staircase was missing from the plans.
Faced with a bit of a dilemma, the nuns prayed day and night for
nine days. On the tenth day, a guy showed up at the chapel. Riding a
donkey, he had long hair and a beard, and he offered to do the job for
them. In what seemed a ridiculously short amount of time – just three
months – he built a spiral staircase that led up to the choir loft. He then
promptly disappeared before anyone could determine his identity or
even pay him for his work. Mysterious, eh?
The staircase is certainly very beautiful. I had a close look and
couldn’t see a single nail mark or any trace of glue. And I found it
difficult even to find any joints (that is, the carpentry kind of joint: I don’t
want to suggest that the carpenter was smoking dope while he was
making the staircase). Apparently it’s all held together with dowels, but
it’s still a remarkable feat of construction. Unlike most spiral
staircases, it has no central support and it isn’t attached to a wall. That
said, the owners of the church very rarely let anyone use it, so I had to
wonder if it was as strong and stable as it looked.
The Catholic Church eventually declared that the creation of this
staircase was a miracle, purely because some people reckoned the
bearded guy was St Joseph. It was also claimed that he used only a
small number of primitive tools, such as a square, a saw and some
warm water – although how anyone knew that when he supposedly
worked entirely alone and behind closed doors might be a miracle in
itself. It’s also alleged that the staircase is constructed entirely from
non-native wood, yet no one saw any lumber delivered during the three
months that the carpenter was in the chapel. These mysteries had kept
250,000 pilgrims a year guessing, and the entrance-fee dollars
pouring into the tills. The church was so geared up for tourists it was
almost silly.
As with many ‘miracles’, there are rational explanations for several
of the staircase’s apparent mysteries. For instance, experts have
pointed out that plenty of other spiral staircases don’t have a central
support; and anyway, the Loretto Chapel’s staircase seems to have a
concealed support that acts like a central pole. Also, its double-helix
shape, like a DNA molecule, will lend it some strength – although this
design probably makes it bounce like a giant spring, which might
explain why the owners don’t let people walk up and down it.
Even supposing that the legend is true and St Joseph did build the
spiral staircase, I still have one big unanswered question: how did the
builders construct the choir loft? It’s a big, high platform, so how did
they build it without a staircase to get up there? Did they hang upside
down from the roof? That’s what I wanted to know.
Seeing the crowds inside the church made me think that some
people seem to be desperate for miracles. They really long for them to
be true. Personally, I like Thomas Jefferson’s attitude that miracles
spoil religion because they are obviously tosh and go against nature.
Jefferson even went to the trouble of writing an alternative Bible with no
miracles or other supernatural events in it.
I left Santa Fe and headed even further away from Route 66, northwest
into the mountains, through a landscape that looked like it had been
built by giants. The freeway up to Los Alamos, some 7,320 feet above
sea level, was one of the most extraordinary roads I’d ever seen. If
European road builders were faced with a similar challenge, they
would cut the road into the side of the mountain, making it wind up the
incline in a series of hairpin bends. Not so in New Mexico, where they
unashamedly and pragmatically built the six-lane Los Alamos Highway
straight up and through the valley.
For many years, Los Alamos was a secret town that didn’t officially
exist. The locals carried driving licences that had no names,
addresses or signatures on them, just always the same occupation –
engineer – which indicated to the police that the holder was conducting
secret government work. Cut off from the outside world, this small town
in the mountains was home to the Manhattan Project – America’s top-
secret effort, with participation from Britain and Canada, to develop
the first atomic bomb during the Second World War.
When I arrived in Los Alamos, I was flabbergasted to find it was a
beautiful country town – clean, well laid out, with fantastic facilities and
crystal-clear mountain air. It also has the highest concentration of
residents with Ph.D.s anywhere in the world, and consequently the
highest per capita income of any American city (and the highest house
prices).
It was a beautiful day, the kind you dream about, as I rode into the
centre of town, where a string of handsome wood and stone lodges
make up the Los Alamos Historical Museum. In 1942 these mountain
lodges were requisitioned by the military from Los Alamos Ranch
School, a private boarding school. The site was chosen for the
Manhattan Project because of its isolation, access to water, and
location on a table mountain that allowed all entrances to be secured.
Originally referred to only as Site Y, it later became the Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory and, after the war, the Los Alamos National
Laboratory. In a strip of buildings known as Bathtub Row – because
they were the only houses in Los Alamos with baths – stood the
school’s Fuller Lodge and Big House. Both were social gathering
places for Manhattan Project personnel, while other nearby buildings
were used for housing.
At one of the historic lodges I met Jack Aeby, who used to be a
driver for the project’s scientists, many of whom had codenames in this
no-questions-asked town. Sitting beside him was Frank Osvath, a
machinist on the project. Both men are now in their eighties. I asked
Frank what he did exactly.
‘Can’t you tell by looking at me?’ he said. ‘I glow in the dark. I
machined uranium for thirty-nine years.’
‘You did not!’ I was amazed.
‘I did.’
‘Is that a safe thing to do?’
‘It was mostly depleted uranium. Enriched uranium – I just did a little
bit of that.’
‘How did you feel about being part of manufacturing an atomic
bomb? Did you know that’s what you were doing?’
‘They came looking for machinists at the Ford Motor Company in
Detroit and about a dozen of us came out here. They told us we would
build something that might end the war, but we didn’t know for sure
what it was.’
‘Really? Well, it certainly did that.’
‘They said they couldn’t tell us how long we would be here. We would
be restricted from travelling and our letters would be censored, so it
was quite a restriction to come out here. Our names were changed;
they gave us false names. My folks, who lived in Detroit, used to write
me letters and they were censored coming in and going out. My folks
came from Hungary and I wrote them in Hungarian. Those letters
couldn’t be censored here, so they sent them to Washington, DC, then
back here, and then they delivered them to my folks. So it took a very
long time.’
I turned to Jack. ‘And you were a driver?’
‘I would get the people who were coming up here,’ he said, ‘take
them to 109 East Paulos, which was the headquarters in Santa Fe,
and they would be met by military personnel for their induction to work
up here.’
 ‘Were you allowed to speak to them about the project?’
‘They all arrived with assumed names, like everybody else that
worked here, and they never remembered their names, but I’d taken
physics long enough to know who they really were and I’d even remind
them what their codename was when I put them in the car and brought
them up.’
It must have been a most interesting time. I was especially
fascinated by the museum’s pictures of people having parties, wearing
funny hats and holding drinks in their hands, and presumably falling in
love in the evenings, while by day they were building the first atom
bomb.
‘We weren’t allowed to travel, so we had to have our parties here,’
said Frank. ‘We ate our lunch here in this room. One time I came down
and six men sitting around that table started to sing the Hungarian
national anthem. So I joined in and sang with them. When we got
through singing I went over to talk to some of those fellows and one of
them said his name was Edward Teller. He was the father of the
hydrogen bomb. He played that piano over there several times to
entertain us.’
I found that kind of strange. There was no reason on earth why these
people shouldn’t have played the piano or held parties or fallen in love
or got drunk, but it still seemed incongruous.
Jack took the picture of the first atom bomb test explosion at the
Trinity test site, White Sands, south of Albuquerque, on 16 July 1945.
It’s one of the ten most published photographs in the world and I’ve
always thought it’s extraordinary – the mushroom cloud billowing in the
desert – but Jack told me there’s something wrong with it. He pointed
to a print of the famous picture on the wall. ‘It’s facing the wrong way. It
was taken on a slide and whoever made that picture turned it over.’
Then he pointed at a whisp of smoke on the right of the picture. ‘That
little plume’, he said, ‘should be on the left. It belongs on the other
side.’
‘It doesn’t matter much, does it?’ said Frank. ‘I was back at base
camp when I took it,’ said Jack, ‘on the south side of everything. So
everybody thought that any good picture must have come from the
technical staff at the bunker on the north. I’m strictly an amateur; I didn’t
have any technical knowledge.’
The night before the explosion, Frank and a group of friends climbed
a mountain called South Baldy, the highest peak of the Magdalena
Mountains in central New Mexico, and slept at an altitude of ten
thousand feet to ensure they would get a good view of the detonation
the next morning, but when the appointed hour arrived, they thought the
bomb had failed to detonate.
‘We thought it didn’t work,’ said Frank. ‘We knew what time it was
supposed to go off in the morning and it didn’t go off. They delayed it
because of the weather. So all of my friends crawled back into their
sleeping bags, but I was sitting up, watching the sun come up from the
other direction. All of a sudden a flash went off and then I heard the
sound come in later. All the others woke up and watched it; it was quite
an exciting experiment. We looked down at it from above and saw the
mushroom building up below us.’
Their stories were extraordinary. What a privilege to have been
present at such a momentous event in history, even if there was
something quite horrific about it. ‘How did you feel?’ I said. ‘Did it fill
you with fear or joy or horror? You must be one of the few people on
earth who have watched an atomic explosion for pleasure.’
‘Right,’ said Frank. ‘And unofficially – from a high place.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Jack, ‘there was a lottery going and
people bet on the yield that it was going to give. I guessed at about
twelve kilotons, which was pretty close, and it was estimated all the
way from zero to infinity. There were those who thought it would set the
atmosphere on fire and melt the earth.’
I wondered how that person felt when the explosion took place. He
probably ran off to hide under his bed somewhere.
‘After the explosion, we came down the mountain to have breakfast
in Socorro,’ said Frank. ‘The newspaper already had the headlines
out: “Accidental Explosion”. They thought it was an ammunition dump.
We knew it was a lie, but they had to publish something because
everybody around there heard that explosion and saw the big flash.’
‘Were they aware of radiation and fallout?’ I said. ‘Or did it take
them by surprise?’
‘They knew there were going to be fission products and that they
had to go someplace. The wind was blowing, so they could trace it
across the country, and they interviewed people who were in that path.
There were cattle that died and some people got mild exposures, but
nothing serious.’
Frank and Jack both looked in very good health, especially
considering all their years of work on the project. A few weeks after the
explosion, Jack was part of a group that dug up some of the
radioactive remnants at the test site in search of new elements. In the
debris they discovered a few new isotopes, including plutonium.
Then Frank told me something astonishing. ‘A friend of mine is the
only person in the world who saw the first three atomic bombs. He not
only went to Trinity, he also flew on the airplanes that dropped the
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He invented the trigger for the
bomb so he was asked to go along in the airplanes to set it up when
they got close. And then he dropped it. When he came back, I asked
him, “How did you feel, killing so many people?” He said at first it was
a very bad feeling, but then he prayed a lot about it and realised that
many of our soldiers wouldn’t have to go there to continue fighting the
Japanese. The war would end, so he saved a lot of lives. He was
satisfied with what he did.’
‘Was anybody troubled with guilt?’
‘A large number were,’ said Jack. ‘They circulated a petition not to
use the bomb aggressively but to demonstrate its power at a deserted
island someplace. There were literally hundreds of signatures on that
petition, but it never reached Roosevelt. Secretary Byrnes [James F.
Byrnes, the US Secretary of State in 1945] blocked it. He didn’t want
Roosevelt to see that.’
‘Really?’ I was amazed.
‘He had already decided with the military and all,’ said Jack. ‘They
may have been correct, I’m not questioning that. But, yes, there was
guilt. A lot of it.’
I was very glad to hear that. Not glad that people felt guilty exactly,
but it would have been deeply disturbing if no one had even cared
about it.
One of the lodges had been the home of Robert Oppenheimer, who
led the Manhattan Project and is widely regarded as the architect of
the bomb. He apparently served the best dirty martinis in town, but he
never came to terms with being the person who unleashed the horrific
power of the atom bomb. Immediately after the test, he admitted that
he had ‘become the destroyer of worlds’.
Nevertheless, Jack said there ‘were a lot of fun sides to the pre-
explosion bit. Working here was fun, a great deal of pleasure in finding
things out. It was exciting looking for something very new. That
question of how might it work and could we build one? And then:
“Wow, we did it!” That kind of thing. But it wasn’t anybody’s idea to
blow up people with it. They wanted to end the war, no question about
that. Certainly a demonstration would have been possible, inviting
everybody in, but that suggestion didn’t work. Nobody accepted that
outside of the people who were concerned.’
Personally, I wish the ones who drew up the petition had won.
America has been left in a very weak position because it has used an
atomic weapon in anger. ‘How could America say to Iran, “You mustn’t
do it” when they’ve done it twice?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely right,’ said Jack. ‘And it’s worse than that. We will not
sign a non-first-use treaty with anybody.’
That made me shiver.
Frank and Jack clearly had misgivings about where the world had
been led by the Manhattan Project. They’d both also been involved in
the development of the hydrogen bomb. Frank was sent to New York
State, where they assembled the outside steel case of the new, much
bigger bomb, but it was so large that it wouldn’t fit under some of
America’s railway bridges, so it was sent by ship to the Pacific. Frank
wasn’t present at the detonation, but Jack took a picture of it.
‘I was in a health physics group that kept people from hurting
themselves with all that radiation around,’ said Jack. ‘I happened to be
there at Operation Bravo. It destroyed an island completely. It’s gone.’
Eventually, Frank joined an outfit that cleaned up thirty-two FUAES –
Formerly Utilized Atomic Energy Sites. ‘The big first hydrogen bomb
left a great big hole in the ocean,’ he said. ‘Water filled it up right quick,
but the hole was still there. All the debris from years of testing on
Enewetak Atoll was dumped down that hole and covered over with
concrete. I worked on that job for years. I was the garbage man.’
 Both Frank and Jack were intensely interested in the outcome of the
latest Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that were going on at the time. ‘I
think there are some level-headed people that realise that we’ve got a
gadget we cannot use,’ said Jack. ‘That’s what we need to realise.’
Even though I didn’t know much about the subject, it seemed kind of
incongruous to have weapons that would wipe us all out if they were
ever used.
‘You use it, you’re dead,’ said Jack. ‘That’s why there’s just no point
in it.’
It was fascinating to meet these two men in Los Alamos, and they
were an absolute delight. I had expected them to be totally atomic, all
for the atom bomb, so I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that
they weren’t. I had one last question: ‘When you were living here in the
war, was there any sneaking out going on?’
‘It was easy enough to do,’ said Jack. ‘Our travel outside was
monitored and restricted to visits to Santa Fe. However, I had a
girlfriend in Phoenix, who I managed to meet at least once. They knew
about it down there because the bomb went off and she wrote me a
letter and said, “Aha, a little bigger than you thought, eh?” The censors
read that and I didn’t have an answer.’
*

The next day I rode to Albuquerque, a short hop down the pre-1937
Route 66 route from Sante Fe. Again, a lot of the buildings are low-rise
adobe structures, but Albuquerque lacks Santa Fe’s charm. At first I
thought it was a nothing kind of town, just a one-street joint with some
dodgy stores, but then I visited the Rattlesnake Museum. A lot of good
things were happening in the square outside the museum, and the
place seemed to be buzzing, with live music and busy restaurants.
The museum itself is owned and run by Bob Myers, a self-confessed
rattler fanatic. I’m not that fond of snakes myself, so I quite like the idea
of one that warns you it’s there. That rattling noise, which sounds like a
high-pitched footballer’s rattle, is a very succinct way of saying, ‘I’m
scared! Don’t come any nearer. Get lost.’ And, of course, it’s never a
good idea to go near scared animals. The old prospectors who
roamed the Wild West and played guitar around camp fires at night
used to keep rattlesnake tails inside their guitars. If a thief lifted the
guitar, he’d hear the tikka-tikka-tikka of the tail, think there was a
snake inside, and drop it.
Stacked to the rafters with tanks containing rattlesnakes, the
museum is fascinating. Bob had a stick with which he prodded some
of the snakes to make them rattle properly. There’s no other noise
quite like it, and anyone would recognise it instantly. If you hear it, you
should stop dead in your tracks, then slowly back up the way you came
and get the hell out of there. As Bob told me, rattlesnakes are not
aggressive and they’re much more scared of us than vice versa, but if
they’re cornered and unable to escape to safety, they will invariably
retaliate.
Many of the snakes were beautifully camouflaged and almost
impossible to spot against the rocks and sand. I was very impressed.
The canebrake rattlesnake reminded me of Tom Waits, the only
person I’ve ever known to talk about them. Then there was the mottled
rock rattlesnake, the black tailed rattler, a southwestern speckled
rattlesnake and a panamint rattler, which was the most difficult to spot
of all. Most of them gave me the willies.
Once, in an earlier TV show, a python was placed around my neck.
She was very nice, and kept whispering in my ear. I told the keeper
that I thought his snake must fancy me, and he said, ‘It’s a boy.’ It didn’t
seem quite the same once I knew it was a gay snake. And in the movie
o f Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events I had a snake
wrapped round my wrist as I played a musical instrument. At one point
in the film, I said goodbye to the snake and it kissed me. It was a
magical moment, but I wasn’t inclined to repeat it with any of those
rattlers, just in case one of them tried to bite my face off.
Approaching the New Mexico–Arizona state line, I crossed the
continental divide, the line that splits where America’s rivers flow –
either to the Pacific or to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Then I
spent a night at the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, where stars from
Hollywood’s golden age like John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy stayed while making cowboy movies in the nearby
mountains.
Moving on the next morning, a sign caught my eye. ‘Indian Ruins’, it
said. Hmm, I thought, that might be interesting. But, as so often on
Route 66, the sign promised much more than the place delivered.
Pulling in, I discovered the ruins had long since gone. Flooded or
possibly blown away, only a few markings remained in the dirt. There
was a trinket shop, but it had nothing different from all of the other
Indian gift shops along this stretch of the road. So I got back on the
trike and resumed the relentless journey west, hoping to reach
Holbrook, Arizona, before too long.
Winona – which, like Gallup, is name-checked in the song – lay just
beyond Holbrook and everything seemed to be going well. Then, all of
a sudden, we ran out of Route 66. In itself, this was nothing new: Route
66 had stopped or disappeared plenty of times before. One moment
there would be tarmac; then there would be gravel and scree, or a
dead end. The crew and I would consult our maps, fire up the satnav,
have a wee discussion, then go in search of Route 66. Usually this
entailed doing a U-turn, retracing our steps for a few miles and then
taking a different road. It happened a lot.
But this time it was different.
Carefully edging the bike around – avoiding the side of the road,
which disappeared into nothingness – the revs suddenly shot up and
the bike went crazy. My hand was stuck. The throttle wouldn’t respond. I
tried to calm the engine, but everything was moving too fast. Even now,
I don’t know exactly what happened.
Fighting the jammed throttle, I spun out of control. The bike wheeled
around, somersaulted, then bounced off me. The big rear wheels went
right over the top of me and something slammed into my ribs. My knee
thumped hard into the road – a crunch of bone and flesh on tarmac.
Then I was lying on my back, staring at the sky. As I lay there, I
wondered just how much damage I’d done to myself.
Desperate to stand up and just get on with it – because, of course,
I’m a man of steel, a real hero – I was immediately told not to move, to
stay absolutely still. Mike, the director, insisted that I must continue to
lie down. He wouldn’t even loosen my bloody helmet, the bastard.
While I waited for an ambulance to arrive, the crew looked after me
brilliantly. Then the paramedics arrived. If there’s one thing at which
Americans excel, it’s being the good guys in a time of crisis. Three of
the four ambulance crew were motorcyclists themselves, and they
knew exactly what to do – and not just in terms of medical attention.
They instinctively knew that they could do whatever they wanted with
my T-shirt – cut it to ribbons, for all I cared – but they had to tread very
carefully with my jacket. Working with painstaking precision, they
sliced the jacket along the seams, cutting up the sides and around the
back, and removed it in one big flappy – but easily repaired – piece.
Slipping some metal plates underneath me, they eventually lifted me
on to a weird folding stretcher, then carried me off to a helicopter for
one of the worst flights of my life. Clear-air turbulence and chest straps
were not a pleasant combination for sore, badly bruised ribs. I was
absolutely stiff and couldn’t move, immobilised in case my neck had
been broken in the crash. But every judder and jolt of the helicopter,
every sudden drop because of the turbulence, shot like a thunderbolt
through my body. With the back of my head pressed against that
bloody stretcher, I gritted my teeth throughout the hour-long flight to
Flagstaff.
Once inside the hospital, the doctors examined me thoroughly. After
several X-rays and some tests, the verdict was that I had one broken
rib and lacerations to my knee. It could have been much worse. The
pain was hellish, but I was more concerned about my jacket. Someone
in the crew offered to take it to a seamstress, who pronounced that the
damage wasn’t terminal. My jacket could be saved. Twenty-four hours
later, I had it back. Both my jacket and my leather waistcoat had been
magnificently reassembled. I was left marvelling at the thoughtfulness
and care of the ambulance crew. That’s one thing I love about America
– they think about little things like that.
Unfortunately, getting my body back into shape wasn’t as easy as
repairing my clothes. A broken rib might sound like nothing, but there’s
nothing anyone can do to help the healing process. It can’t be
bandaged and there are no fancy creams to apply. So I just had to rest
and leave the bloody thing as it was.
Back at the hotel, easing myself into bed, I coughed. Christ! I thought
I’d been hit by a bolt of lightning. And when I sneezed, it felt like
someone had dropped a Volkswagen on my chest. The pain was
excruciating. I couldn’t laugh, either. And getting in and out of bed was
a nightmare. Just hellish pain.
I was prescribed some serious painkillers, but they were so strong
that I was a bit scared of them and soon decided they probably weren’t
the best idea. I was feeling too good on them. Opiates can creep up
on you like that. Opting to give the serious stuff a wide berth, I settled
on some simple anti-inflammatories and had a good rest. Meanwhile,
the crew and everybody else who helped me were very kind, even
though I was turning into a grumpy whinge-bag. Eventually, I had to sit
down and have a word with myself about my behaviour. This was real.
It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t an act. People really were that nice, kind
and pleasant. They accepted that I’d been through the mill. I’d really
been kicked on Route 66.
Flagstaff, Arizona, Don’t Forget
Winona
After four days’ recuperation, I had to face the fact that I’d have to get
back on the bike the next day. My rib was still tender, my knee was still
bandaged and covered in weeping scabs, but I needed to continue the
journey. To be honest, I didn’t give it too much thought. Like getting
back on a horse, it just had to be done. Hanging around until everything
had healed was not part of the deal.
The bike itself held no fear for me, but I was a wee bit apprehensive
about going over bumps – simply moving around on my bed still sent
sharp shocks of pain through my rib. I told myself I’d be okay. After all,
the bike was a relatively comfortable vehicle with a relaxed riding
position, so I ought to be fine. My main problem was that I’d now
reached the part of the journey where every destination was a very long
way from the previous stop. This was the big country with big distances
and big, big drives.
Thanks to my emergency helicopter trip to the hospital in Flagstaff, I’d
ended up further down Route 66 than I’d planned to be, so I double-
backed to Payson, Arizona, where it was rodeo time. I’d never seen a
rodeo in the flesh before, but I’d watched it on television and quite liked
it. It was like skate-boarding or BMX biking; I hadn’t realised it was a
proper sport until I’d seen it on TV, but then I’d learned about it and
become interested. And I’d worn cowboy boots for many years, so that
had to count for something.
I was most fascinated by the clowns. For ages, I’d thought they were
kind of useless, some of the worst clowns I’d ever seen. Then I
discovered they aren’t there to make the crowd laugh. Their real
function is to protect the guy riding the horse or the bull by acting as a
human decoy. I really wanted to meet one, so I turned up with high
expectations in Payson, which claimed to hold the world’s oldest
continuous rodeo. That meant wall-to-wall ridin’, ropin’ and dancin’ fun,
and a chance for me to meet some real-life cowboys and cowgirls.
First held in August 1884, when some ranchers and cowboys got
together to test their roping and riding skills and the speed of their
horses, Payson’s rodeo, like all the others, is based on traditional
cattle-herding practices. It involves a number of sports, including racing
horses around barrels, lassoing, roping and tying down various
animals, but the highlight is bareback riding of horses (called broncos)
and bulls. And that’s when the clowns are an essential part of the
action. They live their lives in terrible danger. They’re not just dafties
doing tricks; they distract the bull from a guy that it wants to kill. And the
only way they can defend themselves is by jumping into a barrel in the
arena. They wear shirts and jeans that are stitched together, teamed
with stripy stockings and boots, and look absolutely ridiculous. But I
suppose that’s the idea – to catch the eye of the bull.
I was introduced to Rob Smeets, who told me that he and his mates
didn’t call themselves clowns. The guys clutching on to the backs of the
bulls called themselves bull riders, so the clowns called themselves bull
fighters.
‘You know, I used to fight bulls,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I used to fight bulls for twenty years. Three broken necks later,
I had to quit. I then became a rodeo clown bull fighter. These days I just
get the bulls away from the riders.’
‘I broke my rib last week,’ I said. ‘Now, when I think of all the people
with broken ribs, there must be a high percentage among you guys.’
‘You bet. Especially pre-1989, when we lost Lane Frost, one of our
world champion bull riders, at Cheyenne.’
Frost, a professional bull rider, died in the arena as a result of
injuries sustained on a bull called Takin’ Care of Business. Since then,
a lot of rodeo participants had worn Teflon vests.
‘The vest doesn’t make you Superman,’ said Rob, ‘but it does
absorb a lot of the hit. So the safety factor has gotten better in the last
twenty-plus years.’
‘And these are Braymer bulls?’
‘These are all Braymer or Braymer cross. Our sport in the last
twenty-plus years has really gotten into genetics, just like for years
they’ve bred good dogs. They all of a sudden said, “Boy, I’ve got a
daughter out of this great bucking bull, let’s cross it with this one,” and
now we’ve got some super high-bred bucking bulls.’
Next, Rob explained what happens during a competition: ‘When they
give a marking at a rodeo, the judges mark out of twenty-five points on
how well the rider performs, and it’s also out of twenty-five points on
how well the animal performs.’ So, between them, two judges will
award up to a hundred points for each ride – with half the points being
earned by the bull, not the rider.
‘How long do you have to stay on?’ I asked.
‘Eight seconds, one hand. And during that eight seconds, you can’t
reach and slap the animal. That one arm has got to stay up as a free
arm.’
Unlike in the horse-riding events, bull riders are not required to
shuffle their feet or spur the animal. They just have to maintain control.
What amazed me was that the bulls, some of which weighed more
than a ton, could arch, flex and twist like cats when they had a cowboy
on their back. As I talked to Rob, though, they seemed quite docile.
‘How do you get them from this quiet state to that wild state?’ I asked.
‘It’s just there. It’s like pro-soccer players lying around in the locker
room and then they go out there and can run and do the things that they
do. The bulls are professional athletes.’
‘They know when it’s show time.’
‘Exactly. When that music starts rocking’n’rolling and the noise starts
going, everybody’s adrenaline starts pounding, they know.’
‘What makes a guy want to be a bull rider?’
‘The cowboy lifestyle, the mystique, being your own boss.’
‘It’s rock’n’roll, isn’t it?’
‘It’s man against beast. Can I ride him or am I going to get thrown
off? And being able to say that I’m entered in Payson, Arizona, tonight,
I’m in Reading, California, tomorrow and I’m in Hayward, California,
after that. It’s the road life.’
‘You say you fight bulls. What does that mean?’
‘When those cowboys hit the ground, I step in and get that bull’s
attention and make him come to me.’
‘You do the most impressive job.’
 ‘They have what we call a freestyle contest, a lot like your Mexican
matadors. They turn out a bull without a rider and they judge how well
we manoeuvre around the bull.’
‘Just using the barrel?’
‘Just my hands. No weapons, no cape.’
‘No barrel for protection?’
‘Mainly they judge me on how well I run around him and the tricks that
I perform. If I run up the fence, I lose points. If he runs me over, I lose
points. I won the World Championship five times.’
‘Woah.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I thought your entire job was to protect the bull rider.’
‘It is. But back in the day, for twenty years, Wrangler Jeans put on the
Freestyle Bull Fighting Contest and they turned a bull out for seventy
seconds. You were judged on how well you could manoeuvre around
him, if you could jump over him, the tricks that you could do.’
I thought it was extraordinary. I’d never seen anything like that. Then
Rob told me something that surprised me even more.
‘There’s a reason in Mexico they kill those bulls the first time they
fight them. They’re not a dumb animal; they get very smart. After a
while, if he fights you, he’s seen all the tricks and it’s like climbing in
the ring with Muhammad Ali. They get real smart.’
Rob showed me a couple of his moves. The main challenge, he
said, was that ‘four legs are going to outrun two legs all day long’.
Completely outclassed by the bull for strength, power and speed, the
key to surviving was to stay close to the bull’s shoulder, so that he had
to turn in a tight circle in order to attack. ‘The closer and tighter you can
keep to him, the better. Hopefully, his head is right in your hip pocket
and you’re able to just keep circling tight and making good tight
rounds. The further he pushes you out, the more he isn’t bent down,
then the more room he has to come and gather you. That’s when they
knock you as high as a telephone pole.’
Speaking to Rob was a joy, but I didn’t enjoy the rodeo half as much.
It went on far too long and was too commercial, with a constant string
of interruptions by the announcers plugging ‘our good friends who’ll
supply you with all your plumbing needs’ and suchlike. ‘I don’t have any
plumbing needs,’ I wanted to yell. ‘Just get on with it. I want to see
somebody being flung off a bull.’
The comedy was crap, too. Seriously crap. And I know this might
sound ridiculous, but I’d never previously equated rodeos with cruelty
to animals. I was horrified by the shabby treatment of the animals and
especially by the crowd’s lackadaisical disinterest in their welfare. The
bulls and horses were heaved and pulled and thrown to the ground,
tied up and kicked and harassed. Nobody else seemed to mind, but I
didn’t like it at all.
Worst of all were the mutton busters. These are children who are too
small to ride bulls. So, instead, they ride sheep. They wear crash
helmets, jump on the backs of the sheep, then hang on for grim death.
A lot of them were crying and limping once they’d finished their rides. It
reminded me of fox hunters blooding the children after a kill. In the
rodeo culture, maybe it all makes perfect sense. But, to me, it was
grotesque – with the kids as well as the sheep being mistreated by the
adults who arranged the whole thing. Everyone at the rodeo had been
really kind to me, so I felt uneasy about criticising their way of life, but
my honest opinion was that a lot of it was cruel and unnecessary.
The rodeo was an overly long, cold, unpleasant experience. By
halfway through, I knew I would never attend another one in my life. But
towards the end, as if I needed any more convincing that I shouldn’t be
there, they enacted the most embarrassing patriotic gesture. Some old
soldiers and sailors marched shambolically into the arena, carrying
flags that signified the army, the navy, the air force, the coast guard,
the marines and soldiers who were missing in action. The whole thing
was a shabby, redneck affair. Very low rent. I felt embarrassed and
started to get the distinct impression that I wasn’t among friends.
These people were the exact opposite of me politically. Then it got
even colder, so I headed back to the hotel.
With the centres of population and civilisation now much further apart, I
was having to get used to travelling longer distances each day. But
after leaving Payson, I soon arrived at something I suspected would
divide households across Britain. I suspected that every man would
say, ‘Oh, interesting,’ while every woman would lose the will to live and
say, ‘So what? It’s just a hole in the ground.’
I have met thousands of men – possibly millions – and I’m sure that
every single one of them has, at some point in his life, taken a stick,
sat on the ground and dug a hole between his legs for no reason
whatsoever. Meanwhile, I’ve never met a single woman who has done
the same thing. So, my theory is that a fascination with holes is what
truly separates men from women. And now I was visiting a really
interesting – some might say spectacular – hole.
It’s 570 feet deep and 4,000 feet across (I also know that every man
will be desperate to have these details), and those people who are
good with calculators say it could hold twenty football stadiums and
seat two million people if it were an arena. Quite why anyone would
want to work out such meaningless statistics is a mystery to me, but at
least they give an indication that this is a really vast hole in the ground.
What makes it even more interesting, though, is that it was made by
something really extraordinary – namely, a meteorite.
About fifty thousand years ago, a meteorite with a diameter of about
160 feet, made of nickel and iron, came flying out of the sky and belted
into the Arizona desert – although in those days it was neither Arizona
nor a desert, but probably open grassland dotted with woods and
inhabited by woolly mammoths. Flying at a speed of maybe 45,000
m.p.h., the 300,000-ton rock hit the ground with as much force as ten
million tons of TNT. That’s about the same as 650 Hiroshimas. Bosh!
Of course, it flattened everything for many miles around. The
surrounding landscape is still as flat as a pancake until you come to a
range of mountains in the far distance, so the shockwave must have
travelled a very long way before something stopped it.
Midway between Winona and Winslow, it’s at a place appropriately
called Meteor Crater and the way in which it was formed plays a large
part in making this such a fantastically atmospheric place. What’s so
great about it is that you can’t see into it until the very last moment. You
approach up the side and then – boof – there it is, revealed in front of
you. Standing on the edge of the crater is like being in some kind of
weird experiment. It has a magnificence and a grandeur. It’s very
windswept, too, which apparently has something to do with the crater’s
shape, the altitude and the flat environment all around it.
 Before the moon landing in 1969, American astronauts trained in the
crater because it was thought to resemble the lunar surface. On one of
these practice sessions, one of the astronauts tore his suit as he was
clambering around near the rim. If he’d done that on the moon, he
would have been a dead man. So they strengthened the material and,
of course, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon took place without
incident.
Although I couldn’t find much to say about the crater for the TV show,
it was certainly one of my highlights of Route 66. It’s well worth paying
a visit … but only if you’re a bloke. If you’re a woman, there’s a nice
wee shop in the visitors’ centre.
My rib was still agony, and the bandages on my leg needed changing
twice a day, but I had to push on if I wanted to see everything before
the end of Route 66 at Santa Monica. My God, sometimes it’s hard
being a star.
That afternoon I arrived back in Flagstaff, but this time on the trike
rather than strapped to a stretcher in a helicopter. It’s a lovely city that
has the feel of a frontier town combined with a ski resort, mainly
because that’s pretty much what it is. At nearly seven thousand feet
above sea level, it’s a popular area for winter sports – the Arizona
Snowbowl is just fifteen miles north of the city and the 12,633-foot
Humphrey’s Peak is even closer.
That evening, I rode up to the top of a mountain on the edge of
Flagstaff. From the top, the city looked like a wee village and it was
hard to believe it has a population of more than 65,000 people. In
particular, it seemed very dimly lit. But there’s a reason for that.
Since 1894, when Percival Lowell, an astronomer from
Massachusetts, chose Flagstaff as the location for his observatory
because of its high elevation, the city has been a world centre for
stargazing. In the 1930s they discovered Pluto at the Lowell
Observatory, which really put the place on the celestial map. People
came from all over the world, and they still do to this day. When I was
visiting there was a flood of anoraks in the city. There are now several
other observatories, in addition to the Lowell, including a military one
and a university one. To aid the astronomers, the local authorities
passed laws to minimise light pollution and allow the boffins a really
clear view of the night sky. Special low-intensity sodium street lights
helped to make Flagstaff the world’s first ‘dark sky’ city. And it’s one of
the few places in America where you’re not assaulted by neon signs
on every block. I think this is all a rather good thing. For an amateur
stargazer like me, it was almost as good as being in the far north of
Scotland – where there’s no artificial light at all.
I think there’s something fundamental to our existence about looking
at the stars, wondering what they are and what it all means. Back in the
Dark Ages, they thought the black part of the sky was solid and the
stars were wee holes that let through rain and the light of heaven. I’ve
spent a lot of time looking heavenwards and wondering what it’s all
about, but I’ve never understood how the constellations got their
names. Take the Great Bear – if you take away the drawing of the
bear, it’s just a cluster of stars that look nothing like a bear. So, as a
schoolboy, I named them myself and compiled my own drawings of the
night sky, creating constellations that suited my designs. I had the
Great Bicycle and Uncle Harry’s Ear. Have a go yourself. I can
guarantee it always works.
Then, when I’d finished devising my map of the stars, I moved on to
the planets, which led to my own grand unified theory of the universe –
the Cup of Tea Theory.
If you look at the sun and the planets – like Mars, Venus and Jupiter
– they resemble a basic atomic structure – with a nucleus and
electrons spinning around it. In a way, they’re almost exactly the same
thing. So, I thought we’d made a big mistake over the years thinking
we were the big shots in the universe. We aren’t huge. In fact, we’re
teeny weeny – the smallest things imaginable – but we’re parts of
something huge, like atoms are parts of something relatively huge, like
this page, or a T-shirt, or a little finger. We’re all made of atoms, and
the whole cosmos is like an atomic structure, so we’re all part of
something enormous. Our planet is like a tiny bit of gravel flying around
in this gigantic thing called space that’s far too big for us even to see,
let alone understand, in the same way that a trout has no idea that we
exist. So what is out there that we don’t know about? What is so huge
that we are unable to realise we are only a wee part of it? In the end, I
came to the conclusion that we are swimming around in an
unimaginably enormous cup of tea. That’s why I loved being in
Flagstaff, Arizona – it let me gaze into the heavens and think about my
Cup of Tea Theory.
Standing on that hillside above the town on that very dark night, I
pronounced my theory to the camera. I hope to have legions of
devoted followers chanting my name before too long, with cups of tea
tattooed on their chests, and wearing wee gold cups of tea around
their necks, in much the same way as Christians wear crucifixes. For
many years, my wife has been pushing me to publicise my Cup of Tea
Theory. So I took great pleasure in writing to her to tell her that I had
finally brought it into the public domain and that she should expect our
first disciples to start turning up imminently.
Leaving Flagstaff the next morning, I was in the best of spirits. The
mood up on the hillside had been just right, and all the crew thought
we’d done a great job. And we felt proud of Flagstaff. So few places
on earth would be prepared to reduce their lighting to suit the wishes of
a group of astronomers. The only stain on our stay in the town had
come when I’d disappeared into the bushes for a pee. It was only when
I finished that I realised I’d peed right in front of a couple who were
using it as a lovers’ lane. Oops.
We had a long day ahead of us, so Mike rode the trike for a couple
of hours while I hitched a lift in the crew’s truck. I took over once we
reached an easy stretch, and the painkillers dulled the twinges I was
still feeling in my leg and rib. After stopping at a dodgy gas station for
an equally dodgy burrito, we arrived at Monument Valley, 175 miles
northeast of Flagstaff. At that point I forgot all about my injuries.
Monument Valley took my breath away. Eerie and haunting, it’s
hugely significant for anyone who grew up watching Westerns and
John Wayne – who called this remote region the place ‘where God put
the West’. Its majestic landscape of vast, vivid-red sandstone buttes
that rise to heights of up to a thousand feet is one of the most
extraordinary, magnificent things I’ve ever seen.
Most of us have seen at least one of the seven Westerns that John
Ford shot in Monument Valley, so the shadow they cast on our culture
is long and pervasive. Movies like Stagecoach, Fort Apache and The
Searchers created the image of the heroic, romantic West. I spent my
childhood Saturday mornings at the local flicks watching those films,
then running down the street in a cowboy suit with a gun holstered on
my hip, so it was an absolute joy to see the place for myself. I just
stood there, a tiny dot in that massive vista, trying to soak it all in and
really appreciate it.
The place is almost impossible to describe in words. Awestruck by
the red, pink and orange rocks, I immediately took pictures on my
phone and emailed them to the whole family. Within minutes, the
replies came flooding in, all of them saying they wanted to swap lives
with me. But pictures cannot do it justice. You have to stand within it to
understand it and feel its full force. Suddenly, in my head, I could hear
some typical Western movie music – the sort that surges to a
crescendo as a line of Indians appears in silhouette on the skyline –
which only added to the drama of the place. Because of its prominent
place in our cultural history and its uniqueness on our planet, I think
Monument Valley is something we all own. We had better look after it
well.
Shortly after arriving in the valley, I met Larry, an extremely friendly
Navajo man who would guide us through the entire area the next day.
Monument Valley is very sacred to the Navajo, so no one is allowed to
go barging through it in their four-wheel drive with the radio blaring.
There’s a certain protocol, and Larry was going to lead us through it.
He also offered to introduce me to a medicine man, which sounded
like a wonderful idea. I hoped he’d be able to sort out my sore leg and
aching rib.
The medicine man was dressed in a plaid shirt and grey slacks
when I met him, which didn’t really fit the image I had in my head. But at
least his thick, coiled turquoise necklace and silver bracelets looked
authentic. He told me I looked like Kit Carson, the American
frontiersman and comic-book hero. It must have been the beard and
the long hair, because I wasn’t wearing a fringed jacket and I’ve never
hunted buffalo in my life. I told him about my ribs and my knee, then
showed him on a map exactly where the accident had happened. He
listened intently before taking me into a building called a hogan. From
the outside, it looked like a large garden shed crossed with a mud hut;
but once inside I could see it was actually a really sophisticated
wooden building. Made from long juniper branches arranged like a
wigwam, then covered with mud, it was apparently strong enough to
withstand a tornado.
Sitting beside me along the wall of the hogan were the medicine
man and his assistant – a kind of roadie who looked after him on his
travels. They lit a little fire by removing some coals from a stove and
adding some wood. Then the medicine man opened some leather and
hide wallets to reveal ‘male’ and ‘female’ arrowheads (the females had
a kind of waist; the males were a traditional diamond shape), sacred
stones he’d collected over the years and crystals. Laying the
arrowheads, stones and crystals on a mat, he next unpacked
fragments of beech ash and threw them on the fire to make smoke.
Then he prayed, blew a small whistle, and held a cup of water and
some feathers in his hands. There was a lot of praying, meditating and
bowing to the four points of the compass, most of which we were not
allowed to film. At times, the praying intensified, becoming repetitive,
like a mantra, and I found myself quite caught up in it. I’d had the same
feeling listening to Tibetan and Hindu chants, and even Catholic
recitations of the Psalms.
Next the medicine man consulted the map to see where I had come
off my bike. He had to cool the earth where I’d landed. Muttering
another prayer and fluttering the feathers, he brought peace to the
earth, resettling it back to how it had been before it experienced such
violence from me and the bike at the time of the crash. Having
realigned the planet, he turned his attention to me. It was time for a
cosmic x-ray. While I clenched a wee crystal, about the size of a cigar,
in my hand, the medicine man rubbed my rib with a feather and gazed
into a much larger, clear crystal – about the size of a clenched fist.
‘There’s a fracture in it and it’s lightning shaped,’ he said. ‘It’s gone
along the rib in a lightning shape.’
Then he picked up some hot coals from the fire with a pair of
pincers, blew on them and held them near my rib, chanting all the while
and waving his feather.
I loved all that stuff. It wasn’t a question of whether I believed it or
gave myself over to it. As far as I was concerned, it was all about being
in the company of people who did believe it. That was the whole
cheese for me, and I felt very privileged to be part of it. When I spoke
to Larry afterwards, he was very open minded about it and told me he
used both Navajo and Western medicine when he was sick. I thought
that was a very healthy attitude.
Midway through the healing ceremony, a drummer arrived. He was a
fireman, and had been delayed by a plane crash. Fortunately no one
had died, he told us, although the pilot had been in a bit of a state
afterwards. No kidding, I thought. Pulling out the most extraordinary
drum I’ve ever seen, the fireman got to work, banging out a beat. His
drum was actually a wee dumpy iron cooking pot with three wee legs
and a skin stretched over the top. Some beads and rattles were
arranged on the skin, and the pot was about a third full of water. When
the drummer hit it, the beads and rattles moved and the water made
the sound resonate. It was extraordinary. He said the sound would
carry for several miles.
In the midst of all the chanting, singing and drumming, the medicine
man’s mobile phone rang … and he answered it. I thought that was
brilliant – the clash (or possibly the merging) of the modern world of the
United States and the spiritual world of the Navajo. I’d already seen an
example of it when I’d handed over some money to pay for the
ceremony. I was fine with that – you have to pay the doctor – and his
reaction to the money had been fascinating. He’d taken the notes,
straightened them out, made sure all of the heads of Thomas Jefferson
on the stack of twenty-dollar bills were pointing in the same direction,
then aligned all of his arrowheads and other bits and pieces in the
same way.
Shortly after the phone call, the ceremony came to an end. It had all
been done with a sincerity that I think is missing in Western religions,
and I’m really glad I took part in it. But my rib felt no different the next
day. Then again – who knows – maybe it would have felt worse if the
medicine man hadn’t intervened? I didn’t really care either way,
because he was great company. The last time I saw him, he was
sitting on my trike, laughing and enjoying having his picture taken.
Larry took us back into Monument Valley just before dawn the
following morning, but this time into the sacred part that the Navajo
owned and controlled. They are deeply attached to the environment,
and don’t allow anyone to climb the buttes and mesas here. Because
of their care, it’s in wonderful shape – a truly moving and magnificent
place.
At one point, a big beetle came over to me. I was just about to
nudge it when Larry said it was a stink beetle that squirted a kind of
urine if it was irritated. Apparently it’s very smelly stuff, but it’s used by
the Navajo to treat mouth diseases in babies. Larry also told me about
the huge tarantulas that come to Monument Valley from the plains each
year to mate. I would have loved to see that.
His next story was about the Navajo code talkers, a band of young
men recruited by the US Marine Corps in the Second World War to
transmit secret messages. At a time when America’s best
cryptographers were searching for ways to keep ahead of the
Japanese code breakers, these modest Navajo farmers and
herdsmen constructed the most successful code in military history.
Even now, it hasn’t been broken. With a complex grammar and no
written form, Navajo is the most complicated of all Native American
languages, and it is spoken only on the Navajo territories in New
Mexico and Arizona. In 1941, when America entered the war, fewer
than thirty non-Navajos were thought to be able to understand the
intricate syntax, tonal qualities and dialects of the language. So it was
the perfect foundation for a code.
However, there were few Navajo equivalents for many modern
military terms, so the code talkers had to be inventive. For instance,
the Navajo word for tortoise was used to mean tank, and the Navajo for
potato signified a grenade. Equipped with their mental dictionary of
terms, the code talkers joined the marines on the battlefield and were
able to encode, transmit and decode messages at lightning speed.
They could pass on a three-line communiqué in just twenty seconds,
while conventional coding methods took more than half an hour. Their
importance was highlighted when the commanding officer of the
marines’ signals division at the crucial Battle of Iwo Jima said that the
island would not have been taken without the Navajo’s efforts.
The code talkers were also used in Korea and Vietnam, but then
knowledge of the code started to die out and now many Americans are
unaware of the vital role the Navajo played in so much of their country’s
recent history. Partly this is because the US government kept the
Navajo’s work secret for many years, just in case their unique abilities
might be needed again. And partly it’s because the Navajo are very
modest, quiet, unassuming people.
Bumping around Monument Valley with Larry, I listened to more of
his stories – such as how John Ford came to film in the Navajo’s
sacred place. Larry said it was all due to a rancher called Harry
Goulding, who had been living in a tent in Monument Valley since the
1920s. In the late 1930s Goulding heard that Ford was making a big
new Western called Stagecoach. Convinced that Monument Valley
would be ideal for the film, he enlisted a photographer to take some
pictures. Then this uneducated man of the wilderness packed up his
bedroll, his coffee pot and some grub and made his way to California.
Arriving in Hollywood, he hoped to talk to Ford in person, to try to
convince him to come and film in Monument Valley. While his wife
waited, knitting in their car, Goulding approached the receptionist at
United Artists, where Ford was preparing to shoot his new film. Of
course, he was told he couldn’t see anybody without an appointment –
because that’s the way they work in Hollywood – so he just said, ‘Well,
I’ll make myself comfortable,’ and took out his bedroll. The staff at
United Artists had never met anyone quite like Goulding, and
eventually they realised they’d have to do something about this bloke
who seemed to be setting up camp in the lobby. So they called the
locations manager, who arrived with every intention of sending this
lunatic packing. But as soon as he saw the photographs, he was
convinced. Goulding was introduced to Ford, who thought the rancher
was a great guy, and the rest is history.
Larry took me to an outlook called John Ford Point, which features in
The Searchers – it’s where John Wayne, looking for a girl who has
been captured by Indians, rides out on to a spit of rock and sees the
Indian village beneath him. It was one of Ford’s favourite places, and I
could almost smell the Duke as I looked at it. While I was standing
there, soaking in the atmosphere, a red truck with a water tank on its
back bounced past, a tiny speck in the distance. Larry explained that
most of the Navajo people who lived in Monument Valley were elders
who preferred to live in the old, traditional way. They didn’t want water
piped in or electricity. I thought that was kind of appealing, but it meant
their water had to be delivered by truck. In a funny way, I wanted them
to live in the old way, too, because that meant the place would be kept
intact.
Driving around with Larry, time and again I saw vistas which I’d
ridden through in my imagination when I was a child. I’d come out of
the cinema and ride home on my imaginary horse, smacking my
backside as I harried up Highlands Street, which was transformed into
Monument Valley in my little fantasy world.
I love Monument Valley, and I felt very privileged to be standing
within it. But when we were filming, part of me wanted to tell the
viewers not to visit it themselves – just take my word for its beauty.
Selfish, I know, but I don’t want it spoiled. If anyone does come, I hope
they don’t come on big tourist buses with loads of other people. The
way to see it is to get up early and watch the sun rise, before all the
buses arrive. Of course, this is a very snobbish, elitist way of looking at
things, but for a wee while now I’ve been saying that if anyone wants to
do the world a real favour, they shouldn’t come to any of the places I
film for TV shows. They should just read about them or watch the
programmes, and leave it at that.
After our day exploring Monument Valley, Larry helped me build a
fire and prepare to sleep under the stars. He explained the problems
that exist in modern Navajo families whose children get involved in
drugs and alcohol. An outreach social worker, he organises Brat
Camp-style four-day treks for Navajo teens to help them understand
their sacred land, the sky and nature. An inspiring, knowledgeable and
passionate character, Larry is a very gentle man whose real passion is
to help the next generation. Listening to him in such a fascinating
place, I hoped he succeeded in educating the young Navajo in their
culture. He deals with problems that parents and social workers face
around the world, but it was still strange to hear him talking about
issues that are very familiar to anyone living in Govan. Crystal meth,
heroin and all that other poison are being peddled everywhere, and
Larry is trying to keep Navajo youngsters away from it by making them
aware of their culture. He knows it’s a big step back from hard drugs to
the indigenous culture, but I had to wish him the best. And I’m
optimistic about what he might achieve, because he’s a very inspiring
man.
That night, as the sky darkened and I strummed my banjo by the
camp fire, my thoughts turned to what lay ahead. For weeks now, my
daily existence had been determined by the need to keep moving
west. But now the end of the journey was starting to loom ahead. The
next day I was due to leave for Williams, Arizona. From there, I’d go to
the Grand Canyon. There were a few more destinations in Arizona to
visit after that, but soon I’d be in California. And then the Pacific Ocean
would be right in front of me and my great adventure would be over.
I started to wish there was more Route 66. Two and a half thousand
miles suddenly didn’t seem quite enough. Because one thing I had
learned on this trip was that Route 66 was cut up into bits and pieces –
some of it tragic, some of it inspiring, most of it fascinating and all of it
interesting. All along the Mother Road, I’d found people working very
hard to bring it back to life. Something as simple as painting a few
murals or making delicious pies could wind the clock back a bit. But
despite all of their efforts, Route 66 didn’t officially exist any more, so
anyone who went in search of it had to find the fragments and piece
them together to make their own Route 66. That was one of the things
that made it so special.
You’ll Wanna Own a Piece of Arizona

I had a great start to the week in Williams. A further two hundred miles
down the road towards California and the coast, this was the last place
on Route 66 to be bypassed. On 13 October 1984, the final stretch of
Interstate 40 opened, but Williams didn’t go down without a fight. It held
an official day of mourning when the freeway took over. The next day
newspapers in America reported the demise of Route 66; and a year
later the road was officially decommissioned.
A lovely wee rural community, Williams was named after Bill
Williams, a trapper and hunter. Although it was nice to name a town
after a trapper, I’d hoped it was named after Hank Williams – but then
I’m disappointed quite a lot. I’d come to Williams to catch a steam train
to the Grand Canyon. As you can imagine, I couldn’t wait to see the
world’s biggest hole in the ground, but I was equally excited about the
steam train because there’s nothing I like more than a wee choo-choo.
Bores of my age have never stopped going on about how lovely
steam trains used to be back in the day, and I’m no different. They
have played such an important part in my life that I have nothing but
fond memories of them. Everything that I remember as being great
about my childhood involves a steam train. Some of the loveliest
holidays I had as a kid were spent in Rothesay, and all of them started
with a steam train ride from Glasgow’s Central Station. I can
remember it as if it were yesterday – passing through the barrier from
the public area to the ticketed platform, the engine right there in front of
us, a lovely olive-green colour, hissing away. My sister, brother and I
would walk with our cases, our wee bags and all our things along the
platform until we came to the bit where the engineer, with his shiny cap
and a blue cotton suit, was hanging out of the window, saying hello to
the passengers. He had black marks on his hands and on his sweaty
face, and behind him the engine was warming up with a cacophony of
whissshes. As we passed, we would hear the fireman shovelling coal.
It was magical.
Taking our places in the carriage, we’d be beside ourselves with
excitement, waiting for the steam engine to start its countdown to our
holiday. Like an orchestra tuning up, there would be a steady increase
in random noises, culminating in a whistle, and then the engine would
start pumping – shooosh, shooosh, shooosh – as it struggled to push
the carriages out of the station. It was like a countdown from ten to one.
By the time we reached one, the shooosh, shooosh, shooosh had
become shusssh, shusssh, shusssh and the wheels had started to go
dickety-da dickety-dee, dickety-da dickety-dee on the rails. We could
soon see Glasgow disappearing underneath us with a shoossssh.
Then the River Clyde: shoossssh, shoossssh.
We were heading west, to the seaside, miles away. The train would
take us to Wemyss Bay, down on the coast in the Firth of Clyde .
Shoossssh. On the train, there was very little to do. No connecting
carriages, no tea trolley. You had to bring your own sandwiches. My
dad would urge us to be quiet and not fidget while he read the paper
and we’d look out of the window, getting cinders in our eyes from the
smoke of the engine. Every year it was the same: ‘Argh, there’s
something in my eye!’ But I couldn’t resist looking out, getting a face
full of smoke and steam while watching it flying across the fields of
corn like a ghost, disappearing as if it were being sucked in by the
crops. It was one of the loveliest things. The smoke had a funny
charcoal, sulphurous smell, but to me it was eau de Cologne. I thought
it was absolutely fabulous.
At Wemyss Bay, we disembarked on to paddle steamers. The first
one I was ever on was the Marchioness of Brid Albion , which I thought
was a kind of posh name. There was also a Queen Mary II, the
Caledonia, the St Columbus and the Waverley (which is still
operating – the last ocean-going paddle steamer in the world). Linked
by a quayside bridge to the train, there was always a magical engine-
room mixture of diesel and coal smoke and steam and fumes as we
boarded the boat. It was fantastic.
So when – in Williams, Arizona – Mike asked me if I liked steam
engines, I thought: Do birds sing in the morning?
From 1901, steam trains had carried passengers and supplies from
Williams to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, which had become a
tourist destination in the 1880s. Although hugely popular, by the 1960s
most of the traffic had switched to the roads and the last train, which
ran on 30 June 1968, carried only three people. That should have been
the end of the Grand Canyon Railroad, but the train refused to die.
Enthusiasts clubbed together and started to renovate the sixty-five
miles of track, the stations and the depots, and the old locomotives
and carriages. In 1989 the powerful pull of the steam engine returned
to the track, exactly eighty-eight years to the day since the first train
had run. Since then, they’ve carried more than two and a half million
people to the Grand Canyon.
Unlike the steam trains of my childhood, the big locomotive I met in
Williams was powered by vegetable oil – like a gigantic fish supper –
which was towed in a stainless-steel tanker behind it. Donated by all
the restaurants and fast-food joints in Williams, the smell of the oil was
something else. One moment there might be a whiff of fish, then it was
kind of meaty, then veggie. But it was always a million times better
than diesel.
Looking just like Casey Jones, the train’s engineer was a big man
with a striped hat, overalls and gloves sticking out of his back pocket.
His assistant, a thin man with glasses and a bowler hat, welcomed us
on to the boiler plate of the engine and we all clambered aboard – the
camera man, the sound man, Mike and me. Squashed beside the
assistant, I winced as we reversed out of the station. Something
seemed to be missing. Then I realised what it was: the shovelling. No
whist, whist as the coal was shovelled and no kerchang as the little
door to the furnace was clanked shut. Instead, there was just a wee
hole with a shining flame behind it. That’s progress, I suppose.
After chuff, chuff, chuffing out of the station, we linked up with a
diesel that was hooked on to the other end of the train. Maybe a steam
engine powered by vegetable oil couldn’t pull such a big train on its
own? I transferred to a very fancy carriage at the rear of the train, the
kind of thing I’d expect the Queen to roll around in – all plush blue
furniture, cinnamon rolls, cups of tea, and an open bar. Chuffing along,
it took nearly two hours to reach the Grand Canyon. All the way, I
couldn’t help thinking about Jesse James riding through that rolling
countryside. The James Gang were the first criminals ever to rob a
train, so I pictured them in their dust coats with their guns out, ready to
jump aboard. This was perfect terrain for an ambush – prime baddie
country.
I’d never visited the Grand Canyon before, so I used the journey to
try to get my head round some of the statistics. Two hundred and
seventy-seven miles long (I’d thought it was about five), eighteen miles
across at its widest point, more than a mile deep, and all created by
the Colorado River taking four million years to cut its way through
layers of rock, exposing two billion years of the earth’s geological
history. Unless, of course, you’re a religious nut, in which case all of
that erosion never happened and the fossils were placed in the ground
by God, and none of the geological history counted for anything – it all
just magically appeared one day about six thousand years ago.
We finally arrived at a little siding and I set off to walk up to the
canyon. One of the many great things about the Grand Canyon is that it
has a similar element of surprise to the one I’d experienced at Meteor
Crater: you can’t see it until the last few seconds before arriving at its
rim. My guide – a lovely woman wearing a kind of boy scout’s cap and
the olive-green uniform of a National Park ranger – walked with me up
about forty stairs, then steered me towards a little promontory. She
promised I’d get a good view when I reached the top. I walked along a
path and then got my first glimpse. I almost stopped dead in my tracks;
I certainly slowed my pace. Oh my God, I thought. It was magnificent.
Stunning. But then I realised I was only looking at the hills in the
distance. I’d been bowled over by the beauty and grandeur of them,
and I hadn’t even seen the main attraction yet. I walked further forward
and caught my first glimpse of the actual canyon. Of course, I’d known
there was drama lurking just around the corner, but I hadn’t
appreciated the sheer scale of that drama until the moment when I
stood at its edge. I felt the same as the first time I saw the Himalayas.
But, if anything, the Grand Canyon is even better.
It’s like a thousand temples of rock painted in a vast palette of
colours. Sandy, pale yellows merge with cool or warm pinks and
dozens of shades of red and orange. There are greens and blues, pale
greys, like ash, darker blue–greys and black. It’s truly awesome and
almost impossible to describe – its grandeur and magnificence are
just too grand and too magnificent. All I could think to say on camera
was that it was so much more than I had imagined and quite unlike
anything I’d ever seen in my life.
Standing back a wee bit because there was a sense of being blown
by a wind whooshing up and out of the canyon, I suddenly got the
frights. In the short time that I had been staring open-mouthed at it, the
canyon had already changed. Even relatively small movements of the
sun had quite profound effects, simply because it’s so vast. There are
canyons within canyons within canyons. And there are probably
canyons within those canyons, but I couldn’t see that far into its depths.
Like an inverted mountain range, vastly more was hidden than could
be seen.
With a kind of creepy silence to it, the canyon has a lovely eeriness
that overwhelms and hushes the voices of all the tourists. I’m reluctant
to say it has some of that old hippy ‘a certain kind of energy’ stuff, but it
does. Like the Arctic, it has a presence, a dominance, a weird kind of
silencing effect that’s impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t stood
at its edge. It has to be seen and heard to be believed, so when you
stand on the edge, it’s a matter of just shutting up and sucking in the
experience. As I’m sure you can tell, I loved it.
As I said earlier, I’ve recently started telling people not to visit the
places I film for television shows. I’ve become concerned that these
often remote, empty places will be spoiled if people rush to see them.
‘Go and see a good film of it,’ I say, ‘and leave the bloody thing alone.’
But I’m prepared to make an exception in the case of the Grand
Canyon. I would urge everyone to go and see it. But, as President
Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The
ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.’ God bless his
wee bum. What a wise guy.
*

Back in Williams, having returned from the canyon, I was getting ready
to move on to the next destination when I heard something that piqued
my interest. As one of the stops on the Chicago–Los Angeles railroad
line, Williams’s history had been shaped by its position on the great
east–west railway that transformed a transcontinental journey from six
months by covered wagon to six days by train. The railway companies
recruited thousands of people for this massive construction project.
Some were Civil War veterans, others were Irish immigrants, but most
famously the companies also imported ten thousand Chinese
labourers, fifteen hundred of whom were killed on the job.
Nitroglycerine had just been invented and it was incredibly unstable – it
could hardly be moved without blowing up. So the company foremen
assigned the task of blowing tunnels and cuttings through the bedrock
and mountains to the Chinese labourers, whom they reckoned were
used to handling gunpowder and fireworks. But, of course, they had no
experience with nitroglycerine. On some of the lines, one Chinese
labourer died for every mile of track laid. Not that this bothered the rail
companies or the government, who had a very dismissive attitude to
recent immigrants.
When the railway companies reached a town like Williams that was
at the end of a line, the Chinese labourers, the Irish immigrants, freed
slaves, low-lifes and the poorest of the poor often wanted to settle
there. However, they would only ever be offered the worst land, on the
other side of the railway from the locals. Hence the phrase ‘on the
wrong side of the tracks’. When I was a boy, the tramlines in Glasgow
divided the city in exactly the same way: they separated the poor from
the rich.
Of all the immigrants, the Chinese were often treated worst. There
was no good reason for this, as they were hard and loyal workers. It
was just racial prejudice and suspicion of people who were different.
But the Chinese workers came up with an ingenious way to duck out of
bad treatment. In the part of Williams that was very much on the wrong
side of the tracks was a brothel called the Red Garter (although I had a
funny feeling that it would have been on the right side of the tracks for
me). Next to it were a series of other fun palaces – mainly bars.
Whenever the boozed-up locals stumbled out into the street, looking
for trouble, they would usually target the Chinese workers who lived
near by. But the Chinese were too smart for them. They excavated a
network of tunnels underneath that part of Williams so they could slip
down trapdoors, scarper down their escape routes and reappear
somewhere else entirely.
Eventually, though, the constant attacks got too much for them and
they moved away. Thinking about the effort that must have gone into
digging all those tunnels, I was struck by how threatened they must
have felt. They had done the most incredible job of building the railway,
blasting paths through mountains and losing their friends, only to be
attacked and vilified when the job ended. It was a rotten, shameful
thing. To me, it seemed to be yet another example of the tendency
among immigrant communities to seek out and persecute anyone who
is socially beneath them and make their life a misery. I’ve seen this
around the world and I wish we could get rid of it. It must have been
terrifying to run like hell through those tunnels, chased by those
bastards, shooting left and right to lose them.
A large fire in the 1970s destroyed much of the tunnel network, but it
was still extraordinary to see the remnants. I was shown to one of the
entrances by a local bar manager called Jackie. Convinced that the
ghosts of two Chinese guys guarded the tunnels under her bar, she
had never ventured down there herself. As you know, I’m very sceptical
about that type of thing, but she was welcome to her beliefs, and she
was a great sport for letting me peer through the tunnels before
continuing my journey west.
 After another fifty miles of sun-baked Arizona desert, I arrived in
Seligman, which was immortalised as a Route 66 town in a fabulous
photograph taken in 1947 by Andreas Feininger that appeared on the
cover of Life magazine. As so often on Route 66, Seligman was later
bypassed by the interstate, but unlike many other places along the
Mother Road, the small town (population 456) was not prepared to
take its demise lying down.
The really sad fact about Route 66 is that so many towns have been
unable to put up a similar fight. For instance, the journey from Williams
to Seligman took me past at least ten derelict gas stations and
umpteen shutdown motels, with the wind blowing through their
vandalised remains. I was often told that Route 66 was dying, but in the
most derelict parts it was already dead. Many people obviously gave
up the struggle a long time ago.
And yet, amid the decline, the decay, the death and destruction, little
pockets along Route 66 are still thriving. This is something anyone
travelling the length of the road has to get used to. You can’t expect it
to be like the famous song – one long, glorious highway all the way to
California. It’s now in bits and pieces. One place will be doing just
great, with big statues in the streets, bustling businesses, everything
alive and healthy. Then, just ten miles down the road, there’ll be nothing
but derelict houses in a ghost town.
When I visited, Seligman was certainly one of the thriving, lively
places. There was a lot of tourist tat, but it was keeping the small town
alive. And that survival – not to mention much of the survival along the
whole length of the road – is largely due to one extraordinary man: the
owner of Seligman’s barber shop, Angel Delgadillo.
Born in 1927 in a house directly on Route 66, Angel has witnessed
the rise and fall of the road. When the interstate bypassed the town,
Seligman started to die. To make matters worse, the authorities even
removed the signpost that pointed to the town, so it became a secret
destination. Businesses closed, people left, buildings decayed. In
desperation, Angel and fifteen others called a town meeting. The result
was the founding of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona.
Elected president, Angel successfully appealed to the Arizona State
Legislature to reinstate the sign. He then went on to fight in a thousand
different ways to bring the town back to life. And lo and behold, his
campaign worked. Next he lobbied other states to follow Arizona’s
lead and form their own Route 66 associations. Now, all eight states
along the route have recognised the historical and social significance
of the Mother Road. Eight international associations have also been
formed.
Now in his eighties, Angel is Route 66’s guardian angel – a role he
was clearly still relishing when I visited him in his barber shop. He
rarely cuts hair these days, but he continues to spend much of his time
in the shop, watching the world go by on his beloved Route 66. He is a
wonderfully warm, positive man, with a wicked sense of humour and a
wisdom that comes from years of experience. I asked what it had been
like to spend his entire life at the side of Route 66.
‘I saw the dust bowl when the Okies came travelling through on
Route 66, when the road was still dirt and they were going west for a
better life. Then I saw all the service boys pass through during World
War Two. And I saw the children of the same boys when they grew up,
travelling to go see Grandma back in Oklahoma or Texas. I saw the
automobile get better – from no heater and no refrigeration to heat and
refrigeration. Then I saw the day that this town died for ten long years.’
‘Was that when the interstate came?’ I said.
‘September 22, 1978, at about 3 p.m., the business community
died. Just like that. The world forgot about us for ten long years. The
travelling public took to I-40 like ducks take to water. They got their
wish to just zoom. But after ten years I got angry.’
I laughed. ‘Good on you.’
‘When I found out that we didn’t have any signing between here and
Flagstaff, I got angry. I fought the state to get those signs up and I
called a meeting in Seligman to tell everyone how I thought we could
get the economy back. We formed the Historic Route 66 Association
of Arizona. We had a big three-day celebration with a fun run, a
pageant for Miss Route 66, and we invited Bobby Troup, the man that
wrote the song. We fed six hundred people at the old gym, the town
was filled with news media and they begun to tell the world Route 66 is
not dead.’
In the summer of 1988, Angel’s brother Juan, who managed a
hamburger restaurant that had served almost no customers for a
decade, needed to hire extra staff to cope with all the tourists who
were now flocking to Seligman. Since then, the number of visitors has
increased every year. Angel told me he was on his fiftieth guest book,
but he’d noticed one curious wee characteristic in those books:
Europeans and Asians vastly outnumbered Americans. I asked him
why he thought that was.
‘The United States is like the new kid on the block. We’re only two
hundred and thirty years old. European countries, they’re centuries old
and they understand the value of history. They know where they come
from. They know preservation. When they read about us and see that
we, the people, helped to save a piece of history, they want to come.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.
‘And we take it for granted. We live here, right?’
‘Well, you’ve done a grand job, Angel.’
‘It is beautiful to be here and witness the happy, happy people that
come to travel Route 66. It’s beautiful. That’s a big pay for me. They
don’t have to spend a dime, but they are so happy that we have
preserved.’
He told me lots more about his life – how he followed in the
footsteps of his father, who bought the barber chair in which I was
sitting on 10 April 1926 for $194. In those days, Angel’s father’s pool
hall and barber shop business was one block further south – on the
path that Route 66 took through Seligman from 1926 to 1933. When
the road was moved north, to its current position, Angel’s dad was
bypassed and went bust. He seriously considered joining the stream of
Okies heading west: ‘We were all but loaded to go to California, a
Model-T Ford pulling a trailer and eleven of us, but music stopped us,’
said Angel.
His brother Juan played in the Hank Becker Orchestra in Seligman.
Another brother, Joe, played banjo. They’d receive five dollars each to
play at a dance. ‘But ten dollars wasn’t enough to feed eleven of us,’
said Angel, ‘so we were going to California to pick apples, pick
whatever they let us.’ However, when Hank Becker heard the family
had loaded their belongings on to a trailer, he found jobs for Juan and
Joe in Santa Fe, which allowed the rest of the family to stay in
Seligman. Later, Juan started his own orchestra with Joe and ten other
musicians. According to an unwritten family law, each of the nine
Delgadillo children joined the band when they were old enough. ‘I was
the last one to audition and I played the drum from when I was twelve
years old,’ said Angel. Playing at local events such as high school
graduations, the band eventually became the Delgadillo Orchestra.
When his brothers Juan, Joe and Augustine went to war, Angel moved
on to the trombone and tenor sax, supporting the rest of the family by
keeping the band going.
The remaining members of the family still play together today,
rehearsing every week. One of Angel’s daughters, Myrna, manages a
store in Seligman, and the other, Clarissa, works in the barber shop
with her husband, Maurizio, and Angel’s sister-in-law. It is a proper
family business, a throwback to when Route 66 ran through the real
America.
Angel is a remarkable man. With an impressive talent for
remembering dates, his conversation is peppered with the precise
times of every key event in his life. When I listened to the way he had
held his town together, and looked after his family, I wanted to be his
grandson – even though he’s only twenty-odd years older than me. He
was named Angel for a reason.
‘Billy, we have so much fun here and we make a living. Both of those
things matter,’ he said. ‘But you also want to understand that the world
is not what it was fifty-six years ago. The world moves so fast, we have
so many distractions. I’m not against McDonald’s, I’m not against Wal-
Mart. We need them. But there, you’re a number. Here, we greet you:
“Hello, how are you?” I guess what we’re selling is service, and that is
something that was lost years ago.’
I agreed wholeheartedly with him.
‘I’ve had many, many tourists over the years and still they come in
and say to me: “You people on Route 66 are like one big family. I
started in Chicago, Illinois, and they all treat us so well.”’
I knew exactly what he meant. ‘That’s what’s happened to us,’ I said.
‘We were flabbergasted in Missouri, Oklahoma and other places by
how nice people were to us.’
‘And that is what we helped to preserve. Isn’t that beautiful?’
 ‘It’s lovely. Small-town America is wonderful. I’m a big fan.’
‘At first the travelling public that came here were mainly grown-ups.
But when John Lasseter made Cars – I’m in it, incidentally: he
interviewed me for about two hours for the extra disc with the DVD –
he captured the imagination of the children, the generation that’s going
to inherit all of this. And now we have children coming here from all
over the world, saying, “We saw you on the DVD.”’
Angel exuded this sort of positivity throughout our conversation. It
was one of those great days, and it got even better when I walked
down Seligman’s Main Street and bumped into a gang of leather-clad
trikers.
Ever since I’d started my journey on Route 66, I’d noticed a lot of
people riding next to me on hired Harleys. Frankly, I’d grown to dislike
them. Big, chrome-covered monsters, to me they had begun to look
more like tourist buses with every passing day. The people who rented
them were okay. Many of them were early retirement guys in search of
freedom and escape after decades of hard work. But I also had a
sense that they were buying into that corporate image of Route 66 that
I mentioned at the start of the book. They all seemed to think that it had
to be ridden on a Harley or driven in a red convertible. And that sort of
corporatisation was exactly what killed the Mother Road. It had
transformed the drive from Chicago to Los Angeles from a cobbled-
together passage through small towns with family businesses into a
sanitised procession along freeways interspersed with strip malls,
fast-food chains and plastic motels.
So it was a relief to meet a bunch of fellow trike riders. They had
some extraordinary custom machines, some factory ones and some
home-made ones with bits and pieces of cars and other odds and
ends. Like me, most of the riders refused to call their bikes trikes.
Many of them were older people and had moved on from bikes to
trikes, which pleased me as patron of the British Disabled Trike
Society. A lot of the guys had been injured in motorbike accidents and
couldn’t balance on two-wheelers any more, so they’d gone down the
trike route. Anything to keep biking.
One of them had created his trike by sticking a wheel on either side
of the rear wheel of his Honda motorbike (actually, I suppose it was
technically a quad, because it had four wheels). It was a splendid,
neat-looking machine, still powered by the original rear wheel; the
extra wheels simply acted as stabilisers.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. ‘Why did you change your bike?’
‘My left leg had given up the ghost,’ he said. ‘It would go to sleep, so
I would stop at the traffic lights, put my feet down and the bike would
collapse on top of my leg.’ He’d come up with the perfect solution to
keep biking.
Another wee man was there with his wee girlfriend, who had only
one leg and one arm. She had a wee trike of her own, but had come
on the back of his this time. They told me they still went everywhere
together, and they were bursting with positive energy. Happy-go-lucky
and delightful, they would be an inspiration to anyone.
Then there was Catfish Larry, the owner of a big, beautiful, yellow
trike. He told me the hilarious story of how he got his nickname, but all I
can say here is that the clues were to be found in a catfish and his big
bushy moustache. It was not that clean. In fact, it was downright dirty
and great fun, but not wanting to offend anyone of a delicate
disposition, I’ll leave the rest of you to use your imaginations. Anyway,
Larry came from a wee town about ten miles down the road. It had
died because the stone works had been operated by illegal
immigrants and the government had deported them all. Broke and
trying to sell his trike, he didn’t have a bad word to say against the
immigrants. He thought it was ridiculous to deport them, because the
economy plummeted as soon as they were forced to leave. If they’d
been allowed to stick around, they could have continued to work,
generating money for the town, and eventually becoming legal citizens.
I thought that was a rather good idea.
After the fun of Seligman, I spent the night in possibly the weirdest
hotel room in the world. At Peach Springs, Arizona, the room was in
the centre of a dry cavern, 220 feet deep and 65 million years old. One
of the few dry caverns in the world, there was not a drop of water in it,
which made it uniquely suitable for use as the world’s deepest hotel
room.
Until quite recently, the cavern was a tourist attraction. People would
be winched down on ropes, through holes in the rock, holding a
paraffin lamp. Promised the chance to explore what was billed as a
‘dinosaur cave’, those must have been the bravest tourists in the world,
because I certainly wouldn’t have done it that way. I took the newly built
lift, which was scary enough, especially when I realised it was my only
lifeline back to the surface.
As soon as I stepped through the lift door, I felt a huge rush of air
surging up through the shaft. That air, I was told, came from the Grand
Canyon, more than sixty-five miles away. It makes its way through a
series of tunnels all the way to that cavern at Peach Springs. Then, in a
way that nobody really understands, it escapes from the cavern,
meaning it sort of breathes. Weird … and a little bit scary.
Having walked down a short corridor, I entered the most
unbelievable cave. It consists of two enormous rooms, with a wooden
platform in the middle of one of them – my quarters for the night. With
two double beds, some nice Route 66 furniture, a couch, a television
and an assortment of National Geographic magazines to remind me
what the world upstairs looked like, it was a pleasant enough place to
stay. There was also a wee shower and a toilet. It was pretty much the
same as any other motel room I’d stayed in on Route 66 … aside from
the fact that the roof was about seventy-five feet above my head and
made entirely of solid rock that had been hollowed out over millions of
years by an ancient waterfall. I started to wonder exactly what I thought I
was doing down there.
In 1962 President Kennedy decided that the cave would make a
good bomb shelter. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when
Americans felt there was a very real possibility that Soviet missiles
might be launched against them, JFK had the cavern filled with enough
provisions to feed two thousand people for thirty days. I suppose it was
a good idea in those very dark days, but the idea of two thousand
people in that cave, fighting for the food – most of it sweeties and
crackers – just boggles my mind. The smell, the dark and the crush of
people would have been unbelievable. And how would they get two
thousand people in and out of a cavern using a lift that could carry a
maximum of a dozen people at a time? And what would they do if the
food ran out? And would they really have wanted to return to the world
up top, which presumably would have been full of people with two
heads running about, eating anything that dared to show its face,
human or otherwise?
Wandering through the cave, I struggled to come to terms with the
sheer size of it, but then I always get freaked out by the size and age of
things like that. Talking about squillions of years confuses me. I spotted
some helictites – very rare crystals that baffle geologists, who still don’t
understand how they are formed. Neither do I, so I moved on and found
JFK’s store of food and other vital supplies. It didn’t look very big.
Some big black plastic drums contained water that had been stagnant
for years, but the provisions also included purification tablets that
would make it drinkable. It would taste rotten, but that would be the
least of your worries if you were confined down there for a month.
It was properly dark – not like the dark you get in your living room
and to which your eyes eventually become acclimatised. Down there,
my eyes never acclimatised, because there was no source of light
whatsoever.
Having investigated my surroundings, I returned to my tasty little
bachelor pad. About 150 feet wide and 400 feet long, the cave was
quite a desirable little number, even though it reminded me of one of
those rooms in which some mad bastard would hole up and plan the
destruction of the world. I could imagine him sitting on one of the beds,
cackling to himself and saying, ‘That’ll show them. That’ll teach them to
fail me in my exams and make me a laughing stock. I’ll give them
something to remember.’
Few people have slept down there on their own. Most guests come
with their partners, but Pamela was back at home, which most of the
crew seemed to find quite funny. They just skittered off and left me
down there on my own. Sitting on the sofa, looking at the rocks all
around me, it was hard to think that it had been like that for sixty-five
million years. The thought did cross my mind that if anything went
wrong, like the whole thing dropping by ten feet, they would never be
able to rescue me. I would have given up the ghost long before they’d
managed to drill through 220 feet of granite – no matter how many
crackers and sweeties I managed to find in JFK’s stash. That was a
dodgy moment, but pretty soon I started to relax. Before long, it was
time to go to bed, so I slipped between the sheets. That’s when the
one true drawback of the place struck me: maybe I was not alone.
Back in the 1920s, when these caves were first opened, they found
two human skeletons. I could just about cope with that. But they also
found the bones of a fifteen-foot-tall four-toed sloth – a prehistoric
creature that was the ancestor of the three-toed sloth, which is ugly
enough. They showed me a picture of it before they left me alone for
the night, and it was kind of terrifying, especially as it was so tall. Lying
in my bed, I couldn’t help peering around, staring down the dark wee
tunnel to check if any big hairy monsters were coming to say hello.
Eventually I overcame my fears about monsters, and after reading
my book for a while I turned out the bedside lamp and fell asleep. I
slept wonderfully well. With no moisture, there were no creepy crawlies.
Tarantulas, lizards and snakes that could have crept around in the
middle of the night and given me a bite couldn’t survive down there.
With nothing to tug at my bedclothes and give me the jitters, I slept the
sleep of the just.
I enjoyed it so much that I decided I must come back, but next time I
would try to convince Pamela to spend the night down there with me.
Emerging into the bright Arizona desert glare, I bumbled eighteen
miles down Route 66 to Valentine. This section followed the path of the
old Beale Wagon Road through a dusty, sandy landscape. I was a long
way from the interstate again, seeing Route 66 as it had been at its
inception in 1926. Although the road was very rough in parts of
Arizona, lots of terrific sections were still intact, particularly the
infamous Oatman Highway, which crossed the 3,550-foot Sitgreaves
Pass via a series of tight hairpin bends next to sheer drops. Regarded
as one of the highlights of the entire 2,278 miles of Route 66, it lay an
hour or so ahead and I couldn’t wait to see it. But first I had an
appointment at another wildlife sanctuary.
Keepers of the Wild is a refuge for abandoned pets and showbiz
animals. The vast majority of the animals are seriously dangerous and
had been donated by their terrified owners. Others had been seized
from people who had abused them. Compared to what they’d been
through, the animals were now in heaven. One of the sanctuary’s
jaguars used to roam around a notorious drug dealer’s back garden
and was seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency in a raid. Another
former resident was a cougar that used to live freely in the Los
Angeles home of Slash, the former guitarist with Guns N’ Roses – until
it attacked his wife.
The sanctuary was founded by Jonathan Kraft, who used to have his
own big cat show – like Siegfried and Roy’s in Las Vegas – before he
saw the light and decided to work for the animals instead of having
them work for him. Grey-haired, tanned and fit in his fifties, he looked
more like a movie stuntman than a conservationist, but his stories were
fascinating.
‘Big cats are a huge business in the United States, a fifteen-billion-
dollar illegal trade,’ he said. ‘There are more animals – fifteen
thousand big cats – in private hands in the United States than there
are in all habitats in the rest of the world put together. It’s kind of crazy.’
Jonathan told me there were about seven thousand privately owned
tigers in the United States, which meant there were more tigers in
American back yards than there were in the whole of India. I couldn’t
imagine what anyone who kept a tiger at home was thinking.
‘We just rescued a little baby lion that was typical,’ said Jonathan.
‘Surplus in a zoo, he was sold to a wild animal auction and some girl
out of Washington bought him for eighteen hundred dollars. She
thought she could keep him, but she didn’t have any licence or permit,
so she tried to sell him to a guy in Canada. This animal was two and a
half weeks old. Crazy. So we had to intervene and we took the animal
from her. His name is Anthony and he’s wonderful. He’s ten weeks old
now, a little rascal, and so darned cute. People think they stay that way
but unfortunately they end up like this guy over here.’
Jonathan pointed at Sultan, an adult male lion with a huge mane of
hair. Lying nonchalantly in his enclosure, Sultan was looking the other
way, minding his own business, licking one of his paws, but when
Jonathan called his name, he turned around, stood up and walked
about four steps towards us. Then he saw the camera crew and
stopped to have a think about it, until Jonathan encouraged him. With
Sultan standing right in front of us, looking magnificent, Jonathan’s
partner, Tina, brought some meat and they threw it over the rail. This
giant, beautiful animal looked straight at us, then wandered closer and
started eating the meat.
‘We rescued him along with a tiger and he is all right now,’ said
Jonathan. ‘He’s about ten years old, right in the middle of when male
lions are very dangerous. They have a lot of testosterone. I used to go
in and brush his mane. I don’t do that any more. He’d be brushing
mine, you know?’
‘It just baffles me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how somebody could think
they could keep a thing like that in the back yard.’
‘Plenty of them do. I know people, private individuals, who’ve got
thirty or forty cats in their back yards. Of course, most of them can’t
provide the right habitats for them, so you’ve got a cage situation. Next
thing, the neighbour’s kid comes over and does a little touchy–feely
and the kid loses their arm or their fingers. And then it’s the animal’s
fault. It happens all the time.’
Jonathan spent years interacting very closely with wild cats, but he
stopped doing that because he thought it sent out the wrong message
to anyone who might be watching. All food is now passed to the
animals on the end of a long stick or chucked over the fence.
Jonathan pointed at a beautiful female jaguar. ‘Her name is Hope.
She’s only a little jaguar, but jaguars pound for pound have more
crushing power than any other cat. Compared to a leopard, she has a
very short, fat body with stocky legs. Considered the wrestler of the cat
family, the jaguar is very tenacious. They’re the only cat that doesn’t kill
by a throat bite. They take their prey, bite it in the back of the head and
crush its skull.’
Skull crushers. That sounded horrific. Yet people kept them as pets.
‘What kind of thing would tick her off?’ I asked.
‘Food, for one. And other animals. Jaguars are solitary, so she gets
annoyed with other animals. I have a separation between her and the
leopards. If she were to be up against their cage, she would constantly
fight with them.’
With about forty big cats, the sanctuary is extraordinarily expensive
to run. It costs about half a million dollars a year just to keep the show
on the road – not that surprising when you consider that the big cats
gorge their way through four cows every week.
 Quite a few of the tigers and lions had come to the sanctuary after
unscrupulous photographers had abandoned them. Once they stopped
being cute and fluffy at about six months old, they became surplus to
requirements as far as the photographers were concerned.
‘Most of them end up in a canned hunt,’ said Jonathan, ‘where you
can shoot them for a fee. It’s disgusting.’ Others had formerly been in
zoos, mostly private ones. ‘That’s the only thing I have against zoos.
Why do they keep breeding these animals? We all know why:
everybody wants to come and see the cubs. But what happens to the
cubs when they are full grown? They end up in facilities like this. Or,
worse, they go to a canned hunt where the big brave hunter can shoot
one.’
‘Where do they do that?’
‘All over the country. There are more than three hundred canned
hunts in this country. It’s illegal, but they move from place to place.
Sometimes they let hunters shoot them in the back of a horse trailer.
It’s ridiculous.’
‘For the sheer joy of doing it? I just don’t get that.’
‘The trophy-hunting thing is just ridiculous. And there’s a couple of
places in this country that actually breed lions for human consumption,
to make lion hamburgers. Now, why would you want to do that? And
they have licences! I would love to shut them down. Lions are now on
the endangered species list.’
‘I’ve never seen it for sale.’
‘Some of them here in Arizona sell lion burgers for twenty-seven
dollars a burger. They mix it with cow meat, but why would you?’
We moved on through the park, which had a total of about 175
animals in around forty compounds and enclosures. Jonathan
introduced me to a cougar called Bam Bam that was more tame than
most. ‘They’re wonderful cats,’ he said. ‘Great survivors. This cat can
take down a horse, big prey. He is a little bit shy, but if you get him one
on one, he’ll come and sit right in your lap. He’s just a real sweetheart.
I’ve got other cougars I wouldn’t do that with, but this one is pretty safe.’
‘It’s astonishing that in America a thing like that’ – I pointed at the
cougar – ‘is still roaming in the wild. There’s something quite nice
about that.’
 ‘In Arizona there are about twenty-five thousand in the wild. In the
southern part of Arizona there are some jaguars in the wild. They’ve
spotted about six of them. They’ve come up from South America.
People always wonder what they eat. I always tell them “slow natives”.’
Later, Jonathan took me into an enclosure that housed a lioness.
Standing a foot behind Jonathan, I was quaking as he tried to entice
her to come out from behind a rock. Oh my God, I thought. This will be
the one day when she loses the plot and rips off someone’s face. But
Jonathan got her out from her hiding place, put a leash on her – a
leash – then sat her down and cuddled and kissed her.
‘Come on over and see her,’ he said.
Very gingerly, I approached. I sat down beside the lioness, as
instructed by Jonathan, who was stroking her. When my heart had
stopped beating out of my chest, I gave her a bit of a stroke. I’d never
stroked a lion before. It was an amazing feeling.
We moved on to look at some beautiful wolves, then Jonathan
showed me some of the ways in which people have mistreated the
animals that are now in his care. One monkey couldn’t keep its tongue
in its mouth because some bastard had removed its incisor teeth. The
tongue was just hanging out, and the poor little thing was slobbering.
I thought it was wonderful that a man who had made his living from
lions and tigers by making them disappear on stage had turned
completely the other way and now devoted his life to their welfare.
Jonathan should be celebrated and congratulated. It had been a
fantastic day and I came out feeling much better, rejoicing that people
like Jonathan make the world a better place.
Get Hip to This Timely Tip, When
You Make That California Trip
Crossing the Colorado River, I entered California, the Golden State,
and my home for many years. Entering the eighth and final state I
would have to pass through to complete the long journey from Chicago,
I had mixed feelings about the approaching end – both disappointment
and relief that it would all soon be over. Shouting the battle cry of
generations of westbound travellers – ‘California or bust!’ – I eased
back in my seat and pointed the bike in the direction of Barstow, some
two hundred miles down the tarmac. However, when I arrived at the
little town I found little worth exploring, so I just kept rolling, the miles
passing easily under my tyres as I crossed the wide-open spaces of
the Mojave Desert, en route to the fleshpots of Los Angeles. Then,
shortly after passing through the village of Helendale, I spotted an
oasis of colour in the sandy desert – an orchard made of bottles.
It was an astonishing sight. In the front yard of one of a strip of dusty
properties stood row upon higgledy-piggledy row of trees constructed
out of coloured bottles, most of them topped with metallic pieces of
junk, like car wheels or watering cans or even a rusty old rifle. I had to
meet the person who’d created this magical world of ironmongery and
glass in the middle of the desert. At the back of the wonderful
enchanted crystalline forest I found him – a man in a sun hat with a
trailing white beard that was even longer than those sported by the
guys in ZZ Top. He told me his name was Elmer Long.
Elmer is a genuine eccentric in the traditional English sense. In other
words, he thinks he’s completely normal; which, for my money, he is.
He’d built the hundreds of trees in his front yard by welding rods on to
poles bought from a scrap dealer and slipping the bottles on to the
ends.
‘I love it,’ I said to Elmer. ‘When did you start doing it?’
‘In 2000.’
‘As recently as that?’ Judging by the extent and intricacy of his
orchard, Elmer had been working very hard.
‘Yes, eleven years. But I’ve always collected and some of the bottles
my father collected. He was a bottle collector but he had no way of
displaying it.’
‘What was your father’s idea when he collected the bottles? He just
liked them?’
‘He thought he was going to get rich. I mean, he found some good
bottles. They’re put away. But I’ve got photographs of him digging for
his bottles. He would dig a hole in the ground maybe five foot deep
and when he found an old one, he honestly thought he had a gold mine
in his hand.’
‘Sometimes you do.’
‘Yes, well … it didn’t work out that way. You’ve got to find someone
who is willing to pay the price. You know what I found out, just by doing
what I do? There’s no money in it. It’s all free. Yesterday, I had a couple
of ladies from Mexico come here, a mother and a daughter. The
daughter had an eight-year-old son with her, and before they left, the
grandma gave me a hug and her daughter immediately gave me a
hug. Now, if you were to compare going to a mine and excavating a
vein of gold and taking it to the bank and getting rich, that’s one thing.
But little hugs like that coming from people from another country, that’s
pure gold. You don’t put that in a bank, you put it in your heart, you
know?’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘That’s the key here. I have so much fun talking to and meeting
people, you never know what you are going to run into.’
Just before Elmer’s father died, he gave away all of his best bottles,
but there were still thousands left. Around the same time, Elmer
chopped down his fruit orchard. ‘The birds were getting all the fruit
anyway,’ he said. ‘So I just pulled the orchard down and I made this.’
All around us were piles of bottles, some of them sorted by colour or
size, but most of them piled up randomly. ‘Are these ready to go up?’ I
said, pointing at some bottles that looked quite old.
‘I found a new dump. Well, not a new dump, it’s an old dump. About
1950. Somebody reached in this pile the other day and found a 1942
beer bottle. These are all old. They’re better-quality glass, thicker, a lot
different than the new beer bottles. And I know where there are
thousands of these now. The dump continued for miles and I just
gathered enough to get me by for a while. It’s an hour and a half from
here.’
‘When does the forest look at its best, in the evening or the
morning?’
‘It looks different every part of the day.’
I asked if Elmer had a favourite bottle or tree among his collection.
‘The only thing that’s favourite is the things I’ve had since I was a
kid,’ he said. ‘I’ve got childhood items out here. I still have my teddy
bears. I don’t throw nothing away. This handmade rake right here’ – he
struck it – ‘you hear this ring?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I found that near the town of Boron in 1960. I was a freshman in high
school. I’ve got photographs of the trip.’
‘And you brought it home with you?’
‘I bring everything home.’
‘And do people think you’re nuts?’
‘No. Well, in a good kind of way.’
‘I don’t think you’re nuts at all. I think you’re the sanest man in the
place.’
Elmer’s glass orchard is spectacular. I enjoyed every second of
going around it with him. He’s a completely non-violent man, but he’d
built all sorts of bullets and empty cartridge cases into his bottle-tree
sculptures. He doesn’t believe in guns and bullets, but he’s happy to
buy old broken guns and weld them into strange shapes. They look
fantastic.
Most of the items in the forest were obtained for free by sifting
through rubbish dumps. Claiming to know the whereabouts of dozens
of dumps, Elmer talks about them like other people talk about old
churches or ruined castles – ‘I know where there’s a beauty’ – and he’s
marked several on his mental map that he wants to investigate in
greater detail.
‘I’ve got my eye on this rubbish dump,’ he said. ‘My wife comes with
me and she sits in the car and I go and dig.’
For hours or days at a time, Elmer sifts through the dumps, digging
up bottles and bits of metal. One time, he found a car door with a metal
detector. Then he dug a bit further, ‘And there was a whole car there
and it’s flat. So I’ve covered it up and I’m going back for it.’
In time, he hopes to put the car on top of one of his trees. God, I’d
love to see that. When I visited, there were already metal parts from at
least three military Jeeps, a Model-T Ford, several tractors, a swing, a
trailer, a boxing-ring bell, a shotgun, an old train, a chicken feeder and
dozens of other things – all of them welded on to the tops of his trees.
Elmer’s home is equally eccentric. It’s made from a Bailey bridge
(those portable bridges that military engineers use to cross rivers),
although you would never know to look at it. And it has no taps. Instead,
the pipes have on–off switches like those used on commercial
pipelines. There’s no television or radio, just an aquarium full of fish,
and only one bed. Elmer is worried that people might ask to stay if he
gets a second one. That doesn’t make him unfriendly or weird. He just
knows what he likes and what he wants. He’d recently held a family
reunion at his house, but all the relatives had stayed overnight in
nearby hotels, which was better for everyone. Elmer is actually the
friendliest of men, and he spared no effort or time in showing me
everything and describing every inch of his garden. He was exactly the
type of person I’d expected to meet in spades on Route 66. If only
there had been more dreamers like Elmer over the previous two
thousand miles.
Elmer Long was by far my favourite find on the 66. He embodied
everything I imagined might be on the Mother Road. I wish I’d got to
know him long before I did. I wish I could call him my friend.
At San Bernardino, a few miles on from Elmer’s place, the great Los
Angeles sprawl began and the traffic started to build up. After weeks of
empty roads and wide-open vistas, it was quite a shock. The Los
Angeles basin famously has some of the most dense and aggressive
traffic anywhere in the world. To get a new perspective on it, I went up
in a local traffic reporter helicopter with a pilot called Chuck.
From the air, the intersecting lanes of merging freeways make
Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham look like a country lane. Tens of
thousands of cars mingling, going round and up and down and back
and forth. It looked like a tangled fishing net. And, of course, it all
started with Route 66 bringing travellers from the East who were
seeking fortune or fame in the West. Although the thud of the rotors
made it difficult for us to talk in anything other than broken sentences,
Chuck was a terrific guide. He did a lot of swooping around, with the
rotors at right angles to the ground, which I loved.
Regarded as the gateway to metropolitan Los Angeles, San
Bernardino used to greet Route 66 travellers with orange groves and
vineyards. But those days are long gone. In the words of that great Joni
Mitchell song, paradise has been paved over and replaced by a
parking lot. Nowadays, San Bernardino is a long succession of strip
malls, offices and housing. But right in the middle of all that is a
stunning Spanish colonial-style building – the California Theatre.
In the early years of Hollywood, filmmakers would screen test their
films at the California Theatre, which in those days was regarded as
being sufficiently distant from Los Angeles to escape the influence of
Tinseltown. Dozens of classics, such as The Wizard of Oz and King
Kong, were first seen by the public in this magnificent 1,718-seat
cinema. The Wizard of Oz was screen tested in June 1939 and the
audience adored it. But the studio executives still felt uneasy about the
final song, ‘Over the Rainbow’, and seriously discussed cutting it from
the movie. They were worried that the ballad might end the film on a bit
of a slow note. But Victor Fleming, the director, managed to persuade
Louis B. Mayer to keep it in the final cut, and his faith was rewarded
when it won an Oscar. Since then, the American Film Institute and
many other polls have voted ‘Over the Rainbow’ the greatest movie
song of all time.
In addition to screening films, the theatre has presented plays,
ballets, concerts and musicals, as well as stand-up comedy. Over the
years, hundreds of big stars have appeared there – including my hero,
Will Rogers. So when Mike suggested I should give a banjo rendition
of ‘Over the Rainbow’ on the California’s stage, I knew I would be
following in some very large footsteps. Slinking off to a dressing room,
I sat down and had a bash at the song. I’d played it plenty of times on a
guitar, but banjos are fickle wee things – some tunes just don’t sound
right on them. Fortunately, though, I came up with a nice, slightly
melancholic arrangement – a little folky picking tune.
On the empty stage, lit by a single spotlight and with my jacket
draped over a stool, I stood in front of a completely empty auditorium
and had a go. I used to play the banjo in public a lot, but over the years
I grew kind of nervous about it. I started making a lot of mistakes
whenever I played in front of people, so eventually I cut it out of the act.
Very occasionally, I’ll play at a charity show or for my pals in Glasgow,
but that’s about it. So I was as surprised as anyone when I did ‘Over
the Rainbow’ as clean as a whistle four times with no shakes at all.
Admittedly, I played a very simple version of the song, but I think it
worked well. It was a bit of a breakthrough for me. Buoyed by that
unexpected triumph, I got out my guitar and sang ‘Waiting for a Train’
by Jimmie Rodgers and ‘We’re Gonna Go Fishin’’ by Hank Locklin.
Riding deeper into Los Angeles’s metropolitan sprawl, after thirty
miles I arrived in Pomona in the Hispanic–Latino side of town. This is
probably the world capital for hot rods and low riders. To some people
around here, these cars – which are fitted with amazingly complex
hydraulic suspension systems so they can bob up and down – are
almost a religion. Some of them are works of art, and I’ve always loved
them. Even when I was a welder in Glasgow, I used to look at Hot Rod
magazine and drool over the paint jobs. Now, I’d come to meet a
bunch of guys who were among the best in the business.
The first thing I saw as I approached Mario De Alba’s garage was a
customised Harley-Davidson. It was breathtakingly impressive. As well
as boasting every imaginable accessory – including knuckle-duster
brakes and a skeleton side rest – it had a wonderful engraving of
Benjamin Franklin on the engine block. The seat was covered in
stingray leather, which was beautiful but not really to my taste. I usually
prefer bikes that are stripped down rather than tarted up, but I couldn’t
deny that Mario had done a fantastic job.
The De Albas are a close-knit family, with Mario working alongside
his three sons in the garage. They have real respect for each other’s
talents, and all three brothers are deeply grateful to their father for
everything he’s taught them. One of them – who specialises in
bodywork – pointed out the artistry of his brother’s paint jobs. In return,
the second brother told me that the bodywork was really amazing.
‘My brother’s a genius,’ he said, while his sibling stood just three
feet away.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ the other brother said modestly.
It was a joy to see such love and pride within a family, especially as
it was justified. They were just as talented as their siblings said they
were. It was the attention to detail that really impressed me. They
showed me an old Cadillac that was nice enough in itself, but then they
lifted the bonnet. Holy moly! The firewall, between the engine and the
passenger compartment – which in most cars is an oily, dirty, rusting
plate of steel – had been high-gloss sprayed and lacquered. When I
saw that, I thought: These guys really know what they’re doing.
We went outside, where a four-wheel drive pick-up sat high above
its own wheels, like a giant Tonka toy. It was amazing, but I was even
more impressed by Mario’s 1936 Chevrolet. A total dream car, it had
red metal flake paint and an intricate pattern on the roof. Even the sun
visor had been hand-painted in pinstripes. It was by far the best car I’d
ever seen, which seemed fitting, as I was nearing the end of the
longest road trip of my life. Inside, it was decked out like a high-class
brothel, with red velvet overstuffed seats.
Mario was obviously immensely proud of it, yet he became very shy
and matter of fact when I asked him about it. Standing in his overalls,
he just shrugged when I praised his beautiful Chevy. Then he pulled out
a photograph of a burned-out wreck and told me it was a picture of the
car before he’d started to work on it. In total, the job had taken him nine
years. Now it looked like a piece of fine jewellery. The paint job was so
good that I had to stifle an urge to lick it.
‘Show him how the hydraulics work,’ one of the brothers said to
Mario, before going round the back of the car and opening the boot.
Inside were some huge cylinders, each about the size of a fire
extinguisher, but highly chromed and beautifully engraved.
Climbing into the car, Mario pushed some buttons that made the
Chevy go up and down, enjoying himself immensely as the car
bounced around. Whenever he took it out on the open road, he would
raise it up to drive, but then drop it down whenever he came to a stop.
Sitting as close to the ground as possible is a big deal in low-rider
circles.
On the way to the garage, I’d worried about what I might say to a
group of guys who built low riders. I thought they’d just waffle on about
carburettors and pistons, which I would have found stultifying boring.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. They were charming
people who loved what they did, and loved and respected their family.
Like so many of my good experiences along Route 66, I’d stumbled
across an unexpected delight in the most unlikely of places.
As I was leaving, I thanked them for a great day, then said that I
thought customising cars and bikes was like an obsession for their
family. ‘There’s no cure for you – you realise that?’ I said. ‘You’re stuck
with this for ever.’
‘Yes,’ said Mario. ‘And I’ll love to do it until I die. I guess it’s special. I
love to work on cars and so do my sons now. So I guess I passed it on
to them.’
‘Do you love it as much as he does?’ I asked the three brothers.
‘Oh yeah, definitely,’ said Mario Junior, with the others nodding in
agreement. ‘As you said, there’s no cure for our illness. But it’s a good
illness to have.’
‘And I’m very happy that they learned all the skills,’ said Mario. ‘They
started following me and doing everything. And they’re doing it just the
way I like to do it. They’ve got the same patience now. And I’m very,
very happy that they went along with it. Because they are my good
boys, my good sons.’
My last destination before the end of Route 66 was strangely
appropriate, given that I’d started this journey reminiscing about an
encounter at Mary Shelley’s graveside in Dorset. I pulled off Santa
Monica Boulevard into Forever Hollywood, a grand, sixty-two-acre
cemetery that boasts both Renaissance villas and palm trees. Only in
Hollywood, I thought.
As I’ve said, I’m a taphophile – a lover of graveyards. And with the
graves and cenotaphs of Rudolph Valentino, John Huston, Jayne
Mansfield and Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone, among many others,
this particular graveyard was a real treasure trove for someone like
me. For instance, I learned that Jayne Mansfield was only thirty-four
when she died. And Douglas Fairbanks Junior’s mausoleum looks like
something that might have been built for the Tsar of Russia. It even has
a lake in front of it. Then I saw a particularly interesting gravestone. The
guy’s name – DeVito – had been engraved on it, as had his date of
birth – 1944. But there was no date of death. I thought he must still be
alive, and had arranged his grave exactly how he wanted it while he
still could. Next door was another tombstone, this time with a picture of
a guy with a moustache. Again the year of birth was 1944 and again
there was no year of death. I reckoned they were a couple who had
seized the opportunity to invest in two prime plots in the cemetery,
overlooking the lake.
Another interesting grave – belonging to a girl called Bianca –
featured an angel with a broken guitar. The epitaph read: ‘She lived to
love, She loved to rock.’ There was also a comment about the devil, so
I guessed Bianca must have been a bit of a rocker. That pleased me.
Finally, I wandered over to the crematorium, where some big women
were consoling a wee man. Everyone looked deeply sad, and it was a
timely reminder of what graveyards are really all about.
Now I had to face the inevitable: it was time to bring this great, exciting,
fascinating journey to an end. It was Bobby Troup’s song that first
prompted me to take a long ride down the Mother Road, but ‘Route 66’
had one crucial flaw. According to the song, the road runs from
Chicago to LA, but the reality is ever so slightly different. Officially,
Route 66 has always ended fifteen miles beyond the City of Los
Angeles boundary, in Santa Monica, so if I was going to do this
properly, that had to be my final destination.
For the very last time, I swung my leg over my trusty steed – the trike
that had carried me more than two thousand miles from Chicago. Then
I slipped into the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and rode towards
the setting sun. I enjoyed every second, every yard of it, but I remained
very vigilant because I didn’t want a repetition of an incident that had
occurred a few hours earlier, when I was nearly wiped out on the
Pasadena Freeway. Out of nowhere, a lunatic had veered towards me
from my right-hand side and missed my front wheel by inches. Any
closer and he certainly would have killed me. No doubt about it. I would
have been mincemeat.
I’d had a few other hairy moments on California’s freeways, too. This
state clearly needed a campaign to teach people how to drive
properly. They needed to learn that giving way every once in a while
didn’t make you any less of a man. I think the way they drive is a
manifestation of a rampant selfishness among some Californians.
Certain types of people are attracted to the state, and they show their
true colours on the freeway.
But now, cruising along Santa Monica Boulevard, through tree-lined
Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles, I managed to forget all about my
near-death experience with the maniac on the Pasadena Freeway. I
was approaching the last few miles of Route 66. Ahead of me I could
see the warm glow of a Pacific sunset. And then, suddenly, I was there,
pulling up beside the Will Rogers Highway marker in Palisades Park
at the junction of Santa Monica Boulevard and Ocean Boulevard. Only
a vast beach and then the Pacific now lay in front of me.
Leaning on a barrier above the beach, gazing out at the ocean, I
thought back over the trip. It felt very peculiar to have come to the end.
It had been a long, long way from that little signpost on Adams Street in
Chicago. Officially, it was 2,278 miles, but I had ridden at least a
thousand miles more than that because of all the wrong turnings, the
enforced detours and the visits to interesting destinations off the
beaten track. I’d covered a lot of ground, and now the sun was sinking
into the ocean. It couldn’t have ended better.
Route 66 means many things to many people. Everyone who travels
along it experiences it in their own unique way. For the dust bowl
Okies, it was a road of escape and hope. For the beatniks, it was a
road of self-discovery. For many millions, it was a road of new
beginnings. For countless others, it was a road of romantic adventure.
I still wasn’t quite sure what it was for me. It was too soon to assess
such a long and varied journey. I needed time to take it all in, sift
through my memories and work out just what Route 66 was really all
about. But I already knew for sure that it had been quite different from
the Route 66 I’d had in my head before starting my journey in Chicago.
Some parts of it had been wonderfully alive; others had been
alarmingly close to death; a few had already gone for ever.
 Thinking back over the many miles I’d covered, the constantly
shifting landscape had certainly made a deep impression. The
deserts, the prairies, the hills and the canyons were all unforgettable.
But it was the people I’d met along the way who I would carry in my
heart for ever: Mervin the Amish carpenter, Elmer and his bottle trees,
Angel the barber, Roxann in the ghost town of Glenrio, and defiant
Preston in Bronzeville.
Somebody once said that Route 66 was not for everybody; that it
wasn’t for people in a hurry. But I think it’s for anyone and everyone. It
can be whatever you want it to be. On it, you’ll find whatever you’re
seeking and plenty more. It’s about America’s past, its present and
probably its future. Above all, Route 66 just is. And it always will be.
There was a spirit and a feeling unique to the Mother Road. To
understand it and to feel it, you need to drive it or ride it. So, if you’re
thinking of travelling from Chicago to LA – more than two thousand
miles all the way – take mine and Bobby Troup’s advice:

If any Joe tells you to go some other way,

Say, ‘Nix!’ Get your kicks on Route 66.
Appendix

Mileages from Chicago to Santa Monica

Exactly how long is Route 66? A simple question with a complicated
answer.
Anyone who travels Route 66 will at times encounter several
remnants of the road between any two points on the map. In some
places, travellers are faced with the choice of following the path of the
original 1926 Route 66, or a mid-1930s alignment of the road, or one
of two or more post-war routes.
Sometimes, such as between Santa Rosa and Albuquerque in New
Mexico, one path is more than 90 miles longer than another.
Consequently, there is no definitive length for Route 66. Some people
say it is nearly 2,700 miles. Others claim it is 2,448 miles. The Historic
Route 66 Association of Arizona states the length as 2,278 miles and
that’s the distance that has been used throughout this book.

Illinois
Chicago 0
Springfield 200

Missouri
St Louise Green 296
Rolla 402
Springfield 511
Joplin 583

Oklahoma
Miami 605
Tulsa 691
Oklahoma City 800
Clinton 885
Elk City 910
Sayre 926

Texas
Shamrock 961
McLean 983
Amarillo 1056
Vega 1125
Adrian 1139

New Mexico
Tucumcari 1167
Newkirk 1199
Santa Rosa 1222
Albuquerque 1341
Grants 1416

Arizona
Flagstaff 1661
Williams 1695
Seligman 1737
Hackberry 1787
Kingman 1809
Needles 1870
Amboy 1943
Barstow 2107
Victorville 2157
Los Angeles 2248
Santa Monica 2278

(Distances according to the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona)

The Windy City – the starting point for my Route 66 adventure.
Lake Michigan. One of the best ways to see Chicago, as long as you
don’t get seasick.
Me, director Mike (seated), and Mark, the sound guy, getting to grips
with one hundred horsepower of mean, throbbing heavenliness – my
Boom Lowrider LR8 Muscle.
Taking the trike for its first spin around Chicago. It ran like a cuckoo
clock.
The Willis Tower, or the Sears Tower as it will always be known to me
and to many Chicagoans.
Trying to overcome my nerves in the glass viewing box on the 103rd
floor.
The brass plates marking out the location of Fort Dearborn.
A wee bit of Scotland in Chicago – the Tribune Building, complete
with chunks of historic buildings, including Edinburgh Castle.
 Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (or ‘The Bean’ as the locals prefer to call
it), and Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, both in Chicago’s Millennium
Park. I loved it here – a real life-affirming place.
The sign marking the current start of the Mother Road on Adams
Street – a block north of the original at the corner of Jackson and
Michigan.
With supervisor Jackie, the tracks of the El Train in the background. I
love the El – it’s a staggering feat of engineering and really shows
what the human race is capable of achieving.
The wall of fame at the Chess Records Building – the birthplace of
rock ’n’ roll.
Heading out of the Windy City, and its gigantic palaces in the sky.
The Gemini Giant (or welder), in Wilmington, Illinois.
Striking a pose at the Polk-a-Dot Drive-In with my new friends Elvis,
James and Betty.
Artist Bob Waldmire’s bus in Pontiac, Illinois.
The bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois. With my
finger up his nose.
 My friend Mervin, a lovely, complete man whose company I’ll
remember for ever. The picture was taken from behind out of respect
for his Amish beliefs.
My buggy-riding lesson.
Heading across the Chain of Rocks Bridge, St Louis, Missouri.
The Gateway Arch, St Louis, Missouri.
Getting to know the ‘soldiers’ at the Civil War re-enactment at
Jefferson Barracks, Missouri.
 My, Grandma, what big teeth you have! Despite appearances these
wolves at the wolf sanctuary in Eureka, Missouri, proved that they’re far
more scared of us than we are of them.
The light show at the Meramec Caverns – I couldn’t quite understand
why something as staggeringly beautiful as a cave would need a light
show to improve it.
Taking a load off on the ‘World’s Largest’ rocking chair, Fanning,
Missouri.
Bubbly jock, bubbly jock … Getting kitted out for the turkey hunt at
Fanning, Missouri.
With twins Carolyn and Cheri.
Rob Lurvey and his astonishing collection of instruments.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial.
The National Stock Yards in Oklahoma City, where up to 12,000 cattle
are traded in a single day.
The U-Drop Inn petrol station in Shamrock, Texas – a stark contrast to
the rest of the town.
The barbed wire museum in McClean. I never knew the ‘Devil’s Rope’
came in so many different shapes and sizes.
Cadillac Ranch on the outskirts of Amarillo. I fell in love with this
extraordinary place – a representation of the American love of
automobiles, and an unexpected shrine to me!
 At the Midpoint Café with the crew, from left – Mark Atkinson
(Soundman), Tim Pollard (Director of Photography), Me, Nicky Taylor
(Series Producer), Mike Reilly (Series Director), Jane Nowak
(Production Manager).
The sign says it all – I felt a real sense of achievement having made it
this far.
Trucks – sometimes a welcome shield from the side winds,
sometimes a lethal hazard.
The world-famous photo of the first atom bomb test at White Sands,
Albuquerque – facing the wrong way.
The world’s oldest continuous rodeo in Payson, Arizona.
Meteor Crater, Arizona – it’ll fascinate you or bore you to tears,
depending on your gender …
The medicine man who attempted to cure my sore leg and aching rib –
I felt very privileged to have the experience.
 Strumming my banjo in Monument Valley – an incredible place (see
facing page), filled with vistas I’d ridden through in my imagination as a
child.
 I’ve always loved steam trains and this one, which took me to the
Grand Canyon, was no exception – although the vegetable oil it was
powered by gave off a rather different whiff to the sulphurous smells I
was used to from my childhood.
The Grand Canyon. Much more than I’d imagined, and quite unlike
anything I’d ever seen in my life.
Angel Delgadillo – an extraordinary man whose guardianship of Route
66 has ensured the survival of much of it.
The network of tunnels beneath Williams, Arizona.
One of the extraordinary custom-made trikes I encountered in
Seligman, Arizona.
Heading through the desert and onto the home stretch of my journey.
Me and Mike, the director, with the lions from the Keepers of the Wild
refuge in Valentine, Arizona. The whole crew fell in love with Anthony,
the wee lion cub.
Elmer Long and his bottle orchard outside Helendale, California – my
favourite find of the trip.
Offering my own take on ‘Over the Rainbow’ at the California Theatre,
San Bernadino.
The De Alba boys in front of one of their incredible low riders.
Outside the De Alba garage with a breathtakingly impressive
customised Harley.
Forever Hollywood – a cemetery that could only exist in this part of the
world.
The Will Rogers Highway marker in Palisades Park.
Santa Monica Pier and the Pacific Ocean beyond – the end of the
road, and a chance to reflect upon my extraordinary journey.