Get Your Kicks on Route 66!

To the first Americans, it was Geography's portal for trade and war and Nature's path to treasures of salt, pigment, and flint.

To Mountain Man Bill Williams, it was the Sun's beckoning blaze beyond the Osage Trail.

To Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, it was the open door to America's Manifest Destiny.

To Army Surveyor Edward F. Beale, it was a proving ground for the nation's next beast of burden: the camel.

To Novelist John Steinbeck, it was the "mother road, the road of flight," and to his rambling flocks, the glory road to the Land of the Second Chance.

To Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, it was the chute on a tilting continent down which "everything loose seems to be sliding into Southern California."

To Songwriter Bob Troup, it was "my way. the highway that's the best."

To Promoter Jack Cutberth and a thousand other business operators, it was the Main Street of America.

To Western Chronicler Neil Morgan, it was the bearer of "the largest migration in the history of the world."

And to Associated Press Reporter Dennis Montgomery, when a page of history turned, the "queen of our automotive dreams" became "a fading lady, a gentle, worn-out, seedy sort of unemployed teacher to whom fathers take their sons for their first turn at the wheel."

Route 66, it was nicknamed, during its undisputed reign as "the most famous road in the United States." For about 50 years, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1970s, Route 66 was better known than the Alcan Highway or the Pennsylvania Turnpike or the Skyline Drive. There beckoned longer national roads U.S. 80 from San Diego, Cali-fornia, to Savannah, Georgia. Older ones Route 1 from Grand Isle, Maine, to Key West, Florida. Easier ones Indiana Toll Road. But before the creation of the interstates, Old One-OhOne was just a tour of Pacific beaches, the Bozeman Trail was the back door to Yellowstone, and U.S. 81 was how a few folks got from Winnipeg, Canada, to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Before the freeways, U.S. 66 came closest to becoming the national road. It was the time-warped arc upon which so many of us determined the physical dimensions of the American Dream.

For anyone who has hunkered down behind a concrete bridge abutment say, about the second week of February, somewhere between Amarillo and Tucumcari, with a 40-mile blow spitting snowflakes out of Colorado Springs Route 66 could loom as the biggest, sorriest reality on Earth.

You could huddle there in your olive drab war surplus tropical field jacket, padded with a week-old copy of the Fort Worth Telegram, and amongst the lint in your threadbare dress blues pants pocket you could finger five frigid pennies and four frozen dimes, all the while debating yourself expletives undeleted whether you should hang out another thumb for Glenrio, where nobody was going, or hoof it back to Vega, where nobody was coming from. Your nose lusted over a cafe advertised on a peeling billboard, and your toes hankered for a cow chip fire. Then, more sensed than heard, came the faint oscillation of an unmuffled motor which, in the gray gloom, grew a pair of walleyed amber headlamps which enlarged into a rattling, rumpled hulk miraculously slowing down.

Then it was run! run! leather strain-ing, feet stinging, eyes streaming toward the lone red stoplight signaling one human's willingness to take one more risk with one more bum begging for one more salvation alongside one more lonely road.

Warm. Dry. For the moment, it was all that mattered. The fumes from the manifold of the old four banger filtered through the fire wall and fogged the crazy-cracked glass. The driver, an elderly geezer, reeked of coal oil and country corn, and the Ford shimmied something fierce, but the direction and pace were precisely correct: west, 35 per. By manually flipping a windshield wiper, the passenger whisked away enough frost to read a series of smartly stenciled, increasingly larger wooden billboards promising "Tucumcari Tonight!"

And that night, Tucumcari it was.

Whose signs these are...