Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Patty here…

I don’t like to make things up. I know that sounds odd coming from a fiction writer, but it’s true, especially when it comes to setting. I write about Los Angeles because I live there, which allows me to create what the literary world calls “telling details,” those colorful snippets about people, places, or things that add authenticity or deeper meaning to a scene.

Sometimes people ask me if I ever plan to take Tucker out of Los Angeles. I have taken her out of the city but never so far away that she couldn’t get back in an hour or so. I began to wonder if I was avoiding doing so. Since I had to go to Tucson for a meeting, I decided to drive and take Tucker with me to interview a man about a quest. We decided to take the historic Route 66, established as a federal highway on November 11, 1926. In its day the Route was called “The Main Street of America” and “The Mother Road” because it was the chief artery between Chicago and Los Angeles and the major highway taken by migrants escaping the dustbowl of the 1930s. In 1985, the Feds deemed the Route—all 2,448 miles of it—irrelevant and decommissioned it. I wanted to experience this piece of history and live its famous slogan, “Get your kicks on Route 66.”



Dull gray smog shrouded the San Gabriel Mountains as we left congested Los Angeles heading east on the 10 Freeway. With civilization in the rearview mirror we began our trek across the Mohave Desert, a dry brown expanse of land that seemed as wide as the ocean. Eying the landscape dotted with scraggly low brush and inhabited by rattlesnakes and scorpions and a few mice, I was struck by how little of the West was inhabited or inhabitable.



I stopped in Ludlow, California for gas. A hot wind kicked up dust to burn my eyes. The café across the street was closed, the fate of many businesses along Route 66 when the Interstate bypassed all of the towns. Seeing that boarded up coffee house reminded me of the lives and livelihoods destroyed to accommodate drivers who no longer wanted to slow down while rushing from here to there.

Once out of Ludlow, I passed more ghost towns and derelict buildings: the shell of a garage, a house, a gas station, and what may have once been another café. Traffic was sparse. An eery solitude surrounded me as I imagined Tucker racing down the open road in her Boxster—alone—past all of those broken-down abandoned buildings.



A shingle on the side of the road announced, “Amboy founded 1858.” We stopped at the famous Roy’s Café, which was closed for business as were the small cottages that once offered tired travelers a reprieve from the long straight road and the unrelenting heat.



We found signs of life. Larry Stevens was inside the café restoring the place to its glory days. I asked when he thought he might be finished. He just shrugged. Maybe in Amboy time.



As we crossed the Colorado River into Arizona I noticed something new. The long expanse of nothing was occasionally broken by a rusty trailer or a school bus converted into living quarters. I began to wonder what had driven those residents to choose isolation over community. Were they cooking up crystal meth in those trailers or did they just want to be left alone?

The road led us to Oatman, Arizona, and the Hole in the Wall Tattoo Studio. The woman inside the shop told me I’d pay $400 an hour in Las Vegas for the same tattoo she could give me for $85 an hour. I took her card and told her I’d think about it.



On my way out of the store I saw a do-rag I wanted to buy, but I got distracted by the burros roaming free on the street. I don’t have the do-rag, but I have the memory.



For me, writing wouldn’t be half the fun without those telling details. Sure, I could say that Tucker drove through the Mohave Desert to Arizona and that it was hot and desolate, that she interviewed some guy in an adobe house on a quiet street in Tucson. But I wouldn’t have Roy’s Cafe, those burros, and the dust burning my eyes. And I wouldn’t have been able to create the character of a bitter old man living in a rusted-out trailer in the middle of a vast expanse of desert as wide as any ocean who had lost his business to the Interstate and survived by selling do-rags and cheap tattoos to the occasional passerby who had taken the time to travel down a lonely forgotten highway that didn’t have much to offer except some good memories and a tired promise: “Get your kicks on Route 66.”

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