Route 66 Westbound - Day Six: Amarillo TX to Santa Fe NM

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The days, they do get longer.

Today was about wide open spaces, those incredibly long stretches between instances of human influence where just for a little while you can phase out the asphalt and get a glimpse of what this gorgeous country looked like just 100 years ago. I mean let's be honest; in the grand scheme of things, 100 years is an eye-blink. Sure, the human condition has improved (at least in this country, as in most "modern" societies) more dramatically in the last century than in any 5 prior centuries combined, but this blog post - and by and large, this trip - isn't about the human condition. So much of what we're seeing out here denies humanity's effect on the world - vistas that for lack of an elongated ribbon of macadam would be largely unchanged from the way they were at the birth of Christ.

I'm reminded of a George Carlin routine where he debunked (in his own irreverent and unmistakable way) the concept that humans are destroying the planet. His contention was that the earth had been around for BILLIONS of years before we deigned to grace it with our presence as prehensile monkeys, and that any time the earth got tired of us - when we had worn out our welcome and abused Her enough - she would shake us off like a dog shakes off water.

Carlin was right. Standing in absolute silence in the middle of the high desert in northern New Mexico, you get a sense of our temporary nature.

Today started in the relative shithole that is Amarillo, a town that I literally could not put behind me fast enough. Five miles outside of it, however and you enter into a transition plane - an area where the deep farmland of north-central Texas is slowly giving way to the scrublands and high desert that will characterize this part of the country for the next several hundred miles. The transition is slow, yet somehow dramatic; you seem to suddenly wake up and wonder where all the buttes and mesas came from and why the grass is no longer green.

There are fields of windmills out here larger than Boston. Hundreds upon hundreds of them stretching out as far (and farther) than the eye can see, harvesting the power of a wind unhindered across hundreds of miles. In ghost towns like Glenrio and several other unnamed spots along the route, you get a sense of your own transitory nature. Build for 50 years, live there for 100 - the desert will swallow everything in 5, erasing every trace that you ever passed this way.

Wonders from the road today:


• We found a dry gulch/arroyo/wash on the side of an access road just inside New Mexico that literally took my breath away. Something about this place screamed "sacred" to everything in me that loves the Native American culture. I could have stayed there a week.
• We hit the official midpoint of the Route sometime after 8am, and it gave me a palpable perspective on just how far we've come. Just 20 miles into tomorrow's journey we will have put 2,000 miles on this Mustang since last Wednesday. The sizable detour to Abilene aside, it's humbling to realize just how big this country is - and just how much of it you haven't seen.
• Visiting Cadillac Ranch, where a line of vintage cars have been embedded nose-down in the earth, reaffirmed my belief that the youth of our country value nothing. Every year, the man who owns the field on which this landmark stands paints all of the cars white, inviting the populace to leave their mark on them over the course of the next year. Standing in that field and looking at vintage cars covered in senseless and often vulgar graffiti and empty cans of spray paint left laying wherever they were dropped made me more angry than I can express. Kennedy said it best. The cans didn't magically appear, so the people who did the painting had to carry them in with them. They would have been a lot lighter to carry on the way out.
• Certain pieces of music I have long loved (Roach's "Early Man" and "Nightbloom" and Brand's "The Great Hoop") take on a new meaning when played at volume while driving 75 mph through the desert. Sorry, Bob.



Tomorrow, we take the long stretch down to Winslow, AZ to see about a girl and a flatbed Ford. From there, it's a crater, a great big hole in the ground and run to see Bob's family in Kingman.

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