Just got back from a six-day trip to northern Arizona,
covering motels from Holbrook to Truxton.
The two bookends of Arizona 66, which to me are Gallup, NM and Kingman
AZ, where just out of my range this trip.
Logistically, these interview trips have a couple of limitations –
namely, that you have to fly in and out of a major airport, and in this case
the airport was due south about 2 hours from flagstaff, in the center of the
state. Meaning I couldn’t go too
far from Phoenix, either east or west, if I wanted to keep the trip
manageable. As it was I still
logged around 800 miles in my best friend, my pal, my constant companion of the
road – a gray Pontiac 2-door featuring a free upgrade to satellite radio. XM Sirius Satellite Radio, by the way,
was the best thing that ever happened to me. It wasn’t just the crisp, clear, constant selection of music
(although that’s great in the middle of the desert) as the feeling of never
being very far from mass culture, which for better or worse, is where I feel at
home. Which is weird, because
isn’t that what I love about this project and this fieldwork? Getting away from the familiar?
The truth is, what I love about this project is pretty
similar to what I (now) love about satellite radio – namely, that it’s
something that seems to be pretty generic and pre-produced on the surface, but
that reveals more and more unexpected stories the more time you spend with
it. Not every Sirius XM Radio
station bears up to this, but a couple of stations played great stuff that I’d
never heard, with dj’s who actually demonstrated some kind of meaningful
relationship with the music they were playing and were occasionally hilarious
on top of it. But anyway,
with Route 66, it’s the same thing.
It’s easy to lose yourself in the bland, warm nostalgia bath that’s
crystallized in t-shirt form every fifty miles or so along the road –
particularly in Arizona, where the high level of tourism bolsters the market
for 66-related tchotchkes. But
once you start really listening to the people on the road, like you would to
the radio, you can hear all kinds of things. Stories of entrepreneurialism, of fresh starts in a
new country, of mutli-generational family businesses – and also stories of
poverty, of fires, drugs, abandonment, of owners barely hanging on, and
everywhere a sense of shock fading into acceptance about The Economy, which has
directly affected the income stream for local motels.
This trip, the standout motels and owners, for different
reasons, were the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook and John, the Supai Motel in
Seligman and the Shettys, and the Frontier Motel in Truxton and longtime owner
and dustbowl survivor, Mildred.
These three businesses together demonstrated just how connected these
motel owners can be to their properties and to Route 66 in general. But I saw again on this trip that none
of these owners is really interested in the question of, Why do people come to
Route 66? Mostly, the owners I
interviewed just didn’t answer the question, or said something that made it
clear that the answer doesn’t matter to them. Which makes me think it might not be a very good question,
because the answer, for these owners at least, seems to be both totally irrelevant
and embarrassingly obvious.
But I’m still interested, even though I realize now that it’s the type
of question only a tourist would ask.