Drive (22 page)

IF THE TRADE WINDS
had been a disappointment, Tucumcari's Blue Swallow Motel made up for it. Set amid the mesas and plains of New Mexico, the town once erected billboards on Route 66 that proclaimed, “Tucumcari Tonight! 2000 Rooms.” Now primarily a ranching and farming community, it was originally a railroad centre—with a roundhouse, a depot and a water tower—and later, as the largest town between Amarillo and Albuquerque, a popular stopover for Route 66 travellers. After the interstate went in, the number of rooms shrank to about 1,200 and the population of Tucumcari has fallen below 6,000. But that didn't stop Bill Kinder from resurrecting the Blue Swallow.

Built in 1939, the old motor court, which features a small garage for each of the thirteen rooms, eventually became a wedding present for Lillian Redman in 1958. She ran it for forty years. At the end of 2005, when Kinder and common-law wife Terri Johnson bought it, the hotel was tired and had been closed for a year. “It needed some help,” admitted Kinder with what I imagined was quite a bit of understatement. But the oftphotographed neon sign was in good working order, and Kinder and Johnson had already restored eleven of the rooms. Our room featured twin beds covered in colourful quilts, a 1940s-style rotary telephone and a new television sitting on top of an antique one. All the other rooms have different themes and colour schemes. “It's really hard to find the fine line between fixing it up nice and going too commercial and losing your Route 66 flair,” he said, adding that too many other places do a great job on the outside, but inside, every room looks the same. “I don't think it should be done that way—it wasn't done that way back then.”

Now sixty, Kinder looks younger; he has reddish hair and a beard and blue-grey sweatpants and a grey T-shirt. A Vietnam vet, he spent many years working in construction in Las Vegas before taking early retirement in Florida. But after seven or eight years, even golfing—he trimmed his handicap to an impressive six—and fishing every day began to lose its charm. Johnson had worked in the hotel business and they'd driven Route 66 on Harleys several times (“It's the only way to do it. The wind in your face, the solitude, not a lot of traffic. You can take it nice and slow and enjoy everything”). And as far as Kinder is concerned, the Blue Swallow was the most famous Route 66 hotel. While the challenge of restoring and running the old place appealed to him, he pointed out, “Working is a lot more fun when you don't have to do it.” He also liked the thought of opening eight months of the year and closing for four. In fact, he just bought a camper with solar panels on the roof and “Born Free” written on the side. In four days, he and Johnson would begin a three-month trek to visit friends and family.

The motel office is part souvenir shop, part museum jampacked with Route 66 memorabilia as well as a coins from foreign guests, a copy of
Moby Dick
(his favourite book) and a picture of a British car club whose members had had their cars shipped over for their road trip. Kinder pulled an old Route 66 atlas out from under the counter; he'd found it on eBay for forty-seven dollars and described it as his pride and joy. While Johnson calls him a pack rat, he considers himself a nostalgia buff. “I just like the good old days better than the new days.”

He showed Chris and me one of the two as-yet-unrenovated rooms. He was using it to store junk, but from what we could see, it looked as though he had a lot of work to do to bring it up to the standard of our room. Then, he opened one of the garages to show us his blue-and-white 1958 Chevy. As he lifted the hood, he said, “This is why everyone tries to buy it from me …”

Chris said: “Oh, you've got a stock …”

“This is totally stock. This is the original engine, rust-free. This is the way they used to come. That's why I won't get rid of it. This is as stock as you can get it.” Kinder has repainted and reupholstered the car in the original colours, but that's it. Just two days earlier he'd put it away for the winter, but throughout the summer, he takes his hotel guests for rides in the car, which has ninety-six thousand miles on it. “As soon as it gets dark,” he said, “we cruise the strip and they take pictures of the neon.”

Most of those guests are members of car clubs or from Europe. While he hopes more baby boomers will want to drive Route 66, so far most of the people who've stayed with him have been from other countries. “Europeans pay more attention to our culture than we do, I guess. They know more about it.” Many of the Americans he does see come to photograph the hotel and the neon sign but stay down the road at the Hampton Inn. In fact, after we'd checked in the night before, several people had done just that. “They won't even give me a chance to show them how nice the rooms are,” he complained. As for Americans slowing down and enjoying the journey, he was doubtful: “I don't know if they will. Everybody in this dot-com generation wants to get there now. So it's hard to say. I run into so many people who say they're doing Route 66, but they're still in a damn hurry. You just can't see it all if you do it quick.”

WE HAD NO CHOICE
but to speed up as we approached Albuquerque, because for about seventy miles, Route 66 disappears under Interstate 40. Chris and I had fallen instantly in love with New Mexico, and yet once we were back on a modern highway, we quickly realized we were both focused on the engineered road ahead of us instead of the beautiful arid mountain scenery that surrounded us.

The idea that interstates changed the way Americans see their nation—or, more accurately, what they see of their nation—was, as I later discovered, not exactly an original thought. “These great
roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside,” John Steinbeck complains in
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
, a book about a road trip he took with his French poodle in 1960. Gone are the vegetable stands, the antique stands and all the other roadside attractions. “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

Fortunately, for the past week we'd taken the road less travelled. But while we would have loved to have followed Route 66 all the way to Los Angeles, we had to get off in Albuquerque. Chris was flying back east and I was driving north. In a way, that was fitting because we'd finally reached the new America. We'd left St. Louis, an old rust-belt city declining in both population and economic might, and for a week travelled through dying small town after dying small town—and a few places such as Tulsa and Oklahoma City trying to recapture past glory—before finally ending up in the booming Southwest. Though Albuquerque was founded in 1706 and later benefited from being on Route 66, only two hundred thousand people lived there in 1960. Today, with a population of close to half a million, Albuquerque is growing— and sprawling—rapidly.

Aching for some food that was healthier than what we'd been eating for the past week, we set the GPS for the Whole Foods Market in the northeast quadrant of the city. We saw plenty of pickups but also many imports, especially out at the mall where the Whole Foods was. That's when Chris—who shares a Honda with his wife and would buy a fully loaded Volvo if he could afford one—told me his theory about American cars: to a lot of urban professionals in Toronto, anyone who buys a Detroit product is a chump. There are exceptions, of course—notably SUVs, and iconic cars such as Mustangs and Cadillacs—but most of the people we know drive Toyotas, Hondas or BMWs and look down their noses at anyone in a Chrysler LeBaron or a Chevrolet
Impala. Maybe, he suggested, it's the same in a place like Albuquerque.

As we pondered the meaning of that bit of car snobbery, we headed south to Central Avenue to look for a hotel. We crawled along in thick traffic—the worst congestion I'd seen since leaving Toronto. Now the eighteen-mile spine of Albuquerque's sprawl, Central Avenue was once part of Route 66. Driving through the Nob Hill neighbourhood, past the University of New Mexico and finally into downtown, we saw many remnants, especially motels, of the past. Most of them look pretty seedy now.

My sister Molly had told me that she and a friend had once unsuccessfully tried to find Albuquerque's downtown, and I could see why it would be difficult: it's small, and tall buildings are shockingly scarce for a city of this size. But then, Albuquerque, like many Southwestern cities, has grown into an urban area with many centres rather than expanding in the radial pattern common in older Northeastern cities.

After much deliberation, we checked into the Hotel Blue. It was an unremarkable building despite some art deco touches, but it did offer a cheap rate and a good location on Central Avenue. Since Chris had a flight at 6:30 in the morning, and we were planning a night on the town, he wasn't going to insist that I drive him to the airport. But we hadn't seen many cabs while driving around, so we asked the woman at the front desk about arranging one for the next morning. She explained that it would take anywhere from five to twenty minutes to get a taxi—possibly longer, in other words, than it would take to get to the airport once it arrived. And we were in a downtown hotel.

True, the city's core did fall to ruin in the 1960s and 1970s, as the downtowns of so many American cities did, but recently Albuquerque has been trying to revitalize it. One sign of success was that the strip of Central Avenue between First and Eighth streets, where we were staying, does offer an urban, rather than suburban, feel with a good concentration of funky cafés,
restaurants and clubs. In addition, the city converted one-way streets to two-way streets, which are safer and more inviting for pedestrians; built an extensive system of bike lanes and routes; and installed bike racks on city buses. What will likely make a bigger difference is that Mayor Martin J. Chávez is determined to bring streetcars back by the fall of 2009. The first phase would run along Central Avenue from the Albuquerque Biological Park to Nob Hill, and the mayor hopes the project will reduce traffic while spurring infill development and encouraging pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods.

Those laudable efforts aside, this remains a city built for drivers, not pedestrians, as we found out when we went out for dinner. We'd read good things about a restaurant called Artichoke, and though it was on the other side of the train tracks, it was less than a mile away, so we headed out on foot. The walk was pleasant enough, even if there weren't a lot of other pedestrians. We couldn't get a table for another twenty minutes, so we decided to go for a stroll and kept going along Central Avenue toward the university. We were the only walkers, and while some blocks seemed prosperous enough, others felt a little dodgy, with empty storefronts and litter blowing around the dimly lit empty sidewalk. As it turned out, we might have read the Stay Safe section on the Wikitravel web page devoted to Albuquerque, which warned, “The section from the train tracks (eastern edge of downtown) to University Blvd. can be a little scary in the evening.” We turned around before we got to the university and walked back to the restaurant, where we were impressed, though a little surprised, that our waitress hadn't had a car for a year and happily travelled around town on her bicycle.

11
US 285

Drivers Wanted

AS A SMALL BOY,
Scott Tomenson, my second road trip partner, liked to sit in the family car and imitate his father. He stuck his left elbow out the window, put his right hand on the steering wheel and, as he moved it back and forth, pretended he was driving down the road. His parents got a kick out of this cute performance until the day he put the car in gear and it rolled down the driveway.

I also played in the family station wagon as a boy. I remember the sheet metal dashboard that came to a rounded point and the steering wheel that had no padding. Back in those days, cars did not have ABS brakes, air bags or even headrests. Seat belts were optional. Fortunately, car safety has come a long, long way in the past few decades. Much of the credit, at least for the early improvements, goes to Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and author of
Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile
, who pushed the automakers to build safer machines. (When the car companies hired private detectives to shadow him, the gadfly sued and, in a fitting bit of irony, funded his watchdog work with the multimillion-dollar settlement.)

The industry no longer needs Nader and his ilk to push as much. Safety sells, especially to the suburban parents who spend so much time ferrying kids around to soccer games, ballet lessons and other activities. That's why automakers are in a frenzied arms race to come up with new and better ways to protect people in cars. Already electronic stability control, which senses when a driver loses control and applies the brakes to individual wheels to reduce the chance of a rollover, is becoming standard in more and more cars. We're also starting to see sensors that monitor tire
pressure; side obstacle detection, which is similar to the systems that beep when there's an obstacle behind a vehicle in reverse and will indicate that it's not safe to make a lane change; adaptive cruise control, which adjusts the car's speed to keep it a safe distance behind the vehicle ahead; warning systems that alert drivers with a rumble strip–like shudder when they stray from their lane; and monitors that alert drivers who aren't paying attention that a collision is about to happen. In addition, some manufacturers have guidance systems that help people park with the help of a dashboard screen, while Lexus goes a step further by offering hands-free parking at the push of a button, though it's not clear to me whether this technology really serves a safety purpose or just provides an out for people who are too lazy to learn how to parallel park properly. Other advances in the works could mean vehicles will immediately start applying the brake after sensing the driver's foot coming off the gas pedal quickly; read speed limit signs and reduce the car's speed to match it; detect cars entering from hidden entrances; and alert drivers about yellow or red lights if they don't slow down. And by combining sensors, GPS technology and short-range vehicle-tovehicle communications, automakers will someday be able to offer a system that will allow a car that hits a patch of black ice and engages its stability-control system to transmit a signal to following cars about the hazard.