Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Read online

  Now that much of it has been bypassed by faster, cleaner and more sterile interstate highways, the Mother Road has become, for me and countless others, a historically significant relic of America’s past. To those of us for whom it was once small-town America’s Main Street, Route 66 represents a simpler time when family businesses, not corporate franchises, dominated the landscape and neon motel signs were icons of a mobile nation on the road.

  One of the things that fascinates me is that by following the rutted paths of Native American trails in some parts, Route 66 could even be said to pre-date the arrival of white colonists in the New World. And the road as we know it today can trace its origins to the great migration west beyond the Mississippi in the nineteenth century. When I set off from Chicago, I’d be riding along a route with a pre-history that began in 1853, when the American government commissioned a survey to build a transcontinental railway for military and civilian use. But when the survey was complete, rather than investing in steel tracks, the wise guys in Washington chose to construct a network of wagon trails. Even in those days, it seems to me that the American instinct was to empower the individual to make his or her own way in life. In 1857 a wagon trail costing $200,000 was extended from the New Mexico–Arizona border along a line close to the 35th parallel as far as the Colorado River and linked into other trails to create a route between the Arkansas River in Missouri and the furthest reaches of American expansion into the southwest of the country.

  Fifty years later, when the first motor cars started to chug along American dirt tracks, the Washington wise guys’ attention turned to creating a hard-surfaced road right across the United States. At that time, the main coast-to-coast road was the ramshackle Lincoln Highway, which followed a northerly route from New York to San Francisco, but few people made the trip and even fewer could afford a car. In 1912 the federal government started building a road from Washington, DC to St Louis along the Cumberland Road, an old wagon trail. From St Louis, it was extended along a path following the old Santa Fe Trail to Albuquerque in New Mexico before veering southwards to Flagstaff in Arizona. Called the Grand Canyon Route, the road then passed through Ashfork and Seligman to Topock on the Colorado River, where cars were loaded on to railway trucks and transported to Needles in California. The last section of road ran through the Mojave Desert to San Bernardino before heading due south to San Diego.

  Except for a few minor diversions, all of that route from St Louis to San Bernardino followed what would later become part of Route 66. Then in 1914, Henry Ford, that genius of mass-manufacture, applied the methods he’d seen in the Colt Revolver factory to making cars. Within a decade of Henry Ford inventing his Model-T, the number of registered vehicles on American roads had leapt from 180,000 to more than 17 million, and motoring had become a means of transportation for the masses. For American families and businesses, the automobile promised unprecedented freedom and mobility. By the early 1920s, they were demanding a reliable road network on which to drive their newly acquired vehicles. In response, the federal government pledged to link small-town USA with all of the metropolitan capitals.

  At last Route 66’s hour had come. In the summer of 1926 the first interstate highway connecting Chicago to the West Coast was finally authorised. Officially designated Route 66, it ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, linking the isolated, rural West to the densely populated, urban Midwest and Northeast. Chicago had long served as a central meeting and distribution point for goods and people moving to the West, so it made sense for it to be the starting point. A large part of the new highway followed the old Santa Fe Trail and Grand Canyon Route. Cobbled together from existing roads and designed to connect the Main Streets of remote local communities, much of it was in poor condition. Speeds above 20 m.p.h. were rarely possible in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, where the road was often little more than a dirt track cleared of the largest boulders. Nevertheless, by running south to avoid the high passes of the Rocky Mountains, Route 66 was the first road from the Midwest to the Pacific that was passable all year round.

  By 1929, the whole of the Illinois and Kansas sections, two-thirds of the Missouri section and a quarter of the road in Oklahoma had been paved. Even bikers like me would have been happy with that. But across all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and non-metropolitan California only sixty-four miles had been surfaced. Nevertheless, businesses in the numerous small towns along the route prospered as local entrepreneurs built service stations, restaurants, motels, campgrounds and entertainment attractions.

  When the Great Depression gripped America in the early 1930s, more than 200,000 people escaped from the dust bowl states of Kansas and Oklahoma. Strapping their belongings on to their flatbed trucks, they set off along Route 66 with dreams of a better life in the promised land of California. President Roosevelt’s New Deal programme increasingly eased their way, as thousands of unemployed men were set to work on the road as part of a nationwide investment in public works. By 1938, all of the Mother Road was surfaced with concrete or tarmac, making it America’s first transcontinental paved route.

  The highway experienced its heyday over the next two decades. As soon as America entered the Second World War in December 1941, Route 66 became the primary transport route for millions of GIs and mile-long convoys of military supplies, and a string of new military bases soon sprang up along its length, particularly in New Mexico, Arizona and California. Meanwhile, an unprecedented movement of people began as several million more Americans headed west to work in weapons and munitions plants, with the vast majority of them making the journey along the Mother Road.

  After the war, the road remained as busy as ever. Millions of Americans, among them thousands of soldiers and airmen who had done their military training out west, exchanged the harsh climate of the ‘snowbelt’ for the easy living of the ‘sunbelt’. With more leisure time on their hands, millions of others spent their vacations on road trips and sightseeing. Catering to the holiday traffic and migrating masses, the motels, campsites, cabins, diners, petrol stations, mechanics, tyre dealerships and souvenir shops multiplied. The most iconic Route 66 landmarks – those neon-lit diners, gas stations and motels that I love – all date from this period.

  However, the Mother Road’s huge popularity sowed the seeds of its own downfall. Like many of the roads that were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, it was too narrow and structurally antiquated for the fin-tailed gas guzzlers and vast ‘humping to please’ trucks of the 1950s. President Eisen hower had been impressed by the German autobahn network he’d glimpsed during the war and his government decided that the nation needed a similar network of multi-lane highways, as much for military purposes (this was the height of the Cold War) as for use by commercial freight and private vehicles. So, starting in the late 1950s, sections of Route 66 were replaced by four-lane interstate highways until, by 1970, travellers could drive the entire distance from Chicago to Los Angeles along Interstates 55, 44 and 40 without ever coming into contact with small-town America. In fact, the interstates made it possible to drive coast to coast without even speaking to another human being. Stop, swipe your credit card, pump some gas, buy a snack, then floor the pedal to the metal until the next stop.

  Life was slipping out of the Mother Road and in 1979 the Route 66 designation started to be removed from the hodgepodge of Main Streets, farm-to-market roads and rural highways that had once linked the two seaboards of America. Thousands of businesses that had relied on it withered and died. Some entire towns ceased to exist. The death knell for Route 66 itself finally sounded in 1985, when the Mother Road was officially decommissioned.

  Yet Route 66 refused to die. Realising its social significance in America’s short history, a band of enthusiasts kept interest in the road alive. In 1990 the US Congress passed a law that recognised Route 66 as a ‘symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their legacy of seeking a better life’. A few years later an official preservation programme was enacted by the National Park Service, tur
ning Route 66 into a de facto national monument.

  Now it was my turn to set out on the legendary Mother Road and fulfil the dream of a lifetime. As I packed my bags and left home, my only hope was that I would experience proper emptiness – that sense of being the only human alive for tens or even hundreds of miles around. I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere, totally on my own, enveloped by silence, like those scenes in the movies when you see the homeward-bound GI step off the Greyhound bus into a vast empty plain beneath a big blue sky.

  I had made it clear to Nicky Taylor, the show’s producer, that although I would obviously have a documentary crew in tow, I was determined to travel with no preconceptions about what was lying ahead of me. I told Nicky I wanted to keep the experience as pure as possible. Even if it drove the crew doolally, I wouldn’t allow myself to be barracked into visiting places that didn’t interest me. There was no way I was going to take part in stunts or make detours simply because they’d look good on television. I didn’t want set-up meetings with weirdos and professional eccentrics, the kind of people whose entire existence depended on promoting Route 66.

  I wanted this to be a personal journey of discovery. I wanted to experience every mile as it came upon me. When I woke each morning, I didn’t want to know what I would be doing that afternoon, let alone the next day. What would happen would happen. The serendipitous nature of the trip was everything to me. Planning ahead would kill the adventure and the excitement. If that happened, there would be no point leaving home.

  A few days later, I was standing on a fishing boat on Lake Michigan in front of a spectacular view of Chicago. Spread out across the horizon were the Willis Tower (still known by most people as the Sears Tower), the Hancock Center, with its two pointy spires, and dozens of other skyscrapers. You might wonder what I was doing on that boat. Well, I was there to have a good look at Chicago before setting off – like getting the target in my sights. It wasn’t my idea and, to be honest, I found it a wee bit pointless. But these things have to be tried. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  Personally, I am not a boaty man. The rising and falling on the swell, the false horizon and the diesel fumes combine to do me no good at all. They make me bitchy. And on that windy, overcast afternoon in late April, I was even bitchier than usual because, for some reason, I was pissing like a racehorse. I’d gone about twelve times by the time I had to shoot the first segment for the programme, introducing Chicago. But in the midst of all this, I heard something that made me forget my foul mood. The skipper told me he’d recently caught twenty-nine salmon in a single day. In Lake Michigan, of all places! I’d always thought that the lake was so polluted that nothing could possibly live in it.

  To an ageing hippy like me, the skipper’s news was a bolt of joy. Then he told me that commercial fishing has been banned on the lake. Another wonderful thing. Sometimes old idealistic eco-heads like me can get kind of depressed when we switch on the television and are confronted by programmes about people killing crabs or hauling in swordfish or hoovering the bottom of the sea in Alaska. Those fishermen tend to be portrayed as macho heroes who do a very brave and wonderful job, but to my mind they are vandals. So when I heard that they are no longer allowed on such a vast expanse of water as Lake Michigan, my heart sang a wee song. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Lake Erie, another of the Great Lakes, was officially declared dead; and the Cuyahoga River, which flowed into it, was declared a fire hazard. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than a river being a fire hazard? But it happened because they poured tons of shit – logs, oil, old tyres, paint, flammable chemicals and, literally, shit – into it. The muck decomposed and created methane and other flammable gases. Then, in June 1969, the inevitable happened and the Cuyahoga did indeed catch fire, devouring two bridges in Cleveland – a city that people started to call the ‘Mistake by the Lake’. What in the name of God were we doing to ourselves?

  Fortunately, the fire sparked so much public indignation that a legal framework for protecting watercourses and lakes – the Clean Water Act – was passed three years later. And now salmon were back in Lake Michigan, which would never have happened without that piece of legislation. We have our arses kicked on a daily basis by people who don’t know what they are talking about, so it’s lovely to hear something that makes me feel a wee bit proud to be a member of the human race.

  By the time we were heading back towards shore, I’d totally shaken off my grouchy mood. It was still choppy on the lake, but now I was feeling good about the world and excited about the journey ahead. I was going to have lots of fun. Meet lots of people. See lots of things. And tell you all about it. So come with me. Join me on Route 66. We’ll get our kicks together on the Mother Road. Come on, I dare you.

  2

  Winding from Chicago

  First things first. If I was going to travel the length of Route 66, I needed the right kind of transportation. A sleek saloon car would have been too dull; a 4×4 too plush. In many people’s eyes Route 66 requires either a convertible or a fat Harley-Davidson. But neither seemed right for me.

  I did my time on bikes in my youth, but I felt that like most other things of joy, the motorbike had become lifestyled and corporatised, a packaged form of rebellion of which I wanted no part. So, with the Chicago skyline looming in the distance, in a dirty backstreet squeezed between semi-derelict buildings and empty spaces strewn with boulders and rubbish, I met my steed. One hundred horsepower of mean, throbbing heavenliness: a Boom Lowrider LR8 Muscle. Officially, it was a trike, but for some reason I’d never been able to say that word. I’d always said ‘bike’. Whatever I called it, though, it was a thing of absolute beauty.

  Water-cooled and fuel-injected, it had a 1.6-litre, four-cylinder Ford Zetec engine and it rode like a dream. Most of it was fairly standard, but I’d removed the leg guards and some tan-coloured panels along the side of the black seats, added a pair of extra headlights and adjustable suspension, and replaced some parts with chrome or polished stainless-steel equivalents. It looked the business.

  Now the thing about trikes – especially a modern, low-slung one like the LR8 – is that my arse is only about eighteen inches off the tarmac. I reckon it’s partly for this reason that they have such a profound effect on people in their nice, safe, grey cars. I’d watch them as they drew alongside me, gawping, mouthing, ‘Shit, look at that!’ and wishing they were me. It happened countless times every day. Sometimes they lowered their side windows and leant out. Then the questions start.

  ‘Oh, man, where did you get that thing?’

  ‘What kind of engine does it have?’

  ‘Jeez-sus! What’s that thing you’re riding?’

  I just make shit up. When they ask, ‘How many cylinders?’, I say, ‘Eight,’ then smile when they shout, ‘Wow! No way, man!’ (It only has four.) But the trike is so outlandish to most people that I could make almost anyone believe almost anything. Compared with anything else on the road, it looks like a three-wheel Batmobile. It’s a joy, it’s funky and it’s designed for showing off. A total poser’s machine. Some people mightn’t like that, but I don’t give a shit what they say, because I love it.

  My trike was like a cross between a hot-rod car and a chopper bike, but in fact it had all the disadvantages of a motorbike and none of the advantages of a car. I couldn’t squit through a static line of traffic like a motorcycle – I was stuck in the queue with the cars. But while I was sitting there, waiting, I couldn’t listen to Radio 4. There was no heater, so I’d freeze my bum off; and if it rained, my crotch would get soaking wet. But that was also the great delight of a trike – I’d be at one with nature, out in the fresh air, smelling and feeling and hearing my surroundings, immersed in the landscape. A motorbike offered the same sensation, but on a trike I could enjoy all that and lean back and relax. Maybe that’s why bikers hate them so much, particularly those Harley-riding weekend bikers (which, incidentally, is another reason why trikes appeal to me).

  One final thing I had
to make clear from the very beginning of the trip was that a bike was like a horse. It’s my bike. The production company might have bought it at enormous expense, and the film crew might be filming me on it, but it wasn’t our bike. And it certainly wasn’t their bike. It was my fucking bike. So, if anyone fancied sitting on it, they had to ask me fucking nice. And if they dared to swing their leg over my bike without asking permission, they would get a very old-fashioned look from me. At one point in the trip one of the girls in the crew climbed aboard to turn off the lights and my immediate thought was: Fuck! She never asked me!

  But you should see the looks I got from people when I parked it. They gazed at it enviously and I knew what they were thinking: Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top’s ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ or the opening line from ‘Born to be Wild’ by Steppenwolf – ‘Get your motor running … ’ The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!

  Before I took the beast out for the first time, I did something I’d never done before. I strapped on a helmet. That’s right, I bought myself a crash helmet. I’d always thought I was the last person on earth who would do something like that. I didn’t know whether it was my age or the age we lived in, but before I left home, I’d done a bit of serious thinking. Now, some American states allowed bikers to ride without a lid while others didn’t, but I wasn’t going to go splitting hairs over it. It wasn’t like I wanted to be on some kind of bloody crusade. I’d always enjoyed the freedom of wearing only a wee leather hat. After all, I had three wheels, so it wasn’t like I was going to fall off. But then I started thinking that somebody might thump into me. Don’t be a bloody penny pincher, I thought. Just wear a helmet. Then my wife said, ‘Wear a helmet,’ and that sealed it.