Virtual Sunday Drive

Travel back in time with me to a place I used to go.

The drive: Old Route 66 west from Springfield, Mo.
The car: A 1980 Chevrolet Citation X-11, silver (it looked something like this, only with a red stripe instead of black)
The music: Bob Seger's Like a Rock, or Boston's Don't Look Back, on a cassette tape copied from a friend's LP. The tape is playing in the aftermarket cassette deck, which sits sideways in the Citation dashboard.

Let's go.

The sun is behind you as you point the car west on Chestnut Expressway, a street lined on either side with junkyards, old tire shops and used car lots, where an occasional buyer walks among tired old heaps with "77 $700 COLD AIR RUNS GOOD" painted in white shoe polish on the windshields. Stop at the Vickers station for some 84-cent-a-gallon unleaded, go through the light at the West Bypass, and settle back in the seat. This is the forgotten side of your hometown; the record-breaking growth and prosperity are happening on the other side. You, of course, are going the other way.

Chestnut Expressway narrows back to two lanes and becomes Missouri 266, just past the exit for the big soulless Interstate. The two lanes are barely wide enough to accommodate the Hudsons and Cadillacs and DeSotos that prowled this road back in the '50s. The old fellow at the antique store in Halltown will tell you as much, explaining in his cigarette-stained voice that they called this stretch of road Bloody 66. "Head-on collisions all the time, every day, practically, especially when it rained," he'd say. "Cars coming off that curve tryin' to slow down for the speed zone here, get all sideways and boom! that was all she wrote."

About five miles past Halltown, you stop at a stop sign. Turn right to get on Missouri 96, which was the modernized section of the old Mother Road. Still two lanes, but wider, with an upturned lip on each shoulder. Highway engineers in the late 1940s thought that would be an ideal way to prevent a drowsy driver from drifting off the road and into oblivion. Instead, the usual result was a drowsy driver drifting off and his ghost later finding himself upside down in his '51 Chevy with no seat belts and a metal headliner.

Highway 96 is also dead-level straight for about 40 miles, with one stoplight near Mount Vernon. An old gas station and garage is on the left; the buildings are made of rock, the lot out front is gravel. The pumps are vintage late 1960s, rusting. The price on the pumps reads 49.9 cents per gallon; pre-oil embargo prices. Inside the garage are piles of used car parts, boxes, hoses; stuff that could sit there for hundreds of years before rotting away. And probably, it will.

Drive on down 96 and go through towns that aren't there anymore: Heatonville, Albatross, Rescue, Plew, Avilla. Towns that exist as little more than signs along a highway nobody drives.

The occasional farmhouse can be seen, usually out the passenger window. It's always the same layout: ranch-style house set back about 300 feet off the road; big garage/workshop-type building; barn; silo. Where 96 meets Missouri 97, however, is a different sight. A multi-story farmhouse, big wraparound front porch, majestic in its loneliness. The house is sagging in the middle. It hasn't been occupied for at least 20 years, probably more. At one time, however, it was very likely the jewel of far western Lawrence County.

Drive on through Avilla. About 10 miles later, the road takes a jog to the left and you're in Carthage, a town of about 14,000 that once was the seat of commerce for western Missouri. Stop for some fast food if you want. In the middle of town is a lake, stocked with fish that are all too willing to bite whatever bait you're carrying. Don't eat the fish, though; signs warn of the possible environmental hazards that the town dumped into the lake over the years.

Drive under the exit for Alternate U.S. 71 and continue west. You're back in a semi-industrial zone, which means the occasional small factory or feed mill bounded on either side by a junkyard, a tire shop, or a used-car lot. You'll enter Webb City at the statue of the Praying Hands. At the time the statue was conceived, the location was a very busy intersection of two major federal highways. When the statue was dedicated in 1974, however, the interstate, built several miles to the south, had long since supplanted U.S. 66.

Old 66 follows U.S. 71 going south through Webb City and into Joplin, a sad little city of about 40,000 on Missouri's western edge. In the heyday of Highway 66, Joplin was a reasonably prosperous lead-mining town. When the lead had all been mined, however, there wasn't much reason for the prosperous to stick around. They left behind many of the less fortunate. The percentage of Joplin residents who receive some sort of government assistance far exceeds the state average, and the town shows it. Joplin is neither proud nor ashamed; it is merely resigned to its fate.

You're now going west again on a road called 66; it's Missouri 66, renamed after the feds gave up maintenance of the road in the early '70s. You'll go past another few junkyards before the outline of Missouri on the road sign changes to a bright yellow sunflower. You're now in Galena, Kan., once a major stop on the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway, better known as the Frisco. A restored train depot highlights the otherwise nondescript downtown.

The highway crosses the pretty Spring River and heads south, through Baxter Springs, Kan. -- "The First Cow Town in Kansas!" -- and across the line into Oklahoma. You'll go through the tiny burg of Quapaw, curve around a bit and find yourself on Mickey Mantle Boulevard in Commerce, Okla. Mantle was born in Commerce; his dad was a lead miner. A New York Yankees scout from Willard, Mo., Tom Greenwade, discovered the teenage Mantle playing on the American Legion ballfields in Baxter Springs and Galena and Joplin. What an incredible sight he must have been, a man among boys, slamming balls past the hay haulers and skinny Army-bound kids and boys who were pretty sure their futures were in the lead mines.

South of Commerce, you're on a road that was once U.S. 66/69; the signs for SOUTH 69 are still there, on the right side of the pole. On the left is a sign that says WEST, then nothing. Any 66 sign that the Department of Transportation didn't get to first was long since stolen by a collector. It's probably in one of those "Antiques" stores selling junk that you just drove by.

Soon, you're in Miami, Okla., another town that has obviously seen better days. Closed-down tire factory, empty feed mill, teetering grain silo, silent railroad tracks, old folks sitting on their front porches and simultaneously wondering where the hell their town went and praising themselves for sending their own kids off to better places.

You stop at some off-brand convenience store that could use a good cleaning, buy some gas, a Cherry Coke and some beef jerky or Doritos, and pop in another tape. Head back toward home, only on the soulless interstate this time, a direct line back to a world that's moving forward, and wonder if you're heading the right direction.