Strife, Hope Endure on Route 66

Of all the cars on old U.S. Route 66, the rusting four-door parked at a Tucumcari, N.M., gas pump is clearly going somewhere.

There’s an overstuffed bag strapped to the trunk lid and a weary-faced man stooped at one tire. A 4-year-old boy bounces on the back seat and whines. The boy is tired, explains his mother.

They’re headed west. Driving toward Arizona, looking to make a better life for a disabled adult son there, she says. Gave up their home in Michigan to save for the trip. Resurrected their ’85 Cadillac from the dead.

“We are displaced,” Retta Dixon says calmly, her eyes shifting to the road. “But we have a tent, and we’re going to find a place to camp.”

It was 60 years earlier that another family in an overloaded rattletrap defined this stretch of Highway 66 as the road of the displaced.

John Steinbeck called this fictional family the Joads, and their brutal trek west in the pages of “The Grapes of Wrath” came to represent the experience of those Great Depression migrants scorned as “Okies.”

Much has changed on the migrant path. But from Oklahoma to California, even where SUVs outnumber the jalopies, Ma Joad’s words still echo in the American faith that something better lies just a hard push ahead.

“Why, we’re the people,” she said, “we go on.”

Sixty years later, a sprawling Cadillac noses onto the road of the Joads and heads west, into a blinding afternoon sun.

*

To retrace the Joad trail in these best of times is to be reminded of those worst of times. It is to reflect that within living memory, an American family could lose its farm or business in a heartbeat and be cast penniless into the night; and that without the social safety nets we now take for granted, one fall took you straight to the bottom.

The trail begins in Sallisaw, hometown of the fictional Joads and starting point of the novel.

Here, in the eastern Oklahoma hills off Interstate 40, past the glitter of fast food, the library and two barbershops with striped poles, a quiet street is given over to a game of catch.

“I don’t plan on going anywhere,” 16-year-old Todd McGowan says, thumping his glove against his thigh.

“Same with me,” adds McGowan’s neighbor, Buddy Gardenhire. “I’m pretty proud of who I am. It’s each for their own in that.”

These are the hardscrabble hills, where people knew Pretty Boy Floyd’s folks and many call him a Robin Hood. Here people still resent Steinbeck for portraying their people as dust-blown and destitute, but a Grapes of Wrath Festival is held every October.

Last year’s festival featured a car show, a tractor pull, Indian tacos and arts and crafts, but not a single copy of “The Grapes of Wrath” was in sight. “It made Oklahoma look bad,” snaps an elderly woman. She hasn’t read the book.

Nor has Gardenhire. But he wants to correct the impression it left on the outside world.

“Anybody can make a future in Sallisaw, just like you can in New York City,” says the 19-year-old. He himself has worked framing houses and trimming trees. “If a man wants to get out and work, there’s work,” he says.

*

“If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book,” John Steinbeck wrote in his journal. “But I am assailed by my own ignorance and inability.”

He was 36, an Irish-German Californian, a college dropout who had been a laborer, then a journalist documenting the plight of the migrants. He was also an established author who had written a half-dozen novels, among them “Of Mice and Men.”

When “The Grapes of Wrath” was published in April 1939, schools and libraries banned it, preachers railed against it and Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren denounced it as “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”

It won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize and worldwide acclaim. It spurred congressional investigations into California labor practices. It created a stir that lasted long after the wartime buildup brought the migrants jobs and World War II sent them into battle.

Migrants Starved

The migrants from whom Steinbeck drew his fiction came out of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri--a great tide of more than 1 million people that flowed westward through the 1930s in search of work and shelter.

Arthur Hayes, a sharecropper in eastern Oklahoma, was among the last to leave for California, in 1941.

“We had three crop failures in a row, and then we had a good rain that made one pretty good crop. And I stayed with it two more years. So we had one good year out of six. That’s five crop failures,” he says. “If you don’t make a crop, why, you don’t survive.”

Hayes drove a 1929 Model A Ford that “hammered and rattled and smoked.”

Ma, Pa, Rose of Sharon and the other Joads piled into an overloaded Hudson and headed west.

Past Checotah, Henryetta, Okemah. The Joads drove through Castle, and a few miles farther to Boley, where a rusting water tower still broadcasts the name in thick black letters.

Through the busy sprawl of Oklahoma City, onto old U.S. Route 66, west onto the rolling prairie where the scent of grass hangs in the air, down the streets of forgotten prairie towns, the ghosts are those of people in flight. Gas stations stand with vacant windows. Motel signs flake in the sun. Storefronts sit boarded.

In rural western Oklahoma, today’s flight is rural to urban.

Along the interstate in the middle of golden grasslands looms a fortress of walls and wire. Many in Sayre, Okla., thought the jobs at the new private prison might revitalize the town, says Jack Dungan, a convenience store owner on Route 66. But the road tugs at his 16-year-old son, Chris, and other youths with city-size ambitions.

“We lose most of them,” Dungan says.

*

At the edge of Sayre, 287 miles out of Sallisaw along 66, pickup trucks flank a diner. Inside, a waitress named Misty circulates with a coffeepot. Grease hangs heavy in the air, along with sluggish flies.

An old rancher named Bear Mills sits in a booth. Smoke rises from his cigarette and circles his stained cowboy hat. He takes a deep drag.

“It was so damn dry then you didn’t raise much of anything,” he says, leaning his wiry frame across the Formica tabletop, eyes burning with memories of the mid-1930s.

The drought came to western Oklahoma and then the wind, and the term “Dust Bowl” was coined. The dust covered the crops, choked the livestock and blew so black it tricked the chickens into roosting at midday.

Landowners like himself could get by, Mills says. But tenant farmers--confronted with low yields, mechanization and eviction by profit-seeking landlords--tied their mattresses to their cars and trucks, loaded them with family and drove west. “I admired them,” he says. “They were going someplace where they could get something to do.”

They came from this place of dust. And they trekked from the east, where there was no dust but plenty of hard times. They drove because the unseen Promised Land a half-continent away had to be better than what they had left.

Steinbeck drove himself to tell it because he knew what disappointments awaited them in California. “There are about 5,000 families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving,” he wrote of migrant camps in 1938. Three times, he tried to tell their story. But he wasn’t satisfied until “The Grapes of Wrath,” in which he strove “to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

Seven Flats on Way West

The exodus crossed 180 miles of Texas through Shamrock, Amarillo, Glenrio under the dangling stars of the vast sky; then 350 miles across New Mexico through Tucumcari, Santa Rosa, Gallup and on to the Arizona deserts. They journeyed in fragile, faltering cars, some of which died on the road.

“You wanted to help them, but you didn’t dare,” Hayes says. “You couldn’t afford to help, so you just left them sitting alongside the road.”

He himself had seven flats.

Sixty years later, 85-year-old Garnette Franklin can still see them rolling to her husband’s service station in Holbrook, Ariz.

If she said a word to the ragtag stragglers, she can’t remember. But the faces she can’t forget.

“They were hopeless people. They were gray. Their clothes were gray. Their hair was gray. Their cars. They were all gray.”

On the Hualapai Indian Reservation, Cheryle Beecher recalls the words the elders used to describe them: Hygu mija, starving white people.

*

In New Mexico, three days into our journey, the canyon rocks glow gold in the morning sunlight. The boulders bear down like teeth along Interstate 40, where cars fly self-importantly above the landscape. The towns of the migrant route sit on the old road, bypassed.

Outside Gallup, Interstate 40 sprouts its own town.

A Laundromat, a hair salon, restaurants, fax machines, movie theater and U.S. Post Office all share the great big roof called the Giant Travel Center. There’s parking for at least 300 trucks.

The highway pulses with the high life of the longest peacetime boom in American history--fast cars, SUVs with holders for 32-ounce cups, motor homes as big as buses heading to sunny retirement spots.

The Joads pushed 35 mph. These cars push 80.

The road signs scream: Buffalo burgers! Moccasins! Cold beer! A free 72-ounce steak in Amarillo--if you can eat it in an hour. Photos with real Navajos! 35 miles, 20 miles, just ahead.

“Yesterday I had my picture taken six times,” says JoAnn Hubbard, the real Navajo at the Chief’s Trading Post, a roadside curio shop. “It doesn’t bother me. If they want me to dress in the Indian way, I do.”

And sometimes there are small signs--barely noticeable rectangles on the side roads that serve the mighty interstate, or on the main streets of the little towns. Historic Route 66, they read.

Steinbeck’s “mother road” lies in scattered fragments these days.

Sometimes it’s a trendy thoroughfare through urban centers and storefronts appealing to nostalgia: 66 Antique Mall. Salon 66. Route 66 Roadhouse. In a Texas pasture, 66 is a bridge to nowhere. In the little towns, it’s an abandoned main street.

Watching the Okies roll down their main street, children in Seligman, Ariz., made cruel jokes. How do you tell a rich Okie from a poor Okie? A rich Okie has two mattresses tied to his car. Four decades later it was Seligman’s turn to experience a sudden reversal of fortune. In 1978, I-40 opened a mile away and traffic on 66 stopped.

Salvation came in tourism. They pour in from all over the United States and from Europe and Japan. They photograph Angel Delgadillo, Seligman’s man-about-town, in his old-time barber’s chair, rummage through his Route 66 memorabilia, climb into his brother’s clown-car jalopy for a free trip honking and lurching down 66.

A party of Harley riders from France roars down a mountain road near Oatman, Ariz. “The French love Route 66!” a biker exclaims in French to a passing motorist. “Easy Rider!”

*

And finally, after four days on the road, almost 1,200 miles from Sallisaw, the Colorado River brims blue. California!

“Are you from Oklahoma?” an inspector at the border asks us.

In 1936, Los Angeles police officers stopped migrant families and turned them back. It was called the Bum Blockade. Today’s inspectors run the agricultural inspection station. They are on the look out for a different kind of migrant: gypsy moths, Japanese beetles, any critter that might threaten California agriculture.

“You have a nice day now,” the inspector says. He hands us a booklet. It’s a tour guide to California.

Not the Promised Land

The migrant road crawled forward, through the Mojave Desert, through a beige landscape of rocks and brush. Today the Interstate offers a safer, more comfortable ride, and only a few cars pierce the silence and barrenness of old 66.

The migrants drove up past Tehachapi and down the winding grade, and then--a breathtaking stop to stare into the great valley below.

Green grids in all directions. Citrus, apricots, figs, grapes, almonds, walnuts, asparagus, cotton, onions. “I never knowed they was anything like her,” Pa Joad sighed.

Over lunch at the senior center in Lamont, on the valley floor, Bobbie Harp describes making the same journey as the Joads when she was a child and her parents’ reaction when they reached the valley. “They thought they had come to the land of milk and honey,” she says. “They found out real quick it wasn’t easy here either.”

No hallelujahs. No Promised Land. The constant refrain was “Know of any jobs?” They said it in the squatter camps. They asked it along the canal in Lamont where Bobbie Harp’s family slept for a while.

Hayes, the migrant from Oklahoma, still considers himself lucky. His brother-in-law had a job waiting for him on a ranch when he arrived. It paid 25 cents an hour. Now, he lives in Bakersfield.

But off a dusty farm road, Steinbeck found a haven amid the green fields of toil.

The Arvin Federal Camp, or Weedpatch camp as it was known, still stands at the edge of town. Here, Steinbeck described a place where migrants could find shelter, sanitary facilities and, above all, dignity.

It still offers all that.

Sixty years later, behind the camp gate and the wood-frame buildings of Steinbeck’s time, laughter bubbles through the screen door of a tiny cabin at the end of a row of identical cabins.

Yolanda Gomez, 31, smooths her hair and steps out to the porch. Six months out of the year, for 14 years, she has been coming here from Texas, following the crops in the tracks of the migrants before her. “It gets to be that time of year. You look forward to it,” she says.

The camp, now called the Sunset Labor Camp, is home to about 500 migrant workers and their families. Most are the children of Mexican immigrants, camp manager Rigoberto Martinez says.

The Gomezes and their five children have a clean, tidy cabin. The father drives a truck, hauling grapes, tomatoes and potatoes. He is working toward a long-haul trucking job and a permanent family home. Yolanda Gomez’s dreams for her children are simple: “Out of the fields.”

Steinbeck wrote of migrants working for starvation wages, and any complaints being denounced as communist talk. Today migrant field workers typically make $5.75 an hour plus bonuses.

“We go to Disneyland. Doesn’t everybody?” Yolanda Gomez says. “And when we can’t do that, we go to Chuck E. Cheese’s.”

*

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. He wrote a dozen more novels before his death in 1968, but nothing compared with his Dust Bowl epic. As recently as 1990, a Broadway stage version of the novel won a Tony for best play.

A year after finishing “The Grapes of Wrath,” Steinbeck wrote of the enemies it had made him and the fame it had brought him, and he said “that part of my life that made the ‘Grapes’ is over.”

But in the book, his Joads lived on.

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one, and then . . . Then it don’ matter,” Tom Joad said, quoting a preacher who traveled with the family. “Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where--wherever you look.”

*

On a fall day in the fields of Lamont, the harvest is nearing completion.

The workers in the green-gray haze of the evening are on their knees shaking the dirt from what remains of organic crops.

And in the Gomez cabin, a family is packing for the next move.