Interstate Forty's Ghost: The Route Sixty-Six Layer

Most of Interstate Forty did not replace an empty landscape. It replaced Route Sixty-Six. For most of this highway's length, the old road still exists alongside or beneath the new one, two lanes wide, deteriorating at its own pace, serving the towns the interstate bypassed and occasionally vanishing altogether into parking lots and subdivisions.

Route Sixty-Six was commissioned in nineteen twenty-six, running from Chicago to Los Angeles, and it became within a decade the main road west for everyone who had no choice but to go. The Dust Bowl migration of the nineteen thirties sent hundreds of thousands of people from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas down this road in overloaded cars and trucks, heading for California agricultural work that sometimes existed and sometimes did not. John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road in the Grapes of Wrath, and the name stuck.

The road was the subject of a nineteen sixties television show and a nineteen forty-six song and several thousand road trip narratives. It became, over time, an object of nostalgia before anyone who had used it for actual survival purposes had finished dying. Interstate Forty bypassed the last stretch of Route Sixty-Six in nineteen eighty-four at Williams, Arizona, the final segment to be superseded.

The signs came down. The through traffic disappeared. The motels and diners that had been built to serve the road lost their customers within a season.

What remained was the physical road itself, the signs that survived, and a tourism industry that serves people seeking the experience of a road that no longer works. The ghost layer is visible the entire length of this drive. You will see it if you look.