Steinbeck's Road and What They Were Actually Fleeing

Glenrio sits on the state line between Texas and New Mexico, two gas pumps and a diner on each side of a line painted on the road. For approximately three decades of the Route Sixty-Six era it was a real community. Then the interstate opened, and it was not.

John Steinbeck drove the highway that passed through here in nineteen thirty-eight, gathering material for the novel he would publish in nineteen thirty-nine. He called it the Mother Road in that book, in "The Grapes of Wrath," and the name stuck to Route Sixty-Six the way certain phrases stick to certain roads: permanently, whether or not the road deserves them.

What Steinbeck was documenting was a human catastrophe. The Dust Bowl began in the early nineteen thirties on the southern Great Plains, the product of a decade of over-plowing that had broken the native grassland and left the topsoil unanchored. When drought came, the soil blew. It blew in storms that turned the sky black at noon and suffocated livestock and children. Approximately three hundred fifty thousand people traveled Route Sixty-Six west between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen forty, most of them from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. They came through Glenrio and through Tucumcari and through Gallup and through Holbrook and through Flagstaff, looking for the California that the farm labor recruiters' handbills had promised them.

The California they found was often a labor camp, a grower's field, and a county government that did not want them there. Steinbeck knew this and wrote it. The mythology that came later, the romance of the open road, the postwar family in the station wagon heading west in optimism, was built on the same highway where the Joads drove in desperation.

Both stories are true. They just describe different cars on the same road.