Route 66: Thoughts Of Natty Bumppo On The Mother Road

Photo: Guy Randall

At this very moment we're sitting on an original portion of U.S. Route 66 in rural Kansas. The road curves south where the Brush Creek Bridge spans a narrow, quiet section of the Spring River. The bridge, a Marsh arch "rainbow," is the last of its kind on the historic Chicago to L.A. route. As a designated U.S. highway for over sixty years, millions of travelers used this road for passage to a better life in the promised land of California. In its first three decades the highway funneled many members of the Greatest Generation west where they became the backbone and muscle to fight and win World War II, then help lift a nation into a world power. Who could imagine this short stretch of road where rabbits now outnumber cars could be so significant?  Single links do build great chains.  Today Route 66 may soon become a national scenic trail - or something similar - and far more than the confederation of well-meaning state and local interest groups that keep the memory and experience  alive today.  Here in the very southeast corner of Kansas visitors can find a tiny portion - a tad more than twelve miles - of the original 2451 miles. It may be a short distance and a relatively brief experience, but it is the real thing, an honest and genuinely deep experience for cultural history types.

A century and a half ago, the novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, buried Natty Bumppo, his hero of the Leatherstocking saga, under a copse of noble oaks on the Nebraska prairie. It was the end of the frontier for Cooper as well. Fifty years later at the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that the geographic frontier in America had swept across the continent to an end on the Pacific coast. That closure also called into question Turner's hypothesis of the frontier as a shaper of a distinctive American character. What experiences would define the American people and their great experiment without the old frontier? Today, this concept of environmental determinism has been appropriately marginalized, but in its day, it was a respected and powerful concept. Much of the revision began in the development of new a new frontier; that is, the psychology of mind, emotion, and behavior.  Perhaps this piece of the Mother Road is a fine and fitting nexus of the physical and behavioral frontiers in a culture that has long defined itself by mobility.

As Americans we have lived like no other nation, a New World republic, and quite the experiment in equality and human rights.  Not perfect, but ever more perfectible among nation states as the national experience unfolded.  As such, in the spirit of Cooper's deerslayer, pathfinder, and pioneer, we may find ourselves on highways searching for betterment and perhaps our very survival.  In our minds, there is no limit to our frontiers at least until we approach the world of teleology where reality and reason give way to landscapes stranger than our logic and imagination should permit us to understand.

Here on the American prairie we're watching Route 66 disappear to a dot in a classic linear perspective. It's a scene straight out of elementary school art class.  Our thoughts turn to those who first conceived the idea of this highway, to those who built it, to those who sought and used it.  What would Natty Bumppo think of this? This isn't Nebraska, but for all we know, he could be resting over there in those trees on that rise off to the southwest. He's been  here all this time watching the parade of the curious, the ambitious, the desperate.  It's just that things are slower now along the Mother Road, a treasured trace across the heartland and a powerful force that continues to shape who we are as a people.  And now the road also captivates travelers from around the world.

As travelers without a serious destination, we take each turn and rise in Route 66 as it rolls over the prairie, always looking forward to whatever this fascinating resource has to offer. We will pass this way again.