The Myth of the Road

THE ROAD
a sentimental journey

Morning in Tulsa, Oklahoma, August 2010. My 66th birthday. The plan was to rent a car. Next to the steering wheel is the map of Route 66, which I travelled in 1966 riding on a Greyhound bus all the way to Santa Monica, CA. Parts of the road still exist, some sections are restored as a historic route, others have been replaced by interstate highways.

The hope of still finding traces of memories and what it felt like to be alive back then. With the idea of stretching time beyond September – with the sun westward through three time zones and five states from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Amarillo, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Flagstaff, Arizona, to Santa Monica, California.

THE HYPE OF A MYTH
recalculating 2844 point 6 miles – turn left, then turn right, end of destination. recalculating…

From the very beginning this question: is it possible to subvert a myth without ironically breaking it, to modify it with one’s own insertions? This myth – long an element of our collective memory – holds in our subconscious the images from the socially critical novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) woven together into the all-American going on the road – there is always something to find that is better, there is something new down the road, around the bend. The moments, too, of reliving that first trip. Fear of staying in motels because of the horror scenes in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The déjà-vu scenes in films by Wim Wenders and Rosa von Praunheim, the photos of Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and others, all of these contributing to the fascination of this road, to the images of decay and transience, of failure and transfiguration. Also, I was reminded of and moved by the natural world changing and shifting according to its own laws and thereby staying the same in its equanimity and sublimity. Its great, terrifying beauty.

And at the same time the desire – urgent and precarious – to free oneself and experience “the now” in that Ford Escape: the idea to go west on Route 66 to the California beaches. That is about freedom, the freedom to make choices, and the ability to just go.

THE IMAGES
closed little words or open free worlds

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The whole essay will be published soon