The Mother Road — for loners

David King Dunaway, Across the Tracks: A Route 66 Story
(Book Locker, Inc, 2001) 353 pp.
Paperback, $17.95; ebook, $11.95;
3 CD Set, $14.95.

Dunaway holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a professor in the English department at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a city astride Route 66. A published expert in oral literary history, twenty years producing documentaries on public radio honed his own narrative style. This book results from his two and one-half years of travel and research on the road for his radio broadcasts of "Across the Tracks" in 2001.

"Story" in the book's subtitle, "A Route 66 Story", is a positive attribute in Dunaway's thinking. "Story" neither stands for artifice nor fanciful entertainment. Dunaway, however, intends no factual account of names, dates, events, and favorites. Roadside architecture, a feature of Route 66 writing nearly equated with Route 66 writing, is not his concern. "My Route 66 is not larded with fountains and vanished drive-ins," he writes.

Route 66 enthusiasts have created a tourists' ledger of must-see personalities and specific businesses or scenes, yet Dunaway also avoids those icons: "[W]e will not stop at every famous stop, nor eat every corn dog you can find in the guidebooks of Route 66." Such people and places have gotten in the way of understanding, he asserts. Dunaway shares the perspective of Jacqueline Dace, an African American and researcher for the Missouri Historical Society, whose eloquence he rightly quotes. "The sentimentality of Route 66 is Eurocentric; African-Americans in my view don't necessarily connect with roadways, icons, buildings themselves. It's more the emotional place, what occurred there," she argues. Instead, Dunaway seeks the living past. "I hate how the present covers over the past on the road of life," he posits. "Is history then invisible? Must it sit parked like an empty, idling tour bus outside a museum, adrift from the people who lived it, and those who need know its meaning?" Dunaway, thus, shuns the classical stance of objectivity that historians have taken as an article of faith since history became a profession in the late-nineteenth century. Whereas traditional historians would wait for a subject to be sufficiently past and its participants perhaps deceased before addressing the subject, Dunaway relishes the swift current of now. Emotional intimacy, not distance, he prefers.

Nonetheless, he shares the traditional historian's exercise of a balanced perspective, looking for the good, the bad, and the indifferent aspects of Route 66. For example, after recording the life story of Edmund Threatt, an Oklahoman and African American who learned to overlook the losses he suffered to racism along Route 66, Dunaway leaves "with a new buoyancy. The past is not yet buried here; it awaits anyone ready to search it out. Maybe just around the bend, we'll find gentler folks and the generosity Route 66 is known for."

Dunaway uncovered racism and experienced a sullen reception in some locations along Route 66 as he conducted his search. He acknowledges about his quest along Route 66 that "some days I feel like the Tiresias of Route 66, that ancient Greek prophet whose news was always right, but always tragic. Since I've started, I've tripped over chemical drums at Times Beach, stumbled onto the site of a lynching." Yet he emerges untroubled for others from his time on the road. He reports cases of prejudice, most of it racist, none sexist, and homophobic in the form of one man's opinion. "For me, a point of driving this long road, and giving up my resources to it, is not to change Route 66 so much as to appreciate it in depth," he observes.

Like the objective historians he round inadequate, Dunaway remains outside the people whose lives he momentaril' enters.

Despite his self-proclaimed iconoclasm, Dunaway's path parallels many who preceded him. Route 66, after all remains an "experience" to be understood through personal contact. Of its lure, he "yearned to start from the beginning, in Chicago, and drive it through to the ocean." Literary concepts and other writer's accounts enrich his capacity to bring new mean ing but even local lore about the road encapsulated in libraries and archives, much less previous academic treatments of the road, do not draw much attention. He suspects "theory-loving academics " cannot accept Route 66s low class and physically shabby traits. However, puzzled ultimately by the virtual absence of scholarly literature about Route 66, he implies he'd welcome more.

His remains very much a modernist project. Questioning the received opinion among whites about a happy highway history on the Mother Road, he gathers the feeling of other individuals and relies on his own inner resources to assert an independent con elusion. Self is not only the test but the motive. "I've long been a loner, content to peer in on life: an only child, a bookish, near-sighted adult. I want to connect. With birds, plants, animals of 66—all the natural world. With the people of 66," he explains. To feel one with a realm beyond self, he anxiously quests

18 ILLINOIS Heritage

another perceived and bigger separate By: Route 66. What secularists have ejected in religion and democrats have fccted in a hierarchical society—and funaway is both atheist and egalitarian—they have often sought to recon-buct in the warm feeling of community. He acknowledges many Route 66s but gladly found his own. He sums up in the linal chapter by drawing in truly egalitarian breadth from sociologists, a fiction writer, and a Route 66 writer. Route 66 assuages their pangs of loneliness with the balm of togetherness in divisive culture of individualism. Lonely travelers looking for meaning in the comfort of shared experiences past, pesent, and future: Route 66 carries ligious overtones. Dunaway prefers lo write that "Route 66 is a road of dreams." His exploration ends in self-discovery as much as of the real road.

Dunaway's personal mission in print extends to readers both an accessible and eventful intellectual trip. Stimulating serious reflection after various interviews, his writing simulates the occasional way many take lessons from life.

Dunaway reasons but not syllogistically like historians. But can his discovered essence of Route 66 shared by so many, because it is an acknowledged road of dreams, only beckon ceaseless searching for a more secure emotional mooring? Likely, unless one arbitrarily stops critical reflection about it. Traditional academic historians will likely remain unbidden to Route 66 by the way and what Dunaway has written. But scholars of popular culture and cultural geography as well as the average historically minded reader will welcome his contribution to a growing dialogue about a vital subject.

The three CDs of the original radio broadcasts contrast and often pallidly. Their more informational content probes timidly. Prejudice becomes a minor theme whose dissonance contradicting the white idyll about Route 66 loses the poignancy and sharper correction of the historic record Dunaway mobilized in the book. Route 66 celebrities resonate, although the "little people" Dunaway gave voice to in the book are heard intermittently. Actor Martin Milner of Route 66 fame introduces a large cas of respondents, singers, musicians, and readers, replacing Dunaway's serious written soul-searching. His enter taining oral story, a discursive and occasionally gratuitous mosaic, contributes to the increasingly familiar stock of Route 66 lore.

Reviewed by Keith A. Sculle
Illinois Historic Preservation Agency

Illinois HERITAGE 19