Read El Portal

There are few highways that have the iconic, near mythic status that Route 66 holds in American culture. Route 66 stretched some 2,500 miles between Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California. Route 66 became a symbol of the open road. It was America’s Pilgrims’ Road, where folks in the East or Middle-West could escape to the western reaches of the United States. In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Route 66 offered Okies a way out of a state ravaged by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Jack Kerouac mentions the iconic highway in On the Road. Large swaths of Route 66 have since been absorbed by five Interstate Highways (55, 44, 40, 15, and 10). Although Route 66 is no longer with us, its legacy still lingers in the West.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 12):

HIGHWAY 66 IS THE main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield—over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”

[To] go west: 1) If something goes west, it is lost, damaged, destroyed, or spoiled in some way; and 2) (British & Australian, old-fashioned) if someone goes west, they die.*

The West has become synonymous with ruggedness, adventure, desert climates, and shootouts amongst outlaws and lawmen. In American society, the West is where the nation must meet its foreordained destiny, amongst the plains, deserts, and great, snow-capped mountains. This same thinking believes the West is a place where prosperity is found with prospector’s gold pan or farmer’s plow. However, throughout history the West has often been synonymous with death. The ancient Egyptians buried their dead on the western banks of the great Nile River. The West is where the blazing sun sets at the end of the day. More specifically, the West is where the sun goes to die at night. It is renewed the next day by rising from the East. During World War One, British and Australian soldiers might say their dead comrades went West. Although the West has been appropriated by the sweet words of progress, hope, and life, it is death that is familiar with and even comfortable in the West.

*Sources: Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary & Thesaurus and Free Dictionary

Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.” — Jingo (Discworld series)

Finally, in this discussion of water in the desert, I should make note of a distinctive human contribution, one which has become part of the Southwestern landscape no less typical than the giant cactus, the juniper growing out of solid rock or the red walls of a Navajo canyon. I refer to the tiny oasis formed by the drilled well, its windmill and storage tank. The windmill with its skeleton tower and creaking vanes is an object of beauty as significant in its way as the cottonwood tree, and the open tank at its foot, big enough to swim in, is a thing of joy to man and beast, no less worthy of praise than the desert spring.

Water, water, water…. There is no shortage of water in the desert by exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. ” — Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (p. 126)

In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them. It goes 444 miles (the distance from Boston to Washington) by aqueduct from the Feather River to south of L.A. It goes in man-made rivers, in siphons, in tunnels. In a hundred years, actually less, God’s riverine handiwork in the West has been stood on its head. A number of rivers have been nearly dried up. One now flows backward. Some flow through mountains into other rivers’ beds. There are huge reservoirs where there was once desert; there is desert, or cropland, where there were once huge shallow swamps and lakes.” –Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (p. 12)

Here’s Bryan Cranston reading Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”