Before I Die
Roy’s, the Cemetery, and the Ghost Watching Me
Neon Dawn, Roy’s Motel & Café, Amboy, California.
Available as a fine art print on my website. Click the image to view details.
When I photograph a landscape, I don’t pull the camera out right away. I look. Really look.
For most of my life I moved too fast. I noticed things, but I didn’t see them. The camera slows me down. It forces attention. And attention changes you.
Roy’s Motel & Café in Amboy is one of the most photographed signs on Route 66. Magazines. Fashion shoots. Movies. You drive through the brutal flat Mojave and suddenly—neon. It feels like a lighthouse in a sea of dust.
Cell Phone photo from the Amboy Crater
Here’s the trap:
How do you create something new with something already iconic?
That question almost ruins the experience. It turns you into a performer instead of a witness.
So I walked. I circled the sign. I studied it.
Cell phone of the city limit sign
And then I found the cemetery.
Cell phone photo of the cemetery.
Wooden crosses. Some broken. Some fallen. No polished marble. No names on any of them. Just rocks outlining mounds in hard desert soil. Only the American flag suggests someone still remembers.
and is old glory…
That’s when it hit me how unforgiving the Mojave is. Those crosses aren’t weathered for effect. They’re eroding. Early 1900s railroad families buried in a place that does not forgive.
Roy’s glows like it might live forever.
Those crosses are already disappearing.
I AM ROUTE 66
In 2026, Route 66 reaches its centennial. A hundred years of movement, migration, survival, reinvention. I Am Route 66 is an officially recognized centennial project — not about the road itself, but about the people who stand on it now, adding their own line to its history.
The I Am Route 66 project changed me in ways I didn’t expect, especially the third prompt:
Before I die…
Bob Mullins wrote:
“Before I die I would like to travel the entire Route 66 Mother Road.”
He didn’t get to.
