Still Searching —
borrowed from the portrait, ties the whole piece together
The Hum of the Road
I love traveling Route 66 with friends. But if I’m being honest, I love it alone much more.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy the company. It’s that conversation is a distraction, and I don’t mean that the way it sounds. When someone is in the passenger seat, I see less. I notice less. The road becomes background to whatever we’re talking about.
But alone — radio off, Spotify off, nothing but the dotted line and the hum of tires on pavement and the landscape sliding past — something happens. I get hypnotized. Not in a dangerous, falling-asleep-at-the-wheel way. In the way that silence, real silence held long enough, stops being empty and starts being full.
The things I bury because they’re too painful or too complicated to make room for — they surface. They don’t ask permission. They just show up, riding shotgun whether I invited them or not.
Dirt Roads, Caliche, Asphalt, concrete, even bricks, route 66 is like America in that it is a melting pot of road surfaces.
Recently a road trip — not on 66, but 36 hours of driving — gave me that kind of silence. There’s a situation that has vexed me for close to a year, and I’ve done what I always do with the hard ones: I’ve stayed busy. I’ve stayed distracted. It took all those hours of hum and dotted line before I could actually listen to what I was feeling.
ROAD PHOTO — brick road]
Route 66 holds the ghosts of so many triumphs and tragedies, so many broken hearts and dreams achieved, that if you listen to enough stories the romance begins to lift. And underneath it you start to see echoes of your own life. Maybe not the exact words. But a distorted echo — close enough to recognize, warped enough to make you pay attention.
[
ROAD PHOTO — redbud highway or rolling Oklahoma road]
A few weeks ago I shared the historical facts about how I came to ask total strangers the three questions at the heart of I Am Route 66:
I am... I regret... Before I die...
I have a confession. I lied. Well — kind of.
David Allen Corbin, one of Amarillo’s best artists and friend: “I am still searching for the meaning of life”
