If one uses history for an excuse to travel, it might be helpful to decide beforehand who is the authority on the places you will see. After a lifetime of wondering I have, in effect, thrown out dry academic opuses, written by a cloistered class. I have learned not to trust what Oscar Wilde labeled professional history — as ”Nothing more than gossip.” I also am very aware that conquering army’s have always directed majors whose job description could be defined as “public relations propagandist / historian,” as one of the spoils of war is for the winner to appear as anything but confused.

I have come to believe that the “genetic memory” of walking the talk is far more accurate than any stay-at-home professor could ever hope for. Yes, I know I may have offended academics by ending that sentence in a preposition. Yes, as a Celtic descendant of ancient Europe (Swiss mountaineer, French Hugonaunt, Scots Highlander) I know, having walked the battlefield at the rural Alamance, North Carolina, that the first shot of the American Revolutionary War was fired at a redcoat long before that claimed by ivy league universities as happening just down the road at Concord.

So what does all this have to do with Route 66?

If your authority on visiting what is left of the authentic asphalt of the “Mother Road” route of Western America is a nostalgic BxW TV show featuring the incredible “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” Corvette, I suggest you take a look at our www.RVTravelMagazine.com/hackberry.HTML, where one is parked at a historic gas station in Arizona. If your attraction is the song, “Get your kicks, on Route 66,” then cross the Colorado to the bar of the hotel where movie stars Clark Gable and Carol Lombard honeymooned, and hoist a glass to the civil rights pioneer Nat King Cole, uniting America from, “Chicago, to LA,” and, “On The Road Again, freedom fighter Willie Nelson.

What the true cultural tourist should use as a true historical reference here is gathering an understanding by actually following footsteps. Having crossed a portion of the Mojave, on horseback, leading a packtrain, I can tell you Jeddah Strong Smith — the first American to follow the natural way through the desert on what was to became the “National Trail” — needed a camp with grazing for his horses, and water. I know, as Jed knew, that a tree growing alongside of a dry wash, feeding a dry lake, was a good place to dig, or die. This is why I have the notion to return to the “shoetree” just outside of Amboy and tack up a horseshoe as a monument to “Parson” Smith, who I call in my book, “Search For A Shadow Of The Past,” the ultimate Western explorer.

There is no question that author Jon Steinbeck, who labeled Route 66 “The Mother Road,” in his famous Grapes Of Wrath, passed by the “shoetree,” or perhaps himself camped in the shade along with “Oakies” during the depression escaping the ecological disaster —perhaps a pre-global warming message— of winds blowing away topsoil. Steinbeck also was a witness other causal natural disasters as a California draught, that may one day send bankrupt brush fire survivor the other way on what he also called “the great American escape route” of Route 66.

What I would like to find out as a amateur “feel the heartbeat of the earth through my moccasins” historian is if the other personality of Route 66, Woody Guthrie —a noted Dustbowl survivor— and Steinbeck ever happened to run into each other, before their respective fame, on Route 66, for “Grapes,” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

Guthrie had traveled Route 66, he boasted, enough to run it up to 6,666— back and forth, across the county as whim and winds took him. Hollywood historians adapting the "autobiographical novel," Guthrie called his Bound For Glory, had Woody writing his signature song that has all but overtaken Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, and The Star Spangled Banner, as our national hymn, while setting on top of a freight train. He was however known for scribbling on random sheets of wrapping paper, or paper bags laid open to catch his torrent of words. Those of us who actually hopped a box car know the romanticism of writing anything while buffeted by a blast of wind and coal smoke, just did not happen.

I like to think the verse:
“As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me.”
may have had something to do with that the highway through the endless Cadiz Valley back-dropped by the Bullion Mountains, was inspired by California’s remnant of Route 66.

Here is another amateur historian hypothesis, just as dramatic as the Six Degrees of Separation, as seen on TV. Could it have been possible that writer Steinbeck, doing his accidental research, driving the highway may have come across a guitar player setting in the shade of the “shoetree?” Did they share a moment of togetherness of thought, before “moving-on?”