Drive (20 page)

The government also maintained its steadfast defence of the Iraq War. Though the weapons of mass destruction weren't there and the putative ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were a complete canard, the anti-war chant “No Blood for Oil” is too simplistic. The United States gets far more of its oil from Canada and Mexico than from the Middle East. But while America's neighbours, especially the northern one, seem politically stable, many oil-producing nations in the world aren't so lucky: civil war looms in Nigeria, nationalization threatens in Bolivia, nutty demagogue Hugo Chavez rules in Venezuela and oil is a political football in Russia. All of which suggests the United States may become more reliant on Mideast oil rather than less. So it seems likely that petroleum was part of the rationale for the invasion of Iraq—or at least a nifty ancillary benefit. But little has worked out well over there, and oil production in the country has remained lower than it was before the war. Nine months after Bush's “addicted” speech,
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman wrote: “And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they're fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil?”

High gas taxes long ago forced Europeans and others into smaller, more efficient cars and made them think about how much they drive. Even in Germany, a country with a robust auto industry and an abiding love for fast, well-engineered cars, the government raised gas taxes by three cents a year for five years in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Any such policy would be a tough sell in the United States, with its powerful oil and automobile lobbies, tax-averse population and succession of politicians who, since Jimmy Carter was run out of Washington,
haven't had the guts to ask the American people to make any sacrifices. (In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the country might have been willing to make sacrifices, asking people to go shopping was the best the Bush administration could do.) Even without increased taxes, though, the price of gas is likely to stay high. Additional geopolitical tensions aside, the demand created by the roaring economies of China and India could make oil even more expensive. And if climate change means we'll endure more hurricanes like Katrina—or even if we're just entering a period of more and more severe tropical storms—we may find ourselves at the mercy of hard-to-predict and painful shortages and price spikes.

Perhaps spooked by what high gas prices might do to the sales of some of its least-efficient vehicles, in 2006, as gas headed to $3 a gallon (and, in some places, higher), GM launched a promotion to woo Californians and Floridians to buy certain models, including Hummers and other SUVs, by pegging the cost of a gallon of gas at $1.99. Under the scheme, the company refunded the difference between the average price at the pump in the state and the $1.99 cap for one year. Maybe GM got the idea to adopt a standard drug pushers' ploy after hearing the president say the country was addicted.

THE DISCOVERY OF OIL
in Red Fork, now part of West Tulsa, in 1901 led to an economic boom in what was then Indian territory, especially after the massive Glenn Pool oil field strike of 1905. By 1914, Oklahoma produced more than a third of American oil, and by 1920, the city had a population of seventy-two thousand and was home to hundreds of oil companies. The output started declining in the 1930s, and by the early 1980s, Tulsa's status as an oil capital was just a memory—and today Oklahoma pumps just 3 percent of the nation's crude.

The brief prosperity did leave Tulsa with a solid cultural legacy, including the Philbrook Museum of Art, and the fruits of an
ambitious building boom from the first third of the 1900s. And since art deco was the style of the time, that's what Tulsans built. The stunning Boston Avenue Methodist Church, completed in 1929, is perhaps the city's most dramatic example of the style, but there are impressive buildings throughout the central core. Those charms are apparently lost on the more than 900,000 residents of the metropolitan area, most of whom seem determined to live anywhere but downtown, and that means the greater Tulsa area inevitably suffers from sprawl. Even the city itself, with a population of almost 400,000, has a density of just 2,150 people per square mile.

Eventually, we gave up looking for a hotel in a cool part of town and checked in at our original destination. At the front desk, a cheerful young woman with a pixie cut and freckles sympathized with our plight. She couldn't recommend anything within walking distance and suggested we take a cab up to Brady Village. She also offered to call us one because we'd be wasting our time trying to flag anything. (Along with taking us to our destination, our Lebanese taxi driver explained that the people who worked downtown started emptying out of their offices at four o'clock and the afternoon rush hour was over by six o'clock. We'd just missed it.)

As a bar district, Brady Village was hurting. Once again, that shouldn't have been the case. Located near a cross-town expressway and not far from college campuses, it's a section of town dominated by old warehouses—just the kind of area being transformed into entertainment districts in cities all across the continent, including just down Route 66 in Oklahoma City. Plus, the area is home to two popular entertainment venues, the Brady Theatre and Cain's Ballroom. Though it has since hosted a variety of acts, including Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Wilco, Cain's is a seminal site in the history of Western swing music because during the Depression, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys—best known for their signature song, “Take Me Back to Tulsa”—recorded their popular radio show there. Later, in 1978, Cain's was one of the few
places the Sex Pistols played during their disastrous and shortlived U.S. tour.

Apparently, location and history aren't always enough. When we got to Brady Village, the cabbie stopped on a deserted, dimly lit street and admitted he didn't know much about the area and so could offer us no suggestions. When we got out of the cab, we saw only a few bars and restaurants and, even though it was a Thursday night, they weren't busy. Nor did we see people on the streets. The most appealing option of an uninspiring lot was a place called Lola's at the Bowery, which had two rooms—one with a sloppy jazz trio and one with a long, polished wooden bar. We sat at the bar and ordered dinner and drinks.

The bartender was a small, thin, fey man with bleached blond hair who had lived in several U.S. cities before returning to Tulsa. When he told us he lived in a downtown condo, we were surprised to hear the place had downtown condos. He admitted he'd lost his original optimism for Brady Village—slow nights will do that to people who rely on tips—and wasn't even sure Tulsa would make it: “I'm so frustrated.” He sounded as though he was about to cry.

Later in the evening, before he called us a cab, he told us about a conversation he'd had with a woman on the next treadmill at his fitness club. Recognizing him, she asked where he was working now; when he told her, she said, “Oh, I love the martinis there.” What she didn't like was the location; the problem was that if she and her friends went downtown, they needed a designated driver. The implication was that if they went to a bar near where they lived, they could drink and sneak home on back streets and not have to worry about cops.

As I thought about this story, it dawned on me that sprawl encourages impaired driving. People heading out for a night on the town, or even a dinner that includes a bottle of wine, don't want to take a cab because they can't flag one at the end of the night—and they have to travel so far they couldn't afford the fare anyway. So they drink and drive.

10
Route 66 (Part Three)

The Long and Lucrative Road

BURMA-SHAVE SIGNS
—displaying jingles promoting a brand of brushless shaving cream—first appeared along a Minnesota road in 1925, but they may be best remembered as part of Route 66 lore. Spaced about one hundred feet apart in sets of five or six, the small wooden signs were easily readable by people in cars going thirty-five or forty miles an hour. The rhymes were corny—“This cream makes the/Gardener's daughter/Plant her tu-lips/Where she oughter/Burma-Shave,” or “A Man A Miss/A Car A Curve/He kissed the Miss/And missed/The Curve/Burma-Shave”—but wildly popular, boosting the shaving cream to number two in the market. By the time Phillip Morris bought Burma-Shave in 1963 and started taking down the signs, more than five hundred jingles, many written by the public, had appeared on roadsides across the country. Perhaps they were too hokey for the marketing department at a big corporation, but it's also true that interstate speeds made the little signs all but unreadable. Now, huge billboards put up by businesses—hotels, restaurants and attractions, for example—and evangelical Christians fight for the attention of highway drivers.

Ever since Cyrus Avery used his influence to bring Route 66 by the front doors of his tourist court, café and service station, the Main Street of America has been about making money. That's just one more reminder of how central the car is to the world economy. For decades, General Motors was the largest corporation on the planet, while Ford, Chrysler and several oil companies weren't far behind. Steel, rubber, glass and plastics industries also
benefited from automobile manufacturing, while many other businesses grew rich catering to drivers.

Even though a lot of the old motels, diners and other enterprises have closed, nostalgia tourism may be the last great hope for the Mother Road. Brad Nickson, a small, dark-haired man who wore running shoes and jeans without a belt, is the Tulsa County representative for the Oklahoma Route 66 Association, a group of more than three hundred people dedicated to promoting the past and present of the old road. Born on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the birth of Route 66, he moved to Tulsa from Texas in 1997 to work for a software firm. Chris and I met him for lunch at the Metro Diner on Eleventh Avenue. Now mostly a busy but otherwise unremarkable strip of light industry, fast-food joints and used car lots, Eleventh is dotted with the occasional gem from the past, including the Desert Hills, a renovated 1953 motel with rooms lined up diagonally to save space on the lot and a gorgeous neon sign featuring a giant green cactus. But most of the past is gone: Nickson's organization had planned to help a Tastee-Freez outlet repaint its sign and building, but the franchise closed. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “we don't get there in time.”

The state has just over four hundred miles of the old road, the most in the country, but the Oklahoma Department of Transportation, which needed some convincing just to allow the city to erect a sign at the exit to Eleventh Street, remains reluctant to put up Route 66 signs. “I've heard their reasoning is they don't think it is a safe highway,” said Nickson. But the bureaucrats finally designated the old road a scenic byway, and if the association can obtain similar status from the feds, money from Washington is a possibility.

Small towns struggle to attract travellers to their Route 66 legacy, but so do bigger centres. “Tulsa's had a long-term problem,” explained Nickson, “because once you hit Catoosa, it's real easy just to take the interstate all the way through Tulsa and
suddenly you're on your way to Oklahoma City and you have no clue of what all you're missing here.” But in 2004, the city hosted the International Route 66 Festival, which pumped nine million dollars into the local economy—and spurred the Desert Hills to refurbish its sign.

Tulsa County also launched a fifteen-million-dollar project to revitalize its twenty-four miles of Route 66. The money, raised through a voter-approved one-cent increase in the sale tax, will improve streetscapes; add decorative gateways; erect a sculpture of Avery and a Model A Ford meeting a horse and wagon from the oil fields at the Cyrus Avery Route 66 Memorial Bridge; and build the Route 66 Experience, which, though Nickson avoids the word “museum,” will be an interactive museum. In addition, the city saved a sixty-foot sign for the old Meadow Gold dairy in 2004, when the building was being demolished to make room for a car dealership. The restored sign will go up somewhere else. The long list of ideas to revive Route 66 would have cost eighty million dollars, he explained, “So there were some tough choices to make.”

After lunch, Nickson invited us on a tour, put on oversized aviator sunglasses and led us to his black PT Cruiser Limited Edition. When I asked if he was much of a car guy, he demurred. But I noticed that he kept his six-year-old PT Cruiser in immaculate condition—most days he drives his Chevy pickup—and had added an eight ball to the top of the gear selector and hung black fuzzy dice from the mirror. “It's one of the most fun cars I've ever owned,” he said, and it later came out that he was a founding member of the Tulsa Area PT Cruisers, a local car club. He'd also sold a beloved two-door 1953 Ford Ranch Wagon so he and his wife could buy their first house in Tulsa, and his father had been a hot rodder. More than that, though, Nickson's demeanour changed noticeably once we were in the car. In the diner, he'd seemed reserved, nervous and a little nerdy, but behind the wheel he loosened up, laughed at our jokes and revealed his own dry
sense of humour, teasing me about my old car and suggesting I take advantage of one of the many used car lots in town.

Used car salesmen may suffer from a reputation as cartoonishly shady characters with slick patter, but more than twice as many people buy pre-owned vehicles as new ones. It may not be as lucrative as manufacturing automobiles, but there's still a lot of money to be made selling cars. Or renting them. Nickson showed us the building where Thrifty Car Rental started in 1958. With a thousand locations in sixty-four countries, the company is now one of the largest in an industry that started in 1918 when Walter L. Jacobs, at the age of twenty-two, started renting a dozen Model T Fords in Chicago. Within five years, his revenues had reached one million dollars. In 1923, Jacobs sold the business to John Hertz, who changed the name to Hertz Drive-Ur-Self System and then sold it to GM in 1926. It later had a great rivalry with Avis, which started when Warren Avis opened up shop at Detroit's Willow Run Airport in 1946. In response to being the second-largest rental agency, Avis launched its celebrated “We Try Harder” advertising campaign in 1963—and tripled its market share. The original businesses on Route 66 were mom-and-pop operations, and though most of them are now gone, Nickson is convinced there's a growing fascination with the old highway. He suggested that different people are drawn to different elements of it, including the architecture, the history, the economics or even the music. (As he drove us around, he played a recording of the
Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour
show. It was the episode about places, which I thought was a bit calculated, though I appreciated the effort.) Taking a trip on the old road is also a great excuse for people to slow down a bit or simply enjoy a great drive. His main interest is the history, but Nickson, whose grandfather ran a Holiday Inn in Gallup, New Mexico, is increasingly fascinated by the economics. “Route 66 has always been a commercial road,” he said. “It's still a commercial road and it will probably always be a commercial road.”