FORGOTTEN AMERICA, ROUTE 66: THE GRAND CANYON AND THE HERO OF THE ROAD

 

"In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."

-President Theodore Roosevelt, May 1903

 

Only a handful of experiences in my life have equaled my first sight of the Grand Canyon. In its quite hazy majesty it offers an experience so overpowering, so larger than life, so humbling and so mesmerizing that no structure, however beautiful, can parallel its beauty.

There is something uniquely personal about America’s natural wonders partly because they have played such a big part in our collective story since the oral traditions of our First Nations to the first European settlements to the expansion west and, in turn, our story has been written in our landscape.

When I first arrived at the South Rim and saw nature’s work spread out before me I was awestruck not only by the spectacular vista but also by how many stories it has seen and since contained throughout the ages.

Walking the Canyon is a journey, but never an exhausting one. Every step, every mile brings you forward to another vista. However, as I began following a trail set up charting the geological evolution of the Grand Canyon in relation to an average lifespan, a light rain began and I opted for a tour bus with option hop-off stops along lookout stations on the way.

Finally, we reached Hermit’s Rest, a stop built for prospectors in 1914 with the use of local stones and wood. This stop for wary travelers was the idea and design of Mary Jane Colter as an addition to the Santa Fe Railroad’s Hermit’s Rim Road, a response to Bright Angel Trail which was charging a toll for wayfarers.

It dawned on me, learning this, how much of Route 66 and its surroundings was created and built by innovators filling the needs of their fellow citizens. If the road was initially built to expedite travel to the West Coast, much of what made it iconic was designed by artists, entrepreneurs and dreamers to quench curiosity, serve other travelers and essentially build the largest living memorial to our national heritage. It’s almost ironic, then, that Route 66 itself, the guardian of our culture, has not until recently been afforded the same consideration.

Fittingly, though, my last stop in my journey through Route 66 was Seligman. The city prides itself as the birthplace of the Mother Road, but it is also where its new lease on life began. Here in 1987, Angel Delgadillo, a great visionary and the true savior of America’s Highway, established the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona. The mission of the association, restoring historic markers throughout Arizona along the road, soon spread to every state traversed by Route 66. Born in 1927, Delgadillo can be said to have been raised by the road. Born in a house along the newly constructed road, Route 66 played an important role in the Delgadillo family from early on. Some of his earliest childhood memories were of the Okies passing through the road by his house on their journey to the promised lands of California and then the return of G.I.’s after the war hoping to begin a new life on the Coast. In 1950 he opened a barbershop and established his livelihood on the road he had always called home.

Eventually, he would see the decline of the road with the coming on I-40 and the loss of memories that came with it.

“At first it was so sad, and then I got so angry. Everybody just forgot about us,” Delgadillo once said. But his grief turned to action and the very continued existence of Route 66 is a result of his call to action. At 99 years of age, Mr. Delgadillo is still a presence on the road though his family now runs much of the business. Still, a trip through Route 66 would not be complete without a stop honoring the Delgadillo family and so I made a stop at Delgadillo's Snow Cap Drive-In, a popular ice cream and sno-cone stand opened by Angel’s late brother Juan in 1953. I was much pleased to find that the current staff of the stand continues the tradition of Juan’s peculiar sense of humor. On my visit, for instance, a server wore a badge identifying him as the janitor and when customers, probably assuming it was some mistake, were invited to take a closer look at the badge, water would squirt out form behind the tag.

Seligman would be the last stop before reaching the end of my journey, Las Vegas. This I won’t write about since I covered Vegas in a series of articles a few years ago after celebrating my 40^th there. Besides, Seligman is the best place to end any series on Route 66. Here the road began, here an ambitious young man built a business during the road’s heyday, here that same young man saw the road he had always called home begin to die. But here is where that now older man brought it back to life to enthrall new generations of travelers. If the story of Angel Delgadillo is the story of Route 66, Route 66 is in many ways the story of America, a tale of innovation and courage, of hard work and challenges, of dreams and losses and, ultimately, of second chances.