2001 Hot Rod Virtual Power Tour - Day Seven, May 9

LIST OF ALL DAYS

Attention: If you were selected as a winner by registering at the Hotchkis booth in Albuquerque, you will be contacted directly by Hotchkis. For more information on Hotchkis, log on to Hotchkis.net

Heading west from Amarillo on I-40 we encountered an overwhelming expanse of sky dwarfing our armada of rods sailing on a smooth, four-lane river of asphalt. What a sharp contrast from the early days of Route 66’s winding concrete trail with tar seams, worn thin by all the Depression-era tin motoring toward an uncertain future. It’s hard to imagine the hopes and anxieties that must have swirled in the minds of those desperate travelers--would their vehicles hold together long enough to reach the Colorado River where they might find back-breaking work on that massive dam project to be named after President Hoover? Or perhaps they might continue to drift from farm to farm as field workers, picking the grapes of wrath as John Steinbeck put it. Who could have guessed that decades later the same sorts of Model Ts and As, and ’30s Fords as well, that traveled the Mother Road would be making a similar trip? Only this time they wouldn’t be rusting, overheated jalopies held together with hemp rope and bailing wire, but painted the colors of hard candy and outfitted with polished, computer-controlled engines.

The contrast sharpens even more upon reading the historical marker at the rest stop a few miles east of the Texas border in New Mexico. This empty scrub-brush landscape dotted with pinon and juniper trees was long dominated by Commanches. From the 1700s until its defeat by the U.S. Army in 1874, this tribe raided every sort of settlement, whether Spanish, Mexican or even Apache. It’s hard to conceive of anyone surviving on such desolate land with only a horse for transportation.

In just a few lifetimes, Route 66 replaced the old horse and cattle trails of the region. In Albuquerque, the Mother Road started out as a dirt street connecting the Old Town with the new one created by the railroad. This linking of old and new, the east and west, is both her essence and significance, pure and simple. The entire way of life that sprung up around the highway--the motels, gas stations, cafes, drive-ins and malt shops--were Mother’s offspring. Yet so many of her children have been scattered or lost their charm and simplicity as Route 66 was eventually bypassed by the modern system of Interstates. The new era she ushered in ultimately claimed her as well, but the same sense of nostalgia for this earlier time drives efforts to restore both the route and the rods.

How fitting, then, that our Power Tour would overflow Albuquerque’s remaining piece of Route 66 (now named Central Avenue) in the Old Town section. Again, the sense of contrast was startling: urban office buildings surrounded by a raiding party, but this time, it was just a bunch of hot rodders trying to find a place to park.