Larry M. Coleman

This is the second week of a series that will span September: a series of Friday posts based on a selection of pictures I took myself during a walk down Route 66 in Tulsa in August, 2021.

Route 66 is about cars, but it’s about more than that: it’s about the stories people make for themselves in them. Road trips are a form of entertainment that combine the modern 3- or 5- act story structure (beginning of the trip, the fun/weird/revealing/etc. things that happen on the road, and the feelings upon having finally arrived) and also hurl us all the way back to the pre-modern novel era: the picaresque novel.

Don Quixote and the like were enormously successful in their time, even centuries before cars would be invented. They appeal to that part in the psyche that wants to see other things while staying in place. While that story form is rarely used today, when it is done and done right, it still has enormous impact: Forrest Gump was an instant classic and masterpiece, a movie that had a picaresque feel and a road trip he takes on foot. The only two movies worth remembering (or even watching) from the entire National Lampoon series, National Lampoon’s Vacation and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation demonstrate the difference. Christmas Vacation was a good and solid movie that stands on its own as a traditional act-based form, but the reason National Lampoon’s Vacation stands at the top of the dozens of Lampoon movies (most of which you’ve probably never even heard of besides Animal House) is because it was a road trip, pure and simple.

I still remember a road trip I took solely on a whim, even though it was decades ago. A friend had wanted to go to Virginia Beach all summer but hadn’t. It was the last weekend before our senior year of high school, so she and her friend and I hopped in the car and made the 9-hour drive, only to find out in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era that we were driving right into Hurricane Bob, which was supposed to hit Virginia Beach that night. We got lucky and it stayed off the coast, only skirting the shore and knocking down a few trees, but even without that little dash of meteorological spice, I’d still remember it.

I remember the car, a two-door 1986 Ford Escort GLX, black with a red pinstripe and red interior. It wasn’t much bigger than the Fiat Abarth in the picture above, which made it cozy and fun. Think of how different a carefree, spontaneous road trip would be in a sports car like the one next to it or the vanilla SUV in the back.

Now think about a road trip in any of the vehicles below:

Honestly, it’s a microbus. Maker of a million stories. Pick one and make it yours.

I can imagine this car with a fresh coat of wax going down a country road in early summer. A man in the driver’s seat wearing driving gloves. A woman in the passenger seat laughing in her pink and white summer dress. They stop along the roadside to pick a bouquet of fresh wildflowers, put them in the trunk next to the picnic basket and a bottle of champagne rolled in a gingham blanket.

What happens next is up to you. Maybe they find a gorgeous hillside, unroll that blanket, and she says yes to the question he pops her on it in a way that leads to their first child being born nine months later. Or maybe the picnic basket holds two silenced pistols and a pile of secret documents. Maybe they go mushroom picking and, knowing nothing about it, both eat them and die. Or to make that one even worse, only one of them dies.

What did this van used to deliver? Does it deliver something now? The single best work of art I’ve ever come across—and I’ve stood in front of Picassos in Spain, Dalí in his own museum, Monets on more than one continent—is the video game Kentucky Route Zero. It’s the story of a delivery of some household goods in an old truck in much worse shape than this and evolves, piece by piece, into one of those “I’d tell you my favorite part but they’re all my favorite parts” kind of things.

Go deliver something interesting to the world.