One thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine miles from Chicago.
One thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine miles from Los Angeles.
You are standing at the exact center of Route 66. The sign behind you says so. The math is symmetrical and verifiable and the symmetry is, in the way of all good symmetry, slightly meaningless — the road did not know it had a center, and neither did the people who drove it. They were just going.
Going west, mostly. Going away from something. Going toward something they had been told was better, which is a different thing from knowing it was better.
The Midpoint Cafe has been here since 1928. It has been a diner and a gas station and a rest stop and a curiosity and a destination and a set piece. In 2001, a Pixar research team arrived in rented longhorn Cadillac limousines — the specific kind of rented vehicle that says: we are from California and we know it and we have decided to lean into it — and they talked to the woman who ran the cafe, a woman named Fran Houser, and they went home and made a movie.
The animated version of this cafe has been seen by more human beings than have visited the town of Adrian in its entire recorded history. Adrian's population in 2020 was 128 people. Cars has been seen by somewhere around a billion.
Fran Houser became Flo. The Midpoint Cafe became Flo's V8 Cafe. The movie was set in a town called Radiator Springs. Radiator Springs was every Route 66 town that I-40 bypassed in 1984 when the interstate went through and the highway didn't, and the traffic that had kept these towns alive turned onto the on-ramp and never came back.
Sixty percent of the original Route 66 towns are gone or dying. The road exists because nostalgia tourism found it, not because it serves any practical transportation function. The tourists drive the road because the road is the point, which is a different relationship to infrastructure than the Okies had when they drove through here in the 1930s and '40s.
The Okies were leaving. They were leaving Pampa, sixty miles north of here. They were leaving Amarillo. They were leaving the Black Sunday dust cloud — April 14, 1935, a wall of darkness that turned noon into midnight and buried livestock alive and drove people indoors and stayed — and they were headed to California on this road because this road went to California and California was the word they used for "somewhere else."
A man named Woody Guthrie lived in Pampa for eight years. He was there for Black Sunday. He learned to play guitar from an unnamed Black musician the locals called Spider Fingers, whose actual name was never written down anywhere that survived. Guthrie went to New York and wrote a song about the land he had driven away from.
"This Land Is Your Land." February 1940. Written about the Panhandle.
Nobody in Amarillo claims it.
What Fran Houser actually negotiated with Pixar — and what she didn't. The Route 66 nostalgia economy versus the towns it claims to celebrate. And the Okie migration numbers, county by county, from the 1930s census that Amarillo has never put on a historical marker — Act Two.
[$0.99 · inkwell.wiki/route66-midpoint]
Next: This is the center of the road that carried everything out. The canyon is 40 miles east. Someone left a mark at the Lighthouse trailhead. Start there.