Rediscovering Route 66

For years, I spent summers traveling across our country’s highways and byways in my family’s trusted Toyota, captive to my dad’s obsession to “cruise the roadways of America.”

As a young adult, I eschewed this type of free-spirited wandering, and opted for more carefully planned itineraries and booked-months-ahead hotel reservations that would ensure a hot meal and clean sheets.

As I entered my thirties, however, I tired of the accountability that my careful planning provided. Sure, I was eating great meals…but my sense of adventure was dulled. There was no pulling off the side of the highway to watch the Northern Lights from the roof of the car. No chasing the end of a rainbow and ending up halfway across Iowa. I couldn’t remember the last time I followed my nose to a roadside stand for boiled peanuts and jerky.

So without a hotel reservation in sight, I called my dad, and we embarked on a no-rules adventure that took us from Colorado to California. We visited the grave of Doc Holliday, watched bighorn sheep battle by the roadside, and ate a sandwich the size of my head. When we couldn’t hold our eyes open, we pulled into Route 66 motels that boasted original carpeting and rustic wood paneling.

Veering up California’s interior, we followed a tip from a local and found ourselves in search of a folk art installation known as Bottle Tree Ranch, outside of Victorville. It wasn’t hard to find. From a distance, you saw the sun glittering off the canopy of Elmer Long’s bottle forest. Up close, I realized that Elmer’s “ranch” consisted of nearly 200 structures adorned with various bottles and whirligigs. Elmer, working in the yard, was more than happy to talk about roaming the desert for detritus, and repurposing it into art. A rowboat filled with bottles fills a small clearing in the forest. An old missile forms the trunk of one rusty sapling. As the breeze picks up, the forest takes on a life of its own, spinning and creaking and tinkling in the wind.

As we continued to explore the forest, we saw rifles, kitchen colanders and tractor wheels. Chains, old signage and a tricycle danced in the treetops. Long, who spent years working at the nearby cement plant, is always tinkering. His beard sways wildly as he talks to us about his life’s work.

Standing with my dad in Elmer’s recycled thicket, I found my inner adventurer again. Don’t get me wrong, The Smithsonian is great. But I’ll take a bottle tree forest under a desert sun any day.