Canyons, cozy dogs, and the meaning of the West

Sunset, Dec, 1998 by Peter Fish

To get to Hackberry, Arizona, you drive west from Seligman until the red sandstone walls of Crozier Canyon rise up around you. Then you're in Hackberry, which consists of a few houses, a post office, and Bob Waldmire's visitor center - and the worn, two-lane highway that brought you here. A marker reads "Historic Route 66," telling you you're on America's Main Street, or what's left of it.

Oregon Trail, Santa Fe Trail, the trails of Father Serra and Geronimo. There are paths that run not just across the American landscape but across the American mind, and Route 66 is among the most resonant of these. It may be, I think, among the last.

I came to Hackberry at the invitation of two Als. One is Al Richmond, who works at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The other is Alfred Runte, a distinguished historian who writes about railroads and national parks. They told me Hackberry and Crozier Canyon, and Route 66, were things I needed to see.

Standing on the highway shoulder, Richmond tells me, "This is part of the longest original stretch of Route 66 in the country."

Runte points up to where bulldozers are quarrying red rocks from the side of Crozier Canyon. "They're scalping it off."

The highway that runs through Hackberry and Crozier Canyon acquired its name and number in 1926. At that point, only 800 of its 2,400 miles were paved. But by 1937 a concrete and asphalt U.S. Highway 66 took travelers from Chicago's Grant Park southwest to Santa Monica, along the way loping through prairies and deserts and those towns later immortalized by the Bobby Troup song: "Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino ..."

That song, with its syncopated incantation of place names, indicates what happened to Route 66. It became the symbol of American momentum. Everyone's family traveled it. The highway was the mother road for the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath and, later, the route of another set of American icons. While I Love Lucy did not emphasize the fact that the Ricardos and Mertzes were traveling cross country on Route 66, they surely must have been: their path led them from Albuquerque - where Ethel sang "Short'nin' Bread" while waving a white lace hanky - out to Hollywood, where Lucy got Richard Widmark's autograph on a grapefruit.

Today very little remains of Route 66's halcyon days. The interstates killed it. Bypassed by tourism, many of the towns that depended on the highway began to fade. In some places even the landscape the road traversed is threatened.

That, says Alfred Runte, is what is happening at Crozier Canyon. The canyon's brilliant red walls are being quarried. As a historian and a Route 66 enthusiast, Runte considers this an abomination - destroying the scenery along one of the longest remnant stretches of America's most historic highway. "There are rocks all over the place," Runte says. "You don't have to use these rocks. This place should have been a state park years ago."

Naturally, the people who do the quarrying have a different interpretation. They have lived around Hackberry for seven generations. It is their land. They can do what they want with their own property.

I stop taking notes. I feel I have grasped the story. Preservation versus development; private property versus public good. Because we've been standing in front of Bob Waldmire's Old 66 Visitor Center, and because he offers me iced tea, I feel it only polite to go inside. The minute I do, the story gallops away from me.

Waldmire arrived in Hackberry in 1992 and turned an old gas station into his visitor center. That term does not adequately describe what he has wrought. It's a grotto, a shrine, crowded with some mementos clearly related to Route 66 - Burma-Shave signs - and others less so, like photographs of Leo Tolstoy and John F. Kennedy. A poster tallies the number of foreign visitors Waldmire has received. "From 62 countries," he says. "And I've seen 62 different species of birds here." Dominating the jumble are Waldmire's artwork and maps, done in the information-packed style of "Ripley's Believe It or Not." His masterpiece is a foldout map of Route 66, with points of historic and scenic interest crowded onto every square inch of it.

But the highway has a rival to Waldmire's affections, and that is the Cozy Dog. One corner of the center is devoted to the Cozy Dog, the world's first hot dog on a stick, and its inventor, Ed Waldmire, Bob's late father. "Even if he had never invented the hot dog on a stick," Waldmire tells me, "my father's life would still be memorable."

Waldmire's center has become a symbol Of Route 66 hospitality. But he's closing shop. He sold the center and is moving back to Illinois to write his father's biography. One of Waldmire's illustrated signs explains:

"Why is the Visitor Center Closing?

"I can't handle living between 2 new rock quarry operations.

"I can't even get started with the book of my father's life.

"I need to reclaim my pre-66 identity and return to being a reclusive environmental artist and cartoonist."