American Road magazine preview; Spring 2010 (Vol. VIII, No. 1)

• Arizona's Apache TI'ail • Native AIl18I'ICall SC(;IlIC BywilY • Massachusetts' Mohawk Trail

VOLUMf VIIl NUMBER I

Features

Roadside

22

5

Tecumseh: Path ofthe Prophet's Lost Silence In 1917 ""ident' ofT~cumseh.,Michigan, routed an auto trail north to Jackson and 'outh to Toledo, Ohio. Today the Tecunueh Trail continue, to find iu 'oul in the spirit of the greaT Shawnee chief.• THOMAS ARTHUR REPP

Editor's Rambler "All·Americ.n"

8

Write-of-Way Letter, tTom Our Re:Klers.

40 Apache Trail With coyotes howling in it' wilderness, .nd a neon Jadydiving high.bove the City ofMes., the .ncient p""'ge that kc.me the Apache Trail mixe' Whiurum with Roo..,vdt, .nd cowboys with cantin••. ' JOHN MURPHEY

9

Who's Driving? Contest

10 Friends in the Fast Lane: Road Event Retrospect Monument to Carl Filher 1'.1arks Lincoln Highway. Children Send Soldier>

54

Mohawk Trail: Massachusetts' Native Masterpiece Silently the path wo. worn from the ocean of the un to the mount.i", of the sunset. In 1914 that trail bcc=e New EngUnd', fim offici.1 Konk byway.

.AmericAn Ro4JChcc~ Route 66 Grieves Road Arti't Bob Waldmirc.

12

64

Memory Motel lndianhcad Motd, Chippewa F.Us, Wi'consin.· ALICE 8< JOHN WM. R1oc;E

• ANNA LEE BRAUNSTEIN & MIMI "BRONX" MCCULLOUGH

Circle Sky: Native American Scenic Byway

14

Tunnel Vision: News Around the Road Route 66 Canle Gets Clucky. Peg.JU' Poached tTom US 2 Preserving a Checkered Past. Meal. on (Minivan) Wheds. Pony Express Going Postal Squeezable Squaw,?

Stretching acrms the ullgr... pl.im of the Sioux people, the NatlveAmeric.n Scenic Byway seeks to instill touri't< with an understanding of trihal life as it rolls through the reservations of North and South Dakota.· JOEL ARNOLD

21

Diner Days Red Arrow Diner, Manchester, New Hamp'hire.· JESSICA LEVINE

Departments

53

Hollywood Boulevard The Lime RAnger. • TONY CRAIG

36

Route 66 Kicks!

"Something About Mary"

Modest San Fidd, New Mexico, has long been alSOCi.ted with Southwestern crath. Mosaic arti't 1'.1ary Trask puts the pieces together.• JOHN MURPHEY

50 Our National Road

"Mountain Thunder"

69

Gallow.yTotem Pol. Park, Foyil, Oklahom•. • ERIKA NELSON

74

"Peanuts and Crackerjack"

Take yourself out to a minor le.gue baseb.ll game along New Jer'ey', 'tretch of US Highw.y 1. Peter will provide the peanuts.· PETER GENOVESE

78 79

70

Drive the Old Spanish Trail

Inspection Station Today's Top Custom Bike BuiUm. Hoodi.~ Portable Hard Drive Case. Oxo 360" LiquiSeaI~ Tr""d Mug. Mike ButtnjidJ's GuiJe to the Mountaim if' New Memo. Pdic.n" 1030 Micro Ca,•. Lincoln Highway Companion.

Dri"", glide, or chug to Cumberland, where the Western 1'.1arybnd Scenic Railroad continues to let off,te.m.• ROBERT KLARA

60 One to 101

Think Big!

"Goin'Mobile"

The .pirits of Mobile, Alabama, arc ali"", "",II, and ea.ily invoked in the City of Azalea,.· JOHN & KRIS MURPHEY

Advertiser Index Park Place YourCurb,id. Calend.r

80 John Claar's Hitching Post Ro.d GitT, & Souvenir.

76

Thinkin'Lincoln

"Olivers'Twist"

Find fud, friend" and .n affinity for the Father Road .t Oliver', Foothill G., in dipper Gap, Californi•. • JERRY 8< ANNA LEE BRAUNSTEIN

82

American Crossroad Puzzle "D.nces with Wheels"

Editor's Rambler ..All-American..

THOMAS ARTHUR REPP &ce<:UfM> Ediror & An Di'ffiO' REBECCA REPP GmeralMonoger ALLAN BURNS ROBERT KLARA WILLIAM ZINKUS Ed~ors

GUY COOK Webmosr..

ach spring-when the world shakes itselfawake from frosted sleep and sheets of ice melt into blankets ofvetdure-mythoughts rerum to Neah Bay. In my mind I see again that westernmost cornet of these continental United States-a remote section of Washington kissed by the Pacific and encompassed by the Makah Indian Reservation. Whale bones bleachwhite in yellowfields-the trophies oflong-ago tribal hWlfs. Sea stacks cut sharp silhouettes across Shi Shi Beach, chiseled majestic by ocean foam. The Makah Cultural & Research Center-considered by many the finest tribal musewn in the cOlUltry-marks the heart ofthe reservation, telling tales oftotems, cedar-dugwhalingcanoes, and a proud people who put to sea three millennia past.

During the years I lived full-time in the Northwest, a trip to that indomitable slivet was a rite ofspring, a ride taken into the eye ofthe equinox to rejuvenate my own bones and senses.

The Makah Reservation contains no casino. The jingle ofcoins has yet to usurp its trickle of tranquility. Wetlands and mossy forests muffle the bluster ofthe modern day. In that silence, I sought out and hiked the three-quarter-mile trail to Cape Hattery to stand at the westerrunost point in the lower forty-eight states. On the precipice! lingered,gazingout to sea at gull-covered Tatoosh Island, considering my own mortality and the ends ofall things.

The story ofAmerica's Indian tribes is, in many ways, a story about edges. The Makah's saga differs little from that ofothet tribes. Although they embraced the sea as their lifeline-and took their sustenance from the salmon, seals, and gray whales offered up by the waves-their approach to territory remained the same. In the beginning, tribal bolUldaries were soft and blurred, defined only by the sovereignty claimed by each familyor clan. White settlers changed the patterns, scissoring the land into lUlnarurai shapes and stitching their swatches to maps.

Cape Hattery rejoins the pieces. Standingon its edge, one loses perception oflines drawn in the sand. Societal barriers between races, religions, and politics fall away because rime itselfcan find nowhere to cling. Only the horizon endures-an infinite face lUlchanged from the eons before human eyes sawit and began separating one thing from another.

For some time, readers ofAmerican Road have asked me to shape an issue that pays homage to roads named for American Indian leaders and tribes. In doing so, I've been obliged to consider dozens ofhighways worthy ofattention. I made my final selections with an eye to firsts: the 1914 MohawkTrail, an ancient trade route turned early tourist road in Massachusetts; the 1915 Apache Trail, Arizona's cenruries-old thoroughfare forged by Salado Indians; the Native American Scenic Byway evolving-as I write-to connect reservations in North and South Dakota; and the Tecumseh Ttail, a 1917 auto route from Jackson, Michigan, to Toledo, Ohio, that still evokes the spirit ofthe noble Shawnee chief.

The Makah people conrinue to revete the gray whale. The glorious animals remain, lUlaware ofthe esteem in which they are held, migrating each spring through the ageless waters far below Cape Flattery. Peer OVet the brink, and you'll see them in season-swimming to a rhythm sounded long before anyone thought to build altars or armies and tracing that long blue line that COill1ects us all.

E

FOSTER BRAUN Podeon Co-han JOEL ARNOLD ANNA LEE8IJERRY BRAUNSTEIN DAVIDG.CLARK BETH CONWAY JAY A. FOLLIS JILLIAN GURNEY MIMI-BRONX- McCULLOUGH Road,ide C"fllribuwrs PETER GENOVESE JOE HURLEY JILL LIVINGSTON JERRY McCLANAHAN JOHN 81KRISMURPHEY ERIKA NELSON ALlCE8IJOHNWM. RIDGE JOHNNIEV MARKVERNARELLI Deporl1rn'nr Editors JESSICA LEVINE Edirorial A"inonr MICHAEL GASSMANN VIVIAN MOSLEY A.<socio!..Graphic De,;gners LYNN MILLER DAVE PRESTON Produa Reviewers TONY CRAIG AMYC.ELLIOTI SroffPhotographers ROBERTC.CLAAR Road,ide Consulron!

TRACY WAWRZYNIAK

a",u/orion LYNmE NIELSEN Hitching Pan Sole, JENNIFER & PAT BREMER

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Executive Editor • ON OUR WlNDSHIELD: DavidArmstlOngofManchester,Michigan,driveshiocwtomized 1950. Chevy along the 1917 Tecumseh. Trail. Photo by Karl Racenis. OPPOSITE PAGE: Near Neah B.y, Washington, sea stacks .nd tide pools carve a mystic bndscape at the Point of Arches on Shi Shi Beach. Photo by Sunny Walter.

HITCHING POST ORDERS PO Box 3168. Lynnwood. WA 98046 206-369-S7B2 Inielsen@>amerkanroadmagazin".com Sobo:f...... plio,. SlU'i "" l"iI; US; SlUS, Uood>; SQ9S. Ior<igo.AMERlC'oN llO'.IJII .....,irnlI' ...........,,",,, _ " " " tdilor@omtri<anro.dnOllllil• .<on.W. ......." _ Ior ....... ""' .. dJnuttdil_... II<w, .... """"'"' iIlIidt,_IIIng .. AMERlC'oN~ do ... opiniool 01 AMERlC'oN llO'.IJII tdioon .. lUIl

""""""'"iIt<I"".."'....

he road wanders through primeval stone and neon sprawl.

Along the way it embraces a mining town, cowboys tipsy on horses, a lost Dutchman, a diving lady, and miles of

saguaro-studded scenery. Ir began humbly, cenruries ago, as a nerwork of paths used by Salado Indians and larer the Apaches.

But it was water that turned the rough trails into a highway.

byJOHN MURPHEY

S

SPRING 1010

-APACHE TRAilTIRMlt\I: Mesa and Globe.

Arizona DISTANCE: Approx. 9S miles

ROUTE

"Something About Mary" find gallery owner and mosaic artist Mary Trask at the back of her shop in tiny San Fidel, New Mexico.

Dressed in an "Abracadabra~ sleeveless shirt, tan jeans, and work boots, she's re-mudding an adobe wall. The adobes show bits ofcoiled wire, broken glass, bones, rocks, a peach pit, like a huge earthen mosaic. "You caught me dressed for mudding," Mary laughs, wipingherearth-srained hands on her pants.

Mary, blue-eyed, beanpole thin, big with laughter, is ready for the Route 66 world to

I

find her.

Fifteen years ago, she lived a different life.

A native of New England, she applied her talents to theater costume design. During one hectic season, she took a break and applied for a job as a summer camp crafts director. There Mary discovered mosaics during a quick study, when she realized she needed to ~hone her skills at making ashtrays, trivets" andothercrafu.Thecamp pastime stuck with her.

Around the same time Mary met Mike Petzel, a golf course construction supervisor. Both were divorcees with grown kids and found they had new freedom to explore.

Mary spent time in the Southwest; Mike had never ventured "west ofwest Georgia."

Heck, why not New Mexico? Mary found her new business-a boarded-up curio shopon the Internet, and on Thanksgiving Day, 2002, Mike and Mary started new lives on Route 66.

Mike couldn't quit his job right away, so Mary homesteaded alone for five years in the company of her dogs. The early days were tough. People were suspicious of her; kids talUlted the dogs; the local drug dealer drove by, giving her a menacing, "what's up with you" look. But, detennined, she concentrated on rehabilitating the 2.5-acre property and getting the curio running again.

Mary's Internet "steal" turned out ro be a building once owned by another outsider, A.H. Fidel. Bornin 1880 asAbdoo H. Fidel, hegrewup in Roumine, a small hillsidevillage inNabatiye,Lebanon.In 1913 he immigrated to the United States in a wave of Christian

US HIGHWAY 66 traveled from Chia>go to C11lifornia. via Missouri. KIln..... Oklahoma. Tens, New Mexico, and Arizona. The route was decommissioned in 1985.

Arabs escaping religious persecution, poor economic conditions, or conscription in the Ottoman Army. After sevetal yeats of mentoring at a mercantile in Seboyeta, New Mexico, Fidel opened his own business in San Fidel in the adobe, false-front building that is now Gallery66.

He later moved his mercantile to bigger quarters on the west end oftown, butwith the uptick oftraffic on Route 66 in the 19305, he reopened the old store as the Acoma Curio Shop, selling Native American potrery and toutist goods. Despite its strategic position, the store shuttered fouryears after it opened.

ARTFUL OASIS: Situated twenty feet south of the old highway, Gallery 66 is one of three businesses in San Fidel, a small rural community in central New Mexico. The completion of Interstate 40 in the 1970s stripped the village of its commerce. Among the ruins sits Mary's gallery, a whitewashed adobe with perky blue window and door trim, a bright spot along this faded stretch ofhighway.

SPRING z010

Hendy the men, feet bare or moccasin dad, wore a path between the ocean of the sunrise and the mountains in the sunset.

In peacetime they traveled to trade with other tribes. When at war, they crept with hair cut into narrow strips or skin painted with fearsome strokes.

To the east were the Wampanoag, who reaped the benefit of the vast ocean and greeted the strangers on ships that sailed out of the far horizon. In the middle valleys the Pocumtuck harvested squash, beans, and maize from the fertile soil, not knowingthey

S

would soon share the land with white invaders.

From over the mountains came attacks from a

third tribe-the Kdnien'kehJ:ka or "People Flint~ -called Mohawks or "Maneaters" by their enemies. Their name would be immortalized on this footpath that came

of the

to be called the

Mohawk Trail.

With the arrival of the English on the shores of Massachusetts, the forests and rivers along the footpath began to change.

Horses and carts broadened the trail as the English moved ever farther west in search of farmland. Settlers seeking rich soil stopped in the Connecticut Valley, displaced the Pocumcuck, and built towns.

Relations between the native people and the newcomers shifted constantly between barter and battle.

Metacomet, leader of the Wampanoag, initiallyttied to live in peace with theEnglish.

His people inttoduced maize and turkey to the white men and shared a feast with them.

;ao '..

"MOHAWK TRAIL" TERMINI: Orange and Williamstown, Massachusetts DISTANCE: Approx. 40 miles

As English settlements expanded, however, the Wampanoag, too, began to be squeezed from their land. In 1675, to save his homeland, Metacomet led his braves in battle along the trail, laying siege to settlements, in an effort to evict the iIwadingEuropeans.

The town offieerfield suffered destruction at the hands of native tribes. In Greenfield townspeople huddled their homes close together and protected them with pickets.

War made further changes to the footpathduringMetacomet's rampage and nearly one hundred years later when Benedict Arnold widened the track during his march to Fort Ticonderoga. Armywagons wore grooves in the dirt as they carried provisions to outposts along the ttail.

The end ofthe American Revolution freed villages along the trail to develop. At the end of the 1700s the trail became the Fifth Massachusetts Turnpike. Tollboothscollected fees for horseandstagecoach travel. Cattlewere driven along the trail on their way to market.

A pastoral peace reigned over the mountains and dribbled gently into the valleys.

As farms gave way to mills and factories, the railroad competed with the trail for conunercial and private transportation. Towns like North Adams harnessed water power and built mills for wooL cotton, and lumber. In 1875 the completion of the four-and-three-quarter-mile Hoosac Tunnel from Florida, Massachusetts, to North Adams providedeasieraccess to further markets. Yet the railroad would not remain king. In the early 1910s the wotld heralded the coming ofthe automobile.

In 1914 the trail was widened to fifteen feet and pavedwith gravel andoil to accommodate touring cars. Graced with a red and white pole marker, the ancient trade route was now Massachusetts' scenic road. Only then-as some 350 cars traveled the highway each hour during its first peak season-was the path's finished portrait revealed. Lingeringdoubts were erased by 1927when the road's surface was slathered with bituminous material and widened to twenty-four feet to serve the ever-increasing traffic. The romance of the path's early trading days, the footfall of armies marching to war, the rugged creaks of stagecoaches, and the steaming whistles oftrains-all had been part ofa larger work. stanzas ofapoem in motion, strokes brushed and daubed onto a canvas over the course of some four hundred years.

The MohawkTraii was a work ofart.

AMERICAN ROAD

速

The Beat Beneath the Dakotas' Native American Scenic Byway hen the Native American Scenic Byway was still a seed in the minds of a mere

handful ofpeople, Duane Vermillion of rhe Sranding Rock Sioux Tribe scudied a map of rhe Unired Srares. "I looked ar all rhe rribes and scarred

"NATIVE AMERICAN SCENIC BYWAY" TERMINI: Chamberlain, South Dakota, and CaIYlOfl Bal North Dakota DISTANCE: Approx. 350 miles

plottingthem on amap." he says. "Irscruckme that ifyou connected

all me roads that ran through them, it formed amedicine wheel." The medicine wheel is asacred symbol ofrhe Plains Indians, represeming rhe cominuingcycle ofofe and dearh.

byJOEL ARNOLD

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