A Route 66 icon

We cruised our way out of Oklahoma, through museums and hokey little towns, capturing a border sign at Texola and the leaning water tower in Groom, but we were really aiming for Amarillo. In fact, we were aiming for Albuquerque, but we were doing so much lollygagging and having so much fun just poking our way along old 66 that there was no way we were going to make it all the way across Texas in daylight, and we ended up settling for “Tucumcari Tonite“.

But that’s another story. A whole other bunch of other stories. The big thing about Amarillo is that just outside is one of the most famous Route 66 icons – and it’s not even on Route 66!

The Cadillac Ranch lies a few hundred metres south of I-40, and Route 66 (as “Indian Hill Road”) is about the same distance north of the interstate. Not really visible from the old road unless you’ve got telescopic eyesight. We had to get onto I-40 and then onto the south frontage road before we even got to the parking area, which is just a wide spot on the verge.

Originally, we’d planned to have MissMarkey from Oxford with us, and she had wanted to see the Cadillac Ranch. We could have done it – I’d do just about anything for MissMarkey – but it would have involved a lot of hard driving to get from Washington DC to Amarillo in the five days available to her. As well as do all the other stuff we all wanted to do. Regretfully she sent us off and flew home to England, but before she left she gave me a Route 66 shirt, which I loved immediately. I’m not a flamboyant dresser, and my clothes advertise ancient database products, like as not, but this gaudy item sang to me.

I changed into it on the roadside, the evening air chilly on my freshly exposed skin, and thought about how much more fun it would have been to have her aboard. Travelling companions can make or break a holiday, and MissMarkey’s ability to not just seize the moment, but jump up and down on top of it, would have made this trip truly epic.

Next time.

We could see the famous Cadillacs planted nose-down in the wheatfield. There were some vehicles parked nearby, but no apparent way of driving through the turnstile gate in the fence, so we, like everybody else, walked.

I’d heard that, very soon after the cars had been planted, visitors had begun souveniring smaller pieces, and graffiti-tagging the bodywork, in effect adding to the artwork. Certainly the gate had been well and truly tagged.

But as we approached, it became obvious that the cars – or what was left of them – were a uniform blood-red colour. A fresh artistic advance, supplied by a team of painters, clad in white overalls and spattered with gore. It was their vehicles parked by the Caddies, and they must have gone through a tonne of paint that day.

They were winding down from their effort, slightly demented after a day in the field, proud and protective of their achievement. “Fresh graffiti on car eight,” someone called out, and a painter was despatched to cover the offending tag.

The cars are covered in layer upon layer of paint. Apart from the graffiti, there are enough periodic repaintings that the paint sometimes sloughs off in sheets a centimetre thick, and such fragments litter the nearby field. Chunks of car have been removed – in one case an entire roof panel has been taken away for illicit display – and the whole installation is gradually deteriorating.

But it’s still spectacular. We posed for photographs, the low sun on the red paint making the scene even ruddier, poked around, left a book inside one car, and then hurried back to the van. It was cold out there in the Panhandle breeze, and we still had a long way to go.

Oh yeah. The story of the ranch is that an eccentric millionaire bought ten old clunker Cadillacs and buried them nose-down in a wheatfield, the angle of the cars exactly the same as the slope of the Great Pyramid. The trademark fins of the Fifties and Sixties Cadillacs pointed up into the sky and people came from all over the world to marvel.

When Amarillo expanded out over the surrounding farmland, the cars were exhumed and re-interred three kilometres further out. They are probably safe from encroachment for a decade or two, but there may not be much left by then. Just shells of paint.

We had to get back on the road, and we pushed through the barbed wire fence in the approved Australian manner, me lifting the strands apart so Discoverylover could push through. Just behind our plain-as-pie van was a fair dinkum classic Cadillac, straight out of American Graffiti, fins as sharp as razors, front end loaded down with chrome that sparkled like a galaxy in the level sunlight. It was gorgeous, and the driver was even more so. My Route 66 shirt was gaudy, but this chap had on a shirt that was elegant in a way that only Americans can do. Plain black with the Cadillac logo embroidered across the back in glittering thread. He was wearing a ten gallon hat and a tie in the shape of a set of tailfins, held down with a Cadillac pin in what looked like and probably were diamonds and gold.

“Now ain’t that something?” he asked, sticking his thumbs in his belt and pointing with his chin at the row of Caddies.

“Going to park your car there?” I asked him mischievously.

He looked me up and down, and seeing that I was smiling, he broke into a big Texan laugh. “Naw, they can plant her right alongside when the good Lord calls me home, but until that day, I’m going to enjoy me my Coupe DeVille. Ain’t she purty?”

“Sure is!”, I agreed, wondering if I could possibly arrange a swap.

“She was state of the art in her day. Power steering, power seats, Hydramatic transmission, Four Thirty Vee-Eight..,” he rattled on and on, “…four barrel carburettor…”

My ears glazed over after a while, but he was fired up. “Lookey here,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket, “The keys are individually matched to the original factory serial number.”

He hauled out a keyring – more diamonds – and some small change and a couple of golf tees spilled onto the ground. We bent down to retrieve them from the Texas dust.

“What are these?” asked Discoverylover, holding up a golf tee with a tiny Cadillac logo. She’s not a great sports fan.

“Oh, that’s what I put my balls on when I drive.”

“Wow,” she goggled. “Those Cadillac people think of everything!”

Later:

From the photographer’s caption:

After the perfect blue New Mexico skies of the day before we awoke to a cloudy and windy morning. We made our way out to Cadillac Ranch intending to add our names to the thousands of spray painted “tags” that decorate this iconic art installation, only to find that a group of students from Denmark had just finished painting the cars to resemble their national flag.The students were still on site admiring their work,and I didn’t have the heart to be the first to deface their “flag”,so I just shot a couple of pics and headed into town to see what was left of Route 66 in Amarillo.

Earlier:

People climb up on these things to tag the rear ends and to pose for photographs in a suitably heroic manner, so I guess that the pillars on car number two just rusted out and gave way one day. This photograph shows the ranch in November 2010, and given that the hood has folded in two, it’s probably from the weight of someone climbing on it and getting a nasty surprise.

A little serendipity: someone has painted a Danish flag on the flank of car number one!