“We are people of yesterday.”
For those who visit Route 66 today, which was the great highway of the central-western United States, time seems to have stopped in the 1950s.
The gas stations, the
diners
, the painted houses, the motels, the abundance of pastel and art deco colors, and the posters refer to the post-world war years, when the automobile became popular among Americans.
Route 66 was called the Main Street of America, and it connected Chicago with Los Angeles along almost 4,000 kilometers that allowed travel almost from coast to coast, and allowed Americans from the interior to approach California (or emigrate, which they often did. in years of crisis and drought).
“It took me a while to understand why the world had forgotten about us.”
You feel the charm of decadence there.
There are tourists, yes, but more desolation on what was Route 66. There are places where some visitors stop, because the highway is not too far away and they are signposted, and also towns abandoned forever.
The documentary
Almost Ghosts (Almost Ghosts,
on Filmin and Prime Video) was filmed in 2018 by Spanish director Ana Ramón Rubio with the aim of perpetuating the memory of the elderly people of the place, the last ones who remember its splendor.
It is not surprising that a very melancholic tone abounds.
Three neighbors who are in their 70s, 80s and 90s, respectively, tell their memories of when that was a frenzy, and stop at the moment when it suddenly ended because they opened another stretch of highways.
“I know the world outside: I stay here.”
These gentlemen declare themselves proud
rednecks
, as the working class in the interior of the United States is called. We visited places like Selingman (Arizona, 750 inhabitants), Texola (Oklahoma, 45 residents) or Enrick (Oklahoma, about 1,000).
We also passed through uninhabited places like Glenrio, between Texas and New Mexico, one of many that had been something and ceased to exist.
And we are introduced to Lowell Davis, the only inhabitant of Red Oak II (Missouri), a town that he refuses to leave, where he has restored abandoned houses and added everything he has collected in other places along the route.
This octogenarian, who says he has already been around the world, explains that he would not change his lifestyle for anyone else.
“Here on Saturdays there was no room on the sidewalks.”
The road was planned in the 1920s and was not paved until 1938. Its glory days came in the 1950s that marked architecture.
But the infrastructure investments that Eisenhower initiated in that same decade began to replace parts of the route with modern highways: by the 1980s there was no section left in use.
It was decertified in 1984: it ceased to exist.
Each town, on a different date, had seen itself, from one day to the next, without clients or livelihood.
The efforts of the merchants achieved, in a battle of many years, that it was classified as a historical route, that the most visitable sections were indicated on the now main road.
At the end of the nineties, buses and bikers arrived.
And a way of life was created based on selling the authenticity of what had vanished.
More information
Photo story: Route 66, a cinema highway
“This area died from tourism.
“Everyone started wanting to take advantage of us.”
Some of the testimonies collected here regret the step from serving travelers to becoming a tourist attraction.
The most vehement is Harley Russell, who runs a
souvenir
shop where she improvises, when visitors stop by, a country music show.
He used to do it with her wife, but since he died in 2014 it is much more difficult for him, and he cries when he remembers her.
For about a decade and a half he saw no more than three clients a year;
There were times when he slept in the tent armed because looting was frequent.
Only near the end of the century did he see the resurgence of visits.
He is amused that they have traveled from Spain, so far away, to interview him.
“We had grown up in the Great Recession, but this was even harder.”
Ángel Delgadillo is a barber, active at 91 years old, who was among those who fought to turn the old highway into a tourist destination.
He tells it with pride: he was one of those who saved that place.
The documentary is supported by beautiful photography, which takes advantage of the power of the images of what seems to be a lost civilization.
Also in a country
music
that fits with the scenarios (nothing from Johnny Cash: it is the work of the Valencian Don Joaquín).
There are universal messages here: the determination to move forward after a defeat with no turning back, the attachment to the place where one feels one belongs, the magnetism of nostalgia, which always has something tricky because we make many memories.
“There are very few like us left.”
Lowell Davis, the only resident of his town, died in 2020. Route 66 transmits magic and, at the same time, sadness.
This film captures that well.
Other places in deep America never had a main road in their environment and are no better.
But these elders knew the glory of the entire country having to pass through there, and they were determined to prevent all that from being lost without a trace.
Nothing very different from what has happened in populations around the world suddenly disconnected from modernity.
In Spain (an episode of
Repor
on TVE tells it) a route is being promoted along the old N-VI, where there are also abandoned gas stations and hotels along 600 kilometers, inspired by the example of those fighters of the 66. These landscapes did not appear in
Easy Rider
, it is another type of
vintage
, but the elderly also have a lot to tell.
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