I soon discovered a problem I hadn’t considered. I found it difficult to keep to the road. Much of Route 66 has been paved over and renamed so many times that it isn’t uncommon to find a stretch of road carrying two different names.
Fortunately, Illinois has an active Route 66 Association that works to keep the memory of the road, even the road itself, alive and relevant by lining the Route with signs. Otherwise much of the Route would already be untraceable.
Around one p.m. I reached the town of Berwyn. Route 66 passes through the center of the town, so the main road was copiously marked with Route 66 signage.
I passed through the town, then turned right on Joliet Street, which led me out of the suburban area. For much of that stretch there was no sidewalk, and so most of the day I walked off the side of the road on weeds and gravel.
I reached McCook at around six, the city heralded by a Las Vegas–style sign:
Directly under the sign stood a giant fiberglass rooster.
I was already tired and glad to be back in civilization—and by civilization I meant in proximity to a Target and Walmart. I was tired and hungry. A mile into town I stopped at a Lone Star restaurant and ate a bowl of baked potato soup, a wedge salad, and their largest steak, a twenty-ounce porterhouse.
This time I paid with my credit card. I figured that I might as well use it while I could. It would likely take the banks a little while to learn of my death and shut down my card. With the charges, they would assume that my ID had been stolen, something they were used to.
I read somewhere that the most common victims of identity fraud are the dead. Identities of more than a half million deceased Americans are stolen each year. According to the report, it can take financial institutions upwards of six months to register death records, giving thieves plenty of time to rack up charges. And since the dead don’t monitor their accounts, the thieves usually get away with it. Many of these thieves even file tax returns under the deceased’s identities, collecting an estimated five billion dollars a year.
I finished eating, then walked across the parking lot to check out a massive Harley Davidson dealership. For years I had toyed with the idea of buying a Harley but just never got around to it.
I browsed the bikes a while, then walked down the road to a Holiday Inn Express.
I checked in, dropped my pack off in my room, and then walked to a nearby Walgreens to purchase foot powder, moleskin, and Epsom salt. I went back to my hotel, filled the tub with Epsom salt and steaming hot water, and soaked until I was ready for bed.
For as anxious as I had felt before starting the walk, the day had been surprisingly uncomplicated and head clearing. Maybe this journey would be easier than I anticipated.
Just weeks later I would laugh at that thought.
Chapter Nine
One day down, a hundred to go. Could it be that the chains of my life are already beginning to stretch?
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
The next morning my legs were sore but not terribly. The salts had helped.
I stretched my hamstrings, then got out of bed and read through my travel notes. It was about twenty-one miles to the city of Joliet, my day’s destination. I went downstairs for the hotel’s complimentary breakfast before collecting my pack and heading out.
Joliet Road was easy to follow and clearly marked with Route 66 signs. After two miles I saw a brown road sign at a junction.
ROUTE 66, USE THE 55 UNTIL EXIT 268 TO JOLIET
Highway 55 was easy walking with wide, paved shoulders.
Besides industrial warehouses and manufacturing, there was nothing interesting for miles except for Montana Charlie’s flea market, with another large rooster. I’m not sure what it is about oversized fiberglass roosters and Route 66, but I had only been on the road for two days and it was already my second encounter with a massive fowl.
About fourteen miles into the day’s walk I entered Romeoville, passing the Romeoville High School, Lewis University, and two miles after that, the wide, well-manicured lawn and the tall, razor wire–topped fences and guard towers of Stateville Prison.
On the road, surrounding the perimeter of the prison, were signs that read
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS
Especially those wearing orange prison jumpsuits, I thought.
Suddenly the repeated pop of gunfire filled the air, which was a bit disconcerting until I saw that it was coming not from the prison but from a nearby outdoor gun range.
A little more than two and a half miles southeast of the prison was the Old Joliet Prison, a limestone institution made famous by the notoriety of some its inmates, including the two men from what an older world had named the “crime of the century,” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. (Their crime was later dramatized in Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope.)
But it was the prison’s life in media that had made it iconic. The building has been immortalized in dozens of books, poems, songs, and movies. It is perhaps best known for the opening scene of the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. John Belushi’s character, “Joliet” Jake, got his name from the prison. (His brother, Elwood, was named for Elwood, Illinois, the next town west on the Route.)
I reached the Joliet city limits at around four in the afternoon. In spite of its small-town feel, it’s the third-largest city in Illinois, trailing only Aurora (by a little) and Chicago (by a lot). The traffic became more congested as I approached the downtown area and the downtown area approached rush hour.
Joliet is one of the rare big cities that still claims its roots in Route 66, and its most notable Route icon, outside of the prison, is the Rich & Creamy ice cream stand—a boxy, white-shingled building with a large ice cream cone–shaped sign on its roof that reads, “JOLIET Kicks Route 66.” Also on the roof are fiberglass replicas of Jake and Elwood, posed in their signature dancing stances.
A few miles later I passed Dicks on 66—an auto repair shop with vintage cars parked in its lot and two old cars on the roof.
Joliet has earned her share of notoriety. In addition to its famed prison, its Rialto Square Theater was a favorite hangout for crime legend Al Capone.
I turned left on Ruby and crossed a riveted blue metal bridge. There are five drawbridges in Joliet, though I only saw two of them. They were picturesque.
In the center of the town is the century-old Saint Joseph’s, an ornate, two-spired Catholic church. At one time Joliet was considered a religious town, nicknamed “the City of Spires” because of its many houses of worship (122). Now it’s better known for its casinos, the largest being Harrah’s Hotel and Casino, located in the city center.
Near the resort is the Joliet Area Historical Museum. The building that houses the museum was once a Methodist church but is now a shrine to Route 66, the church’s cross replaced by a massive neon Route 66 sign. I went inside the museum to check it out and was quickly engulfed by two employees, Elaine and Zack. Their enthusiasm for the road was palpable.
“Route 66 is America as it used to be,” Elaine said, her energy approaching that of a TV evangelist. “It’s the last thoroughfare to the American dream.” Her eyes lit up. “You know, Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles stood right where you’re standing now. Right there,” she said, pointing at my feet. “That very spot. He was driving Route 66. He was an Englishman and we get a lot of Europeans driving the Route.”
Her companion, Zack, was no less passionate. “Let me tell you, the way to do the Route is with a menu, not a map,” he said. “Oh my goodness, you eat your way through 66!”
“I’ll do my best,” I told him. I paid the seven-dollar admission fee and led myself on a short tour. There were other exhibits in the museum besides Route 66, but they seemed almost out of place, including a section that honored former Joliet resident and rocket scientist John Houbolt, the “unsung hero” of the Apollo program. Unsung was accurate. I’d certainly never heard of him. Houbolt was the aerospace engineer credited with designing the lunar orbit rendezvous and putt
ing a man on the moon.
The man had his critics. One scientist said, “Houbolt has a scheme that has a fifty percent chance of getting a man to the moon and a one percent chance of getting him back.”
He got the astronauts back. I’ve always sided with the doer more than the critic.
Before leaving the museum I stopped in its prodigious gift shop, which sold every conceivable stripe of Route 66 memorabilia, from pencils, puzzles, and Christmas ornaments to patches, 3-D viewers, and refrigerator magnets. There were books and maps—scores of them—and they were something I needed. I purchased a spiral-bound travel guide and a large folded paper map. Up till then I had been using my cell phone to chart my way, something I was growing increasingly nervous about.
Before I left, Zack insisted that I try the Route 66 “Route Beer.” I purchased a cold bottle and walked the few blocks to Harrah’s, where I booked a room for the night.
Chapter Ten
To understand the world we live in, we must first understand that we are not seven billion people occupying one world—rather, we are seven billion worlds occupying one planet.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
In spite of the distance—I’d walked about twenty-three miles the day before—I felt pretty good the next morning. I walked back onto the main thoroughfare of Ottawa to 53, then after about a mile, under the 80 overpass, continuing along IL 53—a road that clearly wasn’t made for pedestrians. Joliet was also once a center for the steel industry, and I passed several iron companies on the way out of town.
A little after one o’clock I entered the town of Wilmington. One of the famous Route 66 landmarks, the Gemini Giant, towered above the street near the city entrance. The twenty-foot fiberglass man held a rocket next to the Launching Pad Drive-in, which was closed and for sale.
The town looked like an oasis in time. The main street was lined with older but well-preserved buildings, including the still-operational yellow-bricked Mar Theatre and Kaveneys Drug & Soda. Both looked as though they had just recently been plucked from the fifties. Kaveneys had an impressive reproduction of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat painted on its exterior wall.
As I walked through town, a woman hailed me. “Good afternoon,” she called out affably.
“Good afternoon,” I replied cautiously.
“Where are you going?” She was middle-aged with heavily bleached hair. At first I worried that she recognized me, but then I realized she was just being sociable. Or bored.
“California,” I said.
She looked puzzled. “California. The California?”
I wondered what other California she knew of. “Yes, the state. I’m walking Route 66.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding slightly. “We get a lot of people coming through town traveling Route 66. Not walking of course, but in cars. Sometimes older ones, like Corvettes, like they drove on the Route 66 television show. Sometimes they’re on motorcycles. But not many walking.”
“I wouldn’t imagine,” I said.
“It’s a long walk,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“I met a man once. A few years back. He was walking the Route.” She paused to take a deep breath, then added, “He had a goat.”
“A goat?”
“A goat. And a wagon. The goat was his friend. He had the wagon for when the goat got tired.”
“He pulled the goat?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“I’m goatless,” I said.
“I can see that.”
“And wagonless.”
“Yes. But you don’t need one. You haven’t got a goat.”
I couldn’t imagine anyplace else to go with the conversation, so I said, “It’s nice meeting you.”
I had turned to go when she said, “You weren’t planning on staying at the motel, were you?”
She said this with such gravity that I stopped. “I don’t know; why?”
“I wouldn’t stay there. They found a decomposed body in it last week. Best to keep going.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I walked away with an amused grin on my face.
I reached the Van Dam motel around two. It was near the Wilmington Dam. The sign outside read, “Best motel by a dam site.”
In spite of the woman’s warning, I checked in to the motel. After inspecting my room for decomposing bodies, I went across the street to Nelly’s, another landmark eating place I’m sure Zack in Joliet would crow about. Outside the restaurant was a sign that read, “Home of the Best Dam” burgers, beef, dogs, onion rings, fresh-cut fries.
There were Route 66 signs all over the outside of the restaurant, along with vintage gasoline pumps and flags from around the world.
Inside, the walls and ceiling were covered with the signatures and scribblings from decades of visitors. Almost as soon as I entered, a waitress approached me. She had a name tag pinned to the breast of her creamsicle-orange blouse: Tina. Seating me at a table, she asked, “You from out of town?”
“Yes.”
“Where you staying? Van Dam?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know they found a decomposed body there last week.”
“I heard that.”
She nodded, then said, “Stay away from the dam.”
“The dam?”
“It’s a drowning machine. We’ve had eighteen drownings on record. Two more this Memorial Day.”
“I’ll keep my distance,” I said. I was beginning to feel like I’d walked into the opening scene of a horror movie.
I ordered the Chicago-style Italian beef with mozzarella cheese and a large salad, a Coke, and a strawberry milkshake, then walked back to the motel. I stayed away from the dam.
Chapter Eleven
More has been sacrificed in the shadows for us to live safely in the light than we know. Perhaps more than we want to know.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
Based on the motel’s online reviews—one and a half stars out of five (one guest wrote, “I don’t think the place has been cleaned since the Great Depression”)—I wasn’t expecting much other than a bed, a bath, a low price tag, and maybe a decomposing body, all of which I got (except the body).
I slept in the next morning, leaving my room around ten. Nelly’s was closed, so I started off without breakfast, following 66 across the Kankakee River. I stopped at what I thought was a bakery but was actually a barkery, a place that made dog treats.
Outside Wilmington, I passed a neighborhood full of houses peculiarly decorated with lawn ornaments, including a cardboard cutout of a Sasquatch. The road had a very narrow shoulder, so I did a lot of walking on the railroad tracks.
I reached the town of Braidwood and the Polk-a-Dot Drive In a little before noon. I had read about the drive-in in the Route 66 guidebook I’d purchased in Joliet. The outside of the restaurant was adorned with fiberglass statues of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Betty Boop.
According to the write-up, the restaurant started in a polka dot school bus and then, after years of success, moved to an actual brick-and-mortar building.
I stopped for lunch, ordering a pizza burger, mashed potatoes and gravy, and two lemonades. I don’t know if it was my walking-induced hunger or the food itself, but everything tasted extra delicious.
I had gotten a late start, so I ate quickly and got back out on the road. My guidebook also said to look for the Braidwood Zoo—which consisted of metal folk art of an elephant, polar bear, giraffe, cow, and steer—but I didn’t stop. One thing else I found peculiar: there were a lot of black POW-MIA flags flying beneath American flags.
Outside Braidwood the landscape turned bare and flat. An hour later I reached the village of Godley. Curiously, the town’s telephone poles were uniformly tilted at a forty-five-degree angle.
The next town I came to was Braceville, followed by the larger Gardner, with its whopping population of 1,500. Gardner had also made my Route 66 guidebook for a sti
ll-extant two-cell jailhouse that had been used in the thirties for hobos and vagrants who hopped off the train looking for work. The guidebook said that the townspeople felt better having them locked up at night. Next to the jail was a horse-drawn streetcar used as a diner on Route 66 from 1932 to 1939.
A few minutes’ walk from the town center, I came across a humble memorial for someone I had never heard of yet might have saved the world. The Reverend Christian Christiansen (which might be the most perfect name ever for a preacher) was born in 1859 along the west coast of Norway and immigrated to the United States in 1880. He was ordained in 1888 and became a circuit-riding preacher between the Illinois towns of York and Gardner. The reverend was in his eighties when he came across an article in the Chicago Tribune that changed history.
The article reported that the Nazis had built an atomic weapon plant in Christiansen’s hometown in Norway—a site chosen because of its access to the heavy water needed in the production of a nuclear weapon. Even though the Allies’ intelligence was aware of the plant, they were unable to launch a strike against it as it was naturally protected by a mountain shelf, and the fjord was too shallow for a battleship to navigate.
As a child, Christiansen had hiked every inch of the terrain, and he remembered it as well as he would his own backyard. He contacted the editor of the local newspaper, who helped him reach the proper officials in the US Navy.
High-ranking military and intelligence officers descended on the small town of Gardner and listened to Christiansen as he laid out for them in precise detail the mountain terrain. The vital information was passed along to the British military, who organized a commando raid known as Operation Gunnerside. The raid was successful and stopped the Nazis from completing their atomic bomb, a development that, no doubt, would have changed the outcome of the war. The operation was also immortalized in the 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, though no mention was ever made of Christiansen or the role he played.