‍John Steinbeck called it the mother road, the path of people in flight.

‍ Route 66, inaugurated in 1926, provided a lifeline for an estimated 400,000 victims of the Dustbowl. Faced with little choice, families packed up their jalopies and left their farms to head west in droves, hoping to reach the promised land of California. But the mother road wasn’t always nurturing; it too often had real human costs. No reliable records estimate how many people died on the road while traveling west, but the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis was staggering. Steinbeck used fiction to capture the mother road’s capriciousness and danger in The Grapes of Wrath, showing readers the tragedies families faced along the way, as the route claimed the lives of Grandma Joad, Grandpa Joad, and finally, the life of Rose of Sharon’s baby.

‍Steinbeck meant The Grapes of Wrath as an indictment of the ruthlessness of capitalism in its rawest and cruelest form. The novel offered a bleak, hopeless portrait of families fleeing ruin through desperate journeys on Route 66. It showed how they were crushed under invisible systems that turned real people into disposable objects. But over time, somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles, the myth of the mother road took on a life of its own. Travelers and later road trip enthusiasts transformed it into more than a highway. It became part infrastructure, part identity, and part romanticized cultural mythology. Route 66 literally became “America’s main street,” a multi-state experience of Americana lined with chrome diners, glowing neon, and quirky mom-and-pop motels.

‍For many people who traveled on Route 66, it started to represent something even greater: a moment in which cars, speed, and the freedom of the promise of the U.S. southwest fused together into a sense of soaring American post-war optimism when anything seemed possible. A road trip on the mother road not only meant the feeling of speed and the excitement of travel, but also the heady combination of power and hope. When people looked back on their memories of Route 66 after it was decommissioned from the U.S. federal highway system in 1985, they often recalled those travels with a sense of wistfulness for what had seemed like better times.[i] That nostalgia still surfaces in oral histories. One person interviewed for the Illinois State Museum Route 66 Oral History Project recalled, “I know one of the most impressive parts of Route 66 is driving through Albuquerque because it does have all the old restaurants, all the old motels, and it's just amazing. I love Route 66 in Albuquerque.”[ii]

‍But people never really stopped dying on the mother road. Albuquerque, New Mexico claims the largest stretch of the former Route 66, which runs a full eighteen miles through town and now serves as one of the city’s main arterial roads. Perhaps not coincidentally, Albuquerque also has one of the highest pedestrian death rates in the nation. Many of those pedestrian fatalities occur on the former Route 66, now recommissioned as Central Avenue.

In 1926, Route 66 promised freedom and adventure through speed on the open road. A century later, it has delivered an ongoing cultural romance with death.