Seligman, AZ - 10-21-18

10-21-18

This is not the first time I’ve settled down somewhere with the vague idea of writing some sort of travel journal.  Today, I’m in the back lot – Juan’s Garden – at the Delgadillo Snow Cap café in Seligman, AZ.  A staple of Route 66, just as much as that “Corner” in Winslow, the Cadillac Ranch in Texas, or the pier in Santa Monica.  Every time I come here, it seems just a touch more barren.  As the years pass and Juan Delgadillo departed the world longer ago, his spirit departs just a little further from this place.  Though his brother Angel still makes appearances at the Barber Shop just down the block, he’s in his 90s and will, like the rest of us, bid his adieus to earth and his personal touch will fade.

I do this quite a lot.  Visiting old ghosts.  I visited long ago with friends who are now ghosts themselves.  As I sit here, foreign tourists poke in and photograph some of the oddities left behind by Juan and that, without his presence, seem more odd than mischievous.  I sit here in front of my modern tablet and Bluetooth keyboard, transporting myself in my mind to some vague 1950s wonderland.  I can’t imagine anyone in the 1950s expected someone in the 21st century to be wishing to time travel back, any more than I would think the middle-agers for the 2050s would pine for the Walmarts and Family Dollars of today.  Yet here I am. 

The old road has a greater pull nowadays for European tourists.  Everything “old” about America seems to appeal to Germans.  The old west.  Seligman is an old west town, though there is nothing cowboy about it.  It feels firmly ensconced in the 1940s and 50s, that television sitcom interpretation of the time.  Aside from the Snow Cap, there are other quirky spots, like the World Famous Black Cat Bar (which no one outside Seligman’s ever heard of); the Road Kill Café (where you can order the Splatter Platter, the Out of Luck Buck, and such); The Rusty Bolt with its eave topped with an eclectic selection of mannequins; Westside Lilo’s (5 Out of 4 Eat Here); and, at the moment of this writing, a massive flock of vultures and hawks overhead.  Interspersed in this oddness are very old businesses, cracked, rusted, and fading but left that way to fit the overall scheme.  I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for here.  I have been here many times and still haven’t quite figured it out.  I left the house this morning with a vague idea I would end up on old 66 again, and that it would lead me here.  Not a lot of time left for making it all the way to the CA border, so I’ll hover in this area a while.

I’ve waxed poetic before about how different it is to visit places for the several dozenth time.  I don’t even remember the first time I visited Seligman, though I expect it would have been with Rob, and therefore prior to August 2005.  The old Harvey Hotel supposedly stood then, just a block or so from me.  There aren’t many left; the closest I can think of is in Winslow – the La Posada.  The one here was deemed too close to the modern railroad tracks, so it was leveled in 2008.  Railroad Avenue was the initial way into town, dating to the 1910s as the National Old Trails road.  In the 1950s, Angel Delgadillo was instrumental in bringing recognition to the highway and, as I understand, the westbound route in was then recognized as the current Main Street (called Crookton Road as it exits I-40 a few miles from Ash Fork).  Years back, I wrote a series of articles on the various current and forgotten alignments of Route 66 across Arizona, and have been boring passengers in my car with trivia along the way ever since.

The line of cars in the back lot still have vague traces of the eyes painted large on their windshields, but the novelty of Pixar’s “Cars” has faded somewhat.  Any number of towns will take credit for inspiring the fictional burg of Radiator Springs.  It really doesn’t matter which it was, since no one is likely to travel across the world for THE spot.  They just want this curious pseudo-time-warp into what is imagined an easier time, particularly by people who weren’t alive then.  Seligman plays well to that; there’s no tourism to Peach Springs, an equally old town down the road, nor to Valentine or Truxton.  Kingman plays the 66 card, though it’s a little too big to elicit that necessary small town feel.  Williams may be the only other 66’er west of Flagstaff that can compete with Seligman’s vibe.  Oatman, west of Kingman on the old alignment of 66, is entirely old western in atmosphere – except when clogged with motorcycles.  No, if you’re looking for the Mother Road in western Arizona, this is the best place to buy your China-made souvenirs.

A line is forming out the door of the Snow Cap, which as far as I can tell is only serving ice cream this time of day.  I am ashamed to admit that, after all these years, I have not actually stepped inside the place, being thoroughly amused by the outside décor (“Sorry, We’re Open”; Malts-Tacos-Burritos-Dead Chicken; the old convertible out front, commandeered by a faded old statue of Santa; a sign saying if you want credit, go to their credit manager Helen Waite).  As the visitors pile in, my desire to remain here departs.  It probably resembles its heyday when it’s full of people, but that, oddly, is not why it appeals to me.  Being here is not much different to me than being in a crumbling old miner’s cabin in Mineral Park.  I’m here to be alone with ghosts, and modern people are too noisy.

Time to head down the road a bit.

Not long after, I’m here at the Roadkill Café.  It’s always a little strange being here without my wife or the kids or my wife and kid(s).  On the table sits a little wooden game board with several peg holes that form a pyramid.  You have enough pegs to fill all but one, and the test is to see if you can do a series of checkerboard jumps that leaves a single peg on the board.  I think we have only managed that once; the normal result is 3 left, which the board denotes as “Just So-So”.  But today I am alone with my keyboard.  I order ice water and a sarsaparilla, and wait, typing, for my Yellow Line Bovine.  It’s a hamburger with egg, cheese, and a few other cholesterol-bloating ingredients.  I have never had a bad meal here, so there’s no reason to suspect this will be the first.

The Road Kill is a 66 staple, although it has only been here since 1985.  What is lacks in history, in makes up for in plain oddity.  Aside from the odd theme (well liked enough to warrant a market for its menu as a reproduction), there’s the usual gift shop off the side, replete with taxidermied animals behind glass and mounted on walls.  There’s a penny smasher machine, as all good tourist spots should have, and a pie display case that no roadside diner should be without.  The front windows are wide open to Route 66, with the railroad tracks – Seligman’s original lifeline – not far ahead.  Maybe a half mile farther is I-40, the 66 killer.  Trucks and tourists fly by, in a hurry to get to the places that either sprung up later or moved forward with the times.  Seligman, for better or worse, has remained in a bit of a time warp.

I’m not sure what to do next here, as I’m not shopping for souvenirs.  I suppose I didn’t come here for anything other than a different place to write.  Being somewhere nobody knows me.  Writing about things I know, all too well.  People may well ask, how is this any different than the “routine” you try to escape every weekend?  With a regular job, there’s somewhere a person has to be, and my schedule gives me four days a week that are, essentially, exactly the same.  What makes coming to this familiar place different?  It’s knowing, perhaps, that I don’t have to be here at all.  I show up when I want to, and leave after doing whatever I want, even if it’s nothing at all.

That’s why the idea of a life on the road appeals to me.  I can only settle in somewhere for so long before I need to see something new.  Quite often, like today, ‘new’ translates to a different seat in the same old café.  A different entrée, a different server.  Same old me.

I’ll be headed back after this, stopping on occasion along the side where worn, overgrown patches of old alignments remain.  Some a few feet off the current road, some a mile or more away.  And I’ll marvel how, no matter how short the distance away, how the world seems a whole different place from there.