About this Photo
Route 66, ‘The Mother Road ’, was the first Chicago-to-Los Angeles all-weather highway; it was made even more famous by a multitude of songs, novels and films that immortalised it. These include John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the great depression, The Grapes of Wrath, the Bobby Troup classic “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” recorded by the smoothest crooner of them all, Nat King Cole and the 1960’s TV crime drama ‘Route 66’, which many thought was a direct rip-off of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’. Finding Route 66 was harder than one might imagine, as many historic roads have been steadily replaced by the Interstate Highway System since the mid 1950s, with I-44 superseding Route 66 in Oklahoma into Missouri. Not long after we’d left Tulsa, we made a few wrong turns but eventually ran into an original section of the road, and we were able to take some fabulous shots of Rufus on this fabled byway.
The further we went into Oklahoma, the flatter and more distant the horizon appeared, and the wider, more expansive the sky became. The state directly north of Oklahoma is the deeply evangelical, rural and distinctly flat Kansas. From travelling through this area, it is no surprise that two American pop culture classics, The Wizard of OZ and Superman, have origin stories that start in the Kansas prairies. Kansas is the epitome of small-town America, one-horse agricultural towns with main streets that have a diner, a hairdresser, a police station, a general store and not much else. Conurbations that are surrounded by millions of acres of farm land, but curiously very few people.
Both narratives play on the theme of supernatural forces transforming characters, and they explore how the connection between magical alien worlds and our own threatens the conventional American paradigm. Both characters are orphans. Superman is an alien who is thrust upon a farming community, ignorant of his origins, and Dorothy is an unfortunate young girl who is a victim of a freak storm, but both are voyage-and-return stories, characters lost at sea. This narrative device is intermingled with the overcoming the monster plot scheme, in Superman’s case, the monster is Lex Luthor and a host of other evil doers, whilst for Dorothy it is the wicked witches and the fraudulent and insecure Wizard himself. Both stories can be dismissed as simple childish fairytales, but they are actually fascinating insights into the views of American urbanites in the early 20th century and how America projected itself to the outside world.
Quote from Losing Eldorado
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