The Aughties   There is nothing wrong with coining new words to cover a perceived lack. A case is point would be my word Euramerican, to describe a point of view covering those two areas. It’s certainly parallel to the already established Eurasian. I’ve also suggested leaving “linguist” to mean only one versed in the science of linguistics, and have coined “languist” to cover a speaker of several languages, as I’ve used in the name Travelanguist.

Another lack is a name for the first decade of each century, the decade we are presently in, one that feels parallel to saying the Eighties, the Nineties, and the upcoming Twenties and Thirties (the only one not exactly parallel is the upcoming Teens, but that’s an already established word). If decades starting with 1940 and 1950, because they end in 40 and 50, are the Forties and Fifties, what about the decade starting in 1900, or 2000, that ends in two zeros? There have been some rather silly ideas made, some more sound ones, but none has caught on, although I read that a century ago, the term “the Aughts” enjoyed a bit of popularity, but also never caught on. It also has the disadvantage of not ending in “-ies”.

I understand the BBC suggested “the Noughties” (in that spelling), but that was doomed from the start, since it reminded of the word “naughty” and levity wasn’t called for.

First let’s look at how English names the digit below 1. Most frequently, unfortunately, people purposely confuse it with the letter O and call 0 “oh”. That, of course is a problem with reading license plates and serial numbers that utilize both. Second choice after “oh” is the more accurate “zero”. This is a word that will not be misunderstood, but more often than not, we just avoid it. Remember, James Bond is “double-oh-seven”, and most definitely not the more accurate “double-zero-seven”. That’s just the way it is.

But none of the above is suitable for naming a decade with sounding absolutely idiotic, so we go back to the drawing board. Also easily skippable are words like “nothing, nil, zilch”. But then we come to the somewhat antiquated, yet interesting, pair of words naught and aught. And a pair they are—and therein lies a tale.

In Reflections 2005 Series 18, while discussing some Hudson Valley place names, I discussed juncture, the division between syllables, and how sometimes juncture can shift. I won’t cite all the examples again, but will repeat just two, since they’re appropriate here. Remembering that juncture is symbolized with a plus sign, I’ll repeat the example of a+napron eventually becoming understood to be an+apron, with the juncture shifting around the N. Even though we say napkin and napery still starting with an N, we no longer say napron. Also, talking about snakes, a+nadder has become an+adder.

This is why I’ve said our two words above are a pair. The original word was naught. In time, a+naught was perceived as an+aught, and so there developed the word aught, but with a difference. Napron and nadder died out in favor of apron and adder, but with naught and aught, oddly enough, both forms remained, and with exactly the same meaning.

We long ago should have respelled them more sensibly as nawt and awt, but that never happened. Worse, given their weird standard spellings, there are variations, nought and ought, even though the –AU- spelling usually represents the –AW- sound more accurately. Worse still, ought meaning zero has a homonym, the totally different ought as in “I ought to go”. But I digress.

Put all this together, and we get a variation of the BBC suggestion of the Noughties. If that word implies mischief, let’s use the other version of naught, aught, and call the current decade the Aughties. This is not an coining of my own, since I first saw it elsewhere, but for me, the Aughties it is.

I will add that this problem occurs in other languages, but I’ve come across a solution in German that I’m ready to adopt as well. “Zero” in German is “Null”, as in “to nullify”, but it rhymes with “pull”. The “-ies” pattern in German is “-ziger”, so following the decades of die Achtziger and die Neunziger, we are now in die Nullziger (NULLtsigger).

Travel Scope   Some things are planned; others just happen. I’ve said that Beverly and I carefully planned three years, 1968-1969-1970, for our initial visit to all the US and Canada. In 1968 we drove some 10,000 miles in our camper through the western states and Canada, in 1969 some 8,000 miles in a figure 8 through the eastern states and Canada, and in 1970 we went to both Alaska and Hawaii, completing having been in all US states and all Canadian provinces, plus the Yukon. Travel over the years to Europe eventually also filled in virtually every corner there.

But after limiting the Nineties to some minor domestic travel at most, for multiple reasons, including health, in the Aughties (!!!), we went further afield beyond “Euramerica”. We both made it to South America, and then I went to Asia (just a bit—more to come) and Antarctica, with the already announced southern Africa in the hopper for 2008. Australia is finally on the horizon in 2009, and more.

We also updated Europe in the Aughties, but in an unwitting pattern. In 2000 our return to Europe had to be to Germany, but if you review the website, you’ll see that, jumping around here and there, most of the corners of Europe were revisited, sometimes to places previously seen to update the experience, sometimes to new places. I’m going back to Switzerland next year coming back from Africa, but as I look at the map, I’ve missed returning only to southeastern Europe (Greece, the Balkans), and northeastern Europe (Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, not counting the overnight train ride in 2005 through Poland from Moscow to Berlin). At the moment, there are no plans for revisits to fill in these blanks.

But my purpose in this summary is to discuss North America, since my upcoming trip is domestic. During the Aughties, I made absolutely no plans for a systematic revisit. It just happened. At the end of 2004, with the purpose of reaching my last five new destinations to reach 100 for the Travelers’ Century Club, I took a Caribbean cruise. On the way to Siberia in 2005, I wanted to make it into a RAIL trip around the world, so I crossed Canada again by rail. This past January, I was planning on the new GrandLuxe trip to Mexico. Even after that fell through, I went to the Copper Canyon and Mexico City again anyway, after many years.

Domestically, in the US, it all started with the sudden decision to follow the “Carpe diem!” philosophy. I hadn’t been to Alaska since 1970, but had missed two destinations I really wanted to see at that time, so I “seized the day” and went back to Alaska. At that point (Reflections 2005 Series 12) I also stated publicly that I wanted to see some special civil engineering landmarks, including the Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire and the Durango-Silverton Branch of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in Colorado. The Cog Railway trip blossomed into the “Northeastern United States” trip of last year (Reflections 2006 Series 12), especially with my desire to ride the Acela, to discuss the rail routes across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and across Long Island to Boston.

I planned the Durango-Silverton trip for late this summer, and it, too, has blossomed. It is now a trip to the “Southwestern United States”. After a stop in Minneapolis, I fly to Albuquerque, then drive a zigzag route to Los Angeles, returning to New York by train. I had gotten excited about the NE, but I am now really looking forward to the SW trip, and have been preparing a great deal of material over the past year for it. That would have been it. Still, there was no system here, just random plans: Alaska, NE, SW.

Well, not quite. Back from Europe this summer, I started doing more research. I had really been interested in that GrandLuxe train. It used to be called the American Orient Express, until a takeover last year. I didn’t like its Mexico offering anymore, but its trip from Denver to San Francisco sure looked enticing. And in Denver—how about that railroad up Pike’s Peak? We had only driven to the top in 1968. And Aspen and Vail? From San Francisco, how about driving up to see more redwoods, and back up to Seattle? And the only way to end that trip was to go on to Hawaii, for an inter-island cruise. So lo and behold, what have we for the fall of 2008 but “Northwestern United States” and “Hawaii”.

Then it struck me that I’d ended up fitting all the pieces into the jigsaw puzzle except for the Southeast. But with further thought, it struck me that, except for occasional domestic travel elsewhere, it was precisely visits to the Southeast that Beverly and I had been emphasizing during the Nineties, to Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and especially, Florida. Also, I just went to New Orleans, and this coming February, I’m going back to Nola, out of Tampa, for Mardi Gras (with trepidation), and also to the Tabasco area of Avery Island and the antebellum plantations along the Great River Road.

Therefore, my plan is this: in between my imminent SW trip and next year’s NW trip, when I’m in Tampa this winter I’ll discuss the “routes that made Florida what it is”, along with other adventures in the SE in the Nineties, completed by the visit to Mardi Gras, under the heading of “Southeastern United States”, and willy-nilly, the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle will fall into place.

Faust   It was also by chance and not by design, that I started quoting lines from literature in the original language this year in these essays, but now I’ve decided to make it a project for 2007. We talked about El Quijote, with quotes in Spanish, and as a supplement, the Portuguese version. We then looked at the Canterbury Tales, and in Middle English, at that. Actually, it all started with my plans to quote Dante in Italian during the SW trip (notes all prepared and ready to go), and I’ve found a few other quotes to fill in the blanks for some other languages as well.

Chaucer died in 1400, and his Middle English needs clarification to quite an extent to the contemporary reader. The most frequent classical quotes in English come from Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare’s dates center about 1600, two centuries later, but his English is still sometimes a bit hard to follow. Goethe’s dates, however, center on about 1800, and, being two centuries closer still to contemporary speech, his language is extremely recognizable to German speakers. And he, too, is most often quoted from his most famous play, Faust.

I have no intention to go into detail, nor am I familiar enough with details to do so. Just as I had taken a course in the Spanish department at Queens College on El Quijote, the QC German department offered a course on Faust, or perhaps it was two, one for each part of the play, Faust I and Faust II. It is, however, common knowledge that Faust sells his soul to the devil, who appears as Mephistopheles, or Mephisto.

I’m trying to use quotations of relevance to the activities of this website, such as Cervantes in Spain and Chaucer in England. The two quotes from Faust I’ve researched online to use here are less direct to travel. But I learn daily from travel, and from the research I do to write these essays, and both Faust quotes deal with knowledge, so that’s my parallel.

To help the reader follow, I want to discuss something that appears and reappears in these two quotes. The German root meaning “to know” is WISS-, pronounced VISS. Incidentally, the German word for “joke” is WITZ, pronounced VITS. Apparently WISS- and WITZ are two forms of the same thing, despite the know/joke difference.

You may be aware that S in German historically corresponds to a T in English, such as in Wasser/water, or Was ist das?/What is that? Following that line of thought, you’ll see that WISS- is related to “wit” in English. Both wit and witty deal with humor. However, wit in the word “witness” does involve knowledge, so we have in English within the word “wit” the concept of both knowing and joking. At any rate, perhaps this will help the reader keep in mind that WISS- means “know”. WISS- will appear below in three forms, in some way similar to the “sing, sang, sung” situation. You will see WEISS, pronounced VAISS (AI as in aisle), and also WUSS-, pronounced VUSS (rhymes with puss). So our forms are:

In Faust I, Verse 1582, Mephistopheles says:

Pronounce “viel” as FEEL. Literally, we have:

This is of course a very literal rendering, so let’s work on it. Should we leave it as “all-knowing”, make it the fancier “omniscient”, or simplify it? “Bewusst” actually moves over a bit in meaning from just knowing to more “being aware”. Let me repeat the quote, with my own translation, which I think gets to the meaning most directly.

This quote shows an interesting distinction Mephisto makes between pure knowledge and street smarts.

There is a scholar named Wagner who works in Faust’s household. I suppose the contemporary parallel would be someone of status hiring a college kid to help out around the house for room and board so that he can keep up his studies. In Verse 601, also in Faust I, Wagner says the following. My literal rendering is even worse than the first one, but the purpose is to show what each word means:

“Zwar” is TSVAR. We’ve discussed that Ö is a Kiss-E (as in café). A reasonable translation would be “To be sure, I know a lot, but I’d like to know everything”, and that can do quite well. But let me repeat the quote with the way I’m most comfortable phrasing it in English:

In the first quote, Mephisto makes an interesting distinction of two kinds of knowledge, pure education versus practical street smarts. But in the second quote, Wagner, who I’m sure is interested only in the first kind, sets a goal for life, which I find admirable.

Let’s now say Auf Wiedersehen to Faust, but move on to some additional Wissen (knowledge) about translations in general.

Translations: Degrees of Translation   Literal word-for-word translations are extremely helpful in understanding another language, especially a language with which one is not familiar. They are essential in learning another language, to see just what word means what. Beyond that, there are adequate translations, and if some extra thought is put into it, there is the possibility of much better translations, that really pack some oomph, as shown above. In my way of thinking, there are these three levels of translation: literal, better, best. Do keep in mind that there are major prizes that are awarded to translators for the highest quality work, and when you hear that a new translation has appeared on the market of a well-known work in another language, do understand how it can differ from other versions. But always keep in mind that the work has been filtered through an intermediary. You are reading the thoughts of two people, the original author’s work being interpreted, while being translated, by the translator. It’s unavoidable.

I remember reading something that covers the situation of “literal, better, best” quite well. Its original phrasing is sexist, so I’ll alter it to be unisex. It also works better in the plural:

Cynical as this may be about human relations, it is indeed accurate about translations. A literal translation (see above) is true, but unattractive. Move to a better or best translation and they become more and more attractive—but less and less true.

There is an exquisite expression in Italian that covers this situation very nicely:

A translator is--has to be--a traitor to the original to a lesser or greater degree, and Italian can use two words that are very close in form. Yet this expression is untranslatable (see below), since the translated words in another language will never have the similarity of the original pair.

Translations: Multiple Versions   There are multiple translations of popular texts, such as of the Bible. The original texts were primarily in Aramaic and Hebrew (Old Testament), and Greek (New Testament). The classic English version is the King James Version, which was translated in an older period of English where “thou” was still a daily word. For that reason, many people mistakenly consider “thou” a “Biblical” word, rather than a normal factor within the English of the day. There are famous variations in these translations, such as “forgive us our debts” versus “forgive us our trespasses”. Not knowing the original texts, it would seem to me that the latter makes more sense, since today “debts” involves exclusively financial matters, while at the time, it apparently meant something else.

Translations: Mistranslations   Translators always run the risk of making a mistake, which is why legal translators take out Errors and Omissions Insurance. Some errors, though, become classics. I have at home a small alabaster copy of Michelangelo’s Moses. In this statue, Moses is carrying the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai—and he has two distinctive horns growing from his head.

The error was apparently made by none other than the translator Saint Jerome. There is a Hebrew word which apparently means either “rays” or “horns”. Apparently, the original text implied that he had rays of light emanating from his head, based on the message he was carrying, yet the translation went through as “horns”, and that’s what the statue shows, illogical as it may be.

Sometimes a translator makes a purposeful mistranslation, since only then will the point be understood. I refer to the French pastry called a brioche, similar to a croissant. It is a quality pastry, yet not all those outside France will know what it is. The famous disparaging quote that Marie Antoinette supposedly said, when told that the people had no bread to eat, was “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. The literal translation here would be to “let them eat some brioches” instead, but that translation would fall flat on its face for many people, who still wouldn’t get the point of what she meant. So, second best, the standard translation in English has become “let them eat cake”. It’s a mistranslation (cake is gâteau), but what are you going to do?

Translations: The Untranslatable   This brings us to the subject of the untranslatable, not just the awkward problem with “brioche”, but the totally untranslatable. Something is untranslatable when it relies on a pun or joke in one language that is unique to that language. How could you render it somewhere else? This is what people mean when they say that something is “lost in translation”. If you can’t “get it” in the original, then you won’t get it at all. Here’s a very fondly remembered case in point.

Some years ago, when Beverly and I were in Vienna, we went to the theater, it might have been the Theater an der Wien, to see “Vier Zimmer zum Garten”, which translates quite well as “Four Rooms on (a) Garden”. The setting is a central garden faced by four rooms, and each act tells a story centered on each of the rooms, yet related to the other acts. In any case, we saw in the program that the original title, in French, was “Quatre pièces sur jardin”. We recognized the exquisite pun, which was totally lost in translation. “Pièces” means both “rooms” and “plays”, while “sur” means both “on” and “about”. The French title means “Four Rooms on (a) Garden”, while it SIMULTANEOUSLY means “Four Plays about (a) Garden”. It is impossible to translate that, not into German, not into English.

[Note: further research now shows me that the play was written in 1966 by the team of Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy. It apparently was unsuccessful on Broadway as “Four on a Garden” with Carol Channing, but among many other playwriting credits of theirs starting in the late Sixties are “Fleur de Cactus” and “Quarante Carats”, both of which we saw as Cactus Flower on Broadway (Lauren Bacall; the film had Ingrid Bergman) and Forty Carats (Julie Harris; the film had Liv Ullman).]

Translations: Christian Morgenstern   I’m not all that big on poetry, but I’ve always liked some of the things I’ve seen by Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914). So much of what he wrote is so surreal and so clever, and totally untranslatable. For instance, a humorous favorite, “Der Werwolf”, centers on a werewolf who delights in a grammatical play on the word “Werwolf”. You cannot translate it, because other languages cannot make this grammatical play. His serious, but still very surreal works, include the very translatable “Das Knie” (pronounce the K) about a knee traveling around the world all by itself, it being the only surviving part of a soldier killed in the war. The aversion of my otherwise very ordered mind to the surreal doesn’t seem to count here. (I also liked the very surreal “Spamalot” on Broadway—go figure.)

A very short eight-line work I first translated years ago just for fun is neither humorous nor tragic, but is very much à propos to a travel website, a site that—look at that!—also deals in language. Below, I’ll give the original, then play around with translations that are “literal, better, best” . I’ve checked online see if I could legally re-publish it here, and yes, it is gemeinfrei/in the public domain. (By the way, Morgenstern dying just before he reached 43 had nothing to do with the fact that World War One started that year. He died of tuberculosis, which he had caught from his mother, who had died of it much earlier, in 1881.) Here’s the original with the literal translation.

Note the unusual rhyme pattern of the original: AA BCB CDD. (Also note how German quotes look.)

Let’s first move from a literal to a “good” translation, which is a step up, but it doesn’t rhyme in any pattern, let alone like the original did. Finally, there’s another run-through with what I can come up with.

1) I like this final title, since it not only preserves the three syllables of the original, we already use the concept of “air exchange” when discussing ventilation.
2) A lot of changes were necessary to get it to rhyme, and to rhyme in the pattern of the original. The only rotten rhyme is wind/kid.
3) The syllables-per-line pattern follows the original completely: 6,6/7,7,6/2,5,6.
4) Both groups of cities in the original line up geographically in a roughly straight line on the map, following the route the wind could take, and so do the ones I’ve chosen. The original uses just cities in Europe. None of my cities are American, but I have extended the outlook to Africa and Asia.
5) Kuntz is a typical German family name. In my choosing an American one, notice the hommage to Beverly Johnson. A dance hall would have been acceptable, except what I found rhymes well, and a dry goods store is very traditionally American, anyway.
6) Senior Wind talks down to Junior Wind—that’s the whole point here--so I have Senior calling Junior “kid”, since “child” sounds dated here. Also, Junior uses “like” in typical teenage fashion.
7) “Fly” not only fits the new rhyme well, it’s good imagery to describe what the wind does.

To continue the flying imagery: in the original language, you have the author, soloing. The same thing in another language involves author and translator working in tandem, as pilot and copilot. The author leads, the translator assists and supports.

Quality translation is not secretarial work. It’s an art.

Routes West   What is travel all about? Different people will answer differently, but I have to say to me, it’s all about geography followed by history. Also, to a great extent, it covers ethnicity, which includes language. Beyond that, at least to my way of thinking, you can add on visiting friends and relatives, going shopping, playing tennis or golf, going to sit on the beach or at a pool, all that vacation stuff that really has little to do with pure travel.

Travel is more than destinations, and the way we reach them by today’s means. The history component includes the way these destinations were reached in the past. To me, you don’t fully understand many of the destinations until you know how people got there in the first place. Think of the Transatlantic crossings, or reaching California via Cape Horn; the Silk Road; the Transsiberian.

Among the most interesting and unique routes in the US to me are the two routes south to Florida that developed in the fourth quarter of the 19th century (4Q-19C). I will discuss them next winter within the general discussion of the Southeastern United States.

But most of the routes that settled the US went west. To cover both the upcoming trip to the Southwestern United States and next year’s to the Northwestern United States, let’s deal with these, which started in the middle of the country and were meant to settle the west.

As I see it, over time there have been three kinds of routes, usually developing in sequence: trails, rails, roads. Trails are the oldest. In the mid-19C came the railroads, a vast improvement over dusty ruts, or mud. After the rails, and now co-existing with them, are the roads, although of course, paved roads are not new. The Romans had built magnificent roads in their time—note the discussion of Watling Street in the previous Series, and there were others over time. Yet the sequence of trains, rails, roads holds very true in reaching the west.

I see two Midwestern hubs for the routes west. Early on, most routes developed, not on the Mississippi as one might imagine—Saint Louis would have been a likely candidate--but further west, in an area on the border between western Missouri and eastern Kansas. For sake of reference, I’ll call this the Kansas City area, but it reaches to Independence and Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Topeka, Kansas and other towns in between. This was the principal source of routes west starting in the 2Q of the 19C, and reaching into the 3Q. Later on, this area yielded instead to Chicago, which remains the hub today for routes west.

Trails: Santa Fe Trail   We start with trails, and with nothing less historic than the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail. What I had always heard of these never had made sense to me. As large as the west coast is, why would a trail go just to Oregon? And why would a trail go just to Santa Fe and not further? It didn’t make sense. I now realize that it will continue not to make sense as long as you look at today’s maps. But we are dealing here with the 2Q of the 19C, the same fabulous time period for transportation when the Allegheny Portage Railroad, and later the Pennsylvania Railroad, facilitated crossing Pennsylvania (Reflections 2006 Series 10), and also the time when the Long Island Rail Road was built to connect Brooklyn to Boston (Reflections 2006 Series 11). You have to look at maps of the period.

In the 2Q-19C the Pacific coast was politically in three pieces. Mexico reached up to where even today California meets Oregon. Inland from the coast, all of what is now the Southwestern United States (exactly where I’ll be traveling) was Mexico. Much further north was Russia, which owned Alaska. The piece in between, which includes the coasts of today’s Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and, extending way inland, was known as Oregon Country. So the Pacific coast was, in sequence: Mexico (California), Oregon Country, Russia (Alaska).

The route toward the Southwest out of the Kansas City area hub, which became known as the Santa Fe Trail, was therefore at first an international trade route between the United States and Mexico. The Trail, first used in 1821, started in Independence, Missouri to be precise, and led to the major Mexican city in what was then Mexico’s Northeast, Santa Fe, settled in about 1610. With international trade being its purpose, that’s as far as the trail went. (The area was known as Nuevo Méjico/New Mexico even then, so from the name it all along was presumably considered a northern extension of traditional Mexico. It covered the present states of New Mexico and Arizona.)

The trail came out on a diagonal from Missouri, and turned once it cleared the mountains near Santa Fe. In later years, once the area became part of the US, the main travel route that developed would then go due west at this turning point, to Los Angeles. However, since Santa Fe lies somewhat northward into these mountains, the original trail coming southwest from Missouri did a sort of a fishhook turn and went a distance northwest in order to reach Santa Fe. This fishhook turn will continue to come up again. In any case, the Santa Fe Trail was in use for about six decades, up until the railroad arrived in the area in 1880.

Trails: Oregon Trail   So in the 2Q-19C settlers couldn’t go southwest, since that was Mexico. What part of the Pacific coast was available? Well the part that even to this day lies between California and Alaska, and was known then as Oregon Country. There were three major waterways in this area, the Columbia River, where Portland is today, and which today divides Oregon and Washington, Puget Sound, where Seattle is today, and the Frazier River, where Vancouver is today. This is the “Oregon” that the Oregon Trail was accessing, the only available Pacific coast there was.

Lewis and Clark had originally mapped a land route in 1804-1805 to the Pacific, to where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific, to be precise. In 1810 John Jacob Astor set up a route for overland supplies to his fur trading post at what is today Astoria, Oregon, on the Columbia. From this developed the Oregon Trail.

The Oregon Trail therefore skirted Mexican territory. It ran from the Kansas City area hub about 2170 miles or 3500 kilometers down the Snake and Columbia Rivers to Oregon City, today south of Portland, and at one point considered a leading candidate to become the capital city. The trail also serviced other locations in the region. At its start in the east, it actually followed the Santa Fe trail for a short distance, which I find almost poetic in its perfection. It was in heavy use for only about three decades, from 1841 to 1869. In the sequence trail, rail, road, it was the coming of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 that caused use of the trail to diminish. It continued in use until the 1890’s when not only increased railroad use, but also modern highways began to replace it. Today, US26 follows the Trail for much of its length.

This Oregon Country, a term used from 1818 to 1846 to describe all land west of the Rockies in this area, needs further discussion. It wasn’t Mexican, like California, and wasn’t Russian, like Alaska. The US wanted it. All of it. And the British wanted it. All of it. The extreme British claim was everything down to the California border, at 42°, and the extreme American claim was everything up to the Alaska border at 54°40’. This figure with the border with Alaska is the source of the American phrase of the period “Fifty-four forty or fight”. Well, it never came to fighting, since a compromise was reached whereby both the US and the future Canada would successfully get a Pacific coast. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 drew a compromise line at 49°, but dipped a bit further south to include all of Vancouver Island, with the city of Victoria, on the Canadian side. This is also the long line that cut off Point Roberts (Reflections 2005 Series 6). This left the Frazier River part of Oregon Country to British Columbia, and Puget sound and the Columbia River to the US. Inland in the US, it includes all of Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming. Oregon Country had been jointly occupied since 1818. The coastal part of the US area became Oregon Territory in 1848, and in 1853, Washington Territory was separated from it. Even though the Trail ended in Oregon City in today’s Oregon State, the name still had to imply all of Oregon Country in the beginning.

The name Santa Fe Trail is historic, but somewhat misleading, since this eventually became the major route from the Midwest, running diagonally at first to the turn at Santa Fe, but then leading westward to California. If understood by the fictitious name “Southwest Trail” or “Southwest Route”, the significance would become clearer. In the same way, the destination of the Oregon Trail would be clearer perhaps with the fictitious name of “Pacific Northwest Trail” or “Pacific Northwest Route, with the understanding that that includes what became British Columbia.

Trails: Spurs   The Santa Fe Trail is a decade or two older than the Oregon Trail, and routes that are de facto extensions of the Santa Fe Trail went to California, specifically Los Angeles, once Mexico ceded to the US the entire land tract that has become the US Southwest. Yet it seems to me that the Oregon Trail, which went right to the Pacific (Portland area) in the first place, takes first place in importance. Yet there remains between the two destinations a large unserviced area, most obviously centering on San Francisco, and it ended up falling to the Oregon Trail to service these areas, which is an additional reason to consider the Oregon Trail the primary route west.

The first spur trail was the Mormon Trail (1846-1857). Although it started in Illinois, not in the Kansas City area, it shortly afterward merged with the Oregon Trail for most of its distance, only cutting of toward the southwest near Utah, to service Salt Lake City.

To me, the most important, and most interesting spur was the California Trail. It, too, coincided with the Oregon Trail well beyond Utah to the Nevada area, where it then cut southwest across the top of Nevada through what is now Reno (this region to be discussed considerably more later on as background to Nevada), then to the California gold fields, and then to San Francisco. The California Trail was active between 1849 and 1869 during the gold rush period, the year of greatest migration being 1852.

Only in putting together this summary do I realize that, in our first trip to the West in our VW Camper in 1968, we zipped across eastern states and started getting serious looking around in Kansas, then Santa Fe and on. Unknowingly, we were very roughly following the Santa Fe Trail and then beyond to California. After driving for weeks around the West and Western Canada, we drove back across the northern Rockies; this wasn’t quite as close to the route of the Oregon Trail as had been to the Santa Fe Trail, but it did parallel it for some distance.

Rails   Rails started replacing trails as the easiest way to travel, especially across the continent, in the mid-19C. Whereas the two major trails had gone NW and SW, in time, three major rail routes developed across the US. In Canada, both Canadian National and the Canadian Pacific crossed the continent to Vancouver, represented today by Via Rail’s Canadian out of Toronto (Reflections 2005 Series 6).

Of the three US routes, it wasn’t a northern or southern route, but the central route that made it first, with the famous driving of the Golden Spike in Utah in 1869 commemorating the meeting of work crews of the two railroads working from each direction (now a national historic site). Today, this route through the Rockies, not only in my opinion the most attractive of the three, is serviced by Amtrak’s California Zephyr connecting Chicago with Denver, Salt Lake City, Reno, and San Francisco. The GrandLuxe trip I’ll be doing next fall will be from Denver to San Francisco on this route.

The northern rail connection to the Pacific is closer to the more northerly Lewis and Clark Trail through Montana than it is to the Oregon Trail through Wyoming. Amtrak’s Empire Builder service today connects Chicago via Minneapolis-Saint Paul with both Seattle and Portland (we went east from Portland).

The southern rail connection roughly follows first the southwesterly direction of the Santa Fe Trail, and then the route straight west to Los Angeles. It is represented today by Amtrak’s Southwest Chief between Chicago, Kansas City, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles. Although Kansas City is on its route, it is clear that in time, Chicago has supplanted Kansas City as a transportation hub, not only for rail, but also for road travel.

Rails: Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe   Yet earlier on in the rail era, Kansas City had still been the hub, and I’ll cite two examples. Earlier this year, in Reflections 2007 Series 2, I briefly discussed the above rail routes, but my main purpose was discussing the Copper Canyon. Do recall that it was the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway that planned the route from Kansas City into Mexico and the Pacific, using Kansas City as its eastern terminus.

But tying together best the images of the Kansas City area and Santa Fe has to be the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. Topeka is in Kansas just west of Kansas City, and Atchison is a nearby town, but since the railway was chartered in 1859, its destination was Santa Fe, later extended beyond to Los Angeles.

It is here that that fishhook turn begins to take on significance. The Santa Fe Trail had gone southwest, then fishhooked around the mountains to go a bit northwest to reach Santa Fe itself up in the mountains. The irony is, even though the AT&SF railroad had Santa Fe in its name, and it was its avowed original destination, it never reached it, at least not directly. By the time the railroad had reached the area and turned west, it was easier to continue due west. Therefore, from the very beginning, Santa Fe was served just by a short spur line out of Lamy NM, and, the ultimate downgrade, today that spur line has been replaced by a bus.

This routing avoiding the fishhook turn is not insignificant. Since Santa Fe, as a height of irony, was not on the rail route named after it, in time the nearby city of Albuquerque, which was on the route, took on much greater importance, and is now the biggest city in New Mexico. Do not dismiss the significance of routes.

The 1946 movie “The Harvey Girls” was about the Fred Harvey Company, which filled an early railroading need. Early trains in the west did not have meal service, and passengers at station stops would have to fend for themselves, and often be exploited. The Harvey Company established a series of Harvey House restaurants on the Santa Fe lines so that when the trains made a meal stop, there would be good food and service available. The Harvey Company hired women from across the US on six-month contracts. It was these “Harvey Girls” that gave waitressing a degree of respectability.

Judy Garland starred in the film and sang “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” by Johnny Mercer. It won the Academy Award for Best Song. Do you note what had to have been an intentional error in the song? As a kid, hearing the error always struck me as odd.

Apparently Mercer had to add an extra “the” to the name of the railroad to make it fit the beat. That’s good poetic license—but that’s also not exactly the name of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Here’s a YouTube clip (3:07) of a 1945 vinyl recording of Judy Garland singing On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe:

How could you possibly sing it without the extra “the”? Can you think of any other railway that has a song named after it, an Oscar-winning song at that, even if that song has an intentional error? Considering air travel, you CERTAINLY can’t think of an airline in that situation.

Roads   Trails eventually yield to roads. In the US, we have had two numbering systems, for two different kinds of highways.

In 1924, a system for numbering roads was initiated, which was implemented starting in 1926, for those roads that already existed, plus potential future ones. These are usually referred to as US Highways, even federal highways, although they have always been under the jurisdiction and funding of the individual states. It’s only the numbering system that’s national. They follow a simple nationwide grid. Odd-numbered highways run north to south from 1 to 10 , from US1 on the Atlantic coast to US 101 on the Pacific (for these purposes, 101 is considered to be ten-one). Even-numbered routes go east-west, from US2 in the north to US98 in the south. There are many variations within the primary grid for diagonal roads and spurs.

The second system is the Interstate Highway System. Germany had developed its Autobahn system in the 1930’s, with the rationale that they could be of great use to move military equipment for defense purposes. General Eisenhower was duly impressed with the Autobahn system after the war, and compared it with his experience as a young soldier in 1919 crossing the US on highways of the day. In 1956, the National Defense Highway System was established, with the now President Eisenhower citing the same defense rationale that had been used in Germany earlier.

The interstate system is intentionally numbered opposite from the US Highways to avoid confusion between similar numbers. Odd routes still go north-south, but numbering starts on the Pacific coast instead with I-5 and ends on the Atlantic with I-95. Similarly with the even-numbered routes, I-10 is in the south and I-90 in the north.

Although it was considered that both highway systems would coexist, the Interstate System has now moved the US Highway system to secondary status for long-distance travel, and has even caused many of them to become decertified, in whole or in part.

Roads: Route 66   There are roads, and there are roads. But I don’t recall any song written about an Interstate highway. As a matter of fact, a number of the more traditional US Highways are well appreciated, US1 as it goes all the way out along the Florida Keys to Key West being one of them, but I haven’t heard any one being advised to get their kicks on Route O-N-E. Even with an attempt at rhyme, I haven’t heard anyone being advised to get their glee on Route O-N-E.

For the longest time, I never understood how Route 66 got to have cult status—which it does--as opposed to any other route. But after researching the trails, rails, and roads headed to the west coast, I now understand it. It is most probable we drove along it for at least some distance in the Southwest in 1968, but at that time, we were not “in” enough yet to understand its significance. I won’t make that mistake this trip, though.

[Note: the term “Route 66” used extensively in Britain, usually along with the US Highway sign insignia, but it refers to a variety of things, from being the name of a driving school to a mobile phone company and global positioning device. Google it, and you’ll see it’s used elsewhere as well. But it remains unclear to me if its reference to the actual historic US highway is always clear to everyone.]

Why is (was) it special? Well, for starters, it went from Chicago to Los Angeles, in the same tradition of the great historic routes we’ve been discussing. Then, contrary to the usual even-numbered routes going due east-west, it went first on a grand diagonal, before turning west. If that sounds familiar, it is true: Route 66 was the heir to both the route of the Santa Fe Trail and also the southern rail route to the Pacific coast. But it made history if its own, and there also followed literary and musical references, and also nicknames for the road to indicate the feelings people had (have) for it.

When the US Highway system was being planned in 1924, there were proponents who felt strongly there should be a highway connecting Chicago and Los Angeles, even though this would start out as a diagonal connection. These proponents wanted to use the designation Route 60, but that was taken, and was reserved for a route going east-west. They were offered 64, but opted instead for 66, since the digits were the same and it was pleasant to say and hear, so the use of that particular number was purposeful, not coincidental.

By 1926 Route 66 was essentially built, running some 2400 miles/3860 kilometers from Chicago to Los Angeles. That total is not in stone, because all highways are subject to extension and realignment, perhaps around a town rather than through it (see below). The main variation of Route 66 from earlier connections is that from Chicago it did not go to Kansas City, but the diagonal instead swung south at an earlier point, just cutting through a corner of Kansas, but including central Oklahoma, before straightening out in the area of Albuquerque to proceed west. Picture this highway. What do you see?

I’m almost sure you’re picturing it incorrectly, as I did at first, because when it was first built, Route 66 was a dirt road, and remained so for some years.

Remember, US Highways are financed and maintained by the states, and it was Kansas which proudly boasted—this highway was famous from the beginning--that the entire portion of Route 66 in Kansas was the very first portion to be entirely paved. That sounded wonderful, except for the fact that Route 66, as mentioned above, only cut through the southeast corner of Kansas, and all Kansas had to pave was twelve miles. Starting in 1933, thousands of unemployed young men in the CCC were put to work paving the road, and by 1938, Route 66 was paved from end to end.

Here’s another example of the fame of this road. In 1927, the ten-year old Phillips Petroleum Company of Oklahoma was testing its product in a car driving on Route 66 in Oklahoma. They found that their product allowed the car to go up to a very impressive 66 mph (106 kph). The coincidence of that “high” rate of speed, and on the famous Route 66 at that, caused Phillips to name its product Phillips 66, a name it kept for many years.

It is also historically significant that Route 66 did swing further south, through central Oklahoma. In the period of the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s the migrants from Oklahoma who became known as Okies used Route 66 to travel west to California. It is estimated that some 210,000 people used this route.

This historical component developed into a literary component. In 1939, California writer John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” about the Okies traveling west on Route 66. Steinbeck gave Route 66 its most famous nickname, the “Mother Road”, a name it still retains. When his book won the Pulitzer Prize, it made the road that much more famous, as did John Ford’s 1940 film with Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell portraying the Joads. Route 66 has also been called “The Main Street of America”.

And then there’s the musical component. In 1946, Jazz composer and pianist Bobby Troup wrote his best-known song “(Get your Kicks on) Route 66”, after driving the road its length to California with his wife, who suggested the title. A large part of the song just mentions stops along the way. Nat King Cole recorded it, and here he sings it on YouTube: Nat King Cole: (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66

Mention was made of extension and realignment, and I have two examples I find interesting. Since the stated destination of Route 66 was Los Angeles, the original 1926 alignment swung southwest from Pasadena into downtown LA, down Broadway to the original Route 66 terminus at 7th Street. But it was felt later that the original intention was that Route 66 should reach the Pacific, so in 1940 it was realigned from Pasadena westward instead, down Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard through Hollywood and Beverly Hills to Santa Monica on the coast. You cannot say that Route 66 didn’t strive for glamour.

Santa Monica Boulevard does reach the ocean at Ocean Avenue, the equivalent of 1st Street. Two blocks south of that intersection, I-10, Route 66’s “replacement”, also reaches Ocean Avenue. That fact holds irony, since that newer alignment of Route 66, coming down Santa Monica Boulevard, right after 9th Street turned abruptly left at Lincoln Boulevard, the equivalent of 8th Street. It then went three blocks down Lincoln to its terminus at Olympic Boulevard, which is a half-block short of where Lincoln today crosses over I-10 in I-10’s quest for the sea. So the interstate accomplished later what Route 66 did not quite make; Lincoln Boulevard (8th Street) is eight blocks short of the Pacific.

I have a consolation here. I will be staying one night in Santa Monica, a few blocks away from this area, a favorite location. I will be going to dinner for the third time at Warszawa, a Polish restaurant we’ve enjoyed in the past. Now that I know where the final terminus of Route 66 was before it was decertified, I see that it turns out that Warszawa, on Lincoln at Santa Monica, is right at the fateful intersection where Route 66 failed to make it to the sea. What a pleasant coincidence.

Another realignment is a story of spite, and perhaps sweet revenge. Whether the revenge was deserved I do not know, but it’s a nice story. And it again involves the fact that Santa Fe is set back north into the mountains.

The Santa Fe Trail had swung around that fishhook turn to reach Santa Fe. The Santa Fe railroad had avoided doing this, but the Route 66 planners did swing the right-of-way first northwest up into Santa Fe, then southeast back down to Albuquerque, to continue west. However, in 1938, a governor of New Mexico lost a re-election, and he felt that politicians and business interests in Santa Fe were at fault. Since he was still governor for a final couple of months, he immediately declared a straightening of the alignment coming from the east to go directly west to Albuquerque and totally avoid cutting up to Santa Fe. Before people realized what he was doing, there was already traffic rolling on the new alignment, and it became official. Although the change was done for spite, it did cut off 90 miles of extra travel.

But as they did with other US Highways, the Interstates first diminished use of Route 66, then they made it superfluous, and it was finally decertified on June 27, 1985, meaning it lasted for some six decades, yes, which is just what the Santa Fe Trail lasted. You’ve seen it happen. The US Highway uses the best route, so the interstate supplants it. First two new lanes are built over on the side of the old highway, then traffic moves over and the two lanes of the old highway are upgraded, and before you know it, you have an Interstate instead.

Today, no single highway carries road traffic from Chicago to Los Angeles. I-55 to Saint Louis, then I-44 to Oklahoma City correspond to the diagonal part of its old route, maybe 1/3 of the way, then I-40 runs west covering the remaining 2/3 almost to Los Angeles, where locally, I-15 and I-10 complete the route (to the sea!). The Interstates might be faster, but they’re not the Mother Road.

Still, not all is lost. Interstates tend to run straighter than older roads, and in doing so, part of the older road often remains untouched. In the case of Route 66, they are often renamed “Historic Route 66”. Also, it seems that the most eager of the trail and road preservation associations are the ones that watch over the surviving portions of Route 66.

One little irony visible on the map is that I-44 runs from Missouri to Oklahoma directly, coming very close to the SW corner of Kansas, but not entering it. Therefore, that twelve-mile stretch of Route 66 in Kansas that it was so proud of paving first, seems to be preserved.

At my first SW stop on this trip, Albuquerque, I’ll drive down Central Avenue in downtown, which is marked Historic Route 66, but I’ll have no occasion to see more of it in New Mexico. However, what seems by visual inspection to be the longest preserved stretch of Route 66 anywhere is in Arizona, a section that, running west as ever, first swings a bit north, then south of I-40 and has therefore been bypassed by it, now being designated Historic Route 66. It centers on Kingman, Arizona, which was mentioned in the song, and I’m looking forward to driving this stretch. Just for kicks.