Freeways - A Journey West on Route 66

When Lewis Davies bought a secondhand car in Tulsa, his aim was to drive across Oklahoma and the American South-West to California along Route 66 – the highway many took out of the Dustbowl states during the Depression to what they hoped was the promised land. It is the road that runs through Steinbeck’s 1939 novel Grapes of Wrath, and Steinbeck is an abiding presence in this travelogue which explores the South-West as it is today in the context of a past that is glimpsed in faded towns, local museums, the bric-à-brac of people’s lives and uncertain memories. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is also not far below the surface of Freeways, and the romance of the road, the freedom of getting in a car and taking off across America’s vast spaces, is part of the pleasure of Lewis Davies’s book. The journey allows for a picaresque narrative in which the author reports encounters with chance acquaintances at small town cafés, gas stations, and down-at-heel motels. Among them is Martha, an Australian hitchhiker, who becomes a central character in the narrative, a stranger from far away, like Davies himself. The two have little in common except the road. As they travel, though, they get closer, and have a mobile affair. Everything is transitory on the road, however, and it all ends suddenly in Las Vegas where they bump into Martha’s Brisbane boyfriend – who she had neglected to mention, and who isn’t someone to mess with. Despite the shadowy presences of Steinbeck and Kerouac, Freeways is very much ‘on the road’ late twentieth-century style, with backpackers, prosperous retirees in luxury RVs and, it seems, German tourists en masse – and always the financial fall-back of the ever-acceptable credit card. But this is part of the reality Davies has come to experience, and he weaves it skilfully into a narrative that is given cultural depth by his asides on the Dustbowl disaster of the ’30s, on Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence (whose ranch and grave he visits in New Mexico), and the plight of the Mexican agricultural workers who have taken the place of the Okies on the corporate farms of north California. Sometimes he misses out. He learns that the Dustbowl artist Alexandre Hogue is still alive, in his nineties, and resident in Tulsa. Davies is given Hogue’s phone number. But Tulsa is three days’ drive behind him. The road breeds its own priorities and superficialities and, instead of turning his car around, Davies heads on out West, missing the one living contact with the lost world he is exploring. Freeways was first published in 1997 and this is a welcome reprint. There are surprisingly few travel books of this kind by Welsh writers. It makes you wish for more. -- John Barnie @ www.gwales.com