ROUTE 66 RAMBLE, PART 4
Oklahoma has more drivable miles of Route 66 than any other state. And “drivable,” as twenty-first-century roadies know, is all-important.
I digress for a moment here, from Oklahoma’s varied and fascinating tourist attractions—and its music legends from Woody Guthrie to Garth Brooks—to consider that notion of “drivable.”
You wouldn’t, in the year 2024, necessarily attempt to motor west over every vestige of circa-1926 pavement that still exists. Or would you? Some purists consider this itinerary the holy grail, as Appalachian Trail through-hikers insist on walking the continuous footpath from Georgia to Maine (or vice versa) without cheating by hitching a ride during severe weather, or bypassing steep passages too challenging for your physique.
As a dedicated roadgeek myself, I know from previous tries at the 1916 Bankhead Highway from one end of Texas to the other, or US 83 (“The Last American Highway”) from Mexico to Canada, that this isn’t always possible.
An early thoroughfare that might’ve promised a continuous route from end to end simply doesn’t exist along every mile once the vagaries of weather and bureaucracy have taken their toll. Alignments stretch or straighten; stronger bridges are built; signs come and go.
Here in Oklahoma, that’s abundantly true. Any attempt to stick to the Mother Road across her 432 miles made famous by the Okie Joads of “The Grapes of Wrath” will meet with frustration at numerous diversions onto city streets, toll roads, or that most wretched of east-west Interstates, I-40. The Ross/McClanahan “Here It Is” maps (mentioned in a previous column) are your best shot. Even then, flooding and deteriorating pavement might frustrate your aims, as the author of our audiobook entertainment, Rick Antonson, once experienced in the Sooner State.
For Kay and me, in mid-July 2024, flooding wasn’t a problem. It hadn’t rained a drop since the deluge in Atlanta, Illinois.
Our first challenge, in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, was to locate the legendary Ribbon Road.
So our first challenge, in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, was to locate the legendary Ribbon Road.
The highway anomaly—a stretch of vintage pavement only 9 feet wide that had existed for a decade before being swept up in Route 66—was under siege that very week. We’d read in the papers about the Miami (Okla.) city council’s threat to grind up the remainder of badly deteriorated concrete-and-asphalt sandwich the road had become. It’s understandable that no road-maintainer vehicle (hey . . . perhaps a new character in the next “Cars” sequel?!) could scrape that pavement without damaging road and equipment alike. And the result would be only a worse grosgrain-ribbon texture than exists at present, which holds any automobile’s horses to about 10 mph.
I signed the online petition to forestall the council’s action. I reached out to Oklahoma 66’s head honcho, Rhys Martin of Tulsa, with whom I’d crossed paths in earlier preservation initiatives.
Oh, and I wrote a song, of course. Stay tuned.
Following directions provided by numerous websites (the Historical Marker Database is one of the best), we set out from Miami, southwest toward E 140 Road. At a 90-degree elbow amid field and forest, we knew we’d found it: that 9-foot-wide roadway edged by concrete curbing, recognizable from many photos.
The unique-on-66 Sidewalk Highway, supposedly designed by a 1912 highway department too strapped for cash to complete a full 18-foot two-lane road. The same budget dollars could stretch twice the miles—of a single lane.
Originally part of the Ozark Trail, a regional auto route that predated the national Route 66, the Ribbon Road has become a treasured artifact. To replace its deteriorated surface with modern material and safety marking, partisans argue, would be akin to rebuilding the Parthenon out of PVC. But few preservation remedies remain, except to leave it as is—to further crackle and weather away to dust.
We drive reverently, the setting sun drifting occasionally through the sentry rows of boxelder and blackjack, trying to prevent our Firestones from inflicting further damage. No vehicle passes to force us onto the narrow shoulder. By the time we reach the marble marker at the “preserved” curve most travelers manage to find just off today’s US 59, we’re quiet, somber.
“Completed in 1922 as Federal Highway Project No. 8. Running 15.46 miles from Miami to Afton,” it reads. “The only remaining 9’ section of original pavement on the old Route 66 system, taken out of service in 1937. A National Register of Historic Places Site.”
Whatever of Old 66 lies west of us in Oklahoma, we expect it will pale in comparison to this most elegiac of road relics.
Over the next 24 hours our rambles will take us into Tulsa past Big Bill the Muffler Man at Vinita, over the Pryor Creek iron bridge at Chelsea, by the Will Rogers Museum at Claremore and the delightful Blue Whale at Catoosa. As we stop for all of these it becomes apparent that Oklahoma will require a return trip, for we haven’t even reached its midsection of Route 66 riches.
Time’s winged chariot presses on, and after our in-depth tour of Tulsa’s Church Studio (where rock-piano legend and native son Leon Russell transformed a former house of worship into a world-class recording studio, still a vital force today) the inexorable river of I-40 sweeps us along through the capital city and westward across rivers and plains. Night falls on us at last at Weatherford, having passed our last hours of twilight traversing the two-lane roller-coaster of what Google Maps calls “U.S. Bicycle Route 66” past Bridgeport.
I drift to sleep recalling familiar forays from earlier years— this true-west country isn’t far from home for us, after all. Hydro, Hext, Texola, we’ll catch you on another day.
For now, the memory of the Ribbon Road persists, and perhaps the road will, as well. Only a few days after we’d traversed it, the Miami City Council tabled its proposal to grind up and repave the Sidewalk Highway.
“A solution has been reached to keep a century-old historic Ottawa County tourist landmark partially intact,” read KSN16’s FourStatesHomepage on July 17. The compromise, proposed in a July 16 letter, would leave one mile of the three-mile roadway untouched, said spokesmen for city and county.
“Having that original piece, that attracts tourists from all over. From, you know, all over England and Scotland and Vietnam,” Miami mayor Bless Parker told KOAM-TV on July 20. “I mean, I’ve met people from all over the world, Germany, all over the world that want to come see that piece of the Ribbon Road.”
A single mile, hmm.
Perhaps a few more could yet be spared . . . for those from around the globe, or next door in Texas? Now, where’s Woody Guthrie when you need him to compose a tune . . .
Rally for the Ribbon Road
Over those Oklahoma hills
Came a newfangled kind of thrill:
A gas-powered transport mode
Folks started calling—“auto-mo-bile.”
For buggy lanes the auto wasn’t made—
Cars required new surfaces be laid:
Concrete or macadam, brick or plank,
The price to pave the highway must be paid.
Bean counters for the county checked stockpiles,
Fell short by half, in half a dozen trials . . .
When suddenly one pencil-pusher smiled:
Divide the lane by half, double the miles!
And so, with a solution engineered,
The bureaucrats were happy, drivers cheered:
Fifteen miles of road, just nine feet wide—
The curb was set, the way was cleared.
Sidewalk highway, ribbon road—
Half the cost and twice the miles;
More than eleven decades old,
Half the width, and twice the smiles.
Patch its blacktop if you must,
Or let it crumble into dust,
Fix it for posterity
Or let it be, just wait and see:
But do not ruin the Ribbon Road.
Do not ruin our Ribbon Road.
Rally for our Ribbon Road—
Help us preserve our Ribbon Road.
READ MORE https://oklahomaroute66.com/ribbon
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