Some stories find you before you know you are looking for them.
We both discovered Route 66 the same way, years apart, before we had ever met. The television series. That road, those faces, that particular quality of light across the American plains in black and white. Neither of us could have told you why it stayed with us the way it did. We were young, we were not American, and yet something in it lodged itself and refused to leave. When Mairade and I eventually found each other and began to build a life together, we discovered, among other things, that we shared this. A road we had never driven had somehow already shaped us both.
For us, Route 66 was never really about a road. It was about what America is and what America has given to the world. That is a remarkable thing to sit with when you think about it. The United States is a young country by the standards of history. A few hundred years set against the deep centuries of Europe, Asia, and the civilizations before them. And yet the American contribution to the culture of the modern world is staggering, disproportionate to its age in every direction. The music that moved continents. The literature that changed how people understood themselves. The cinema and television that carried those stories across every border. So much of it, traced back far enough, either traveled Route 66 or was marked by the era and the events the road witnessed.
The musicians who went west. The writers who found their material in the dispossession and the movement of people. The filmmakers who turned the highway into a landscape of the American soul. Route 66 was not a backdrop to American culture. It was a corridor through the heart of it.
And behind the mythology, there was history of a different and harder kind. The Dust Bowl. The Great Depression. Prohibition, which turned the road into one of the great arteries for the transportation of illicit alcohol across the country, every convoy moving through the dark in defiance of a law that had failed to reckon with human nature. And above all, the great migration. Families from the devastated farms of Oklahoma and the plains states, loading everything they owned onto anything that would carry it, moving west because the road existed and because there was nothing left to stay for. For millions of people, Route 66 was not a choice or an adventure. It was the only road available when everything else had collapsed. It was survival, dressed up in motion.
What we struggled with, and still struggle with, is how America seemed to have forgotten all of this. The country that built the road bypassed it with interstate highways, let it fall into disrepair, and moved on without looking back. The motels closed. The diners shuttered. The towns that had sprung up along its length because the road made them possible found themselves slowly emptied out by the simple fact that the traffic no longer came. To us, this felt like a people walking away from their own story. Not out of cruelty, perhaps, but out of the particular restlessness that is itself one of the things Route 66 represents.
What Route 66 really is, at its deepest, is a story about the journey itself. About the people who began in one place and ended in another and were changed by everything they encountered in between. It is also the story of those who found what they were looking for not at the destination, but somewhere along the way, in a town they had not planned to stop in, in a conversation they had not expected to have. That idea is not an American idea. It is a human one. Which is why the road resonates far beyond the borders of the country that built it.
We were not willing to let that story disappear.
We invested in it. We sent a film crew at our own expense across America to travel the full route from Chicago to Los Angeles, to document what remained, to find the people who had lived it or remembered it or chose to keep its memory alive. It was a deliberate act of preservation. We believed that America had forgotten, and we felt, perhaps stubbornly, that someone had to remember.
A few years ago, we created ROUTE 66® Beer to carry that story forward in a different form. Something quintessentially American. Something democratic and unpretentious and shared, the way the road itself had always been shared by the people who needed it. Beer felt right. It is what you drink at the end of a long day of driving. It is what you order in a diner at the edge of a town you have never heard of. It is what connects you to the place you are in without asking anything complicated of you.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM
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