The Road to Nowhere
U.S. Route 6 is a road that has deep meaning for me. It disappears and reappears in beloved and remote places. It starts in the town that nurtured my careers in biology and writing, Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. From there it meanders west, past spiritual Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada with its ancient bristlecone pines, on its way to Bishop, California. It was originally the longest road in the country, and the first to run coast-to-coast, all the way to the Pacific at Long Beach before the final segment was commandeered by U.S. 395 at Bishop.
In the late 1940s, University of California English professor George R. Stewart decided to publish a text-and-picture book about a transcontinental highway. He chose U.S 40 after rejecting U.S. 6, which he described as running “uncertainly from nowhere to nowhere, scarcely to be followed from one end to the other, except by some devoted eccentric.”
Professor Stewart had no idea he was foreshadowing the start of one of the great literary journeys, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. “On the road-map,” wrote Kerouac, “was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I’ll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself and confidently started.”
But traffic on that route was too light for hitchhiking, and Kerouac ended up trying “various roads and routes” in his journey west. “It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America.” Although Route 6 failed him at the beginning of his journey, it proved to be of great use at its end. He drafted at least a portion of On the Road in a dune shack within walking distance of Route 6’s Provincetown terminus. I learned this from the dune shack’s owner, writer Hazel Hawthorne Werner.
Route 6 was the first Atlantic-to-Pacific road, but in that era long portions of it through western deserts were unpaved, with stretches greater than 100 miles between services. Though the road is now paved, the isolation persists. In the Great Basin, nowhere is everywhere, and Nevada has put its prisons in the middle of these empty deserts. Scorching hot in summer and numbingly cold in winter, climate adds another dimension to the turrets and concertina wire.
Public roads, including Route 6, pass by these lonesome prisons, and the state has erected signs reading “Hitchhiking Prohibited.” It means “Don’t pick up hitchhikers,” but the sign is addressed to the pedestrian, as if someone who had committed a felony – and then committed another by breaking out of prison – would worry about getting busted for hitchhiking. In Nevada’s Independence Valley, there is only sagebrush and a state prison. Independence? It is a rascally system that uses irony as a form of punishment.
An odd thing has happened where Route 6 crosses these deserts in western Utah and eastern Nevada. Another road, Route 50, has been placed on top of it. This of course is a common happenstance in the nation’s road system. But Route 50 not only rides through the desert on the shoulders of Route 6, it has also stolen all its thunder after being declared “the loneliest road in America.”
Route 50, however (along with the ghost of 6), is a typical rather than exceptional Great Basin road. They are all the loneliest roads. There are many long stretches where nothing of human origin can be seen in any direction that is not part of the road itself. It can be unsettling to realize there may be no one between you and as far as you can see, as if passing through the portal to a younger planet.
Richard LeBlond is the author of Homesick for Nowhere, a collection of essays that won an EastOver Press Nonfiction Prize in 2022, and was a finalist for general nonfiction in the Spring 2023 San Francisco Book Festival. His essays and photographs have appeared in many U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Weber – The Contemporary West, Burningword, Lowestoft Chronicle, Trampset, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.
You can see more of his work in issues 12.3 and 7.1 and 3.2