In Amarillo, we are on the tracks of Bone Hooks, the black cowboy of Amarillo.

I’d come across Hooks’s story in the vertical files at the University of Texas library, when I had given a talk not long before. The article was from l947. I didn’t know if anyone here had still heard of him and his quixotic quest.

Amarillo didn’t have many native African-Americans. In time, blacks traveled up to far North Texas for jobs as domestics or janitors: "That’s all there was here for work," a local historian said. "Until the military came, the army and air force; then there were good jobs, in war and after, for pretty much everyone."

Bones Hook arrived in town on a horse in l901, 17 years old. He could rope like a cowboy, ride like a cowboy, wear a hat like a cowboy. That he was dark-skinned didn’t seem to be a problem. He hung around, worked hard, saved some money and bought property. People took him seriously when he told them he wanted a new black settlement north of town.

African-Americans are one of the groups often left out of books on Route 66. Yet blacks have worked as cowboys in this corridor since before the Civil War. When Route 66 opened in 1926, 75 years ago, African-American communities were dotted across the West. Along what would be Route 66 were prosperous, self-governed black outposts: Boley, Oklahoma; Bonham, Texas; and Bones Hooks’ North Heights, Amarillo.

 Back a ways, Dave Edmunds of Dallas had told me "Texans are wonderfully optimisitic. Most believe if they’ve got enough money and if they work hard enough they can do anything--as long as the government leaves them alone."

These words are a Greek chorus to two of the people I meet here, a woman who made a museum without asking anyone for anything, and a man who asks the world for everything.

In Vega, Texas, near the New Mexico line, I spot a hand-lettered sign: Dot ’s Mini-Museum. This is an attic like your grandmother has; she has no degrees in museology. There are no signs of curation, just "stuff" as she calls it, scattered about. Vega is one of those towns which more or less blew away when Route 66 bypassed, she explains. Dot worked as a laundress, and she remembers the boomers, railroad workers fired by their company but still riding the rails. She converted her laundry room into a collection for her grandkids and her great-grandkids. Then she overflowed--something museum professionals would understand--into a wooden garage behind the house. In the passageway between, a pink flamingo statue looks out of water.

"Who visits this collection?"

"A lot of the people are from overseas. They like Route 66. Some come on bicycles. I remember one Japanese boy, riding a bicycle. He said, ‘Man, that desert is terrible.’"

"Tell me about tourists in the days of 66," I ask, lingering in her littered living room, glad for a break from fighting the wind.

"Well, we had an ice plant here, and tourists would want to fill up their canvas water bags and carry out chipped ice. They sold them luncheon meat. But things really quieted down when we lost our train. I never did figure out what happened to the Rock Island Line. One day it was here, and the next day they came and took up the tracks. And we were without a train. I missed that train whistle."

I try to imagine this town with bumper-to-bumper cars on Route 66. A tumbleweed blows by the front of her garage/exhibition hall, turning over and over. No traffic to stop it now.

"Most of the traffic was going west, people looking for a better life. I don’t know if they found it or not. I guess they did, because it was bad where they left. Living here in Vega is real good. Just friendly, friendly folks--like living with kinfolks all my life. Tourists, they’re friendly too."

"Why are these people still coming through on Route 66 ?"

"That’s the mystery, isn’t it. I’ve seen them standing out front taking picture of my sign all hours of the day and night. I just don’t know."

What people feel the need to photograph, what images they save of their journey, is a fascinating study. My traveling partner Franny takes pictures for a portfolio. Because as she sees it, one person’s art is another’s junk. On Route 66, there’s often a thin line between art and junk. One man took a bunch of old Cadillacs and buried them in ground, an artistic expression that some laugh at and others are in awe of.

It’s hard to know what to call Stanley Marsh. Mention the name to an Amarillan, and they shake their heads and laugh. He’s the artist who financed and conceived of the Cadillac Ranch installation, and a few hundred people have written about it, including Bruce Springsteen, who wrote a song.

Marsh is also a financier: His dad had gas and his mother had oil. He parlayed these into a string of TV stations. His office is a flamboyant corner of one of them in downtown Amarillo, painted in bright colors. The walls have poor copies of famous paintings that I suspect he produced. He’s also known for elaborate installations, a staircase to nowhere, an outdoor pool table only giants could play on.

As Delbert Trew told me in McLean Texas, "At the time it was put in, l974, Cadillac Ranch was twenty years ahead of its time. Everybody thought Stanley was absolutely nuts, sinking those Cadillacs into the ground, headfirst, with the fins sticking out."

Today Stanley Marsh is in a pixieish mood. He has a young acolyte sitting in on the conversation; too late, I realize he intends to put on a show.

"How did I decide where to put Cadillac Ranch? Well, Zeus and I were sitting around, throwing bolts of lightening, and I tossed one here."

I wonder if Marsh got up on the wrong side of the bed. His bulbous, balding head gives him the look of a monk without his brown habit. He comes back to earth for a moment.

"I wrote a ninth grade paper about tourism in Amarillo: it was the tourism of the truck stop; it was our third-biggest industry. I read a book on the history of the Cadillac tail fins; so I knew what they were shaped like. In Texas in those days, everybody who could afford them drove a Cadillac. Our maid had a Cadillac."

"We won the war and it was our right to have those big cars and we had the gas right here in Texas. The majority of people in this country, they lived on the East Coast. And they wanted to hit the road and go to Las Vegas and break the bank and go to Hollywood and to the beach...and that was the American dream."

"You once asked an interviewer," I say, "if there was a difference between living where the road was or living on the road. Do you live on the road to Los Angeles?"

"I don’t live on a road to Los Angeles. I live in Amarillo, Texas. I am Amarillo, Texas. The city would dry up and blow away if I weren’t here.

"This is not the road to California. I don’t want to go out there with those squishy head, orange juice drinking fairies. Not on your life. This is a road to the East coast. To our pilgrim’s fathers and England where I belong, except they’ve been letting so many foreigners in England, it’s not even all white anymore."

"It only goes to Chicago, as far as I can tell," I say a snideness creeps into my voice I can’t control. I’m tired of bullies and braggarts. This man needs something like a shot of reality. He doesn’t think so.

"It’s AC-DC. It goes both ways. It’s one of those kinky new sexual people that has a preference an hour. I was talking to the road the other day, and I said, ‘You’re old and you’re flat and you just go every place straight.’

"'Look at me!' it replied. 'There is so much of me now. I’ve finally gotten to be as big as Moby Dick.' And it just rolled up around at me like a piece of licorice pretending it was a cobra."

I had never met a man who talked to a road before. "To my way of thinking, the biggest challenge facing an artist in the U.S. is a flat horizontal line...when you have the endless prairie, as far as you can see, and the sun above, and not one feature on it. Anything you put on it is going to seem alien."

"Cadillac Ranch is a monument. You can only expect one or two good artists to be alive and working at any given time in the western world and I am one of them."

Despite the trappings of delusional neurosis, Stanley Marsh (and the Ant Farm from San Francisco, who did the assembly), gave Route 66 stationary art on a moving highway. When the passing driver looks at these cars, frozen in motion, it looks like they are driving to the center of the earth.

The car I’m in is not ready to be buried, but it is fast deteriorating. I notice hair attached to the ceiling, mine--sandy blonde but fading. There are little scuff marks where I stepped into the dark clay soil of Illinois, black gold they call it. Fine flakes of sebum settle on the seats, mixing with black fluff from my trousers. It’s the cumulative detritus of travel. At every stop a sample of where we pass, country and city, accompanies us. Pretty soon we’ll be a traveling exhibit case of American motes, the holy dirt of the Miracle Road.