When I had last driven through Oklahoma City, four months ago, there had been 24 days of triple-digit heat and no rains. Overheard in a hotel elevator, as a man struggled to carry his clubs out to the range, each club wearing a small, furry shower cap: "One thing about Oklahoma, you’re either gonna play in the heat or the wind. I’ve lost track of the last general rain around here."

"An old farmer once said one thing you can bet on is it will always rain at the end of the drought," his friend answered.

I have brought along an old paperback copy of Grapes of Wrath. Nights, to calm me from the road and erase the nondescript hotel rooms, I have taken to rereading it. The edges are coated in a red dye, and turning the old paper pages leaves a powdery residue on my fingers and faint red dust on the turned-down sheets.

Over? I can’t imagine it, on this snowy morning, as I linger in bed. Trucks rumble faintly, their roar absorbed by the snow. Ahead lies more plains than I can drive in a day, more mountains than I can climb, and the country’s most treacherous desert, the Mojave, littered with the bones and stories of travelers on 66 who didn’t make it.

There are still stretches of the old 66, which peel off Oklahoma 66 like a walk in the woods. I’m driving along, and suddenly a spur to the right or left tracks pulls me deep into the forest on a thin, yellow brick road. Up ahead I see a tractor making its way past snowy, plowed fields. Parked by a farmhouse is an old car; in San Bernardino, it would be a "classic." It pulls onto the old road unhurriedly and flits across lanes like a butterfly. Slipping behind, instead of chasing the trucks down the interstate, I brake for reverie. This is Route 66, in its rural enclave. Its inaccessibility--a hundred miles from the nearest large airport--is deceptive. Maybe the guy on the tractor goes home to a screaming Pentium computer and tracks corn futures in Japan. Maybe the guy in that ‘65 Ford Econoline is actually snapping his fingers to an MPEG 3 tune, downloaded from the Internet. It could be.

More likely, though, it’s a T.V. dinner ahead and broadcast television; I don’t see signs of cable, and the land is too poor to grow satellite dishes.

As I cruise, passages from Steinbeck come back to me. I see the Joads ahead, like mirage puddles which dry up as I approach. I see a Flying Dutchman on wheels, an old truck, a pickup from the 40's, with rounded hoods and fenders like the streamlined, art deco of the Coral Court behind me in St. Louis.

The back of the truck is empty, a few husks and paper sacks blowing. I coax my imagination, and the back of the pickup fills with old trunks and a beat-up chest of drawers. Each mile the truck’s imagined load grows heavier. Boxes of pots and pans and blankets are piled on mattresses.

I look over my own Tokyo quarter horse. The Snowbird’s a compact, a bit rough. We bounce across Route 66's aging surface. The Snowbird once had that new-car smell, which buyers prize. (I understand used car dealers have a canned scent they spray on used cars. They say the new-car smell excites the blood. They aren’t far off--most of it consists of molecules in the plastic releasing a toxin.)

Mine is an exchangeable car, ready to be turned in at the nearest rental-car garage in the next city, if it isn’t up to specifications. It’s still in break-in mileage. At the check-out counter, I asked if I should drive at a certain speed. He looked at me like an idiot: "These are rental cars, mister." After that, I drove it with abandon, twisting its wheels into the curves of Missouri in ways I wouldn’t my own car. A replaceable car. That’s what the Joads needed.