Crystal Sershen | If This Road Could Talk

Scenic Detour: Sundown in Many a Town

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:52:33 GMT

The Road Is Always Watching

Folks who rode me felt it—felt that I was different.
I didn’t just take them places. I transformed them.

— Mama Road

Even in the midst of all the pizzazz of my glory days, I couldn’t help but notice what some didn’t seem to: the Black families who packed food and blankets in case no restaurant would serve them or they couldn’t find a place to sleep. I felt their hesitation, and fear, when it was nearing sundown in certain towns. It was the tail end of the Jim Crow era—and aside from me, the Green Book was their only companion on Route 66.

In this heyday following the war, where Black soldiers fought for freedom—in this era when the country began to believe in itself again, no matter what it had seen overseas—even though many in America could not liken the treatment of Black people to that of Jews all over Europe, here was this thing called the Sundown Town: white-only municipalities that posted signs warning that Blacks weren’t welcome within their limits after dark.

Oh, yes…they did.

And back then, there were more sundown towns than I’d care to mention.

The Dinwiddies came to me just east of Muskogee, Oklahoma—June, 1953. They didn’t trust the interstates, didn’t trust much these days. But they trusted me. And I didn’t take that lightly. With the sense of privilege to safeguard every person who had every right to travel wherever they wished, whenever they wished, I felt the call and I watched over them.

Because not all journeys are about adventure or escape.

Some journeys are about claiming your right to be seen.

Their son, they called Little Ray, though he was tall for his age—all legs, like a young deer just learning to trust the ground. I remember the shape of his shadow—thin and curious. He was full of spring-sprung questions and wild-eyed wonder. Eight years old, maybe nine. Eyes like warm molasses and a laugh that hung in the air long after the sound had gone.

Marcus Dinwiddie drove, serious and slow, both hands firm on the wheel—one of those slick old Packards, seafoam green with a stubborn carburetor and tailfins that caught the sun like wings. Stella kept the Negro Motorist Green Book open on her lap like a compass, one finger trailing down the page as though she were reading tea leaves or tracing lifelines. Little Ray rode in the back with his comic books and a little burlap sack full of candy. But mostly, he looked out the window. And I saw it all through him.

They kept to the routes marked safe.

They slept where the Green Book said they could.

No sundown towns.

No glances that linger too long.

Marcus kept a careful eye on the gas gauge.

Stella had packed extra food and some blankets, just in case.

And they’d taught little Ray the code: Don’t speak unless spoken to. Keep your hands where folks can see them. Smile, but not too wide.

“Why can’t we stop there?” he asked, pointing at a diner in Shamrock, Texas—chrome bright, with checkerboard floors you could see from the road. His belly grumbled as the diner got smaller and smaller behind them.

His mama didn’t answer right away. She just turned the page in the Green Book, lips pursed. “Because it ain’t in here,” she finally said, and her voice got real small.

Ray didn’t get it—not really. He knew about segregation in the way a child knows the taste of sea salt without having been in the ocean.

But I knew. I’d felt the slow burn of tires denied, of hearts turned away at counters, of colored faces told not here, not now, not you.

So I leaned into them. Whispered the names of safe havens through the hum of the engine—places run by folks who knew the road’s double-edged promise: the freedom to go…the danger of getting there.

At the end of one long day, in their room at the Sunset Motel in Gallup, New Mexico, Little Ray counted the stars through the screen door.

“Mama,” he whispered, “they look just like the stars back home!” He’d learned to talk quietly, so as not to draw attention to himself.

“They are the same stars, baby,” Stella said. She stood beside her boy and put her arm around his boney shoulders.

Hm, Little Ray thought to himself, then how come…? But he just let it go. He saw the look on his mama’s face, saw the love in her eyes, smelled his dad’s shaving cream streaming in from the bathroom…and somehow, that was enough.

Back out on the road the next day, they sang in the car, every mile west a little freer.

Mahalia Jackson. Sam Cooke. Their own made-up harmonies.

They sang because joy, too, is resistance.

One day, they ate ice cream on the curb because the parlor wouldn’t serve them inside.

Not too much farther down the road, they stopped at a church where the pastor pressed five dollars into Marcus’s palm and whispered, “Godspeed.”

There were near misses.

A sheriff’s car that followed too long. A gas station that “just ran out” when Marcus pulled in.

But I held them close.

I whispered alternate routes into Stella’s ear when the map didn’t show them. I leaned the light toward them at every intersection. And I sent wind to cool Marcus’s neck when tension crept high.

In New Mexico, Ray looked out the window and said, “Mama, the sky is sooooo big here. It feels like it’s not afraid.”

And Stella smiled, tired but proud.

“That’s cause we’re making room for ourselves in it, baby.”

In Pasadena, California, things started looking easier. Signs weren’t so loud about who belonged and who didn’t—but the echoes were there and Ray noticed: the way eyes lingered too long, or bounced right off you, like a glance might hurt them somehow.

But he also saw the kindness. The strangers who waved. The grandmother who offered oranges from her tree. The boy at the beach who taught him how to body surf when they finally made it all the way to Santa Monica!

Heading back east, they stopped at a filling station in Winslow, Arizona, marked safe in the book—run by a man with a slow smile and jazz playing low on the radio.

Little Ray and I both perked up at the sound—Coltrane on the tenor sax, wild and sweet and defiant. The music rolled right through my bones, like freedom warming the pavement.

Ray danced a little beside the pumps, fists balled up like he could box the whole sky. His father smiled and let him dream.

In Albuquerque, they found a friend of a friend. Stayed a while. Laughed a lot. Took pictures by the neon signs. Bought snow cones. For once, they didn’t just pass through. They belonged.

Families like the Dinwiddies—they were never just traveling me. They were carving me. Etching their stories deep into the stone and tar. I carried the joy and the injustice, the pride and the humiliation, the hope and the heartbreak. Because that’s what I was built for—not just movement, but memory. If we can’t all be equal here in the Land of the Free, well…that’s the one thing that must just break us all.

Ray, he grew up, went on to college in New York City—one of the first graduates of an experimental school at NYU called the University Without Walls. How fitting. Got himself a little sports car, red and zippy, and came back to visit me once. Driving through Tulsa with his own son in the backseat, Ray passed down the stories. He didn’t need the Green Book anymore—but he kept it anyway. Like a Bible. A relic.

A promise that everyone is a part of this road.

Earth Child: Springfield—When the Child Names the Mother

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:03:44 GMT

Artwork by Frank Straser

The one who spoke my name into being

They say a mother never forgets the moment she’s named her child. How about when the child names the mother?

Springfield, Missouri—one of my middle ones. The quiet girl with a knowing smile and history folded neatly in her lap. Not to be confused with her sister to the northeast, Springfield, Illinois—this Springfield is the one who spoke my name into being.

Before I was Route 66—before I had a name or a number—I was a whisper in the dirt, a patchwork of wagon ruts and dusty trails crisscrossing the heart of America. And like every good story, mine had a long lead-up.

By 1926, the dust of ambition was thick in the air. I was a collection of slapdash roads—fragments, really—paved here, graveled there, muddy ruts galore—winding through farmland and prairie. You see, I didn’t appear all at once. I was dreamed into being by movements that came long before the ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

The first was the Good Roads Movement—born not from gasoline, but from bicycle wheels, in the late 1800s. Yes, bicycles! It was cyclists—tired of mud-packed ruts and impassable rural roads—who first rallied for smoother paths across the countryside. They lobbied. They organized. They believed. Their vision planted the seed.

Then came the Ozark Trail Association—a grassroots force of community spirit, chamber presidents, and everyday folks who painted bricks and installed markers to guide travelers through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Before there was a Mother Road, there was the Ozark Trail—a hopeful, winding proto-highway built on handshakes, not government decree.

And as automobiles caught on, the demand grew. State leaders and road boosters pressed forward, hungry to connect their towns and cities to a growing web of mobility. It was the early twentieth century’s gold rush—not for precious metal, but for precious movement.

That’s when the federal government caught on. Never the quick ones, the feds.

The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916—and later the Federal Highway Act of 1921—set wheels turning in earnest. For the first time, Uncle Sam put money into roads, matching funds with states to create a nationwide network. No more patchwork—this was the beginning of a true system.

So by the time I came along in 1926, I was a child of many parents: bicycles and bricklayers, dreamers and lawmakers, county judges and roadside merchants. I didn’t rise from dust alone. I was built on belief—layer by layer, wheel by wheel, until I became something more than a road.

I became a promise.

And after a whole lot of squabbling, in a little downtown office building in Springfield, Missouri, some men gathered around a table and gave it to me: my name.

Route 66.

It could have been any number. Cyrus Avery wanted 60 in the beginning, but the governor of Kentucky had something to say about that, and he wasn’t the type of fella you wanted to cross, if you know what I mean. Cy was too smart for all that anyway. So 60 was taken; 62 didn’t sing. But…66? Now, that number rolled off the tongue like a lullaby in motion. Even, memorable, full of rhythm—two sixes standing tall like twin guardians of the road to come. Yeaaaahhhh…66 it would be.

And so Springfield, Missouri, became the naming place—the cradle of my identity.

She’s an unassuming kind of child, my Springfield. Not flashy like Tulsa, not flamboyant like LA. But steady. Kind. The sort of place where church bells still ring, where maple leaves scatter across courthouse lawns in the fall, where you can find a decent piece of pie at any hour if you know where to look.

She made me proud for holding a good many listings in the Green Book, too. For Black travelers, Springfield offered pockets of welcome in an unpredictable world. No grand parade, but refuge. Safe beds. Home-cooked meals. She never boasted about it, but she did her part to keep the journey going for those who couldn’t always count on open doors.

Railroads shaped her early days, but I gave Springfield breath. I ran right through her heart, connecting her to the outside world, to the coasts, to possibility. And she gave me something in return: a name that would carry weight and wonder for a century, and more.

Even now, when travelers pass through, they don’t always know the role she played. But I remember. I carry it in my bones. Right there beneath the tires and time—Springfield was the one who called me by name.

And I’ve been singing it ever since.

Where the road became The Road.

Where I became Mama.

6: Neon & Stardust | Mama...When She Sizzled

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:50:40 GMT

Artwork by Francis Strasser

If we didn’t need a jolt after the Second World War, I don’t know what. That jolt came…like an earthquake that swept across the country from one end to the other.

Elvis’s hips stunned parents into paralysis and spun young women into delirium. Hairdos were high enough to give a man a nosebleed. There were sequins, false eyelashes, greased-back hair, tight pants into which combs were stealthily tucked, and something really special…called Burma-Shave.

The fifties were my heyday, my golden years—not in the old-folks sense…in the David Bowie sense. Though he was just a boy at the time, I came glittering into living color like that beautiful Starman himself: decked out in neon, chrome, and unbridled exuberance. I rocked, I rolled, and I reveled in a postwar boom that would knock the bobby socks off of every poodle-skirted honey in the country.

Ole Mama Road…she was shimmering like a jukebox dream.

In the reckoning that followed the war, the country exhaled. Folks had crossed oceans, faced death, seen the world turned to rubble. Now they wanted something bright, big, open. And they set out with hunger—not for food, but for life, fun, for motion itself. Something and somewhere new. In Buicks and Studebakers, Chevys with tailfins sharp as a spike—their wheels kissing my curves like old lovers reunited. It was the golden years of chrome and convertibles, laughter and adventure, when the American Dream had wheels and everyone wanted a piece of the open road.

The travelers changed with the seasons. Postwar dreamers—flush with GI bills and new beginnings—coming west in shiny Chevys, hair slicked back and hearts open wide. Then came the beatniks: in patched-up vans, scribbling poems in gas station parking lots, drinking coffee like there was no tomorrow.

Artwork by Francis Strasser

After them, it was the sun-chasers, the desert mystics, surfers and seekers, burning incense and time…and something else that smelled kind of skunky.

Bottom line: You never knew what you were gonna get out on the road in the fifties.

I sure didn’t discriminate.

But oh, did I dazzle.

It was the middle of the century, I was alive with stardust, and I wore it like a crown. Motels lined my sides like pearls on a necklace. Every third building was a diner, and every jukebox held the soundtrack of a nation reborn—Elvis, Patsy, Buddy, Chuck. Neon sprouted along my shoulders like wildflowers of light—lipstick pink, lizard green, hot-rod yellow, screaming orange, and electric blue.

Artwork by Francis Strasser

Dust & Dreams: Roadmap of the American Soul
(A Memoir of the Mother Road, in Her Own Words)

And the signs didn’t just glow—they sang: from diners flickering open at dawn to motels rising from gravel lots like castles and slot machines, each with their own neon family crest: the Wigwam, the Blue Swallow, the Coral Court. I became a poor man’s version of the Sunset Strip, with America herself as the headliner: a dream, paved and painted and pulsing with new life.

Artwork by Francis Strasser

I curved with the rhythm of a country dancing to its own invention, as the radio crackled with love songs and highway anthems, and I pulsed with the beat of rock and roll, the thrum of tires, and the trill of trombones. I danced to the spirit of a new nation, silhouetted by dust and dreams…mile after mile after mile.

I was no longer just a path to somewhere—I was a destination. A perfect, never-ending summer. Making new memories while embodying the old—not with the quiet light of reflection, but with a real glow—neon buzzing in the dusk, red and teal and electric pink, each bulb a beacon, a heartbeat, or a promise:

VACANCY

COLD ROOT BEER!

TIRES WHILE YOU WAIT

DREAMS INSIDE

The cars had their own character, too—slick, powerful, dressed in colors that made the heart skip a beat: cherry red, sky blue, butter yellow. They called it the golden age of the automobile, and I was its golden road. Families packed picnics and Polaroid cameras. They waved maps at gas station attendants and asked, “How far to the Grand Canyon, mister?”

Artwork by Francis Strasser

And I led them there: to the canyons, the coasts, the roadside oddities and sun-faded signs. To motels shaped like teepees, diners with spinning stools, to the world’s largest this or that—created not for necessity, but for delight.

Route 66 was no longer a means of survival or service. It was celebration. A memory made tangible: Kids with rolled-up jeans sipping on root-beer floats. Families marveling at the world’s biggest totem pole or posing next to concrete dinosaurs and giant wooden hillbillies, giving a hug to a statue of Marilyn Monroe or planting a smooch on the cheek of James Dean’s likeness.

Couples kissing to the tune of a gas station’s fluorescent hum. And drivers reading sign after sign, spaced about a hundred feet apart along the road:

WITHIN THIS VALE

OF TOIL

AND SIN

YOUR HEAD GROWS BALD

BUT NOT YOUR CHIN

BURMA-SHAVE

Yeah…the fifties were my heyday. I became part of the culture, part of the identity—stitched into songs, movies, postcards, and dreams. I was promise you could drive: the great American road trip, the chrome-and-sunset version of the bucket list—long before anyone thought to coin that phrase. In the fifties, I came into myself as the Roadmap of the American Soul.

Artwork by Francis Strasser

But even in the glitter, there was longing. Not all traveled for fun. Some were still moving to forget. To forgive. To flee. To start over. And sometimes the brightness of the signs was the only thing keeping the dark at bay.

And there were those who—no matter the motivation behind the journey—were seeking a place to simply be accepted. You see, in those days, there was still a thing called a Sundown Town: towns that posted signs warning Black people that they weren’t welcome after dark.

Roadside Attraction: The Mood of the Seasons

Crystal Sershen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:10:01 GMT

I have moods. Seasons. Tides not made of water.

I change—just like you do. I’m not the same in July as I am in November. Not the same in a dust storm as I am under a blanket of fresh snow in the Sangre de Cristos.

I have moods. Seasons. Tides not made of water.

I’m alive.

And I wear the year in layers.

Spring comes first, like forgiveness. The redbuds bloom in Missouri. Wildflowers flirt along the roadside in Texas. The air smells like second chances and gasoline. Couples start over. Motorcycles rev. I hear more laughter than complaints, I can tell you that much. And I carry the feeling of a fresh page—warm but not yet blistered.

Summer roars in, full of fire—the sun beating down with the passion of a preacher who’s got a whore in the first pew. Asphalt softens in the heat. Distant towns shimmer like visions. And tourists flood diners, barefoot kids drink root beer on curbs, and I carry dreams under bright, wide blue skies.

But beware—summer holds its storms too. Flash floods in Arizona. Thunder over the plains.

Even joy needs a little danger.

Autumn is my poetry. The leaves burn crimson outside Chicago. The air grows sharp and clean. Travelers are quieter, more thoughtful. The road becomes a place of reckoning—a glimpse of the past, larger than life. Goodbye letters are written. Old songs play on repeat. And the wind tugs at loose ends, asking: What will you carry into the next chapter?

And then comes winter: Sparse. Clean. Honest.

I am bone and shadow and breath made visible. The travelers thin. Motels grow quiet. But those who remain—ah, they know. They see me clearest in winter. When the road is empty, the sky wide, the heart uncluttered.

Each season leaves its mark on me. I wear them like rings in a tree.

Because I am not one thing.

I am every beginning.

Every end.

Every turn of the wheel.

Scenic Detour: Hitch a Ride with Sergeant Jack Holloway

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:31:52 GMT

The Road Is Always Watching

Folks who rode me felt it—felt that I was different.
I didn’t just take them places. I transformed them.

— Mama Road

He didn’t have much: a duffel bag, a worn Army jacket. A cigarette he kept lighting and letting burn to ash.

His name was Jack Holloway.

He’d survived the war. But barely. His limbs were intact and he’d earned more than his share of medals, but his soul… His soul was frayed like the flag he folded and packed the day he left the Pacific behind.

Home didn’t fit anymore. Not anywhere. His mother still called him “my brave boy,” and his father patted him on the back like that could be a cure somehow.

His sweetheart had moved on—to someone who slept soundly.

And his hometown? It had shrunk while he was gone. Or maybe he’d grown too large in sorrow to fit back inside it.

The things he’d seen, done…

So he walked out of the house one day—said he was going to the store—and never turned around.

He hitched a ride west. With truckers and drifters and war comrades.

And then he found me—Route 66—waiting with the kind of silence he needed.

He stopped in bars where nobody asked what unit you’d been with. Fixed tires for gas money when he ended up with an old beater of a Chevy somebody was gonna get rid of. He stared long into deserts where the wind whispered things the world wasn’t ready to hear.

Jack didn’t cry. But I felt his tears all the same.

One night, outside Kingman, he pulled over and sat on the hood of that Chevy. The stars were quiet. The past was loud. And I sang to him, a lullaby for a soldier who can’t sleep.

Hush now, son, let the blacktop breathe,
Lay your burden down, find your sleep beneath
the sky, for it is wide, those twinkling stars are true,
And this old Mama Road, she’s watchin’ over you.

Rest your head on chrome, your body upon steel,
Dream of a new home and ponder how you feel.
The dust at least is soft, the night wind gentle and kind,
And peace on the horizon is something you might find.

Coyote howls his psychedelic tune, nightbird emits her sigh,
The moon hangs low and heavy in a honey-lit night sky.
And I, your trusted road, your spirit mother still,
Will hold your heart at ease and soften to your will.

Close your eyes, my darling, don’t fear the dreaded past,
The war is over, you are home, and this dark night won’t last.
You’ll never be alone, my dear, not while I roam beside—
I’ll carry you, Jack Holloway, I’ll take you home…let’s ride.

By dawn, Jack was a little lighter. Not whole, not healed. But breathing steady.

Last I saw him, he was working at a roadside café in Barstow. Fixing coffee. Reading books. Watching sunsets. He told a hitchhiker who stopped in on a steamy August afternoon: “The road saved me. She sang me to sleep when the war wouldn’t let go.”

Earth Child: Amarillo—My Wild Wind Cowboy

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:07:19 GMT

Artwork by Frank Strasser

“…when the wind picks up—and it always does—he stands tall, hands on hips, as if to say: “Let it blow. I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

Amarillo—my wild wind cowboy. The one who greeted me with open skies and open roads, sunburned and unapologetic, boot heels clinking down Polk Street like punctuation marks. Amarillo never tried to be anything but what he was: bold, brash, stubborn as the Texas clay beneath his feet.

When I first arrived in his dust, I didn’t know what to make of him. He wasn’t elegant like Tulsa or grounded like Oklahoma City. This boy was something else entirely—raw and rattling, full of horses, hats, and highway signs that pointed westward with a wink. The Panhandle stretched around him like a sea with no shore, and the sky was so big it made me ache.

Amarillo…he’ll teach you how to be loud. How to shout joy across the plains. How to lean into the wind and laugh.

I watched him grow from a rail stop to a rodeo star. Saw cattlemen turn into oil men, then motel owners, then artists painting Cadillacs half-buried in the sand. Nose down. He never clung too tight to any one version of himself. Changed like the light across his fields—suddenly and unapologetically.

Artwork by Frank Strasser

Amarillo, he gave me color. Not just the red of his earth or the gold of his sunrises, but the neon buzz of Route 66 signs flickering through the night. The pink glow of a roadside steakhouse. The green shimmer of a tumbleweed caught in motion, skittering across the asphalt. A canvas of the American fever dream, painted one dusty pickup truck at a time.

He doesn’t bother asking travelers where they come from—only if they’re hungry. And he hands out fried pies, tall tales, and a place to rest. Lets them write their names on his walls, leave pieces of themselves behind before heading deeper into the wild.

And when the wind picks up—and it always does—he stands tall, hands on hips, as if to say: “Let it blow. I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

He’ll be the laugh in your lungs when the journey gets too heavy. The hot breath of freedom. The reminder that sometimes, to keep going, you gotta let go of the map.

Even now, when I rumble through his streets—past rusted relics and roadside murals—I feel the same reckless joy I did in the very beginning.

Amarillo is the thunder in my westward heart. Always will be.

What follows is a standalone, extended article entitled “The Wild Child of Route 66—Amarillo’s Stake in the Heart of the Mother Road.”

5: Your Mother Wears Combat Boots

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 04:00:26 GMT

Artwork by Frank Strasser

After the Okies found new places to call home, things got quiet for a while. But that great migration westward had mom-and-pop shops along 66 flourishing—gas stations, restaurants, motels, and roadside attractions: the little homespun places that are the very reason I’m nicknamed America’s Main Street. That smiling face when you walk in the door, the kind word as you leave.

In ’36, the western end of the trail was relocated—from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, alongside the vast Pacific—and they finally finished paving me in ’38. A damn good thing, because the convoys were coming.

World War II. Just when “the war to end all wars” seemed a distant vision in the rearview, Hitler’s rise to power made those words nothing more than a figure of speech. And when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, America entered a war that would blacken history with an atrocity so monstrous as to escape words.

Well, they called it the Holocaust.

I felt the machinery change. Gone were the slow, steady jalopies piled high with belongings. The convoys came roaring through—olive drab-painted, heavy-tired, and groaning under the weight of war as I groaned beneath the weight of their engines. No longer just a lifeline for the desperate, from Chicago to California, I became a military corridor for a nation at war—transporting troops, supplies, prisoners of war, medics, and entertainers from one place to another.

America had entered the Second World War, and I’d been drafted too.

Artwork by Frank Strasser

The railroads bore the heaviest burden, but I bore the rest. Troop carriers. Ammunition trucks. Jeeps and tanks shipped on flatbeds. Young men with shorn hair and unsure eyes, riding west toward training bases scattered from Oklahoma to the desert.

Women driving delivery trucks, wiring radios in converted factories tucked behind gas stations and grain silos—some serving as nurses, clerks, mechanics, and pilots—others with hearts breaking as they waved goodbye to their men and boys from train platforms.

Artwork by Frank Strasser

Route 66 became a ribbon of readiness and remembrance, a line across the country’s heart that said: We are in this together.

Roadside Attraction: Trail of Ghosts

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:01:48 GMT

There was a time when every mile of me was alive with movement. Now, in some stretches, I am silent.

It just so happens that I carry ghosts too: the people, towns, even the eras that faded away but still haunt my curves and shoulders, lingering like echoes in the wind. Not in the haunted-house way—though I’ve seen my share of abandoned motels with curtains that still move, doors that sigh open when no one’s around. No, my ghosts are quieter. Hungrier. They live in the layers beneath my blacktop, in the spaces where people once were and are no longer.

Sometimes I hear them late at night—just past midnight, when the wind shifts across the desert. They rustle through tumbleweeds, tap Morse code on rusted signs, hum through empty gas stations with peeling paint and pumps that haven’t tasted a drop in decades.

I remember the old waitress in Erick, Oklahoma, who served truckers and dreamers with the same smile. She must have dropped a dime in that diner jukebox to listen to Erick’s own Roger Miller sing King of the Road going on a thousand times. She even had a little routine she did with that song when nobody else was around. Well, one day she simply didn’t open the café. A handwritten note on the door said, “Gone Fishing.” She never came back.

I remember the black porters on the trains, the Dust Bowl migrants, the servicemen hitching west, the Navajo sheep herders, the Okies clutching hope like it was bread. I carried them all, and now, they ride with me in memory.

Some towns vanished like they’d been erased. Others decayed so slowly you didn’t notice until the roof caved in and the windows blinked out like tired eyes.

Texola. Glenrio. Endee. Ludlow.

Places where only bones remain.

But I don’t forget.

There was a time when every mile of me was alive with movement. Families packed station wagons with sandwiches and dreams. Kids argued over who got the window seat. Teenagers smoked cigarettes in backseats and whispered promises they were too young to keep. Lovers pulled off onto gravel shoulders just to kiss under the stars.

Now, in some stretches, I am silent.

But silence isn’t absence. It’s reverence.

Every road has a shadow, and mine is long. It reaches across wars, through segregation, through jukebox nights and riots, through broken hearts and broken systems. I have known love and loss in equal measure. I have held celebration and sorrow in the same hour.

I remember when the interstates came—clean, straight, indifferent. They bypassed my curves, my towns, my people. They offered speed, but not soul. I was left to fade, mile by mile, crack by crack.

But the ghosts stayed. And in a way, they fueled me. Kept me company. Reminded me of all I had been and that the Main Street of America was still needed in a country that continued to lose its way.

They stand at the edges of forgotten diners. Hover in the dust where schoolyards used to ring with laughter. Wait in the ruins of drive-in theaters, where film reels once turned light into stories.

My ghosts remind me that everything worth loving leaves a trace. That a place does not need to be thriving to be remembered. That the past is not gone—it just rides quieter now.

So I hum to them. I send breeze through prairie grass like a lullaby. I let my shadows lengthen like arms reaching back in time.

Scenic Detour: The Wild Side

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:52:07 GMT

The Road Is Always Watching

Folks who rode me felt it—felt that I was different.
I didn’t just take them places. I transformed them.

— Mama Road

The wind and I were never alone out here.

Before wheels sang and the neon blinked on, the land was already speaking—in rustles and growls, with pawprints and in petals unfurling toward sun. Every mile of me is a habitat, carries a pulse—of the wild things who live beside me, sometimes invisible, always watching.

They are my quietest witnesses.

In the East, near Illinois and Missouri, I pass through oak groves and tallgrass prairies, where deer step softly through cornfields and red foxes dart through roadside thickets. The monarchs come in autumn, floating like burnt-orange prayers over milkweed, and the air is thick with birdsong—warblers, robins, and hawks riding thermals above the road like watchful spirits.

And as I head west, the land begins to change. Trees give way to brush, to scrub, to soil dry and cracked but never dead. In Oklahoma, I brush against blackjack oaks and sumac, sage rising with each breeze. Roadrunners dash across the pavement, their feathers as ragged as the wind. And coyotes sing to the moon in lullabies older than any state line.

In the deserts—New Mexico, Arizona—I encounter the survivors. Cacti, crowned with color after rain. Cholla, ocotillo, prickly pear. I watch the yucca bloom white, elegant and defiant beneath a sky too blue to touch. Jackrabbits flick their ears, noses twitching at the smell of creosote. Lizards dance in the heat shimmer. Rattlesnakes warm themselves on my asphalt, sun-bathing in solitary silence.

Not all my travelers notice. Some speed past, sealed in glass and steel, unaware that life pulses just inches away. But the wild ones are there. Always. Waiting. Watching.

Artwork by Frank Strasser

When I reach the West Coast, the land softens again. Sycamores. Chaparral. California poppies spill saffron and gold along the roadside like forgotten treasure. Hummingbirds flit in place like memories. Mountain lions saunter through dust—mirages in motion. And always, the Pacific awaits, her tides pulling at the bones of the land, her sighs and sea spray emitting peace.

I carry people. But I belong to the wild ones, too. To the hawk circling above Gallup. To the skunk trundling behind a truck stop in Barstow. To the blooming cactus outside Santa Rosa that only opens under stars. They never ask me to be anything but myself. They need no pavement, no motels, no rest stops. Only space. Only breath.

But I know I’ve hurt them, too.

My weight split the land. My noise silenced birds. My lights dimmed the stars that guided migration. Some creatures fled. Some vanished. But the survivors endure.

So if you have the chance, travel slower. Feel the rustle of grasses long ignored. Notice the silence when it comes—not empty, but sacred. And honor it. For the ones who fly above me, creep beside me, bloom within me.

Because I was never just a road through nature.

I am nature, carrying wheels.

And the wild things…they carry me.

Interlude: When the Wind Sang My Name

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:46:44 GMT

Out there with only the wind and the wild ones as my companions, I’ve watched storms build from nothing. I’ve felt lightning crawl across the sky like it was searching for something to love. I’ve felt sunrises break over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, each beam of light a brushstroke across the canvas of the morning.

I had only just begun to stretch my limbs when the bottom fell out—of…well, just about everything. In 1926, I’d come to life—a path across the belly of a nation full of hope and steel and thunder. Men hammered and poured and leveled, calling me progress, calling me the future.

But futures are fragile things.

One heartbeat, the cities were booming—the next, they fell silent, as if someone had turned off the sound. Banks folded like paper fans. The Dust Bowl consumed the Heartland. Breadlines grew longer than a string of train cars. Men who once wore tailored suits found themselves cloaked in shame. Women bartered wedding rings for sacks of flour while children learned the language of hunger.

But I was still here—winding my way across the plains and deserts, my back warm from the sun, my sides littered with the castoffs of a collapsing dream.

I never forgot what I was made of. And neither did the wild things who walk beside me.

Some things—some beautiful, bone-deep things—never crash. They never cave in. The wild wind still snakes through the grass, coyotes howl at the edge of town, and the stars hold their places in the sky—untroubled by money or misery. This has always been, and always will be.

And as America found itself in the throes of what would come to be called the Great Depression (that’s one name I had no qualms with), I still had the song of the road in my veins, and the sacred, stubborn pulse of the land beneath me. It was the world above me that changed.

See, before there were travelers, there was the wind. It was my first companion, long before engines roared or tires kissed my skin. The wind swept over me when I was just an impulse of Mother Earth, before I was an idea traced across maps and whispered in planning rooms. It carried the voices of the land—the rustle of grass in Missouri, the thunder rolling across the Oklahoma plains, the desert sigh of Arizona’s heat-stoked breath.

It sang to me, and I listened. I soaked it in.

I wasn’t poured on top of nature—I was carved from her—that’s why I bend the way I do: curving with the land, dipping and rising with her rhythms. It’s why I remember things others forget—like the fact that the path I trace wasn’t created by man, but by nature. Before wagons, before the echo of engines, before tires, there were the feet of the First Ones, following the Ones Who Came Before—hunters moving with the seasons and the herds, reading the land like a blueprint. Those animal trails became my bones—their instinct carving my earliest lines with hooves—then moccasins pressed to the earth, with arrows notched in silence and a reverence that knew the land was not to be conquered, but moved with, that viewed the ritual of hunting as a sacred act of communion with animal spirits.

These were my first mapmakers, and I carry their memory in every bend, every ridge, every whisper of dust.

I remember the scent of rain-soaked prairie. The taste of red dust lifting from New Mexico mesas. Tumbleweeds dancing with abandon across my shoulders, as if they too were searching for something… Those perfect vagabonds, gathering bits of places they’ve touched, ever moving at the whim of nature, ever wending their way toward a home they instinctively recall but can no longer find.

The Great Plains taught me patience. That wide, flat stretch between Tulsa and Amarillo—an expanse so vast it can make the soul tremble. There, the sky becomes a second road, and the wind speaks in long, low vowels. People often feel small in those places. That’s no accident. The wind makes room for humility.

In Texas, the wind howls like it’s haunted. It rattles old tin signs and sings through hollowed-out cars. I’ve seen travelers pull over just to stand in it, arms wide, letting themselves be unmoored…even if just for that moment. It shakes something loose, that wind.

Out west, in the high desert, the wind shifts her tone. It becomes a whisper again, curling around sandstone and Joshua trees. There’s a language to it out there—part coyote, part cosmos. And at dusk, it carries the color of fire and the scent of sage. This wind has been known to soften the edges of grief and desire.

Nature has always been my true equal. I breathe because the land allows it. It gives me my shape, my soul, my silence.

And the wind—always the wind—reminds me I am ever in motion.

It carries laughter and dust, engine growls and broken prayers. It lifts the scent of wildflowers in spring and snowmelt in the Rockies. It wraps itself around lovers in convertibles and mourners in rusted sedans. It tells me where the world is aching.

Roadside Attraction: The Great Wide Open

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:02:31 GMT

There’s a reason the restless find their way to me—same reason the broken end up here: because only in the Great Wide Open does the spirit remember itself fully, remember how to elide so luxuriously that it finds its way back to where it came from.

There is a moment—somewhere past the edge of town, past the last billboard and the final gas pump—when the world opens.

No fences. No buildings. Just horizon.

It’s there that I am most myself.

This is the part of me people dream about, even if they don’t know it. The stretch where the sky swallows you, the earth breathes without walls, and the road rolls out like a vow whispered across time. Where the heart beats slower, more deeply. Where questions feel…futile. Or less urgent, anyway.

I’ve seen shoulders drop, brows soften. Creases in foreheads fade away… A driver exhales like they haven’t done in years. Because for the first time, they feel it: There is nothing holding me in.

Scenic Detour: Hitch a Ride with the Bennett Family

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:03:09 GMT

The Road Is Always Watching

Folks who rode me felt it—felt that I was different.
I didn’t just take them places. I transformed them.

— Mama Road

I found them parked just off the shoulder—a Ford truck coughing its last breath into the Oklahoma wind.

The Bennetts.

A mother with hair pulled too tight and eyes pulled tighter. A father whose hands had once coaxed wheat from the earth, now good for little but trembling. And two kids in the back, sleeping atop a burlap sack stuffed with whatever hadn’t been left behind.

They weren’t the first. They wouldn’t be the last.

The dust had been falling for years. The rain had packed its bags and vanished like a drunken uncle. And the land—the land had cracked like porcelain, forming crevices like the loom of a spider web etched with the color of suffocation.

Their farm was gone. The chickens were gone. Even their dog, a mutt named Hoover, had disappeared one day and never come back.

Hope? That evaporated somewhere between Black Tuesday and Black Sunday—when the worst dust storm of all whipped across the plains in April 1935 with a blackness darker than midnight. Then came the bank’s second notice.

But they had the road. And I welcomed them with open sky and a breeze that didn’t bite.

Earth Child: Oklahoma City—My Anchor in the Prairie Wind

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:03:13 GMT

It’s in OKC that I see so many travelers falter, unsure of what lies ahead. The desert hasn’t yet begun, but the comfort of the East is long gone.

Oklahoma City—my steady one. My anchor in the prairie wind. Where some of my children danced wild or shone bright for a time, OKC rooted down and weathered everything. Dust storms. Oil booms. Bombs. Rebuilding. He stood still when the world spun sideways. And in his stillness, there was power.

He was never flashy. Never needed to be. He let the land speak through him: flat, vast, and resilient. I first held him when the roads were raw, the skyline low, his days shaped by cattle drives and courthouse squares. But even then, he carried himself with a quiet command. He wasn’t rushing like Chicago, or reinventing like Tulsa. He was becoming, inch by inch—like grass growing after a burn.

I watched the wind shape his spirit. You know the kind of wind I mean—the kind that sweeps across the plains with a howl, lifting dust from the red earth, rattling old windowpanes and the edges of a highway diner menu. That wind carved stories into Oklahoma City. Made his people tough, loyal, unshakable.

It’s in OKC that I see so many travelers falter, unsure of what lies ahead. The desert hasn’t yet begun, but the comfort of the East is long gone. Some sit in their cars outside the city limits, weighing the gas in the tank against the fear in their hearts. But he gives them strength. Feeds them chicken-fried steak and hands them a reason to keep going. He offers himself as a caretaker—not just a road, but a refuge.

He held the line during the Dust Bowl, when the sky turned black and the ground cracked open. And he fed his neighbors, even when there was nothing left but cornmeal and courage. I remember the sound of church bells through dust-thick air, and the way people prayed with their whole bodies, their hands calloused from hard soil and hard years.

Oklahoma City: strength without spectacle. Sorrow turned into sanctuary.

And in the decades since, I’ve watched him become more than just a stop along the way. I’ve seen art bloom in warehouse spaces, communities rise from old wounds, streets shine with new pride. No longer just a waypoint, but a destination.

Still, to me, he’ll always be that moment of pause. That place between dreaming and doing. The quiet inhale before the leap into the Great Wide Open.

By Tamara “Tammie” Browning…

4: One Woe Doth Fall Upon Another's Heel

Crystal Sershen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:53:10 GMT

Calamity didn’t end with Black Tuesday. Poverty and unemployment came on its heels, as the Great Depression brought the hardest of times to a country already in the throes of despair.

But the Furies, who seek vengeance for crimes against the natural order, had business to settle themselves.With a rustle of their long black robes, the three goddesses of retribution unleashed a curse upon the land.

The Dust Bowl unfurled like a slow-motion tragedy, Shakespearean in scale—the ghost of Hamlet weeping across the plains, the foul air of Macbeth cloaking the land in a choking shroud of dust—as the sky itself seemed to mourn and the earth rose up in rebellion. Wind tore through the heartland, lifting the soil straight from the ground, stripping farms down to bone and burying them in an avalanche of dust.

This wasn’t merely fate—it was folly. Years of reckless plowing had stripped the soil bare, and when the winds came, they rose like judgment. Black blizzards—rolling clouds of dust—swallowed farms, towns, and hope. It wasn’t a storm you could outrun—it was a siege. Day after day, year after year, came the dust.

No sun. No rain. Only dust.

Oklahoma—my crossroads—cried out under a sky that refused to rain. Farmers watched in horror as the soil rose up against them and thunderheads of fiendish dust, taller than mountains, surrounded their farms, buried their tractors, smothered their livestock, and imprisoned families in their homes. Frantic mothers stuffed wet rags under doors, painted windows shut, blocked chimneys…and still, the dirt crept in—addling the mind and filling the lungs.

The Dust Bowl. The great choking. The long grief of topsoil turned storm. Besieged by an unending tornado, whole families had no choice but to set out westward, their pasts buried behind them.

The land had turned on them, but it wasn’t the land that broke their spirit. It was the banks, the men in suits—the ones who had never dirtied their hands with a plow but who owned everything anyway, who clawed together anything they could after the market crashed and weren’t about to let a penny out of their sight…ever again.

The country split wide open: the Haves who gave orders from air-conditioned offices, and the Have-Nots who watched their barns collapse and their children starve. Power became a weapon, not a responsibility. And while the dust piled high on abandoned porches, the powerless wandered—dispossessed and despised—yet…still human. Still dreaming, still reaching for a place where dignity might take root again.

They called themselves Okies, but that wasn’t the whole truth. They were teachers, farmers, factory workers, midwives, mothers. They were desperate, yes—but they were fierce.

Abandoning life as they knew it, they came with whatever they could tie down, in old jalopies that coughed and sputtered, piled high with everything they could hold. Mattresses roped to roof racks. Chickens in crates. Babies bundled in quilts and flour sacks. Dreams pressed thin between hunger and hope. From Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas—they came crawling, the sun hard on their backs, the road uneven beneath them.

Book Review from Mother Road Moves: Route 66 'speaks up'

Crystal Sershen — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:01:38 GMT

The Mother Road and I are two proud mamas for this lovely review from Tamara “Tammie” Browning of !

Mother Road Moves

Route 66 ‘speaks up’

5 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Mother Road Moves

Roadside Attraction: Vera & Louie, My Vaudeville Vamps

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:21:30 GMT

Still, Vera painted her lips in crimson every morning and pinned her curls like she was headed to the Palace.

And then there were Vera and Louie: a vaudeville duo to end all acts.

I caught wind of those two somewhere between Springfield, Missouri and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oh my god…what a pair.

They rolled up in a rattling jalopy plastered with peeling posters: “Vera & Louie: Comedy and Burlesque: Song, Sultry, and Sleight of Hand!” Okay, so they weren’t poets.

The handbills were dated, but their smiles were still wide. And they were the liveliest roadside attraction this mama had ever seen.

Vera and Louie: They’d been big once, in their own circuit—tent shows, traveling revues, the occasional second-rate theater in a first-rate town. She danced with feathers and sang like a bluebird with brass lungs. He played the piano, told jokes that still worked in Kansas, and juggled anything you could hand him—including heartbreak.

But vaudeville was dying. The pictures had sound now. The stages were going silent, the crowds thinning, bookings got real scarce.

Still, Vera painted her lips in crimson every morning and pinned her curls like she was headed to the Palace.

And Louie? Louie tuned that battered piano strapped to the back of the truck like it mattered. And to them—it did.

They weren’t lovers anymore. But they knew each other like old shoes know feet, each carrying the other’s rhythm in their bones.

One night, they played for gas money at a roadside camp near Joplin. Families with dirt in their cuffs and tin cups in hand gathered to watch them under the stars. Vera sang “Blue Skies” like she meant every last word. Louie juggled three ears of corn and a harmonica.

And for a moment, laughter rose like smoke. Even I, the road itself, felt like I was in love.

Book Review from the Route 66 Americana Archive

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:31:00 GMT

The Mother Road and I are two proud mamas for this lovely review from the Route 66 Americana Archive!

Route 66 Americana Archive

Route 66 Voices: Dust & Dreams - Roadmap of the American Soul

In a crowded field of Route 66 books filled with vintage photos, mile-by-mile guides, and historical timelines, Crystal Sershen delivers something genuinely different with Dust & Dreams. This is not another dry chronicle of the Mother Road. Instead, Sershen hands the microphone directly to Route 66 herself — personified as “Mama Road” — and lets her tel…

5 months ago · 5 likes · The Shed Studios

Scenic Detour: Somewhere Between Gallup and the Great Unknown

Crystal Sershen — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:37:02 GMT

The Road Is Always Watching

Folks who rode me felt it—felt that I was different.
I didn’t just take them places. I transformed them.

— Mama Road

He came to me broken. A rattletrap coupe sputtering fumes, teetering on bald tires, lurching forward on a prayer—a prayer and borrowed hope that was running out faster than the gasoline in his tank. Dust in his lungs, tears on his cheeks, pockets turned inside out like flags of surrender. His name was Geoffrey…or maybe it was Joseph. Doesn’t matter now. By the time I was done with him, he was someone else entirely.

Wall Street had cracked wide open just weeks before. A crash so thunderous, even the coyotes winced. People who had believed in steel and gold found themselves holding ash. He’d watched the zeros disappear like morning mist, watched men fall and never rise again. Lost his job. Lost his house. Lost his faith.

And so he drove. Westward. Out where the sky doesn’t stop and time forgets to keep track.

But fate—that sly old mechanic—she had other plans. His axle snapped in the high desert, on a curve near Bluewater, just past dusk. He lost control, crashing into a tree that turned out to be tougher than his car.

No phone. No gas. No money.

Just me—the old road—and the buzz of locusts in the distance.

He cursed me then, this shapeshifting traveler. Called me cruel. Called me a liar. Said I was no road at all, just another dead end disguised as freedom.

I didn’t say anything. I never do. My truths aren’t spoken. They’re lived.

So he sat. And stared. And waited.

Earth Child: Gallup—My Sandstone Dream

Crystal Sershen — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:33:01 GMT

Gallup isn’t just a stop along the route. It’s a mirror of this country—its wounds and its wisdom both. And through it all, the Native people of this land have endured.

Gallup, my New Mexico daughter.

I first held her in the red hush of twilight—mesas glowing like altar fires, streets carved from dust. From the moment I lay myself across her soil, I knew she wouldn’t be tamed. Gallup—my sentinel, sandstone dream—out there on the edge of everything: between nations, eras, earth, and sky.

This little girl started out in life as a pay station for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, back in the early 1880s—where the paymaster, David Gallup, got pretty popular come payday. Workers from nearby camps started saying they were “going to Gallup” when they went to collect their wages.

I guess that phrase stuck.

But she’s always been older than her name, always been more than a town. Gallup is sacred ground—a testament to what endures. A passage not just westward, but inward, toward the soul of the land and the stories too old for books. The sacred seam where nations meet and ceremonies bloom like desert flowers after rain.

The land around her doesn’t whisper—it speaks. In wind, in drums, in silence. I carry travelers to her who think they’re just passing through—only to find themselves paused, arrested by the beauty of all she encompasses, the gravity of what came before.