The worst domestic terrorism attack in American history took place in Oklahoma City, astride the nation’s most recognizable highway, Route 66.
There is nothing scientific, nothing evidentiary, connecting the famous road, or the people who live alongside it, to America’s most infamous crime. That much ought to be said at the outset.
But the fabled highway, which has been affectionately termed the main street of America, the pathway to the promised land, has lately become scarred by a few loners’ rage and their increasingly familiar extremism.
Again and again these last few months, as investigators have probed the minutest details related to the April 19 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, their paths have kept crossing the remnants of old Route 66.
The accused mastermind of the bombing, Timothy McVeigh, lived and worked for many months in Kingman, Ariz. Kingman is a major crossroads town along Route 66.
McVeigh reportedly sold guns at a local Kingman flea market. The flea market is called the Route 66 Swap Meet.
One of the many “John Doe No. 2” look-alikes hunted in the early weeks after the bombing was a fugitive wanted on unrelated gun charges named Steven Colbern. Colbern grew up in Upland, Calif., which is located on Route 66.
Federal marshals seized Colbern in Oatman, Ariz., where he had been living and working. Oatman is located on Route 66.
Another man, an AWOL soldier, arrested early on as a possible John Doe No. 2, was captured in Santa Monica, Calif. Santa Monica is the west terminus of Route 66.
There is something about Route 66, something about the alienation that crouches along some of its shoulders and the rootless souls borne along its curves, that helps to explain how Oklahoma City could have happened.
That’s because Route 66, particularly in its desolate Western stretches, can be a very angry road.
“Maybe it’s not all just coincidences,” mused Marilyn Hart, the hard-bitten manager of the dusty Canyon West Trailer Park in Kingman. “Route 66 has stayed rural, and it has stayed American. You can go up and down this highway and meet all kinds of people. And McVeigh was much more likely to find people along Route 66 who shared his views-individuals with their own viewpoints about things in this country.”
Those viewpoints, in a place like the high-desert town of Kingman, are liberally salted with paranoia and a deep distrust of the federal government-some of the very ingredients that appear to have motivated McVeigh and his accomplices in their alleged plot to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building.
Indeed, paranoia about “hidden hands” and foreign powers spills easily out of conversations in these parts, as unremarkable as the tumbleweeds that blow aimlessly across the terrain or the sight of a man with a pistol holstered to his waist.
Many people in Kingman, for example, casting about for some way to make sense of the profound social and economic troubles that afflict the nation, have settled upon a popular right-wing conspiracy theory: That the federal government is engaged in a monstrous international plot to hand over control of the U.S. to a “one-world government” controlled by the United Nations.
It is an explanation that makes at least as much sense to them as the more conventional-and complex-reasons offered for America’s problems, such as the increasing dependence of the economy on global trade or the widening gap between rich and poor.
“I definitely believe there are people within our government who would like to totally control the country and take away all our freedoms,” explained Hart, as eloquent a spokesperson for the conspiracy world view as you are likely to find along Route 66. “And they are starting by trying to take away our guns, the means to defend ourselves. This town, for example, is 100 miles from Hoover Dam. And what happens if a foreign power attacks and takes out Hoover Dam?”
Hart, 53, has the weathered look of a survivor who has lived through hard times and broken dreams. Long ago, she reminisces, she worked as a catalog model for Sears and J.C. Penney in California. Her husband, a miner, brought her and their four children east to Kingman when there were still jobs to be had pulling gold from beneath the desert.
But the gold played out years ago, the children grew up and departed and, in 1988, the Harts landed in a flimsy mobile home in the Canyon West Trailer Park, hawking silk-screened T-shirts to pay the bills.
It is a hard life in a forbidding place, a few dozen trailers corralled like pioneer wagons at a bend along Route 66. It’s the kind of anonymous location that suited the loner McVeigh. Unfailingly polite and irreducibly silent, McVeigh rented a trailer across from Hart’s in late 1993, the first of his Kingman residences.
In the truest sense, Route 66 no longer exists. The historic roadway that started in Chicago’s Grant Park and ended at the beach in Santa Monica, the “Grapes of Wrath” road that carried countless millions of dreamers and drifters from the rust of the Midwest and the dust of the Prairies to the promise of California-that road was officially decertified in 1984, when the last span of high-speed interstate finally supplanted the final stretch of old two-lane highway near Williams, Ariz.
It’s not even possible to drive the 2,448 miles of the old route, because many portions of the highway as it existed from its christening in 1926 until 1984 have crumbled into ruin.
Yet Route 66 is far from dead. It lives on in the hearts of thousands of tourists and nostalgia buffs, who buy meticulously detailed guidebooks and set off each year, hewing as closely as they can to the original route.
And Route 66 most defiantly carries on in the fiercely independent sentiments of those who live beside its remains.
“Route 66 is sort of a corridor to America,” said Michael Wallis, author of “Route 66: The Mother Road.”
“It’s one long, American village, and along the way you have all these typical American neighborhoods. So you’re going to have everything from bomb-throwing Bolsheviks to misguided militias.
“But you’ll also find a lot of liberals along the road as well.”
Not, however, in the gold-mining ghost town of Oatman, about 25 miles southwest from Kingman along old Route 66. It’s a remote tourist stop now, home to a few dozen souvenir shops housed in quaint old plank buildings and to a pack of wild burros, descendants of the animals that once labored inside the mine shafts.
Oatman is a town that felt itself squeezed to death by successive decisions of the federal government: the imposition of federal income taxes in 1913, the wartime shutdown of most of the gold mines ordered by the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the switch of the nation’s currency off the gold standard in the 1960s.
Oatman, which in its heyday had 5,000 residents, perished long before the highway did.
The town’s history is succinctly recounted in a bitter mural painted on the side of the old Oatman Hotel, renowned as the place where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent a secretive honeymoon in 1939.
“Oatman, Ariz. Epitaph,” the mural reads. “Death of the American Dollar. How the West Was Lost. Gold Mines Closing 1942, Govt. Order No. L20.”
Painted prominently in the middle is a coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me”-the emblem featured on Revolutionary War banners and, more recently, on a flag flying outside the Kingman trailer home of Michael Fortier, one of McVeigh’s closest friends who pleaded guilty to lesser charges in connection with the bombing.
“The only problem with McVeigh was his timing,” said Ted Tonioli, who until recently owned the Oatman Hotel. “If he had blown up that building at night, he’d be a hero in this country today. What drove McVeigh to do what he did? That’s the question we ought to be looking at.”
Tonioli, a wiry man in his 50s, is the kind of Old West renegade who wears a .357 Magnum strapped prominently to his hip-and isn’t afraid to use it.
He likes to boast of the time a few months back when some county building inspectors showed up to cite his creaky hotel for building code violations, and he ran them off at gunpoint.
“We got too many laws in this country, none of them work, and nobody has any respect left for the government,” he philosophized. “I’ve been put out of business in two or three states by rules and regulations that make no sense. I’m not a violent man, but I’m fed up. We’ve lost all common sense.”
Tonioli made those observations last month. A few weeks ago, in the tradition of uncounted Route 66 drifters before him, Tonioli abruptly quit town, defaulting on his hotel and leaving behind thousands of dollars in unpaid debts. Acquaintances surmise he headed for the Pacific island of Fiji, a place where he had long fantasized about starting up a seaweed farm, free from oppressive government regulations.
