The Jericho Gap was a notorious 12 mile piece of the original alignment of Route 66 that was forgotten by the US Highway system almost as soon as it was included in the new highway. Wholly unencumbered by road improvements for decades, it was a hellscape of deep mud, coarse grass, crushing sun and shady locals. It lays in the great blank space on a map of the Texas Panhandle almost exactly half way between Amarillo and the eastern border of the State. It leaves a traveler with the notable sensation that after hours of driving through nothing, you have somehow managed to arrive at an evan greater nothing.
It was one of the last sections of Route 66 to get gravel and the last section to get paved, probably because they couldn't convince anyone to go out there and work on it. The locals didn't seam to mind because, if the rumors are to be believed, the farmers would drench the road at night in order to make the already dangerous ruts and mud-holes into a cataclysmic quagmire of Model-T eating proportions. Stranded Oakies would often find assistance in a kind soul who just happened to own a tow truck or a strong horse who could help them out of their predicament, for a small fee course. The town never was big, but it grew up, got a post office, a cemetery and a motel and did ok for a few decades on its diet of ranching and tourists.
One first did come to Jericho. It was one of the first towns to be bypassed in a flurry of highway realignments carried out during the 1930's. Aimed to improve the speed at which drivers could make the cross country trip, the Highway Administration set out to sidestep the slower or more dangerous pieces of road they had stitched together in their rush to create Route 66. So hated was the mud, the blind corners and constant railway crossings that a new roadbed was hacked out of the plains a mile north of Jericho, bypassing it and the section of highway that shared its name. The town began to die as soon as the first car zipped across the horizon instead of crawled thru it.
By the 1950's barely 50 holdouts still lived in town or the ranches around it. It's post office was moved (literally, they moved the building to another town) and the motel, shops and train station closed. Just to drive the point home, they tore down the shuttered station, least anyone get any ideas about service resuming. The last hold outs left or died and that was that.
What remains of Jericho lie down a dirt, dead-end strip of the original, hated, alignment of Route 66. Marisa and I were making an attempt to see as much of this first draft as we could, so we turned off the interstate and drove south until what was left of the motel, a house and a few other structures languish into view along the right side of the road. The wind was absolutely howling, so I hopped out alone as Marissa refused to leave the warmth of the car.
Even in late March, the stubborn land was a dying yellow under a hazy sky. I wondered if Spring just hadn't made it to this part of the country or if it ever came to this woebegotten place or if it existed this state for all travelers to reinforce the sense of loss Jericho seamed to wallow in. I wandered out to what appeared to be a house, but mostly to a wreck of a car that had last been driven when Eisenhower Administration. An engine was a pleasant memory to this heap and tires a long forgotten dream.
Someone, when my grandparents were still young, had planted trees on either side of the front of the house. Long dead, they were still the best looking trees for miles around. People like trees. We humans plant trees the moment we land anywhere long enough to dig a hole. We plant trees from our homelands to remind us of safety, we put them in to keep the wind away from our houses and crops and we put them up to shade us or our animals. I hope these trees, when they were alive and green, had brought some comfort to whoever had put these in.
Jericho felt as if something heavy was trying to press it back into the ground. To not only have it forgotten, but disappear until nothing but the dead grass and cloudless sky remained. And Jericho was going let it. So many towns, even ghost towns feel like it could all turn around if the right person comes along. One person, who can grab onto a stray piece of happiness left behind by the past and start to rebuild. But this place didn't even seam like it had that much to give. It was creepy, like many forgotten places are, but it also felt a little bad, like no one had been happy there in a long, long time. Maybe it was all the curses leftover from stranded travelers stuck in the mud from years ago or residual melancholy of locals forced out when their economy was yanked away. Either way, it was a place exhausted, slowly falling down so that it didn't have to keep putting in all the effort to stay up.
Jericho wanted to be left alone. It didn't want a tourist to poke it's carcass when our forbears could have kept it alive. Route 66 had created the town out of the Texas Tall Grass, fed it on the hopes of a new generation and then yanked all that away when stuff was just getting interesting. Easing away from the buildings, I hopped back in the car and let the town have its way.
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