There is no road like route 66. It used to be the most American of roads. In simpler, more innocent times, its two lanes formed the main east-west cross country road. Bob Dylan wrote songs about it; Neil Cassady barreled down it with Kerouac glimpsing out the window at his side; and those who never made it all the way from stodgy East to New West would get stuck waitressing at the innumerable diners that sprung up where the desert land met the road, like blue-green algae on the river edge where the water moistened the land.

Just like the two related spirits of simpler times and innocence died in the sixties – and like two Kennedy brothers died – so did the two lanes of route 66: Another road, this one a large, eight lane highway capable of carrying modern weighty American industry on its back, grew up a few miles away, parallel to the whole stretch of route 66.

This quick death left a thousand abandoned businesses' buildings still standing, but with no one working or living in them. All the families that had owned the diners got up and left 66 for the new road. They had left behind them a skinny, 2,000 mile-long ghost town stretching across the west.

You still can, though, get off the main road, and travel for a while – at least until you need gas – on route 66. The road is bumpier, less well maintained and not as easy to travel on nowadays. But there are almost no cars on it, and that lets you stop and get out and do whatever you want wherever you want.

In that darkest period just before dawn we found ourselves at the heart of route 66, the section that stretches through Death Valley. There were four of us: I, a last year university student having just returned from England after a year spent reading politics and economics at Warwick University; my friend from Warwick, Luke, who was 6' 6' and a poet; and two friends currently enrolled at Harvard by the names of Steve and Keith. They, despite their pedigree, currently looked more like shady South American arms dealers than Ivy leaguers.

We had been on the road since the previous evening, when we had left northern California in the heavy old station wagon my father had given me as an early graduation present. Since that time, Steve and I had been driving as Keith and Luke slept. We had to make good time: there was work to get back to.

Exhaustion had, by this point, claimed the better part of the two drivers' psyches.

At the exact moment that dawn began to break, the cd player, which held 12 cds and was currently on random, selected “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin. With Jimmy Page's ascending chord progressions charging away and Plant singing of sitting “with elders of a different race,” we decided to get out and watch the sun rise into the now purple and red tie-dyed sky.

To burn off some energy and wake ourselves back up, we ran around the large rocks that dotted the land just off of route 66. There wasn't a single building in sight where we had stopped, not even one of those old abandoned ones from decades gone by.

After less than an hour, we decided to keep moving.

We got back in the car and began to drive. Through the glare of the eastern sunrise that was muddied by the remnants of a thousand windshield-fated bugs, we could see the new highway off in the distance.

Trucks full of commerce were rumbling from one coast to another. They were far away from either the beginning or end of their journey, and each driver had to have been so tired that he had stopped thinking of what either ocean looked like.

And there, looking down from our hilly vantage point, was the four of us on the road of the old America, leaving Death Valley.

All photos by Keith Berkoben.