Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [31]
But, personally, I think Bob did his best work when he turned his pen on hunters and really went to town. ‘The campaign to “control” the coyote is more like a war of extermination,’ he wrote in small print on his poster of Silver City, Arizona. ‘The Steel Jaw-Leghold Trap … Scourge of the Earth.’ However, a hunting shop spotted the comments and threatened to sue Waldmire. Fortunately, he managed to get the law on his side and avoid court.
While I was in Pontiac, they were displaying Bob’s old converted bus in which he used to spend the winter travelling through the southwestern states. It’s one of those yellow American school buses with corrugated sides, but Bob added solar panels, rainwater collectors, a solar oven, a sauna and solar shower, and all sorts of gizmos so that he could live off-grid when he was in the desert. From the outside, it looks a bit ramshackle, but it’s an absolute dream machine. It’s even got a veranda and an observation deck on the back. I was so jealous.
It was a bit of a squeeze to get in the bus, but well worth the effort. With his old shoes still lying near the steering wheel by the front door, and all his bits and pieces dotted about on shelves and tables and walls, it’s the cosiest place. All of Waldmire’s wee favourite things are still in there – ornaments, pictures, photographs of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, key rings and things that other people would consider junk – so it’s like stepping into Bob’s dream world. I don’t know what would have happened in an emergency stop in this bus. Everything would have ended up beside him on the floor, I imagine.
All in all, the bus is an amazing thing. A great way for an artist to live, going away for four or five months every winter, a real free man. Before visiting it, I was kind of reluctant to go and see it. I wondered what the hell I’d have to say about a school bus in which a guy buggered off to New Mexico every winter. It seemed a limited subject. But when I got there I was delighted. It made me wish I’d known Bob Waldmire personally. He seemed like an amazing fella. And Pontiac is all the better for having his bus parked there.
Outside the town, there’s another Route 66 landmark that’s worth a look if you’re passing. In 1926 Joe and Victor ‘Babe’ Seloti built a diner and petrol station on the road that would become Route 66 in a couple of months’ time. They named it the Log Cabin Inn. Close to the railway line and built of cedar telephone poles, it seated forty-five customers. The interior still has the original knotty pine walls. After the war, Route 66 was widened to four lanes and moved to the west side of the Log Cabin, which left the back of the restaurant facing the road, so Joe and Victor took a wonderfully pragmatic approach to their problem. First they jacked up the building. Then, using a team of horses, they turned it round to face the new road and dropped it back on to the ground. Business continued as usual.
Pushing on from Pontiac, past Normal, through Shirley and McLean (neatly separated by Funks Grove, famous for its maple ‘sirup’, made since the 1820s by successive generations of Funks), I arrived in Atlanta. This is another lovely town, the highlight of which is a slightly strange story that makes the Seloti brothers’ ingenuity seem like child’s play.
It reminded me of an old joke from Scotland about a railway station in the Highlands where people got off the train with their suitcases only to discover there’s nothing there. The village was away