Highway 66, the mother road

An intercalary chapter that maps Highway 66 town by town from the Mississippi to Bakersfield and names it "the mother road, the road of flight". Families move along it in single cars and small caravans, driving by ear — listening for tappets, a going bearing, a whistling gasket — and improvising a fan belt out of rope. Roadside dealers know the migrants cannot wait, so tyre prices rise; one argument over a casing broken nearly through turns into a lesson on what business calls service. Threaded through the chapter are the reports that the California border patrol turns people back, and a small boy's unanswered request for a cup of water. Two hundred and fifty thousand people are on the road, with wrecks abandoned along it. Against that, one story: a family of twelve with no car built a trailer, waited by the roadside, and were towed the whole way to California by a stranger who also fed them.