A hundred years after Route 66 was commissioned to stitch a fractured country together, the highway that ends at the Santa Monica Pier has found a new chronicler — and, according to local author Crystal Sershen, the Mother Road has been doing most of the talking.
Sershen's debut book, "Dust & Dreams: Roadmap of the American Soul (A Memoir of the Mother Road, in Her Own Words)," was self-published in March in celebration of the Route 66 centennial. The lyrical memoir is told entirely in the voice of the highway herself, tracing a century of American history through the travelers, towns and landscapes the road has carried.
For Sershen, the timing and the setting are inseparable. Route 66 was conceived in 1926 to "unify a country wild with potential and rife with injustice, splitting at the seams and trying to patch itself up with dreams, migrations, and movements," she said. "One hundred years later, that sounds all too familiar."
The book was born on the Santa Monica Pier, the day before Route 66's 99th birthday. Sershen's friend Frankie, who works at the pier's 66-to-Cali shack at the road's western terminus, was describing his own idea for a "Travels with Charley"-style memoir set along the highway.
"I cut him off," Sershen said. "'You know what would be a great idea? A really great idea would be to write the memoir of Route 66 — her story, from the Mother Road's own perspective, in her own words!'"
What came next, she said, was not a process of invention so much as transcription.
"I'm not kidding when I say she spoke to me," Sershen said. "From that moment on, she was beside me every step of the way. I knew her voice immediately. Her humor. What she'd seen and how she felt about it, over 100 years of tumultuous American history."
The structure, she said, "filed into my brain like slot machine symbols lining up a jackpot." Each decade of the road's life gets a main chapter. Towns along the route appear as the highway's "Earth Children," each with its own personality. "Scenic Detours" hitch rides with travelers real and imagined. Tributes go to roadside attractions, to the workers who kept the route alive, and to the natural beauty that makes the highway, in Sershen's phrase, "a kaleidoscopic destination of dreams."
"The chapters would be short: daytrips, not safaris," she said, "the idea being that you can open to any page, learn something, soak in a poetic moment, and take a piece of Route 66 along in your heart."
The book is illustrated throughout in full color by Venice artist Frank Strasser. The two worked seven days a week for a year to finish in time for the centennial — "without killing each other, I might add," Sershen said. "Though it was pretty close sometimes."
The themes, she said, are wanderlust, resilience, land, loss "and the sacredness of motion" — questions she sees mirrored in the city where the highway ends. Sershen has lived in Santa Monica since 2003, leaving twice and returning both times.
"The freedom and oneness with nature I feel living here is mirrored in the feeling you get out on the road — or in the air or on the sea — in the continual search for a home, a rightness, that very well may not exist," she said.
In the book, the road speaks of that ending herself. "I remember the first time I reached her edge, when the pavement met sand and salt, and the road simply…stopped," Mama Road says. "But the ocean, she kept going — into a different kind of Great Wide Open. And in that contrast — in that collision of journey and endlessness — I realized there is no end of the trail, and I was never meant to complete anyone. Only to deliver them here — to the place where questions meet water and fall quiet."
Santa Monica, the road says, is "my horizon daughter. My sunlit goodbye. She's where I end and everything else begins."
Sershen, who holds a BFA and MA from New York University, began her career as a story editor for Bravo, MTV and VH1 before moving into performance, audiobook narration and book editing. She has not yet traveled Route 66 end to end, though she has driven sections of it at different points in her life. This year, she will join the Route 66 Caravan led by Rhys Martin from Santa Monica to Amarillo, Texas.
The full Chicago-to-Santa Monica trip remains the goal, she said, "so I can end at home, where my heart is."
"Dust & Dreams" is available through Sershen's website, crystalsershen.com.