Route 66 wasn't preserved because it was pristine — it survived because the people who loved it refused to let it go, even when the interstates bypassed it and the towns went quiet and the old signs faded to something that looked more like memory than advertisement. The cracks in everything along this road are part of the story. They mean something. They mean it was actually used — driven hard, lived on, worn down by generations of people who didn't care about perfect, they cared about real.
