A MOTHER’S ROAD
Happy face. Proud face. Surprised face. Sad face.
I spot him practicing expressions in the rearview mirror. He’s watching himself, and I’m watching him. It’s a rare moment—usually his eyes are fixed on the passing terrain. Today, the landscape is unceasing midwestern farmland, ripe and verdant, the air thick with humidity and crackling with cicadas.
Like many children with autism, Isaac doesn’t easily “read” faces, doesn’t necessarily grasp what someone might be saying through a raised eyebrow or a furrowed forehead. For the last few days, my husband, Ed, and I have been playing facial reaction games with our 11-year-old son over breakfast. Glancing now at his exaggerated smiles and big-lipped pouts, I’m gauging how much he’s caught on. Then the radio breaks out the opening line of “Whiskey River” and he yells “Willie!” from the back seat. The joy that spreads across his face is unpracticed and entirely his own.
We’ve got a big drive in front of us—128 miles until our next motel, a nine-foot-wide “sidewalk highway” to traverse and a 1925 tin-ceilinged grocery store to visit, two state lines to cross and half a box of Gorilla Munch still to consume. “Isaac, what are you thinking about?” I ask as we pass a tractor scudding across a dry field. “I’m just busy looking outside, Mom,” he says, and I know he’s in his sweet spot: ahead, an open road—Route 66, the most mythic of them all.
“WHERE DOES IT GO FROM HERE?”
Mapping it out
It’s been a few summers since the three of us flew to Chicago to drive Route 66—all 2,448 miles of it—back home to Los Angeles. The adventure was Isaac’s idea. He has a photographic memory for maps, is a gifted navigator, and is obsessed with where roads begin and end. Several months before our trip, we’d begun a weekend habit of driving L.A.’s longest streets in their entirety: 42 miles of Sepulveda Boulevard, say, or the 24-mile span of San Fernando Road. I was at the wheel, but Isaac was in command, logging the routes and pointing out the changing styles of streetlights and traffic signals and other roadside minutiae I’d never noticed. These exploits connected me to his interests and provided us with a common language; they also changed the way I saw the city. I grew up in Los Angeles and know it well, but driving its most epic thoroughfares with Isaac as my copilot showed me how often I’d treated roads as a means to get from one place to another, not as stories unto themselves.
My search for a deeper connection with my autistic son—and with a divided country—on a 15-day journey along Route 66.
One Saturday we were exploring Foothill Boulevard, which unrolls over 60 miles, starting at the L.A. Aqueduct in the northwest corner of the county and then paralleling the San Gabriel mountain range. A mile or so before Foothill ends at San Bernardino’s city limits, we were blocked from completing the drive when police abruptly diverted traffic. Undeterred, Isaac asked: Where does it
