ROUTE 66 UNRAVELED:

For travelers, Alanreed can be an oasis of hospitality on the Texas plains. I had a friend in college whose one "Route 66" story concerned his wearily exiting I-40, oblivious to the local geography, to pass the night wherever the ramp might deposit him, which in this instance happened to be Alanreed.

Immediately beside the town's one motel is the Alanreed General Store and Post Office and Curio Shop and Filling Station. (This is only a partial listing of the store's many functions. It is also, among other things, an art gallery.) For the record, the store is well-kept and stuffed with interesting and/or useful items. The proprietors are pleasant and friendly; they always say "come back again," and I always reply, "I'll try" -- automatically, to be sure, but here I really mean it.

Viewed from the parking lot, the Alanreed Jail stands about 20 feet to the right of the store's front door. The "jail" is simply a metal cage, its maximum occupancy one, perhaps two people, though it would be somewhat cruel to confine even one person to so small a space without a most compelling reason. Visitors are informed of this contraption's civic function by a little sign posted on top of it. The sign reads:

It appears to have been written out by hand, with a black felt-tip pen, on a large file- or recipe-card. My mental picture isn't so precise that I can be certain of this.

As the surface area of the entire cage (including the floor, as I recall) consists of fixed and evenly spaced metal rods, it first struck me as being, most probably, an antiquated instrument for burning people alive in public. Like "The Box" in the film Cool Hand Luke, the Alanreed Jail is so narrow that it won't permit its occupant to lie down*, and it provides even less shelter from the elements. In fact, in its present situation it provides no shelter. For the purpose of public execution, however, the Alanreed Jail is remarkably well designed. Any one in a mob, even a small child, would have an unobstructed view of the malefactor within, if the cage were raised 20 feet above the base of a bonfire.

*Unless he's permitted to extend his legs between the bars...

Considering that the "Alanreed Jail" is a rather obvious sort of practical joke -- akin to the old Texola Jail, and to either the Chambers or the Sanders Jail, a little hut in eastern Arizona wedged between I-40 and a massive wall of rock to the north -- I was perplexed by my having morbid thoughts about it immediately. Maybe the fault partly lies with all those billboards for Amarillo's Big Texan Steakhouse, depicting a FREE 72-oz. steak -- certainly you could grill a large steak on any given segment of the Alanreed Jail -- or with those venerable and curiously inhospitable "Don't Mess With Texas" highway signs (which always make me want to protest, "Hey, Y'all've Got A Friend in Pennsylvania, an' ah reckon rat now it's lookin' to be me," and so on. "You've Got A Friend in Pennsylvania" was our Commonwealth's tourism pitch back in the 1980's, when we weren't so considerate of the nation's good grammar.).

Another curious sight in Alanreed is the town cemetery, which has the Route 66 shield-logo prominently displayed on a very large and text-heavy painted sign, just beside the main entrance. That's as close to a "Route 66 ghost town" as you can get in Texas.