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Copyright (c) 1994, Bruce Berger American (Airlines) Way, July 15, 1993

When it takes over four decades to satisfy a wish, chances are that by the time the wish is satisfied, the wisher will have changed. In 1950, when my parents drove from Chicago to Phoenix on Route 66, my rabid, fiery, implacable desire was to stay in a motel room shaped like a wigwam. My parents refused to patronize roadside trash despite my tantrum. It wasn't until late in 1992 that I pulled up to the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, a collection of cone-shaped units surrounding a gravel courtyard. Both my parents were gone, Route 66 had been supplanted by Interstate 40, and a kid's frustrated adventure had turned into an adult encounter with restored highway schlock. Perhaps my parents were still with me, for I felt them shudder when I entered the office and asked for a wigwam for one.

As I approached my white dunce cap with its tiny diamond-shaped windows, its door framed by plaster folded back like cloth, its red zigzag trim, I wondered chiefly whether the room would be round or square and whether the ceiling would rise to a point. The shock was complexity. A straight wall near the back of the room, hiding the bathroom, paralleled the wall with the door. Negotiating the perimeter between them on each side were four smaller walls that met at wide angles, completing a ten-sided room. At shoulder height, each wall angled inward toward the ceiling, creating a space like the crown of a brilliant cut diamond. I sank in a hickory and wicker armchair to admire this faceted embrace, and flicked on the floor lamp next to me, eight hickory sticks leaning inward in parody of the wigwam itself, capped by a red lamp-shade like a fez. White walls, hickory desk and bed frame, curtains and spread with the same black and red design --- except for the TV and the air conditioner that plugged one of the diamond windows, it was all of a piece.

It was a very strange piece, however, and once I had absorbed it, I returned to the office for a chat with the owner, a laconic man named Chester Lewis II. In 1948 his father, Chester Lewis I, saw a wigwam motel in Orlando, Florida, and decided it was just the thing for Route 66 in Holbrook. He used the same design, did much of the construction himself, and opened it in 1950. The architect, one Wally Redford, allowed seven motels across the country to be built from his plans, asking only that he be allowed to outfit each unit with a radio that played a half-hour for ten cents. His architect's commission was collected monthly out of the radios, in dimes.

Holbrook's Wigwam Motel was an immediate success, and even became a traffic hazard when cross-country gapers braked and got rear-ended by locals. In 1974 came the Interstate, bypassing Holbrook, and the motel closed. During the thirteen years that the wigwams stood empty, Chester Lewis I died and the cult of Route 66 bloomed. In 1987 Chester Lewis II opened a restored Wigwam Motel, complete with its original hickory and wicker furniture from Bedford, Indiana. The rooms, says Lewis, are packed in the summer and busy the rest of the year. I wondered a bit at commercial wigwams on the edge of the Navajo Nation where the indigenous house is the low, dome-shaped hogan: what did Native Americans think of the motel? "I have Hopi friends who call all the time for reservations," said Lewis. "The native Hopi building is the pueblo, but they tell me they love these wigwams."

When I returned to my own wigwam, I saw that I had left the door open and the lamp on. The fez beckoned through the folded doorway like a hearth fire. Because each unit stood alone, there was no aural bleed-through of TVs and no pipes that sang when the neighbors took showers. But because I had requested a unit in the back, away from the business route, I was closer to the unseen railroad tracks behind the motel, and the peace was assailed each time a freight lumbered symphonically through Holbrook, trembling the bed, rattling the grill on the heater. I heard, sharped and then flatted by the Doppler effect, the minor triads of the engines' horns while the metal wheels crackled on the gaps between rails. A way of life, perhaps passing, was at the moment passing right through me. On a bed become a berth, I thought of all the old jazz songs based on trains, realized that it wasn't lust the romance of a machine aimed at the horizon, but that the wailing horns and syncopation of the rails made a kind of jazz.

Between trains, my mind played riffs on the roadside wig-wam. Wasn't the wigwam actually a small structure of saplings and woven reeds, made by tribes of the Northeast? Surely this schematic shuttlecock more resembled bison hide stretched over poles, created by the Plains Indians and known as a tepee. But this design, pitched by Anglos to lure compatriots who didn't know one tribe from another, was Fantasy Indian, not Native American. Since Hopis were amused, perhaps they would lend a word for the style. I dropped off mulling the term kitschina.

When I checked out in the morning, I asked Chester Lewis II who the most frequent customers were. "More than anything else, we get people who stopped here with their parents when they were kids, and for them it's nostalgia." I didn't tell him that in my case, despite an impressive tantrum, it was nostalgia for what I had missed.