Detail from 1950 Phillips 66 road map of Oregon.

Before the interstate, before the Lexus, before the drive-thru espresso stand, there was the open highway. The lanes were only ten or eleven feet wide, but the cars used every inch of it. Along it's edges, motels, diners, and gas stations constructed mostly of plywood, vinyl and neon signage sprang up like mushrooms. Linking the Canadian and Mexican borders via three western states, US 99 became the lifeblood of the west coast with a strip of asphalt barely twenty four feet wide. In Oregon, however, one highway was just not enough. With the population split on either side of the Willamette River, the route was split in two -- Pacific Highway East and Pacific Highway West, the Route 99 West of this site's title.

Inset from 1950 Phillips 66 road map of Oregon.

Route 99 West divided the town I grew up in into two distinct sections, each having little to do with the other, save for the common five-lane wall between them. From my earliest days, the highway represented the lifeblood link to the outside, and where it flew over the railroad tracks became the epicenter of my world. Blacktop tarmac, baking in the summer heat, shimmering in the winter rain, stretching up and over the distant hills at each end of my valley, going south to places whose names rang in my ears: Rex, Newberg, Monmouth, Junction City.

Like all good roads, it had many aliases. My mother still called it Barbur Boulevard, a name it held only within the confines of the City of Portland, where she grew up; others called it the more familiar Pacific Highway, even though it was actually one of three roads in the state to bear the name; in still other places it was known as Portland Road, but it was, wherever it went, known as 99W -- or more fully, Oregon Route 99 West.

North-south highways in western Oregon have come and go and changed left and right over the nearly two centuries of western habitation here. Many started as native trails, which with the coming of European settlers, were soon converted to wagon trails bound for one of the numerous ferries crossing the state's many rivers. Most roads, however, languished, as steamboats ruled early transportation, and they in turn were replaced by the twin ribbons of rail that had so much to do with which communities survived past the raucious 19th century to see today, and which were buried under the tide of history. It was not until the early 20th century that the highway began to increase in importance, and it was in this timeframe that the first footprints of what would become Route 99 West were made.

As the 1960's dawned, so did Interstate 5, whose construction destroyed many segments of Pacific Highway East. Route 99 West, on the other hand, survived mostly intact on it's more leisurely run between Portland and Junction City, Oregon. One of only two US 99 alternate alignments, it languished as a through route, and in 1972, was decommissioned as a US Highway, becoming Oregon Route 99 West, the name by which it is still known as today.

When it came time for me to name my corner of the internet superhighway, I needed a name which held some meaning, some mystique, and was short and sweet. Nothing rang to my ears quite as richly as did Route 99 West.  

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