On warm nights when my bedroom window was open I could hear the endless stream of vehicles on Route 66. We lived in a small house at the east edge of Baxter Springs and across the street from my window was a pasture and on nights when there wasn’t any wind the sound of escape — the rushing of tires, the shifting of gears, the bellowing exhaust of trucks hauling goods to Oklahoma or Missouri — swept across the field with the night breeze.