HOLBROOK, Ariz.—A 10-foot shipping container rises from the Painted Desert in northern Arizona on a 100-degree morning in early July.
It is the Plotz Plot, a tiny Route 66 museum where visitors leave the past behind.
Note to the new self: “You are beautiful.”
The container is covered with similar messages, some hopeful, others laden with sorrow, each yearning for a path forward—away from a difficult childhood, a failed marriage, a death in the family, a lost job, or a painful memory.
Inside are an old cowboy hat, worn shoes, a papier-mâché head with blond hair, an acoustic guitar, and other remnants of former lives….