1,000 Miles and Ever Before Me
The U.S. interstate highway system turned 50 yesterday. It’s arbitrary; but there’s no harm in a little reflection and an anniversary is as good a day as any. I’m tempted to consider what wondrous contortions this wrought on what is now the history of America’s sociology. I’m tempted to consider how the interstate brought the distant closer; how much more readily accessible to the heartland were the waters of the coasts; how the heartland was more readily accessible to folk in the Big City. Without the interstate highway system, maybe insanely large balls of twine would have gone unnoticed. The interstates may have been integral in the somewhat successful movements to guarantee civil rights to a variety of Americans. If not for the interstate highway system, too, it’s unlikely Mexican immigrants could have dispersed so widely and easily throughout the country—for good or bad is your call.
That’s my temptation, but I just don’t feel it. We might celebrate interstates by virtue of their being larger than our ability to fully grasp them. Some 46,000 miles of interstate pavement courses through the country. If I’ve done my math right, that’s about eleventy billion orange cones. That seems impressive; but beyond an initial romanticism, what do the interstates mean for their passengers and neighbors?
The sober view might be that interstates contribute more than any other engineering directive to the destruction of our natural resources. And before the interstates, Americans likely weren’t compelled to cram themselves into minivans and strike out on family vacations or college road trips or random excursions—excursions ostensibly from “reality”. Those Americans probably traveled to or across town if they traveled at all, but more often they stayed home. Those Americans were no strangers to the land around them, weren’t strapped into their ersatz chrysalises, waiting to be delivered from mediocrity by an epiphany found only some 1,000 miles from home—an epiphany, oddly enough, which likely never found the residents living those 1,000 miles away.
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