Celebrating an Interstate State of Mind
While most of my friends were buying houses and raising families in the 1970′s, I was seeing the U.S.A. in a Volkswagen bus that I had customized to be a comfy home away from home.
I had globetrotted in previous years and realized upon my return that I knew more about the Far East than East L.A., so I set out on a year-on, year-off exploration of the contiguous 48 states.
I’d seen Hawaii and Alaska traveling to and from Japan, and except for Kentucky and Montana, ended up driving through the other 46 states courtesy of the marvelous Interstate Highway System, which celebrates its 51st anniversary this week.
The system was the brainchild of President Eisenhower, who argued that the U.S. needed a first-rate national road system for military transportation in the event of war with the Soviet Union.
War never came, of course, at least not with the Red Menace. But the system — officially known as The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways — kept growing and today includes 47,000 miles of highway, 14,750 interchanges, 55,500 bridges and 104 tunnels. But no traffic lights.
The interstates’ impact on America — and my peripatetic travels — was profound.
From the interstates grew suburbs, service stations, motels and strip malls, not to mention the recreational vehicle and O.J. Simpson low-speed police chase.
There also have been downsides: It could mean a death sentence for a rural burg if the interstate passed it by, most famously the necklace of towns along legendary U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles. The highways were nearly a death blow for America’s decrepit public transportation system. Gridlock entered the nation’s vocabulary and stayed. And all those service stations, motels and strip malls are not exactly eye candy.
All that said, I have many fond memories of my travels on America’s interstates, and most especially on the highways and byways and interesting places and people that the interstates took me to.
Here are a few . . .
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8 Responses to “Celebrating an Interstate State of Mind”
I have a love-hate relationship with Interstate highways. I deplore what they’ve done to urban neighborhoods and small towns across America. But there’s something strangely aesthetically pleasing about the red-white-and-blue Interstate highway shield. And when I was a kid I memorized the entire Interstate highway system and could tell you how to get from any American city to any other. Now my 5-year old son seems to have inherited that odd obsession. I just love the sense of possibility when you come across a major Interstate junction; it really seems to make America smaller in the end. For example, there are Interstate signs in northern Virginia that say, “I-95 North to New Jersey, New York and New England.” Then, in Petersburg in southern Virginia at the I-85/I-95 split there is a sign that says, “I-85 Atlanta, GA, I-95 Miami, FL.” For some reason, those signs give me goosebumps because I can actually imagine driving those endless ribbons of highway to those far-off cities.
If you have some photos, you should post some.
The Interstates are oversized for us small vehicle drivers and especially motorcyclists, especially when going through metropolitan areas, but they are the greatest in terms of speed and productivity on the road. I’ve driven nearly all of them as well as innumerable two-lane roads and more primitive dirt roads as well.
Now if the more backward East would get rid of those toll booths, which have no place on a modern superhighway…
A couple of other odds effects of the interstate highway system.
All suburbs are the same suburbs now. Whether in Georgia, Maryland, or Minnesota, the exits off the interstate have the same convience stores, the same McDonalds, the same Crackers Barrel, and the same three story beige motel under 10 different names.
the interstate has made American more risk averse. People stop at the Cracker Barrel because they now exactly what to expect. No more adventure in food, in lodging, or even in the type of Soda in the convience store.
That’s what chains are all about, but they were not created by the Interstate, nor is the risk-averse brand-name-familiarity-or-predictability caused by the Interstate highway system. We see chains in malls, and in airports, neither of which have arisen from the Interstate highway system. The chains are a much broader phenomenon. Risk-aversion? Or familiarity (and predictability), yes, indeed.
The Interstate Highway system was needed at first. Eisenhower did an Army experiment prior to WW2 where he lead a convoy across the United Sates to see how long it would take to go coast to coast. [it was about a month.] But now the whole system is one gigantic pork barrel and earmark monstrosity, it is time to let the states take it over.
Grognard:
It ain’t gonna happen because of two numbers — 90 and 10.
90 is the 90 percent that Uncle kicks in for virtually all interstate construction and repairs and 10 is the 10 percent that the states have to pony up.
A reader at my blog took a close look at the photo and asked what modifications I made to my VW bus.
I took a 1975 Kombi and stripped out the interior from the front seats on back, built a curtained bulkhead of Philippine mahoghany and a new floor 15 inches above the existing floor with built-in storage bins. The face of the raised section, seen through the open sliding door, was covered in a black walnut laminate from a tree felled in an electrical storm at a farm where I lived. I made the rooftop storage box of reinforced plywood.
The coup de grasse was a custom-made Plexiglas roof bubble which I designed and had made for a ridiculously low price by a fellow in upstate New York who fabricated cockpit canopies for racing planes.
Finally, I swapped out the stock side view mirrors for oversized truck mirrors, one of which departed with that crow.
The Kombi lived a long and interesting life, which ended just short of 180,000 miles in typical fashion for VW buses of that era: The engine blew up.