On Driving
To pick up, incongruously, where I left off, I went to visit some friends in Pittsburgh, mostly to get away from “the House Where My Ex-Wife Used to Live” …”of Doom!”. I also wanted to see them, and see Pittsburgh, because I haven’t seen many Midwestern towns outside of Ohio.
So I drove out there, across I-70 from Columbus through Wheeling, to Pittsburgh. For most of its length, I-70 follows the Route 40 …er… route across the eastern states. After the divorce, I’d been thinking about taking a road trip from Atlantic City to San Francisco, across the great American wide-open…. I’d see the small towns, eat at the greasy spoons, wave at people… really experience rural America.
Hogwash! Here’s a fact: Route 40 is usually less than 3 miles from I-70 as it crosses westward from New Jersey. And I-70 is an endless two-to-eight lane trench, speeding America along, gathering up its small towns as it gains speed to 80 miles per hour, then dropping them off at intermittent intersections so they can build strip malls and cine-plexes.
Not to get all regionalist slow-food commie on you, but the great American road trip has been ruined by interstate highways. It’s all about the destination now. And those destinations are homogenized so when people get to where they’re going, they can go out for a very special dinner at Olive Garden.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I think the “Great American Experience” is just a series of technological lag points, the more pervasive technology the less rural an area becomes. Even if you’re in the middle of BFEG,..being able to watch all 6 CSI’s, spend hours on your cell phone, surf the internet and e-shop till you drop is just as destructive to the idea of the Norman Rockwell America as the big highways and byways. I watched a generation of my family from the deep hills of KY, go from no indoor plumbing to surfing the internet, myspacing and abandoning their home gardens in lieu of long haul trips to the mega mall. The funny thing is, all the things I envied about their lives are things that they’ve done away with to make their lives more like mine. The Grass is always greener on the other HDTV I guess.
I agree that the point of the journey shouldn’t always be the destination, but keeping in mind the way things are, I think that it’s all the more important to find destinations that make the journey worthwhile, even if it is all on I-275. Finding the nuggets of joy here and there where you can get a taste of something unique and fun, from Wympee Burger to the Freaky Tiki Place we went to for Brooke’s B-day, it’s all about establishing the memories and making them good ones. Besides,.. if you have the right co-pilot/s it’s hard to have anything but a fantastic journey. Of course, that could just be me being sappy and missing hanging out with you so..there JERKWAD!!