On Roads While On the Road...

One of the biggest allures of this extended road trip will be...well, the roads themselves. No joke. I've always been fascinated by roadways, Interstates, state highways, country trunks, service drives and 7th Avenues alike; not just their construction and the equipment with which they are constructed (a rite of passage for every little boy and, I'd wager, more than a few little girls...), but also how they intersect, and where, what they cross over, and go under, how many miles they go, and with how many lanes. I enjoy thinking about the thought that must have gone into putting it all together, the careful considerations involved in the creation of an efficient system, which, when you consider the level of traffic burdening it these days and how smoothly it continues to function (for the most part), it can surely be argued our roadway system is. Once on a vacation when I was a kid, my dad said of our Interstates, "If the Russians ever invaded, we'd be done for. They'd have no problem getting everywhere."

And as I posted on this page more than a year ago, I've always been fascinated - as well as a little tripped out (in a pleasant way) - by the concept of direction. North, south, east, west...each point of the compass evokes a different emotional and psychological response in me, each has its own complement of memories and expectations.

When I was a kid, I loved globes and maps, and I still do. But that old Rand McNally road atlas doesn't hold a candle to the likes of MapQuest or Google Earth, or any form of GPS navigation. These things breathe new life into the process of traveling long distances to places I've never or rarely been. Rand McNally never bothered with many of the little details that seem standard issue with GPS. I like knowing that the overpass I'm racing under for just a fraction of a second is actually 275th Avenue, for instance. Or that the little shoestring running diagonally off to the southwest is Everett Road, or that the little body of water I catch a glimpse of through the trees as I shoot past at 75 miles per hour is Holcomb Lake, or Tanner's Pond, or whatever. Do I need to know these things? Not at all. Will I remember any of them ten years from now? Probably not. But in the moment, for the moment, they help complete the picture; they aid in familiarizing myself with a new region.

Plus, I will never be reduced to angry tears trying to fold up my GPS.

For a long time, I thought I was a lone dweeb when it came to all this roadway business, but have found there are others, many others in fact, a whole community of highway fans out there, building websites devoted solely to cataloging the roadways in their areas and posting pictures of certain routes, in various states of construction. They are called (er, call themselves...) 'roadgeeks'...and to be honest, I don't know if I feel better or worse for this fact.

At least, there was a thriving community online at one time.  A lot of the sites I've found are old, as in c.2002-style old. Some haven't been updated since the mid 2000s, and some, of course, are simply dead links through a search engine - "Error 404 File Not Found".  But those that have survived, even if they've grown moldy, offer pictures and interesting stats, and in some cases the history of certain stretches, which I find particularly interesting. Like names provided me by GPS, I like knowing when roads came to be, what determined their routes, why they may have been changed or re-routed over the years. In my own adopted hometown, I'm anxious to learn about a re-route of Highway 53 known as 'the by-pass'. Lamentably, information about its construction is hard to come by. Again, I don't know why I want to know; it's not going to affect my life one way or another to ever know. I just want to.

I guess I do believe highway history completes a chapter in the story of our development as a nation and society that should never be overlooked. It could be said our roads are almost as intimately connected to our evolution as a species as are our modes of transportation.

JULY 2010 - There's not much to this pic on the surface, just a state highway (63) running southward through a pastoral stretch of north-central Wisconsin. But look a little closer and consider: everything you see here, from the grade down the little hill, to the roads and driveways intersecting along the way, to the the placement of the signs, the power lines, even the painting of the yellow and white lines that keep cars in the correct lanes and tell us when it's safe to pass...none of it happens by accident. It is part of a carefully thought-out (hopefully!) and on-going process that helps to ensure safe and convenient travel for our ever-restless species. If I ran for the highest office in the land, I would so be the 'Infrastructure President'. 

;-)