Ted Conover on the Meaning of the Road

Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 11.20.07 | 10:35 AM ET

From Jack Kerouac to Route 66, there’s no denying the importance of the road in modern American folklore. So I was interested to hear that author Ted Conover’s next book will be about roads “and their power to change the places they connect and the people on them.” In a recent interview published in Matador Travel’s Traverse magazine, he answered questions about his research methods—which have included tagging along for an illegal crossing of the Mexico-U.S. border—and about his views on “the road” and its meaning to him.

Conover told interviewer Tim Patterson:

“From Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac, roads in the United States have had a meaning they don’t have in other countries. They’re like a commons, a place where one kind of person might meet any other kind of person and be better for it. Fences are bad; roads are freedom—there’s a deep strain of that in American culture. That’s the romantic side of roads, and I, who grew up in the West in the 60s and 70s, certainly feel it. But of course, roads are even more than that…They are expressions of desire and of frustration. Ways to achieve a dream and places a plant can’t grow. Each of them is good and each of them is bad. They are paths of human endeavor.”

Photo by absolutwade via Flickr, (Creative Commons).