The Interstates and “That William Least Heat-Moon Problem of the Intellectual Wayfarer”

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 06.29.06 | 10:43 AM ET

This afternoon, after two weeks on the road, a convoy lead by the great-grandson of Dwight D. Eisenhower—the 34th president is one of the fathers of the American Interstate System—will arrive in Washington D.C. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the big roads. On June 29, 1956, Ike signed the legislation to launch the project, and the country has never been the same. Loads of copy have been spent in recent days on the convoy—some participants have blogged the trip—and impact of the Interstate System on American culture. The best I’ve read so far is by Hank Stuever in today’s Washington Post. Stuever, as usual, offers a fresh take and lovely writing. “The interstate didn’t create us,” he writes, “it is us.”

Stuever doesn’t seem to have a William Least Heat-Moon problem, defined as I won’t really see America from the interstates, so I have to get off. To him, as they are for me and many others, I’m sure, the interstates are something to love and loathe at the same time.

On all the spans and interchanges, on all the flats, at all the rest stops, through the blazing heat and blinding snow and creepy fogs, really, all my life I’ve felt happiest and saddest while encapsulated, on a straight shot at 75 mph, mulling over a poem I can’t finish called “Tucumcari Tonight.” It’s not about small roads and neon. It’s no ballad. It’s about interstates, and about my fractious family, and 44-ounce fountain drinks. It’s about being American in the worst and best way. I just wind up staring at all that road and sky. I always get where I’m going, but I never get past the first line.

The rest of Stuever’s essay is just as terrific. He invokes Joan Didion (“She picked up on the transcendence of wide, open highway; readers took it as disconnect, worry.”), discusses the “unmarked Waffle House line” in the U.S. and dives deep into the small joys of driving the interstates.

The cleanly executed merge—from ramp to northbound, from span to southbound—imparts a feeling, a grace. To take enormous satisfaction in a smooth merge, you don’t have to be a dancer or an athlete or a superhero, and yet the interstate makes you feel like you are.

He goes on:

However it may depress you to pull off at a building that is a gas station and a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut and a KFC all in one, however dislocating it may be to sleep in a Sleep Inn one night and then sleep in the same exact Sleep Inn four states later the next night—isn’t all of that somehow swept away by that endless glorious panorama through the windshield?

Less than two months ago, I drove from Los Angeles to my new home in Washington D.C. I took some backroads, but mostly I drove the interstates. I agree with Stuever. The interstates are the “real” America just as much as the backroads are, and it is glorious seeing the country through the windshield, even at 75 mph on a ruler-straight superhighway.

Tags: North America, United States, Washington, D.C.