Most of us take driving for granted, or worse, a nuisance. We tell little kids how much longer we’ll have to be in the car before we get to the movie theater, grandma’s house, or whatever. I was one of those kids. I always wanted to just get home, and as we hurtled down 355 or 294 I always asked how much longer we would be in the car. The problem was my lack of understanding how long an hour, or even a minute really was. So the value had to be expressed in something more concrete, like how many more songs would come on, or how many tollbooths were remaining. The songs measure proved problematic because those numbers were approximations, and little kids who need to piss aren’t big on approximations. I retained this A to B, are we there yet mentality to driving until my family started to tackle a beast unlike any other.
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South Carolina. It’s far away. Almost 1,000 miles door to door from my home in cookie cutter Chicagoland to the southernmost tip of South Carolina, a place where beautiful beaches were once mixed with indigo plantations, and plantations is the key word in that sentence. Today the island is divided much the same way as it was hundreds of years ago, with the land divided into plantations, some more exclusive than others, most gated, and all having an air of ‘this is the best place on this island, and you really have no reason to go anywhere else.’ But I digress. The exterior of the island is the prime real estate, because, naturally, it is closest to the beach. The interior of the island (which the main route, US 278, mysteriously bypasses, circling around the island) is marshy, and there live the ancestors of slaves, people struggling to survive in the other of the two Americas. (to borrow a line from a North Carolina boy, John Edwards) Anyone flying to directly to Hilton Head Island can get to the beach, or the golf course, without really seeing this area (for those with local knowledge I’m talking about Marshland Road, places like that) and if you fly to Savannah, the more common choice, you don’t see it either. In this country we make a point of hiding the poor from plain sight, shuffling them aside so you have to really venture off the beaten path to see them. As wealthy real estate owners ‘take a hit in the market’ these people are starving to death.
Fourteen hours in a car sounds like pure hell to most people, and I can certainly understand why. In my case, I am locked in close proximity with three members of my immediate family, all of whom have different sized bladders, different preferences as to where and what we eat, different film genres, and overall different perspectives on life. We fight, we laugh, we debate, we fight some more, we see the outside world and react to it through very thin panes of glass. We are at our most unfiltered, being in a car with your family is a remarkably private experience. We are by ourselves, no one else can hear the words that come out of our mouths. That is a godsend, and that principle certainly doesn’t apply on an airplane with 200 of your closest friends.
But the primary benefit of car travel isn’t the ability to speak your mind. It is developing a tactile connection with the country. It takes maybe a minute or two to zoom over Chattanooga, Tennessee in an airplane, and to the vast majority of people I know it is yet another dot on a map, a place where people you don’t know do things you don’t care about for reasons you don’t understand. But the path that Interstate 24 winds through the area is beautiful. Missionary Ridge descends and as you wind your way down into Chattanooga there is this large lake (I’m sorry I don’t remember what it is called) that you pull an almost 180 degree turn around. We did this around sunset on a clear night, and as the sun kissed the mountains and the lakes and this panorama came into view, a hush came over the car. We all knew we were witnessing something special, and the satellite radio (a nice convenience, but it is just another way we’re homogenizing America) was immediately turned down. We swooped around, the moment was concluded, and I realized that I would have never seen this from an airplane, or if I had, it would have been an accident of chance. That doesn’t happen on 24. You feel the turn, and the lake is just a few hundred feet from the road.
I’ve turned into somewhat of a road buff. I appreciate the audacity of Eisenhower & Co. even dreaming up the idea, in a time today where a similar plan would be derided by Beck and fellow crazies as an assault on American ideals. I appreciate that the vast majority of the system is free to use (except for gasoline costs, of course. Hopefully someday soon we will have done away with that as well.) and that for just a few gallons of fuel (in my Prius, at least) you can take yourself quite a long way, much, much more cheaply than an airplane. I like to sit on Google Maps and scroll the country, memorize which interstates go where, and now that my home base has shifted 150 miles to the south (I’m in Champaign for school) I get to repeat the process, see how far away certain towns are.
I dream of being able to take a couple of weeks, drive a couple of hundred miles a day with some friends, and tour the country coast to coast, 90 on the way there, east or west is irrelevant (that long, east west spoke lies just a few miles from my home) and then take 10 through the Deep South back to the other coast. Maybe this summer I’ll do it.
But if you get the chance, and become tired of the latest Celebrity Apprentice like I probably will (I can’t believe Blagojevich has the balls to go on) go out and take a drive. Pick a town you haven’t seen before. Its reputation doesn’t matter. Pick a distance you have time to travel round trip, get in whatever you can, and just do it. What you’ll see, I don’t know. But I know you will see something.