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Blue Highways, revisited

Every year until Grandma died in the mid-1970s, and the cancer took so long it's difficult to remember the actual year it ended, we drove from Seattle to Merced, California. It took two and a half days, best I can remember, and maybe some of that was because we sometimes took 101 down the Oregon Coast, and maybe some of it was because there were two squirmy boys in the back seat always looking for the next Sambos, a now-forgotten pancake chain (better, at least, than Coon Chicken Inn, which I know only from the collectible world my brother's first wife dabbled in), or Dennys, where grilled cheese could be dinner.

The last year, just mom and me, it took a day and a half. In the same car, a 1964 Chevelle, I believe, and not the faster 1967 Dodge. That's how much the roads got better.

Over the years I've driven a good bit of this country, the main roads and the back roads. Back in the mid-1980s, emboldened in part by William Least Heat Moon's book, I sold my first business and fixed up a 1967 Dodge van with the engine next to the driver's seat and a stereo that cost more than the van itself, and went out to try to find the America which had voted for Ronald Reagan.

I didn't.

I do remember leaving Austin with Timbuk 3 playing on the college radio station, though I'm not entirely certain the timeline makes this memory possible, and thinking that would be a cool town to move to, and moving somewhere out of Seattle was on my agenda, though it would take another decade before I would finally leave. A good decade. Grunge. The Rocket. The bare beginnings of No Depression.

But this trip, driving my wife to her yoga retreat in Woodstock, IL, northwest of Chicago, I have been struck by how bad our main roads have become, by how we've lost faith even with the fundamentals of our society.

I wrote this originally for daily kos from an indifferent hotel in the suburbs of Chicago. (I hadn't the passwords to my own site, which explains a lot.) No CNN, no ESPN, a Mexican restaurant next door that thought I might be la migra and was cold at best. We passed beautiful old barns that are about to be turned into housing developments, the cattle already sold, one last corn crop in the ground. We passed new and old -- but unoccupied at a rate that speaks to the deterioration of our economy -- retail and manufacturing strip malls.

And we did it on roads that should have been repaired long ago. Now, I know the weather up here is rough and that road maintenance is expensive. But even Grandma, assistant to the county clerk except during the war, and then she gave his job back, even Grandma said you get what you pay for.

Some day we're going to run out of gas, and it may well be during my lifetime. Certainly its rising price will change my travel habits, making these trips far more of a luxury than they have been. It will become more of a struggle for my daughter to know her relatives on the West Coast.

But the roads are a symptom.

And they're plumb awful. Broken. Fragmented. Dangerous. Crowded, yes, but the pavement is in terrible shape.

If I were a touring band, I would worry afresh about the increasing possibility of severe accident, about the damage done to tires and suspension systems, about the wear and tear and the economy of rock 'n' roll at $4 or $5 or $10 a gallon.

Travel is now, for us, a luxury item, for which we budget.

But the point, here and now, is this: We have suffered a fundamental breakdown of our social contract. We have changed our relationship to taxes and to civic duty. The sainted Ronald Reagan (though I don't remember him having been so beloved during his terms in office) and his followers have recast taxation as theft. Rather than believing government can and should work to better the lives of citizens, they infused political discourse with the notion that government could not work.

This is not a new observation. See: Katrina. See: health care. See: public education.

When we stop believing in this country, when we stop believing things can and should be improved, when we stop being willing to pay for the society we say we wish to live in, and when we start believing that we are all nothing more than specific and discrete interest groups, we have failed. We have failed ourselves, our children, and the patriots who founded this land. (Which is not to say their aim was pure, but that's not the point; their words were.)

We face a lot of choices. This next election, it could be about race, or the economy, or the war(s), or, with any luck, it could be about energy and ecology. But the bottom line is that it's about the roads we travel together.

Posted by grant on May 25, 2008 10:25 AM | Permalink