The Drive Home, Prologue: The Bite

It's not a stretch to suggest that the vast majority of Americans regard roads purely as a utility, to the extent that they think about them at all. There are nearly 2.7 million miles of paved road in the United States according to the Department of Transportation, after all. It's no wonder that most people can't be bothered to spare active thought for the negligible fraction of them that they drive on over the course of a given day or week or month or year. It also doesn't help that a high percentage of these trips are likely part of a recurring routine or commute. Familiarity breeds contempt; repetition begets boredom.

This might have posed a problem for me when I found myself making upwards of several round trips a month between my hometown of Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. That is, at least, until I had the epiphany that a share of the blame must be shouldered by modern humanity's—and especially America's—everlasting obsession with efficiency for efficiency's sake.

The Germans may lay claim to the base invention of long-haul travel by automobile, but only in the United States, unique amongst the industrial giants of the early 20th century for her undeniable immensity, physiographic diversity, and mostly manageable climate could the idea become so inextricably linked to the ethos of a nation.

By returning agency to the hands of the individual traveler, the road trip put the adventure back into the process of Getting There in ways that trains, with their rigid timetables and inflexible tracks, could not. At the same time, there developed unprecedented comfort and safety in road travel. A hot meal and a bed to sleep in were never far away, and itinerant crime like banditry was almost wholly a plague of yesteryear, a relic of the stagecoach era.

But then car ownership became more and more ubiquitous. Two lanes turned into four, which multiplied into six, eight, ten, sealed off from the surrounding world and accessible only via sporadic, fixed airlocks. I won’t argue against the bare necessity of a transcontinental autobahn network as prescribed by Eisenhower, but one of its regrettable byproducts has been the homogenization and sterilization of long-distance road travel. Where it was once a diversion, it’s now seen as a necessary evil in the eyes of most who undertake it.

We've been conditioned to believe that the entire raison d'être of roads is to go from point A to point B in the least amount of time, a maxim that tends to unilaterally inform our choice of routes. We must take the road that will allow us to arrive at our destination the soonest, simply because it’s available to us. On such roads, we then expect—no, we deserve the inviolable right to constantly zoom along at whatever speed we want. In that frame of mind, it becomes impossible to actually enjoy the journey, since every minor slowdown swells into a serious irritant.

I figured out that it didn't have to be this way when I finally broke the spell cast by the Pennsylvania Turnpike's poisonous promise of the earliest possible disembarkation. It dawned on me that I was under no obligation to meekly accept its mind-numbing grind, its ever-increasing tolls slipping invisibly and insidiously away from my EZ-Pass transponder, nor its legions of “just-get-there” travelers, many of whom haven't the faintest notion of proper lane usage. Not to mention having to endure the very concept of Breezewood, a festering sore of gas stations, fast food outposts, and cut-rate lodging crammed into a quarter-mile stretch of seemingly always-red traffic lights that, thanks to provincial political machinations, there's no easy or obvious way to avoid.

And so I set about devising an alternate route home, honing it through hundreds of hours and thousands of miles of trial and error until it congealed into clear preference. Where the Turnpike feels like a chore, a monotonous countdown of mile markers until I reach my destination and no further, this new route has had the totally opposite effect of sparking a sense of freedom and excitement. Since I'm already rebelling against the motivation of utmost haste, the door is left wide open, in theory, for just a bit further. One more hour of daylight. One more turn I've never made before.

The sheer possibilities are exhilarating, even if the neurons responsible for rational decision-making always just about prevent me from whimsically entertaining them. But the important thing is that instead of confining me, I've permitted the road to liberate my mind and my soul. As someone who is most restless when he's stationary and most at peace when he's in between places, that's all I could ever ask for.