Borrowing from a blog

A friend's blog posted what turned out to be a quite existential article on interstates. I was proud of him, so I posted this response: (reprinted here because I liked my response too and I'm not entirely sure that my post went through . . .)

In response to The Last Homely House: Interstate Memories

Thanks Pastor. Excellent essay. Thanks for sharing.

Where to start a reaction to this? (But, of course, to leave it alone would be inappropriate.)
Reading through the second time, seeing the photos now, the first thing I notice is Philip Johnson's PPG (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) building - a psuedo-gothic cathedral tower of glass, play-acting the part of something ancient with its spires in a modern setting for a modern corporation, with all glass, overlooking the river(s), overlooking the interstate.

Maybe what struck me first was how many memories you have of interstates and how you were able to form such significant opinions about them. It's this rush of emotions and opinions, spurred by a hundred voices of critics and cynics, all contradicting each other into the fact of your memories. For example - "So much spent on fossil fuels!" or "If only he had lived and worked in the city." Or the preservationist - "If it wasn't for interstates, we wouldn't have the problems with sprawl that we have today." Or the historical allegorist - "The interstates of today are what the railroads were to the settlers of yesteryear." Or the phlebotimist - "They're the veins and arteries of our standard of living." Or the college grad "I want to see the country before I have to get a real job." Or the salesman - "My territory stretches from Virginia to Georgia and most of Tennessee." Or the realist - "How much time WASTED inside an automobile." Or the automotive manufacturer - "God bless America!" Or Kevin Costner - "This here is a time machine: in the rear is the past, in the front window, why, that's the future."

You mention the mostly ugly landscape, in contrast to the "commercially devloped." But isn't this what the interstates really show us? Isn't this what the first locomotive passengers saw or the first astronauts who orbitted the earth? In all our moments of land planning and consumption and enterprise, we're just developing dots of land on an unimaginably long line. This is as much as we can do, and we all know that the developers are trying as hard as they can. (I pull the conversation this direction in lieu of the obvious reaction that many may consider flat pastoral land more lovely than the Wilco's and cigarette emporiums that also flower interstate exits.)

But you tried. You gave a flat run of land 3 years of your life and made no connection. Thoreau ached to have come to that kind of a disagreement with the landscape.

I confess I am a little sad that you had to drive so much to get where you are today. I also confess that I can't entirely relate. I've also been across the country, more than once, in an automobile, but I wasn't driving most of the way. And, I wasn't doing it for work. And I think commuting is a violent thing, in LA. But I also know that not much time in life feels more "real" than the time in a car, on an interstate. It's freedom at its most contemporarily literal. It's you and your thoughts and your prayers and your reaction time, committed to a machine for your destination and your best guess at a plan for the moment. Sometimes it's shared with company, and what an intimate relationship that is - one that's not easily forgotten. Oh, I'm slipping into my own memories, and this is your blog, so I'd better quit before I get to the story of the Indians I met on the ride-share board, "Turn on the indicator . . ."