About the Road

About the Road – August 27, 2018

On the Interstate

So, when you’re on the interstate, you are separated from the stuff you’re passing, because it’s a limited access highway. You’re focused on where your exit is and where you got on and how far till you get off, not on what you’re actually passing. Like on 94 tonight I couldn’t figure out why it was so windy until I got off at St. Joseph and realized it was because I was right next to a giant lake the whole time. But see it’s also because when you’re on the interstate, the scale at which you see things is so zoomed out. When you’re on like a state road or county road that you take to work every day, you associate the road with things you pass: here is 421, here is the gas station, here is la Porte, and rarely do you ever see ALL of the ROAD on a map. Whereas when you’re on an interstate, you’ve seen maps of the whole United States with all the interstates on them like all the time. So, when you get on 90, it’s almost just as easy to see yourself in Gary, where you actually are, as it is to see yourself in Seattle, in Boston, in Rapid City, because you’re so used to associating that road with such a larger context than just the small section you might drive every day. That’s I think in part what’s so simultaneously inspiring and depersonalizing about interstates; it’s so much easier to grasp the whole country, such a bigger picture, but you lose the intimacy of the small changes and curves, the potholes.

The Postmodern Road

I wonder if when the picture you see when you travel the road changed from a Rembrandt, when you went slow enough to see the details, to a fractured Picasso of Cities, to now, when one may drive for the experience of driving and not necessarily to get anywhere, or rather, when thousands watch drivers drive in circles, if now, this is the Postmodern Road. Because now, there are whole departments, billions of dollars, people who work on all the roads while only ever using the same roads, the ‘road trip’ itself, all seeing and separating the smashed asphalt from it’s Original Purpose; the Signifier, disconnected from the Signified.