In Praise of the Long, Fast Highways

                                  In Praise of the Long, Fast Highways

                                                                        Published in the Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 1, 2015

            Locals and passers-through alike can’t help but notice the highway construction alongside Interstate 75 through Cobb County.  When the job is completed, travelers who wish to do so can escape traffic on the existing lanes by cruising above it on a high bridge-like structure.

I can’t wait to see it.  In fact, I wish I could sit on a bank near Canton Highway, Marietta Parkway or Windy Hill Road and watch its construction as it rises into the sky.

            As were the mighty Mississippi River and its steamboats to Mark Twain, so have been the interstate highways and their fast moving vehicles to me.  I love the interstates.  I know, to most people in a metropolitan area like Atlanta, interstates are merely their route to work, a route that is often a parking lot.  I still say those who belly-ache about interstates have never been without them.

            There’s a distinct reason for my affection.  For two summers during college days I worked for the Mississippi Highway Department on a survey crew.  Our job was to stake out through thick woods and across vast pastures a wide path that would eventually become Interstate 20.  (I didn’t even know it would lead to Atlanta.)

            Both summers my sole assignment was to reach into a bag strapped on my shoulder and take out a wooden stake.  With marker in hand, I would then stand and wait until the crew chief leaned into his tripod scope, read from the measuring stick across the way and yelled, “Cut 5 / fill 3,” or whatever his reading prompted.

  Driving the marked stake into the ground, I felt important knowing I was directing grading equipment operators on how much dirt to remove or add for this soon-to-be  “superhighway.”  It also felt good knowing that one day I could breeze down a limited-access highway that would stretch from Florence, SC to Pecos, TX.  And on that drive I would not have to endure mosquitoes and ticks, and watch out for snakes and the occasional polecat as we surveyors had to do.

            The Interstate Highway System was initiated in 1956 by a Republican president who had grown up hitching horses to hitching posts alongside the dirt streets of Abilene, Kansas.  With the IHS, the largest public works project in the nation’s history, Dwight Eisenhower brought dirt and distance under control.  It’s still 1500 miles or so from Florence to Pecos, yet the two cities are closer.

            One of Eisenhower’s main supporters of the interstate system was Senator Al Gore, Sr. of Tennessee.  Most likely Senator Gore favored the interstates because he envisioned what it could do for the South.  Stirring economically but still lagging behind the nation in 1956, the South needed an extensive distribution idea like the limited access interstate highway.   

            Everything has a downside.  Interstates have done to small towns what Wal-Mart has done to Mom and Pop.  My own father didn’t share my excitement for the “superhighway” that would lie just 2 miles from our house.  Said he, “We’re living too fast already.”  Neither was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev impressed by them while paying a visit to Eisenhower in 1959.  His comment to the President was, “Your people do not seem to like the place where they live and always want to be on the move going someplace else.”

            I don’t know what Eisenhower’s response was to Mr. Khrushchev, but he could have replied that the best thing about the interstate is that it allows you to get home faster.

            Like Mark Twain’s beloved river, the interstate highway holds for me a grace and a beauty.  I admire the skill of the engineers and laborers who built them.  Highways beckon.  They point to somewhere and help you get there.  In a fashion they remind us of the American spirit of exploring and seeking.  Even a short ride on them is a form of escape, except of course when they become a parking lot.

            And let’s not forget their bridges.  Believe it or not, in the late fifties there was still a considerable chasm between the North and the South, residue from the Civil War. The IHS itself became a needed bridge, symbolically and literally.

            If there is a formal opening of the high “bridge” stretched through Cobb County, I plan to sit on a nearby bank and watch.  Doing so will remind me that Americans have always been builders.  It will also renew my admiration of builders of all stripes, but especially those who build our roads.  I’ll also recall once again the mosquitoes, ticks, snakes and polecats and will probably smile.

Roger Hines

10/28/15