Journeys would be fewer without interstate freeways

The surface of my desk is mostly covered by a two-foot-by-three-foot map of the United States showing the entire interstate highway system. I’ve been in the process for some time of tracing my past journeys back and forth across all 48 contiguous states in various patterns of color as provided by my collection of markers.

Each major trip gets a different shade. Routine routes in the vicinity of the six places I’ve called home for a time are marked in a deep, permanent-ink blue to match the interstate highway markers that number each freeway of the system.

Some cross-country routes are rainbowlike from the number of times I have traveled them. Many roads are one-timers from that literal once-in-a-lifetime trip. Each and every tracing represents fond memories of enjoyable days, most often in solitude, spent traveling across America. I have never longed to travel abroad; I have never yet exhausted my plans for seeing or re-seeing our United States.

My dad loved to drive. Back when interstates were only in the process of developing, we’d sail the station wagon between Portland and San Francisco for a weekend visit to his parents. The summer before my senior year in high school, he took us on a four-week car journey east across the northern states, down the eastern seaboard, and west through the southern states.

I had just finished U. S. history that school year, so the East and Southeast were especially memorable with my fresh recollections of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. We traversed 31 states and the District of Columbia that August. We also saw license plates representing all of the U.S. and Canada, and lots of Mexico.

Most recently I drove two one-way trips from and to Orlando, for family reasons. In the first, we skirted the Gulf Coast and the eastern Rockies, visiting New Orleans along the way – 10 states.

In the last, I soloed through the northern Western and Central states, angled to St. Louis to look for the rare Eurasian tree sparrow, and made a big sideways jog to hit South Carolina – the only state other than Alaska that I had never been in – 17 states, three of which I had to make short side trips to hit.

My most exciting series of trips covered six months in 1979, the year of the second nationwide gasoline shortage of the ‘70s. I was in graduate school and visiting natural history museums throughout the U. S., collecting data on red squirrels. I lived in cheap motels, ate out of a cooler in the back seat, was in 35 states, and drove 13,000 miles. I also never drove on weekends or after dark and would not pass up a gas station if I had less than half a tank of gas, despite the lines. Gas was still less than $1 per gallon, however.

I am thinking of all of this today because I just read in the Washington Post that this summer marks the 50th anniversary of our interstate freeway system, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Ninety-eight percent of my cross-country travels have been on that system.

I read that there are 47,000 miles of interstate in all states but Alaska. The system took 36 years to complete with the minimum four-lane highways mandated in the original plan. Our own I-90 is the longest stretch of interstate at 3,020 miles, from Seattle to Boston.

I-90 begins, or ends – depending upon your perspective – at Seattle Mariners Safeco Field, crosses 13 states, several ever so briefly, and ends, or begins, at Logan International Airport, just after passing within sight of Boston Red Sox Fenway Park.

Along the way, I-90 also passes within view of Chicago White Sox Comiskey Park, within two miles of the Chicago Cubs Wrigley Field, and within three miles of Cleveland Indians Jacobs Field. In addition, one may see, besides Lake Coeur d’Alene, the Little Big Horn Battlefield; Mount Rushmore; Chamberlain, S.D., where my mother was born; Lake Michigan; Lake Erie; and Buffalo, N.Y.

In 1919, future President-to-be Eisenhower was a member of a frustrated Army convoy that required two months to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. As it happened, he later used the German autobahn to get his troops rapidly into Berlin at the end of World War II. Those two contrasting experiences are what led him in the early 1950s to begin development of our own national system of super, efficient highways.

So, just 50 years ago none of this freeway system existed. Most of you probably don’t remember such a day.

American life has changed so much because of it and has become so dependent upon it, that it’s hard to imagine what we’d do now without it. Looking at my map, I know that it would be mostly blank if I would have had nothing to drive on but country roads.