Post #159721 by ikitnrev on Tue, May 17, 2005 6:25 PM

Having gone to college in the city that claims the World's largest Six-Pack, I feel as I have been given the license to condense here a few words from the preface of Karal Ann Marling's classic and scholarly 1984 book 'The Colossus of Roads - Myth and Symbol Along the American Highway'

It is the terror of infinite spaces.

Hours of straight roads, lined by endless, even fields of beans and corn, or stands of timber merging with the mirror surfaces of shallow lakes scooped from the level surface of the ground. The land is too flat, loudly proclaiming its bigness and its blustering expansiveness and its crude power by that insistent, uninterrupted sprawl.

Like a boulder on the highway, the material of the big [fill in name of giant object] stops traffic. A rooted mass at odds with the flight of the road, it vivifies a sense of place. We write postcards for friends back home: "Wish You Were Here!" "Here" is strange and odd, the domain of lurid, monster fauna - dream turned to nightmare, the magical someday becoming a sweltering now, fantasy becomes a dense, disconcerting, impenetrable reality.

Seen against the measure of pokey little Main Streets skittering past the shores of placid lakes, they startle by their florid rhetoric, their grandoise aspirations. They brag and boast and holler and stomp, in a wild Amercian orgy of self-assertion and desire.

It is a place made for pioneers and pilgrims and tourists, a place for the dramatic arrivals and flamboyant departures that give to the weary transient the assurance of having come to someplace new. The miles and hours 'have' indeed flown by. Roadside monuments mark off the frontiers and boundaries of 'here.' By increments of 'heres,' we feel our way every onward.

"Which way to the American dream?" Why, it's up the road, there.

Damn, I wish I had written that.

Vern