Canadians could stand on guard for missiles coming across the Arctic Ocean aimed at Washington, D.C. We imbibed the fear of creeping Communism with our Sergeant Rock comic books, soaked in racism with every episode of Amos ’n’ Andy, and loved every minute of it.
Only later did I resent living the American Dream in Canada. I wonder how I’ll feel about travelling through it in the United States.
“The Cannery Pier Hotel,” Merilyn reads from the brochure, placing special emphasis on its strangely Germanic sprinkling of capital letters, “is a luxury boutique hotel built on the former site of a historic cannery six hundred feet out into the Mighty Columbia River in Astoria, Oregon. The Hotel offers . . .”
“How do we get to it?” I ask. “By boat?”
“ . . . the Hotel offers guests an unparalleled experience in a real working river. Private river-view balconies in all rooms. Fireplace. High-Speed Internet in room. Clawfoot tubs with views. Terry robes.”
I am still feeling anxious.
“Who,” I ask, “is Terry Robes?”
MY estimates are wildly out of whack. Clearly, I have forgotten how long a mile can be. It is late in the afternoon by the time we turn west off the I-5, toward the Pacific. The direction seems all wrong. Aren’t we supposed to be heading home?
US Route 30, the highway we’re on, ends just a few miles down the road, in Astoria. If we turned the other way, we’d be in Atlantic City in just over forty-eight hours. We’d head east through Bliss (Bliss!) and Twin Falls, Idaho, across the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers, skim the southern edge of Chicago, then cut straight through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, until we hit Virginia Avenue, a few blocks up from the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
Route 30 is the main east-west highway in the United States. It’s not an interstate; it’s a highway. A main cross-country road, like Route 66, except that long stretches of that iconic cross-country road have been replaced by multi-lane throughways that stop for nothing, not a crossroad, not a town, not a megacity. “Life doesn’t happen along the interstates,” William Least Heat-Moon notes laconically in Blue Highways. “It’s against the law.”
This narrow road taking us west to the sea is the only red highway that still runs uninterrupted across the continental United States. Even Route 66 went only to Chicago. Not only is Route 30 the last of its kind, it was the first of its kind in North America. In 1912, Carl Fisher, the man who built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and turned a Florida swamp into Miami Beach, proposed what he called the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. There were already some 2.5 million miles of roads in the United States, but they weren’t connected. Dirt tracks radiated from settlements to farms, logging camps, and mines, petering out at the last signs of human habitation. Fisher’s idea was to connect all those communities with a gravelled road that would run from Times Square in New York City through thirteen states to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, the first transcontinental road built for the automobile instead of oxen, horses, or mules. A Main Street across America—which is how it came to be known.
The road would cost $10 million, with each community along the way pitching in to do the work. To pay the bills, Fisher asked automobile manufacturers and accessory companies to contribute 1 per cent of their revenues to the project. Packard and Goodyear agreed; Ford refused. The public would never learn to pay for their roads if industry built them, Henry said.
Fisher went ahead anyway. To whip up public enthusiasm, he renamed his new road the Lincoln Highway (after the president, not the car, which was later manufactured by Ford). The idea caught on, and so within a few years, highways with names like the Dixie Highway, Jefferson Davis Highway, the Atlantic Highway, and the Old Spanish Trail criss-crossed the country. There was no system of road signs, just painted bands on telephone poles at important intersections, something like the pointing markers on Fremont’s Center-of-the-Universe post.
The Lincoln Highway opened in 1915 in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Most of it was graded and oiled, but parts never evolved beyond muddy tracks; it all depended on the locals in charge.
By the time the idea for Route 30 came along in 1925, government was taking over road building. With bureaucracy came a federal highway system determined to make sense of the myriad quaintly named thoroughfares. To a foreigner like me, the United States National Highway System illustrates the remarkable pragmatism of the American character. Look at a road sign and just by the number, you can pinpoint where in the country you are. Major east-west routes are numbered in multiples of ten, from US 10 across the north to US 90 across the south. Major north-south routes end in 1 or 5, with the numbers starting at 1 in the east and increasing as they move west. The US Route 30 sign we just passed tells me we are in the northern tier of the country, and we’re heading for US Route 101, which runs down the Pacific shore into California.
The Lincoln Highway was severed into several numbered roads, but almost two-thirds of it became US Route 30. The new road was identified, as every road in America is and has been since 1925, with a shield that encloses the number and, at one time, the name of the state. To avoid confusion, all signs showing named highways were taken down.
Where we live in eastern Ontario, planners a few years ago decided to remove apostrophes from road signs. What, the apostrophe takes too much time to print? Too much ink? The curlicue is aesthetically displeasing? Whatever the logic, the result was that Chaffey’s Lock, where Wayne lived for a time, became Chaffeys Lock. The possessive apostrophe, which denoted the name of the person who had founded the town or built the lock, disappeared, though not without considerable outrage from the local citizenry. Likewise, the shift to numbered highways in the United States was not an easy one. As an editorial in the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald noted in 1927, “The traveler may shed tears as he drives down the shady vista of the Lincoln Highway, or dream dreams as he speeds over a sunlit path on the Jefferson Highway, or see noble visions as he speeds across an unfolding ribbon that bears the name of Woodrow Wilson. But how in the world can a man get a kick out of 46 or 55 or 33 or 21?”
The numbers stayed. After all, the original rationale for a federal highway system in the United States was national defence, and soldiers are not sentimental, at least not about other people’s history. But a few Americans refused to see the old highway names disappear. On September 1, 1928, thousands of Boy Scouts fanned out along the Lincoln Highway to install concrete markers, one per mile, with a small bust of Lincoln and the inscription This highway dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.
A rock road from coast to coast; markers every mile to preserve the memory of a revered name: it’s by these grand, sweeping gestures that I know where I am.
Lincoln Highway was decommissioned in 1928. Route 66 went the same way in 1985. The last major route constructed was US 12 on the Idaho side of Lolo Pass, completed in 1962. No new highways have been commissioned since, except the interstates.
In 1962, the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck took a drive on the new interstate. “These great roads are wonderful for moving goods,” he reported, “but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”
Canada has no interstates. Roads are a provincial concern. It took various levels of government until 1950 to get together to build our one and only cross-country road—the Trans-Canada Highway— which wasn’t finished until 1971. It is our version of Main Street across America: although you can take 1A bypasses around most