Walking Seasonal Roads: Reflections on a Dwelling Place

Introduction: The Road Less Traveled

1 Introduction The seasonal road Opens to the wanderer A tale to be told To write about roads as a nature writer and an environmentalist might seem paradoxical. The road in American literature has always been a symbol of masculine freedom and adventure. From Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road (1860) to Henry David Thoreau’s Walking (1862) to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways (1982), the road has been the way men seek a heroic identity. Yet the reality is that American roads were not created for adventure, meditation, or thinking; they were created for a practical function. American roads were designed and built by a political system to improve commerce and financial gain. That they have been romanticized may reflect that quintessential American characteristic of intertwining the practical with transcendence. The history of modern U.S. roads might begin in 1896 with two bicycle mechanics from Springfield, Massachusetts, known as the Duryea brothers, who built the first American automobile. From that time on, the automobile, America, and American roads have been entwined like a Gordian knot. Throughout the twentieth century and continuing into the present, vast sums of taxpayers’ The Road Less Traveled 2 | Walking Seasonal Roads money have been spent expanding and building roads to accommodate the automobile. Government programs propelled by private industries ensured that the federal government invested in road building. Making the road and the automobile a symbol of America was in the best interest of the automobile manufacturers , and no better example of the relationship between automobile makers and America can be found than in the statement made by Charles E. Wilson, president and CEO of General Motors in 1953. He said, “I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist” (Gutfreund 2004, 7). Under the guise of the Good Roads Movement (Hugill 1981), automobile industrialists lobbied for government funded programs , legislation was enacted, and government agencies were established resulting in a road-based economy and a car culture. The strongest lobby in the country in 1941 was the National Highway Users and its chair was the president of General Motors. Its members included representatives from an enormous number of automobile and transportation-related corporations, such as the Automobile Manufacturers Association, the National Automobile Dealers, American Petroleum Institute, Rubber Manufacturers , American Trucking Association, National Sand and Gravel Association, Portland Cement Association, International Harvester , to list a few (Gutfreund 2004, 33). Some of these groups’ most influential actions can be seen in the creation of the first Transcontinental Highway and the Bureau of Public Roads and in the passing of the Highway Federalism Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, the Federal Highway Act of 1921, and Eisenhower’s Federal Aid to Highways Act (which established the interstates). In the 1960s and 70s, they were behind the establishment of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT), again, to list a few (Gutfreund 2004). The transportation infrastructure of America, in short, became bound to Introduction | 3 the automobile, and the companies that made automobiles and had vested interests in automobiles ensured that the government (i.e., the taxpayers) paid for their pathway. Because of the ease and availability of roads and cars, citizens moved away from congested industrial cities into open lands. And as they did, urban sprawl occurred. The taxpayers’ subsidy of automobile transportation resulted in suburbanization, a phenomenon that has reshaped the American landscape. While most economists would argue that the automobile-dependent transportation of the twentieth century has brought great improvements in the quality of American life, it clearly also has created deteriorating center cities, ballooning municipal debt and unstable municipal tax bases, massive development, and fragmentation of the lands (Gutfreund 2004). Ecologically, roads are not friendly. Roads kill more wildlife than any other force in the country, perhaps as many as a million animals each day on American roads (Braunstein 1996). More than 42,000 humans died from 1999 to 2003 in road accidents (DOT 2005), over half on rural roads (TRIP 2005). The road also has been associated with logging, deforestation, drilling, and all sorts of environmental degradation. The collection entitled, A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places (Petersen 2006), written by some of our foremost environmentalists and nature writers describes the effects of roads on America’s wild lands. Yet...