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93 11 The Road as a Corridor of Complexity America’s roads are enigmatic. Roads are linked together in local, regional, and national networks to the extent that they are essentially ubiquitous. Our modern dayto -day mobility is vested in roads that are so common that we tend to take them for granted until they are in need of repair or choked with traffic. We are inclined to regard the road simplistically, as though it were an accessory, a subsidiary feature lurking in the background. But historically, roads were often the foreground to travel— their routes and attributes such as gradient and condition were of primary concern to stagecoach line operators and carriage drivers. Whichever perspective obtains, background or foreground, roads and their attendant roadsides, which together constitute road landscapes, are very complex places and difficult to interpret. Roads are the primary tangible links between the places where we conduct our lives—home and work, for example—a situation we may not recognize until our favorite route is closed for construction and we are forced to find an alternative road through unfamiliar territory. Road access permits straightforward observation of the towns and countryside through which they lead. More abstractly, roads affect our perceptions of places. We may, for example, associate dangerous, badly maintained roads with places that are politically and socially backward, whereas safe and superior roads may suggest that places are forward-thinking and economically robust. Road complexity is exacerbated through association with multiple legal jurisdictions—town or city, county, state, federal—each with somewhat different construction requirements and different rationales for maintenance. Some jurisdictions may promote the idea that roads serve as tools for economic development; others treat roads as subjects of political intrigue. Roads also provide the venue for linear marketplaces, roadside businesses that erect advertising signs to persuade travelers to stop for food, fuel, lodging, shopping, or other forms of financial or social transaction. And consider how the traveler’s relationship with the road, roadside, and fellow travelers changed through time. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel via horseback or Concord coach (a stagecoach famed for its fine suspension) was a public experience that cast the traveler as a participant in local affairs. The traveling public shared 94  The Maysville Road: A Landscape Biography coach seats and common tavern dining tables, they shared beds and sleeping rooms, they were engaged by local residents eager for news from beyond the horizon.1 The enclosed automobile and truck provided private travel—people could now journey long distances as observers without directly engaging with anyone, provided they did not need to refuel or rent a room for the night. But even these social interchanges were conducted with a small cadre of trained company employees, rarely with “local people.” Road landscapes provide varied experiences for those who use the road or reside at roadside, and therefore roads are subject to multiple interpretations and understandings . Over-the-road truckers, highway patrol officers, firefighters, civil engineers, express delivery truck drivers, school bus passengers, farmers, commuters, and tourists experience roads and roadsides in somewhat different ways. Appreciating such widely disparate perspectives requires that we regard the roadway, in both its historic and contemporary guises, as a visual and experiential puzzle or palimpsest.2 The road landscape has both material—and therefore subject to visual and tactile inspection— and behavioral dimensions that change through time. People who use roads are not automatons; their actions and experiences relate to their social, political, and economic milieus. It is difficult to identify or appreciate more than fragments of a road landscape’s behavioral dimension, although we can enhance our understanding if we gain familiarity with how differing groups relate to the roads on which their mobility depends. What, for example, might an automobile traveler know about the tractortrailers and truck drivers that cohabit the highway? The social world of the trucker and the car driver are radically different, and the points or places where their lives might intersect are limited. On the highway, encased in steel shells on wheels, the car driver and trucker are mutually anonymous. Should the car driver choose to learn something about the truck driver’s world, however, he or she might patronize a truck stop. A trucker’s life is strongly oriented toward the road rather than the home. A large truck stop provides diesel fuel, of course, but it also offers home-type accommodations , such as beds and large restrooms with showers. Banks of telephones permit drivers to contact their companies on...

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