Earl Swift - The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Boston New York
2011

Copyright 2011 by Earl Swift

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Swift, Earl, date.
The big roads : the untold story of the engineers, visionaries, and
trailblazers who created the American superhighways / Earl Swift.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-618-81241-7 (hardback)
1. Highway engineeringUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. Highway engineers
United StatesBiography. 3. Interstate Highway SystemHistory20th century. I. Title.
TE23.S95 2011
388.1'22092273dc22
2010043624

Book design by Brian Moore
Maps by Kevin Swift

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Excerpts from "The Great American Roadside" by James Agee are from Fortune magazine, 9/1/1934 1934
Time Inc. Used under license. Excerpts from "The American Way of Death" by Lewis Mumford are used
by permission of the Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright 1966 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James
G. Morss. Originally published in The New York Review of Books. Excerpts from "Townless Highways
for the Motorist" by Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye are used by permission of the Gina Maccoby
Literary Agency. Copyright 1930 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Originally published in
Harper's Monthly.

For Amy

Introduction

P ART I
Out of the Mud

P ART II
Connecting the Dots

P ART III
The Crooked Straight, theRough Places Plain

P ART IV
The Human Obstacle

Acknowledgments

Notes

I WAS OVERDUE for a road trip. It had been years since I'd last embraced that most cherished of American freedoms: to slide behind the wheel of a car equipped with a good stereo and comfortable seats, and head out into the country, beholden to no particular route, no timetable; to grow inured to the road, the thrum of the tires, the warbling silence and thuds of a big truck's slipstream, the whistle of hot summer past the windows. To live off the contents of a cooler on the floorboards and whatever sustenance the road happened to offer.

It had to be a long trip, as it might be years more before I got another, so I decided to go west, all the way west, through a thousand towns and across the great sweep of farm and forest and desert and windblown high plain that waited between home and the Pacific. We'd take back roads, I told my daughter, the two-laners of generations past. We'd drive with the windows down so that we could smell the tar of mid-July blacktop, hear the corn's rustle, holler at grazing cows. We'd drive for just a few hours a day, and slow enough to study the sights, immerse ourselves in wherever we were and remember it afterward. We'd make few plans; we'd stop when we were hungry, when we tired, and wherever caught our fancy.

We'd make a circle of the Lower Forty-eight, first on the old Lincoln Highway, America's Main Street, a ribbon of pavement twisting through twelve states, New York at one end, San Francisco at the other, few big cities between. Then we'd hug the California coast to Los Angeles and turn back east through the desert.

" It'll be great," I told her. " A month on the road, seeing the entire country. Just you and me."

Saylor greeted this uncertainly. " Well, I guess," she finally replied. " Can I bring a friend?"

So we were three: a single father of forty-seven and two sixth-grade girls in a rented Chrysler minivan, its hatch crammed with tents, sleeping bags, a dozen stuffed animals, and enough T-shirts and shorts for the ladies to execute four wardrobe changes before each day's lunch.

We joined the Lincoln in southern Pennsylvania. Soon after, we came upon a silent gathering of bikers next to the field where a United Airlines jet went down on 9/11, and after paying our respects stumbled into a blinding thunderstorm out of Buckstown. That evening we caught an Independence Day concert in the heart of Ligonier.

We stuck to the old road into Pittsburgh, crawling from one stoplight to the next amid auto-parts stores and no-tell motels and car washes and timeworn bowling alleys, the air dark with diesel smoke. We passed crumbling factories, crossed into Ohio, stayed true to the Lincoln's original path on narrow lanes through Bucyrus and Upper Sandusky, Ada and Delphos.

In Indiana the highway bent northward to shadow the Michigan line; along the way, it cut through South Bend and came within genuflecting range of Touchdown Jesus and the shuttered Studebaker works. It grazed Chicago, close enough to capture traffic but little else of the city. We entered a cornfield near the Mississippi and didn't leave it until Omaha.

The girls passed the hours begging me to stop the minivan to buy them clothes, or candy, or more stuffed animals, and writing notes to each other when I refused. They adopted mock Swedish personas and spoke in what they imagined to be Swedish accents across entire states. They complained that they were bored.

Out in the Great Plains of western Nebraska, I mired the minivan in soft sand and we spent two hours vainly trying to dig it out before a kindhearted local offered a tow. A couple of hours later, stopping for ice cream, we encountered a stranger so odd and menacing that I kept an eye on the rearview for an hour after. We explored Buffalo Bill's ranch in North Platte. Communed with wild horses on a windswept and dusty government preserve. Wandered a Boot Hill studded with the graves of the overly bold.

It was a short way west of there, a week into the drive, a point at which I could recite the lyrics of every song in the Backstreet Boys repertoire, that I decided we'd no longer stick to the original highway. The Lincoln coincided with U.S. 30 except where a grain elevator or water tower marked a town's approach; there, it usually veered onto narrow blacktopoften as not named " Lincoln Way," straddled by ditches, and the province of sagging pickups and rusted Detroit ironto dogleg through the settlement's gut. Ages before, the main highway had been shifted to bypass these prairie burgs, and their reliable sameness (Main Street of post office, hardware store, small grocery, consignment shop, long-shuttered bank) came to seem a forgettable delay next to 30's straight-ahead ease and speed.

So we took up the newer Lincoln, the straightened and wider Lincoln, and pressed up the slow-rising prairie toward the Continental Divide. The towns slid by a half mile beyond the shoulder, behind smatterings of low-roofed stores and diners that had moved off Main Street to lure the bypass's passersby.

In places, we could see that we traveled the middle of three parallel highways. The old Lincoln wriggled off to our right, narrow and slow; we drove its bigger and less cluttered offspring; and away to the left, across miles of rolling pastureland, ran U.S. 30's own successor, Interstate 80, four lanes of smooth concrete, its speeding semitrailers unfettered by cross traffic or slowpoke tractors, by blind driveways or train tracks.