Drive (13 page)

Unfortunately, having booked my room online, I was staying farther from downtown than I'd hoped. Just off the highway, which provided an annoying soundtrack of passing cars, the hotel was at the end of a suburban strip that included restaurants, gas stations, a car wash and a GM-Pontiac-Mazda car dealership. No matter. I was on a road trip and even if I was solo, it was Friday night, I'd already put in several hours behind the wheel, and the Yankees and the Tigers were in a playoff series. All I wanted was to sit at a bar, watch a little of the game and wash down my dinner with a couple of cold Rolling Rocks. Normal road trip activities. My options—which included Don Pablo's, a Mexican chain; Bob Evans, a family restaurant with bright lights; a Pizza Hut; and a McDonald's—weren't exactly appetizing. I ended up at an Applebee's, just the sort of corporate operation I'd never go to back home because I live within a short walk or an affordable cab ride of more good bars and restaurants than I could ever hope to sample.

I was the only pedestrian on the street, which wasn't a surprise given that there was no sidewalk, and I could feel the weird looks from people in cars as I walked through parking lots and crossed side streets. But I just couldn't imagine driving that short a distance. The walk back to my hotel, which took only eight or nine minutes at a leisurely pace, was lovely despite the bad urban planning; between the crisp, clean fall air and the big, bright, full moon in the cloudless sky, I sure wasn't rushing to get inside. The folks cooped up in their cars didn't know what they were missing.

6
Interstate 70

The Automobile as Living Room

I WOKE UP ITCHING
to get out of suburbia. I just couldn't understand how anyone could be happy living such a car-dominated existence, but it was finally dawning on me that this is where most Americans live. They don't have to, especially when neighbourhoods such as Broad Ripple, just a few miles away from my hotel, offer such an appealing alternative. This gentrified section of Indianapolis is home to art galleries, bars, restaurants, a good indie music store, an independent bookshop with an oldfashioned half door and the Monon Coffee Company (where I sipped my first espresso since leaving Toronto, and a pretty good one at that). My stroll through Broad Ripple took me to the Monon Trail; people were out of their cars, enjoying the warm, sunny day and getting some exercise, so I joined them for an hour. Then, after checking out the largely lifeless downtown, I headed to St. Louis.

Actually, my destination was Fenton, yet another suburb. The members of the Gateway Camaro Club were to hold their annual Fall Colors Tour on Sunday and I wanted to join them. I'd emailed the club president a few days earlier but hadn't heard back, so I planned to just show up at their meeting place: the parking lot of a Drury Inn. I plugged the hotel's address into my portable Pioneer GPS Navigation System and took off.

A GPS is really not necessary for long-distance highway driving, but I had it on anyway. I chuckled at the thought of the grief I gave my friend Mick the first time he brought one on our annual camping trip. As someone who can read a map—and even use a compass, if necessary—I argued that a GPS was not just
ridiculous overkill but also counter to his obsession with taking as little as possible to make portaging easier. But here I was, a few years later, driving with one, though I took a while to warm up to it. I hadn't had much time to try it out before I left Toronto, and the few times I did, it suggested routes I knew were teeming with traffic or clogged by construction. So the first time I used it when I didn't know where I was going was after I crossed the border into Michigan. I soon noticed that my trips always took longer than the estimates on the Google Maps website, and I began to wonder why my new guide never sent me on any of the many highways around Detroit. Finally, I checked the settings, and sure enough the gadget's software was set to avoid interstates. Once I'd fixed that, I found it invaluable for the kind of voyage I was on, especially when I had a meeting to make in the suburbs, where I find it easy to get lost.

The downside to using a GPS was that I became lazy and rarely looked closely at a road map. I started to think small—turn right in two miles was about as big picture as it got—instead of having a good sense of my larger route in my mind. When travelling from one Detroit suburb to another, I had only a vague idea of what direction I was headed in. And once I'd decided to go to Indianapolis rather than through Gary, Indiana—which would have been more direct—I just let my GPS tell me where to go instead of studying maps and choosing my own, possibly more interesting, route. I found it an odd sensation to know what my destination was but to have little sense of how I would get there or even where I was.

As I drove to St. Louis, there was another reason I had my GPS on: time. My GPS projected a travel time of four hours and twenty minutes from downtown Indianapolis to the hotel in Fenton, and I wanted to beat it. Making good time is an irresistible game for many drivers. Sometimes it's an individual pursuit to, say, beat a personal best from one place to another, but when several people are driving to one location—a cottage for the weekend, for
example—it becomes a competition. Before even offering drinks to the just-arrived guests, the host invariably asks how long the drive took. It's not enough to simply drive fast—making good time requires choosing the right departure time and selecting the best route with the least traffic and fewest construction zones. There are no prizes, of course, and no one even acknowledges that it's really a competition, but everyone knows that drivers who made good time can take pride in having the right combination of speed, strategy and luck. (Even with a stop for gas on my drive to Fenton, I beat my GPS by nearly forty minutes—and felt strangely proud about it.)

Navigation systems are just one of the many high-tech devices that are increasingly finding their way into cars. This technology is part of a long-running trend of transforming the car into a living room. Before leaving for my trip, I got a crash course in telematics and other gadgetry from Tom Odell, a technology planner with GM Canada. I met him at the company's headquarters in Oshawa, Ontario, about sixty kilometres east of Toronto. Known as Mr. Gadget around the office, Odell is an engineer and nineteen-year veteran with the automaker, and his job combines technology with marketing. Dressed in a light lime green shirt with a pen in the pocket, he had a little grin that made me wonder if he wasn't more mischievous than his clean-cut look suggested— the kind of guy who despite his quiet demeanour raised a lot of hell in engineering school. “More and more,” he observed, “people see their vehicle as their cocoon, as the last vestige of privacy and solace from the outside world.”

That may explain why some buyers now consider a car's interior more critical than the exterior. For decades, there was a lot of continuity between the way a car looked on the inside and the outside. Even in the 1950s, interiors were mostly sheet metal and appeared to be one with the exterior. In the 1960s, while the design still took a lot of cues from the exterior, the interiors started to get a little softer. Finally, in the 1970s, with the new
emphasis on safety, interiors began to look completely different from the outside and continued to develop in their own direction. Wayne Cherry, who was vice-president of design for GM, saw interiors grow in importance during his more than forty years with the company. He still believes that people experience an emotional reaction to the external look of the vehicle, but admits, “You buy the exterior; you live in the interior.”

I appreciate comfort as much as the next guy, but in the same way that I found the desire to live in the suburbs baffling, I couldn't imagine the thrill of spending a lot of time in a car— unless, of course, I was on a road trip.

AMERICANS AREN'T THE ONLY ONES
who spend a lot of time on the road. While in Argentina during the summer, I noticed two things: people loved their cars and it was a huge country with varied and gorgeous landscapes—in other words, it was a place that offered many reasons to jump in a car and go for a drive. When I asked some members of an Argentine car club if there was a connection between geography and car culture, they dismissively pointed out that people who live in small European countries love their cars too. But Chrysler Museum manager Barry Dressel had a more nuanced take: pointing out that Australia, another big country, has a car culture that's similar to the one found in the United States and Canada, he noted a difference between the European love of cars and the American one. A European likes to steer tight hairpin curves and dreams of being in a Formula One race car while an American wants to cruise on four lanes of open road at eighty-five miles an hour in a big, luxurious car. I was on the open road, finally, and I was digging it.

No clouds marred the sky when I left Indianapolis, and just a few wisps made an appearance as I headed west. All that sunshine was great at first, but it would soon leave me squinting. A westward road trip across the continent in the fall has a lot of advantages—less traffic, lower room rates at hotels and temperatures
that are neither too hot nor too cold—but because the sun sets in the late afternoon, it also means a lot of driving into a blinding ball of fire, though that seemed a small price to pay for the chance to take a journey like mine. Robert Sullivan is a guy who has driven across the country dozens of times and in the process figured out that the road is not just a path but also a place. It's also relentless in the way it compels drivers forward. “The America that I see is an America that tells you to keep moving, to move on to something better, to get on the road and keep going, to stop only briefly to refuel your car and yourself but then to keep pushing toward the place that is closer to where you should be, or could be, if only you would keep going. America says move, move on, don't sit still,” he writes in his 2006 book
Cross Country: Fifteen years and 90,000 miles on the roads and interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, my wife, my mother-in-law, two kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant
. “When I am on the road, I see the America that is a continual expedition, the neverending race to the last frontier, rural or suburban or exurban. In other words, America is the road.”

If the road is a place, then I was at I-70. It runs from Maryland to Utah, and sections of the highway in Missouri and Kansas were the country's first completed interstates. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the
Federal Aid Highway Act
into law after a dozen years of political wrangling. Sometimes called the
National Interstate and Defense Highways Act
, the legislation was enacted as much for military reasons as economic ones. Eisenhower, who had travelled on the Lincoln Highway as a soldier in 1919 and had later seen Germany's autobahns, realized that a good highway system was essential for defending America. (Similarly, during the Cold War, the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, then a military think tank, were worried about defence when they dreamed up the electronic network that would eventually become the economic superhighway called the
internet.) But most businesses—including automakers, trucking companies and the oil industry—were thinking of profit, not war (though these lobby groups weren't as keen on the idea of paying for the expansion with taxes on gas, tires and other vehicle-related goods, which explains many of the political machinations).

The plan called for the federal government to pay 90 percent of the cost to build a network of forty-one thousand miles of superhighway. The states would pick up the remaining 10 percent and then own and operate the roads. The original spending estimate of $25 billion over twelve years turned out to be a little optimistic: the system ended up costing $114 billion and took thirty-five years to complete—the largest public works project in the nation's history

Today, Americans spend a lot of time on the more than 42,700 miles of interstates, using them to move goods, get to work and go on vacation. These freeways carry about sixty thousand people per route-mile a day, but for all their efficiency, they killed small towns and bankrupted mom-and-pop diners, motels and tourist attractions. In his 1982 travel memoir
Blue Highways: A Journey into America
, William Least Heat-Moon travels around the country on secondary roads, which are known as blue highways because on old maps the main routes were red and the smaller ones were blue. He starts and ends his adventure in Columbia, Missouri, and leaves town on I-70 then cuts down to I-64 and across Illinois and Indiana. “The interstate afforded easy passage over the Hoosierland, so easy it gave no sense of the up and down of the country; worse, it hid away the people,” he realizes.“Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.”

The new interstates also meant that more and more companies shipped their products by truck rather than by train, which wasn't good for the environment; public transit suffered as governments stopped investing in it; and people moved to the suburbs after the destruction of inner cities. Though they diminished downtown life for everybody, these new roads typically went right through
poor neighbourhoods because the land was cheaper and the residents didn't have the clout to put up much of a fight. Noting that interstates were “white men's highways through black men's bedrooms,” architecture and planning critic Jane Holtz Kay argues in
Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back
that the roads actually helped to create ghettos. “The blight and traffic they cause, the ceaseless noise and fumes, sack the weak. The visual detritus of the motorized world is dropped on their doorsteps. Their mean streets hold the repair shops and car washes, the spray paint services and tire marts, the muffler stores, auto parts dealers, and glass vendors.” Worse than unpleasant, it's actually unhealthy. After discussing the carcinogens and other environmental toxins the people who live in these neighbourhoods are exposed to, she writes, “This is the classic case of rich people polluting unto poor, spurred by the auto age's pollutants and spatial segregation.”