This is an excerpt from my 2011 book “Time and the Suburbs” published with ARP.
I think there was a time when the hills around this city were indistinct enough. The problem is that you can drive out of town in any direction without really knowing if you are on the right interstate or expressway. Searching the geography on either side of the massive roadways does not help, because the low serrations of wooded hills and valleys in one part of this city’s metropolitan area are unrecognizable from those of any other. Throughout the region, concentric suburban sprawl flows over what little there is in the way of landmarks. Massive malls and warehouses look the same on the Sixty-five, the Four-forty, or the Twenty-four. Here, a suburb of vinyl houses on the way to one bedroom community looks pretty much the same as anything in the direction of any other. No matter which way you travel, there is nothing singular or unique in the landscape to help tell where you are. The land is vast and empty, save for occasional clots of uniform, prefabricated hotels and fast-food chains that choke the exits to the interstate. Because these agglomerations are nearly invisible from the roadways, they are signalled by enormous signs that rest securely at the top of bare steel masts that soar above the ramps and parking lots below.
Without intended irony, Americans drop the first “t” when they say the word “interstate,” thus situating this network of Eisenhower-era highways at the centre of the country’s psychic structure, the “innerstate.” As a key to interpreting the United States, the image works. There is the empty formlessness of movement and consumption that has always fascinated people in this country. But the significance of the interstates also resonates in the present. The motorways are dominated by long chains of semi-trailers hauling Chinese plastic goods, and circulating them to the thousands of impossibly large big-box stores that surround and invade America’s towns and cities. The roads are a moving index of this trade, with names like Walmart, Lowes, Big Lots, and others, painted in huge letters on the sides of the many shipping containers. Food transport trucks have snappier graphics. These trailers are decorated with enormous depictions of ground beef or other cuts of raw meats, attractively arranged. Sometimes a picture of a gargantuan table of cheddar or mozzarella rattles by at eighty or ninety miles an hour, followed by a rendering of a selection of uniformly soft and crustless breads. Last of all, a truck filled with soft drinks and splashed with brilliant colours speeds on, and the movable illustration of the American feast is complete.
We are headed south for Christmas, pushing our dirty white Toyota through the indistinct real estate of the mid-South. Despite the recession, the interstate is strung for miles with automobiles leaving the cold Midwest for the holidays. Around us, the evening sky is boiling with bright pinks, corals, and fuchsia. As the light fades, we find ourselves squeezed between concrete barriers and different road construction signs and equipment. At this hour, the fatigue of the many drivers begins to show; ahead of us, a semi careens wildly, narrowly avoiding collision with other trucks. Beside us, a trailer drags a chain along the road, sending sparks flying into the air. Above us, the sky on either side of the interstate is blocked by an unending succession of massive, illuminated billboards, all dozens of metres in the air, and each the size of a shipping container. There are advertisements for restaurants and shops that are hundreds of miles away; there are ads for gun shops, massage parlours, and churches next to signs with biblical passages or billboards that rail against abortion. Alongside them all, the night is overcome by hundreds of blank, illuminated signs advertising nothing but advertising space.
In the morning, jumbles of wide, flat buildings appear, announcing that we are nearing our destination. Sometimes, the remnants of an older town are just visible over the embankments, and it is possible to glimpse small squares and dilapidated public buildings surrounded by trees. Quickly, these towns recede, sometimes overrun with half-empty strip malls and gas stations, or ending in fields surmounted by huge vinyl houses. Here and there, broad landscaped elevations of carefully mown grass surround prisons, schools, and software campuses. As we get closer to this region’s dispersed centre, it becomes less comprehensible; off-ramps circle down to constellations of parking, malls, and fast-food restaurants that are only familiar in their uniformity. Mirrored office buildings float on masses of grass and pavement, and industrial parks stretch to the very edges of plastic housing developments.
We are here.