We were warned.
Some friends had made the trip to and from Bentonville a few days before we left; they told us about the construction starting around the 45-mile marker on Interstate 40 eastbound and how it had slowed them down for about 45 minutes. They suggested we take the Pig Trail on our way home and avoid the bottleneck.
We considered it, then thought: Why not whisk down the mountain on I-540, then jump off at I-40 at Alma and take U.S. 64 through Ozark, Altus and Coal Hill? Since 64 crosses over the interstate just before it reaches Clarksville, we'd be able to tell if the traffic was still jammed up. If it was flowing freely, we could hop back on 40. If it wasn't, we could continue on 64 to Dardanelle or Atkins.
For once, we weren't in a hurry. And interstates are purposefully dull drives, designed mostly to move trucks around our big country as efficiently as possible. I used to avoid them when I drove for fun and profit, writing "Piney Woods Journal" for Shreveport's afternoon daily three times a week. The interstates had fast food franchises and higher gas prices clustered around its exit nodes; the more authentic America lived along what William Least Heat-Moon famously dubbed its "blue highways."
Interstates are necessary, but are about destinations more than journeys. The legend, one that the Federal Highway Administration tries to debunk, is that future president Dwight David Eisenhower conceived the interstate highway system when he was assigned an observer to the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy in 1919. He was then a 28-year-old Army officer who had just missed World War I, with the armistice coming the week before he was to ship out for France.
Eisenhower, who in his memoir noted, "No human enterprise goes flat so instantly as an Army training camp when war ends," was feeling dejected. While many of his West Point classmates mustered out after the war and accepted lucrative jobs in the private sector, he and Mamie had decided a military career best suited his temperament.
Still, with the War to End All Wars fought, he envisioned the remainder of his career consisting of "putting on weight in a meaningless chair-bound assignment, shuffling papers and filling out forms." So when he got word of the expedition, he volunteered, "partly for a lark, and partly to learn."
The convoy, which consisted of 81 U.S. Army vehicles--60 trucks, a van-mounted searchlight, a tank on a flatbed trailer, trailers which served as mobile kitchens and supply shops, a few Harley-Davidson motorcycles with sidecars, Packards, and a couple of prototype vehicles manufactured by Willys-Overland--would attempt to cross the United States. They guessed that it would take about two months to cover the 3,200 miles.
That they would succeed was no foregone conclusion--the internal combustion engine was still in its infancy and most U.S. roads were still dirt and crudely constructed. Many were impassable in bad weather. Railroads were still the chief mode of moving people and goods across the country.
It took 62 days, and their average speed was about five miles an hour. Eisenhower remembered it as "a journey through darkest America." While the FHA contends he "did not conceive" the interstate system during the convoy, at the very least he gained insight into the importance of a network of connected roads and bridges.
His report to Army leaders focused primarily on the mechanical difficulties the convoy encountered and the pitiful condition of the existing patchwork of existing paved and unpaved roads, dangerous old bridges and passages too narrow to accommodate two vehicles.
Toward the end of World War II, as Allied armies raced across France and into Germany, Ike was impressed by the autobahn, the vast highway system built by the Germans prior to the war. Ironically, the autobahn hastened the Allied victory by enabling it to efficiently resupply forces pursuing the German Wehrmacht across France and into Germany. He came to understand "the wisdom of broader ribbons across our land."
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Bill, creating the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, 41,000 miles of smooth, mostly straight road, the biggest public works project of all time, with some remarkable unintended consequences.
It bisected cities and cut off communities. It created markets at every exit ramp. It zipped past little downtowns and left them bereft and dying, giving us characterless edge towns of malls and office buildings and suburban houses where people can live and work and never venture into places like Alma, Ozark, Altus and Coal Hill. It created a culture in a hurry.
Interstates are made for zombie driving. It's just steering, and not even much of that since Karen's manual-transmission car is outfitted with lasers that seek out the limits of the lane. If you graze the line, the car beeps and the steering attempts to auto-correct. Drifting into another lane is an argument you can win, but not without having to make a case.
It's weird to feel but, given how other people drive, probably a sensible device. Most Americans aren't interested in driving anymore; they just want to be where they want to be and have little patience for people like me, who used to really be into cars. We probably should have put more money into public transportation, into light rail and bullet trains, instead of making the 1966 Pontiac GTO a fetish item.
But there are moral arguments to be made against most things people enjoy doing, and I still derive some pleasure in driving--or in this case, just riding. I thought Karen would give up the wheel once we got down the mountain. I fully expected her to pull over after we exited to let me drive. But, pumped up on complimentary hotel coffee, she feels fine and ready to take on a twisty two-lane. She's having fun. So am I.
The thing you might not realize about this place where we live is how pretty it is. Downtown Ozark looks like a movie set; the Altus American Viticultural Area is more beautiful than the Napa Valley.
Your eyes can get callused, just like anything else you overuse, and living proximate to bluffs and rivers and rust-colored rocks can cause you to to scan past them in a search for novelty. When I cross the Arkansas River on I-430 I pay more attention to the rubber scuffs on the median divider than the natural blues and browns and greens. I notice the billboard for the Peppermint Hippo more than Lake Conway's cypress knees.
As planned, we slipped back onto I-40 just before Clarksville and ran smooth for a couple of miles. Then the right lane closed down and we crawled along for a while.
We weren't in a hurry. We should have stuck to the surface roads.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.