Apron String

I know I mentioned this in my last post, but I really did get a small thrill out of seeing the mileage sign for California when we got on Interstate 40 outside of Wilmington. I’ve always regarded 40 – not that I spend a lot of time thinking about highways, honestly – as kind of a lifeline to home, home being Texas, of course. When I first moved here it was a small source of comfort to me that the highway that ran through my new city was the same one that ran through the city closest to my hometown. It was down 1400 miles of east-bound I-40 that I drove here – my sister too, because she moved to Boston the same week I moved to NC – me and my mom in my red Ford Tempo, Jana and Dad in her blue Buick, pulling a U-haul trailer. We drove through Amarillo and up the Panhandle, through (surprisingly pretty) Oklahoma and (somewhat smelly) Arkansas, then into Tennessee, of the beautiful mountains and the runaway truck ramps. (“Have you noticed all the pretty ivy stuff all over?” I asked my dad at a gas stop in Tennessee. He snorted and said, “That’s kudzu, and it’s eating up the South.” Oh.) Then, if I recall correctly, through a tunnel under a mountain and into North Carolina, which immediately greeted us with a series of safety reminders – Buckle Up! Headlights on when it’s raining! I was touched by these signs, and if it sounds silly, then remember that I was 22 years old and moving to a place I’d never been before and where I knew not a single soul.

I-40 became a thorn in my side, however, when I got the job I still have today (sigh) and had to commute into Raleigh from Chapel Hill and then Durham. Some days I’d take long meandering “shortcuts” to avoid the traffic, and sometimes I’d just deal with the “I-40 parking lot.” The very worst traffic occurred due to, of all things, an Elton John concert at the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. Gridlock for hours – I think that something like a third of the ticketholders never even got to the concert because of the awful traffic. But in spite of the routine annoyance, I never once got onto 40 for the drive home without thinking, “40 west – towards Texas.”

It’s silly to romanticize an interstate highway; I know that. (I’ve seen Cars!) I know that interstates contributed to the demise of lovely small towns on the less-traveled routes; I know they’re boring and utilitarian and peppered with obnoxious billboards (although also sometimes livened up by “bushes and shrubs,” which my father would pronounce in a funny voice meant, I think, to be Lady Bird Johnson’s in a joke that I never quite got). But it’s strangely comforting for me to know that if I had to, I could get in my car and drive all the way home, without once consulting a map.