Yellowstone 2018

I know what you’re thinking: Who looked under that rock and let him crawl out into the sunlight?  Just when we we’re able to get the children to sleep at night. Well armchair travelers it’s true.  I’m back… on the road.

(A note to the reader: Italicized passages are meant to be the voice of the reader …you… and will seem somewhat more insightful if read aloud.  Now go back to the start and try again.)

There are so many questions deserving answers, let me try to address some of them.  “Yes. No.  Maybe. If you won’t tell either will I.” Now on to new business.

I have been hankerin’ for a road trip for some time now (since the last one) and decided to quit making excuses and just drive.  If you are a faithful follower of my wanderings, you know I favor travel and adventure in the Four Corners states.  But this time I thought I’d obey the court orders and give my rustic old-west buddies a break.  So, for this year’s exercise in Marco Polo-ry. I have selected the lesser known step-child of the Mother Road (Is he talking about US-66?): US-395, Del Camino Sierra!  Okay, I did not coin that phrase, I saw it on a roadside billboard. But it seems pretty apt for a highway running parallel the Eastern Sierra. (So, what makes US-395 worthy of all that travel time?  Isn’t a road, a road?)

 “Compare and contrast!” Do those words evoke painful memories from high school?  Are you one of the millions that grew up learning to hate essays?  Did you ever ask an English teacher, “Does spelling count?” If any or all of those conditions apply to you, then come along with me and see how language can be fun.  But don’t blame me if you learn something.

A Tale of Two Roads

After World War II, President Eisenhower established a national initiative to create, across the face of the United States, a super highway system that would allow rapid movement of military personnel, equipment and supplies in response to enemy attack. Never mind that we had been invaded (Pancho Villa) only once since that little dust up with Great Britain known as the War of 1812 (more romantically, the Second War of Independence). During peacetime the network of freeways would be available for use by private citizens and commercial transporters.  So began the knitting together of a great nation determined never to lose her sovereignty… as long as we could afford to subsidize the civil construction industry, the automotive industry, and various state and local government buy-offs.

In several instances, the new interstate highways would replace long existing routes of the federal highway system, like I-40 for US-66. (Pronounced “interstate forty” and “Route sixty-six”) The new roads were to be super-freeways with limited access via on/off ramps and no cross traffic. And they were engineered to allow higher driving speeds than were the pre-war roads. This meant fewer stops for fuel, sustenance and sleep.  Prior to the new freeways, the US highway system connected rural agricultural communities where the local merchants could generate additional revenue from the itinerant commercial and tourist traffic.  But the winds of change were blowing up as much dust as a passing Buick Roadmaster (What’s a Roadmaster?  Is he talking about bondage and discipline?)

Over the coming decades, Steinbeck’s (read The Grapes of Wrath) small-town diners and service stations would disappear in favor of conglomerate gas stations/fast-food multi-marts strategically located at the edge of the modern autos fuel range, or if you are really lucky the intersection of two or more of these super highways.  And thus, the traffic to these old towns now surviving on the antique trade and nostalgic nomads looking for a bit or yesterday. There are intrepid entrepreneurs who are making a living off of the old roads, but when you wipe away the patina of faux traditionalism you understand that it all delivered up from the same plastic containers stocking your local Wal Mart.

But there is this one particular highway that exists much as it did fifty or more years ago; the posted speed limit in town is 25 mph; and main street is U.S. 395.