Not So Blue a Highway

Returning to the scenes of my childhood this week, I find little of the past intact to conjure up nostalgia or even the less emotive forms of memory. The trip from the Twin Cities to Mercer, Pa. I’ve made almost a hundred times over forty-two years with a diminishing sense of evocation. Perhaps it is one’s own aging. Perhaps the psyche suffers as much deterioration as the body. Sentience is, after all, largely corporeal, and as the body goes, so must go the soul, it seems. In a bid to encounter more of the past this trip, I took the Historic Lincoln Highway for the eastward leg of my journey. That it happened to be the 250^th anniversary of the nation’s founding was purely coincidental and, truth be told, a little deflating owing to the current toxigenarian occupier in the White House. Two hundred and fifty years for this!

The southward leg is I-94E through Wisconsin to I-39S to I-80E in Illinois; I-80 is a section of the Lincoln Highway west of Chicago, but you can catch the eastern length at Joliet—of Blues Brothers fame: U.S. 30E. The first thirty miles or so must have been charming at some point in the past—1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s?—but it had, for me, rather, only the convenience and utility of a franchise-inflected strip mall, as if the beginnings of a trans-continental McMansion suburb. Stoplights offer little charm. Then, eventually, out into the countryside, fields and woods abounding, but not in the least unlike the fields and woods abounding I-80E, though without tolls. The Lincoln Highway landscape, thus, presents as much the same, though you traverse it 10 mph more slowly and with stoplights. I do not know whether it is a function of reduced speed or a genuine difference in floral and faunal diversity, but the Lincoln Highway could boast one charming feature I could not recall on the Interstate: fireflies (who needs fireworks), whose potential extinction has recently been in the news. But otherwise, the blue highways like the Lincoln are not what they once were; they’re not even blue anymore on my road atlas.

Sitting on the front porch ruminating lost time and listening to the rain, my attention falls upon a mature silver maple in the front yard, the one I planted for my mother over fifty years ago. We remain, the tree and I, for a while longer, a few more years, while the world around us dissolves, first into a seeming wasteland compared to our past, and then, magically, into someone else’s golden present and future nostalgic past, someone younger. My old hometown is not what it once was for me, but may be perfectly what it is for the current generation. Beautiful. Happy, even.