TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

One of the things that will always scream out “America!” to me is that long black ribbon of tarmac with the yellow line in the centre, stretching out ahead of me to some far distant horizon. It speaks to me of the poster for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and too many hours spent watching the movie sub-genre now known as the “Road Movie” as well as harking back to an earlier, much darker era which we might like to think of as “Hollywood Noir” but which has its roots in European and, more specifically, German Expressionism.

Like many clichés which have become almost instantly iconic mostly through repetition and familiarity, the highway network of the United States is a comparatively recent development which manages to seem like it’s always been there. According to the documentary “Rich Hall’s Continental Drifters” which I finally got around to watching months after it was first broadcast, it was President Eisenhower who finally set in motion the plan to get the American people in motion by getting the roads organised after being very impressed by what he had seen of the embryonic German road network as he fought there during the Second World War.

This led to a massive construction project to build the Interstate Network which (apparently) meant the movement of as much earth as it took to construct both the Suez and Panama Canals thirty-three times over, which, by any criterion, is a heck of a lot of shale to shift.

It seems ironic now that so much of this uniquely “American” iconography seems to have been forged in the furnaces of the “New” Germany that grew up out of the ruins of the First World War and threatened the end of civilisation and the death of the so-called “free world” as we know it. I can’t really imagine being all that popular an observation, either, but there you go.

Culturally speaking, of course, America managed to make far more of the highway network than Germany ever could. They had more space for a start (and with that, you can start to see where all that “Lebensraum” nonsense came from…) and, to be fair, a much more impressive landscape to look at. Not that there’s anything wrong or unimpressive about the landscape of Germany, of course, it’s just that the good ol’ U.S. of A. seems to have rather a lot more of it to look at.

All of those huge “big sky” landscapes with those high mountain ranges and endless-seeming desert plains stretching off in all directions were almost assured “iconic” status even before the tarmac was slapped down right down the middle of them and the movie cameras rolled in their direction.

Not, of course, that the Interstate Network has a great deal to do with the notion of the “two lane blacktop” as we might recognise it. Those dreary, soul-less multi-lane strips of concrete, full of potholes (I’m looking at you, Sonora…) and traffic jams have little to do with pointing your chrome bumpers at the open road with its infinite possibilities and heading out to the highway.

But once you get beyond the cities, that is where that huge and highly systematic American obsession with extending the urban grid system to cover a whole continent really comes into its own, and you can drive three or four hundred miles in a straight line straight towards the horizon and never actually reach it.

At every point where these great big (and not so big) arteries of commerce meet each other and cross, small communities will have  settled down and some of them (but not all) will have grown into major towns whilst others are little more than a gas station and, perhaps, a diner inside which the local inhabitants can sometimes look as if they’ve never been anywhere else and wouldn’t ever want to. If you’re lucky, the diner will serve good coffee and a decent signature pie, and will have the additional blessed relief of having the euphemistically named “restroom” attached to it which, however dubious looking it might be, can still be a very welcome sight as you move along those long, empty stretches of tarmac.

There are those too who are less than keen on the homogenisation of America and the fact that everywhere you go the fast food signs, the gas station signs and the cluster of motels all belong to the same chain of companies, but, to an outsider, that kind of thing is precisely what means “America” to you, and it was all made possible by the coming of the two-lane blacktop to spread the “American Dream” to every small corner of that beautiful continent and whilst it can sometimes seem “tacky” or  overly “commercialised” it really does say “America” to me, and I love it.