My Hometown/Highways

Despite his often condescending tone, I find great truth in what Kunstler writes about in The Geography of Nowhere. In the final chapter of the book, he writes: “…We have lost our knowledge of how physically to connect things in our everyday world, except by car and telephone. You might say the overall consequence is that we have lost our sense of consequence. Living in places where nothing is properly connected, we have forgotten that connections are important” (246). These words spoke most directly to the way I feel about my hometown. Though I have driven across America and spent some time living abroad, I feel the weight of this lack of connection most acutely when I am spending time in the house I grew up in and the area surrounding it.
            When I came home from my sophomore year at college, I decided that I did not want to partake in the tradition of taking a car to get everywhere. This lasted a mere week. I quickly re-discovered why nobody ever chose to walk anywhere in my hometown: there are no sidewalks. On top of that, the nearest business to the house I grew up in is five miles away! The one time that I did walk to the nearest coffeehouse (which took over two hours), I felt as though I was seeing the area around my house for the first time. I am almost embarrassed to share this, but it was the first time in my then twenty years of life that I had ever seen most of the stretches of road while not zooming by them in a car.
            I suppose every person who has ever gone on a road-trip has had an experience similar to this – the kind you have when you step out of your car at a rest-stop and look back and see the highway not as a black mass passing beneath your wheels, but instead as an object measured against the scale of a human body. The absurdity of what you see takes your breath away. Walking along the winding suburban streets two summers ago, beauty of the trees and forests that lined the sides of the road and the peacefulness in the space between them became visible to me for the first time. When a car would speed on by, I would suddenly be hit by a want to scream: “Stop it! Why are you moving so fast!” But it only took looking back on any other time I’d ever made that journey to remember.
            What Kunstler so clearly articulates in his book, and specifically in the quote I have included above, is that the majority of people in America are no longer aware of the unconscious unease they feel in the lives that they are living. Having grown up in what Kunstler refers to as “America’s Man-Made Landscape”, many people have never experienced life in a community where natural connections can be made and in which human beings are able to share and exist with one another in a, for lack of a better word, human way. As I plan on heading out on a road-trip around America again over the course of the next year, I suppose it is a place like this that I am looking for. 

[photo taken by me - my mother hula hooping at a rest step along I-70 in june 2009]