Traveling Down the Highway, Rambling Along the Back Roads

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York island,

From the redwood forest to the Gulf Steam waters;

This land was made for you and me.

~Woody Guthrie

Interstate 95 runs along the East Coast from the Canadian border at Houlton, Maine, about half way up the eastern state line across from New Brunswick, down to Miami, Florida. If you’ve lived in the East, you’ve driven that “ribbon of highway” sometime in your life.

Growing up in Westchester County outside of New York City, I remember family vacations starting and ending off I-95 as we headed down to Washington, D. C.; Williamsburg, Virginia; the Outer Banks in North Carolina; or Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We’d drive with the windows down, air blowing my hair in swirls around my face, my father’s elbow on the window ledge of the door, my mother checking the map, my brother staring out the window, while I made flowers out of pipe cleaners and tissue paper. We’d stop for lunch at the rest stop picnic tables and eat the tuna sandwiches and homemade brownies my mother packed in the small cooler. Sometimes the Buick would start to overheat in traffic, and my father would blast the heater. We would all wilt as the temperature rose, hoping we wouldn’t have to pull over to the shoulder, throw up the hood, and wait for the engine to cool enough to unscrew the radiator cap and let the steam escape or add coolant to the tank. My father called the car a lemon, and it wasn’t from the yellow color. Sometimes, if we were going all the way to North Carolina or Florida, we’d pull off the highway at an intersection where the pool at a Howard Johnson’s or Holiday Inn awaited us after checking in for a brief overnight stop, but we never ventured out of sight of I-95.

Raising my daughters in New Jersey, we made a lot of similar journeys down that highway to Washington, D. C. and Williamsburg, tracing history just as I had as a child. We turned off at Hilton Head, South Carolina to bask in the sun and swim in the ocean, or we headed for Disney World to get Mickey’s autograph, sail through “It’s a Small World,” and laugh over the “Carousel of Progress.” We listened to books on tape like The Mouse and the Motorcycle , The Cricket in Times Square , and Mr. Popper’s Penguins . Occasionally, we took a different route, stopping at the Dairy Barn in Front Royal, Virginia and meandering down the Skyline Drive. But mostly, we stuck to the highway, aware of the restrictions of time off from work; we needed to get there and get home.

On those trips down Interstate 95, I saw “the sun [that] came shining … clouds [that were] rolling … fog [that was] lifting” and “the endless skyway” stretched out before me. I occasionally glimpsed a “golden valley” in the distance, but I only knew of “the sparkling sands” and “fields waving” by reading the white letters on the large green highway signs announcing exits for Rocky Mount or Myrtle Beach. I didn’t see “in the shadow of the steeple, / by the relief office … my people. / As they stood hungry.” That was all in the distance, out of view.

Now I frequently drive between North Carolina where my daughters live and Central Pennsylvania where I go to school. When I pull out of my daughter’s driveway and plug the address into the GPS, it directs me towards Route 85 that then connects with I-95 north until I have to hang a left at Washington and head west. These days though, I have the time to take a different path, to ramble through the back roads of North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, gaining a better sense of the different people of this land, my land.

Winding along the river amidst the kudzu covered trees, I pass the farms that stretch across rolling hills dotted by hay bales, cows, horses: Homestead Farm, Lucky Dog Farm, Rockfish Stable. Sometimes I stop to buy apple cider donuts or fresh picked apples at a roadside stand now resplendent in pumpkins and chrysanthemums and corn stalks. Then I continue on past the red tin roofed farmhouses covered in bright white sun-washed siding with long black shutters set beside the windows. I keep going alongside the new developments of cookie cutter houses on what used to be more farmland.

I drive by the signs urging residents to vote Daniel Jones for Sheriff and No Pipeline and I get a glimpse of local politics. The history of the land is present in the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, the Frontier Culture Museum, and America’s First Spa. The Virginia Whiskey Experience, the signs for breweries and wineries like Flying Fox, Cardinal Point, and Wild Wolf point to the local economy and offer stops along the way for a leisurely lunch and glass of wine on an outdoor patio with vineyards in the distance.

There are still the Hardee’s, the Burger King's, the Subway's, and the Sheetz of the highway stops, but there’s also Paulie’s Pig Out – Barbecue by the Pound. And rather than the tourist markets at South of the Border, I can peruse the aisles of the Circle A Antique Mall, This n That, or the Ebb and Flow Gifts and Curiosities. Instead of picking between chain hotels clustered by an interchange, I can stop in for the night at The Country Inn, Afton Mountain Bed and Breakfast, or Hopkins Ordinary, meet the proprietors and get suggestions of where the locals eat.

As I wind through the S curves of the mountain forest between Lynchburg and Lexington, I drive around one bend to see a vista open to the valley down below, mountain peaks in the distance. Then I’m swallowed back up in the tunnel of overhanging trees with leaves of dappled branches. It’s regrettable that we don’t always have the time to slowly make our way to where we are going and learn what’s past the sightlines of the highway. It’s unfortunate that we don’t always have the chance to meet the people of our land and gain a better understanding of those whose lives are different than our own. There’s a lot to learn if we venture off that quickest route and take the time to explore.