Roads

Went on a roadtrip a few weeks ago to New York city to experience Hillsong NYC's opening extravaganza.
It was awesome.
I drove on the way there. Didn't stop once.

Highways absolutely mess me up.

When you're on an interstate, all you see is the road that you're on. At 70mph, you're always looking almost a quarter mile ahead of you. With the exception of passing through (over) big cities, there's usually a wall or trees on either side of you.
Your world consists of your car, and the line that is the road that you are on.

Eventually, when you exit the highway, you look around and realize just how far away you are from where you started. Hundreds of miles. A journey of several days 150 years ago. Several weeks if you were on foot.
Technology has come to a point where "travel" is no longer a Grand Adventure like it might have been when our great grandparents were young.
It is now an inconvenience- we measure the distance away from places in "minutes". We groan when we find out our friend's birthday party is "an hour away" and think about the precious gas money slipping away from us.
Before cars were invented, that would have been a great excuse to take a Holiday, go on an adventure with friends, travel to see people you hardly ever see.

On the route between my home and Barrington NH, there's an overpass that goes over local Route 16. Tebbetts Road. Right before you hit that bridge, there's a street sign next to someone's driveway: "Old Tebbetts Road". If you slow down enough, you can see that the trees on the other side of that driveway are thinner brush than the woods of the surrounding area.
The view from Google Maps makes it even clearer: Tebbetts Road is not where it used to be.
Sometime when they turned "Route 16" into a highway, they had to move Tebbetts Road. It probably made local residents unhappy. Or at the very least, Frazzled.
In fact, whenever they decided to cut down a 150 mile stripe of woodland and pour asphalt over the ground, people must have been frazzled.
We love highways. Roads in general. Without them, we would be confined to our local towns, and Somersworth would have to bring back the Trolly line that it used to operate.
But then you think about the millions of people who have been displaced by them.

"Sorry sir, you are going to have to move your house so people can go on family vacations. You have no choice."

Sounds wonderful.

These are all the things that you don't notice when you're driving on a highway.
You don't notice all the people who live literally a hundred feet from where you're driving at breakneck speed, down that line of black tar, staring at the car in front of you. You don't notice the neighborhoods, the businesses, the people.
Let alone the nature.

Me and Karen Mawikere visited the Rochester Toll Plaza a few weeks ago.
Here's how it went: Drove into what could easily be any random business's parking lot. Walked into the woods for maybe a hundred feet. Stepped over a low fence. Looked up and BAM, there's a toll booth. Cars everywhere. Cars on their way home from work. Cars full of people not liking to pay tolls. Just driving, a part of their daily routine. With absolutely no idea that they were just moments away from a parking lot in Gonic, from what could only have once been a christmas tree farm, from a ministorage place, from everything else that you don't notice when you're on a highway.

Think about all the local things that there are in your town. Parks. Local stores. That Gorge in Troy. People "driving through" on the highway that is no more than ten minutes from your house go by in a matter of seconds, and miss everything completely.

We have turned towns into white words on 8-foot tall green signs. Maybe with an arrow. Maybe with a "miles to" number.
Just one more thing that I'm unhappy about.