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By Root 873 0

on the Web, they can be shared with the public: a permanent record of their journeys, even if no one ever looks at it. Every roadgeek website includes pages of these nearly identical photos, an endless stream of green rectangles and “Exit Only” arrows and the taillights of semitrucks. These aren’t rare findings, like a bird-watcher’s photos; after all, millions of motorists see the exact same views every year. But central to the roadgeek urge is the certainty that these journeys must be documented—collected, even. Roadgeeks often boast of how many routes they’ve “clinched”—that is, driven every single mile of.† It’s a very specific—and attainable—form of systematic travel.

And maybe the very banality of these driver’s-eye slide shows is their real value. Though the rest of us may take it for granted, the U.S. Interstate Highway System is one of the most remarkable engineering feats ever conceived. Its origins date back to 1919, when a young army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower, missing his family in California, agreed to join a cross-country convoy of military vehicles heading for the West Coast. Part of the company’s mission was to find out if these trucks and staff cars—which had just won a grueling trench war in Europe, mind you—were even capable of surviving the trip. In 1919, driving from sea to shining sea wasn’t the leisurely five-day tour we know today. Paved roads largely disappeared outside major American cities, so the convoy had to contend with mud, dust, ruts, unstable bridges, and even quicksand. Their “successful” entry into San Francisco came sixty-two days after starting out (an average speed of six miles per hour!), and the convoy lost nine vehicles and twenty-one men* in the 230 accidents they suffered along the way. Eisenhower never forgot the ordeal, especially when compared to the expansive and well-maintained autobahn network he saw in Germany during the Second World War. In 1956, as president, he signed the Interstate Highway System into law, authorizing 41,000 miles of super-highways with a combined land area the size of the state of Delaware and using enough cement to build eighty Hoover Dams. It was the greatest peacetime public works project in history.

And yet, unlike the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, tourists don’t line up every day of the year to ooh and aah over the interstate system. In fact, we literally grind it underfoot in our haste to arrive at, and photograph, far less impressive bits of roadside construction (the Corn Palace; the world’s largest rocking chair; Branson, Missouri). Roads are like maps in that we think about them only when they don’t do their job and we wind up lost or stuck or sidelined. If not for roadgeeks, who would appreciate the lowly highway? Mark pauses for a moment in our route to point out the road construction connecting Sprague Avenue to state highway 16; a new westbound viaduct is being built because the unique design of the existing one—four-legged piers, each leg weighing almost four hundred tons—means that it can’t be widened. It’s true: the tapered legs of the old viaduct are quite distinctive, even beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at the supports of any elevated highway, though I’m sure I’ve driven on thousands.

Maybe roadgeeks can find something to fascinate them on just about any highway in America, but they also have their own special landmarks and pilgrimages. Some of these oddities are so bizarre they’d be spotted even by amateurs like me. There’s the traffic light in Syracuse’s Tipperary Hill where the green signal is on the top (a nod to the neighborhood’s Irish roots). Or 1010th Street west of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, believed to be the nation’s highest-numbered road. Or the strange vortex that is US-321 through Elizabethton, Tennessee—it enters town signed as south–north but reverses the signage when it hits US-19E: now the two directions are north–south, respectively. No matter which way you leave town on US-321, you’re headed south!

Breezewood, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated hamlet of only two hundred people,