[CROSS POST] Pacing Our Way Across the American West
From Tom Pendergast: Reflections on time and mental models, gathered on a recent road trip
Read time: about 7 minutes. This week: I'm trying a cross-post from ’s newsletter. It’s a bit of an experiment, since I'm not exactly sure how the levers and buttons work on Substack. Next week: I can't believe I'm planning a podcast. It’s an adaptation from my book project.
Huh. Nothing new in the Boulangerie this past week. The bakers must be on strike. I only announce when something happens in the Boulangerie with my Mastodon loudspeaker: @mrdelong@mastodon.online.
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I enjoyed reading this post from Tom, because it captures some of the interactions that we have with highways, landscapes, and vehicles as we travel. Those are mediated by the car and the infrastructure it requires, and they form a substantial part of our experience of where we live.
I was reminded of a comment made by Theodor Adorno about American highways. “They are always inserted directly into the landscape, and the more impressively smooth and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent the gleaming traces appear against its wild, overgrown surroundings. They are expressionless,” he wrote. “It is as if no one had ever passed their hand over the landscape's hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what the hurrying eye has merely seen from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces than it bears upon itself.”
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Pacing Our Way Across the American West
Reflections on time and mental models, gathered on a recent road trip
TOM PENDERGAST
FEB 23
Ever since arriving in Albuquerque I’ve been thinking about how we construct mental models to understand the environment we live in, and how things like pace and distance and familiarity impact those models. Consider today’s piece a trial balloon (and if you hate it, please, shoot it down!)
As we entered the home stretch—the long, gradual grade down into Albuquerque—I noted a profound discontinuity between my physical and mental states.
My body felt one way, my mind another.
Physically, I was shot. I felt like I had been tied to a rack: five straight days of driving, 2200 miles in all, had locked my hips and back into early-onset rigor mortis. Despite our daily stops for walks, by mid-day each day, all I could feel was stiffness. During the rare times we stepped from the car I lurched about like my tendons had been drawn too tight.
But my mind, oh god, my mind! Moving quickly through space—simultaneously piloting the Swedish-made, Maple Brown road-trip machine we call “Rootbeer Float” and marveling at the shifting landscape—my mind felt alive, nimble, flexible. …
Tags: driving, car, highway, interstate, blue highways, backroad, travel
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Least Heat Moon, William. Blue Highways: A Journey into America. 1. ed, 22. print. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1990.
Lewis, Tom. Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. Updated edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Kerouac, Jack, and Penny Vlagopoulos. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Edited by Howard Cunnell. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. London: Penguin Books, 2008.