Genesis

Life is pretty good.

Maybe not your life today, or for the last month, and maybe not tomorrow, but life in the abstract is pretty good. If you can see beyond the piles of laundry, the stacks of dishes in the sink, the annoying way your boss starts sentences, and how no one truly realizes how great and brilliant you are, then you will probably notice a context, and it might make you smile and relax.

Sociologically, I don't like freeways. You may not realize this because you're young or in a rut, but the freeway is a fairly new arrival---born sometime at the tail end of the baby-boom, after the A-bomb, before the H-bomb, and fairly concurrent with the poodle skirt. The chronology is important.

Giving you a 20 minute commute into the city wasn't the freeway's primary purpose. Ike was running the country back then, and, by most accounts, he did a serviceable job. But he wasn't a political scientist like Wilson, a Yale aristocrat like Roosevelt, or even good looking, young, and idealistic like Kennedy. Ike was a general and the Cold War was just beginning to frost around the edges.

Ike wanted a way to quickly move nukes and troops from San Francisco to Santa Fe, and to dozens of other cities starting with "San" all across the country. The interstate highway was born, our military responsiveness was greatly increased, and all of the sudden you could live in the suburbs and still sleep until 7:30 before having to leave for work.

Not many missiles have used the freeways since, but lots of people in those suburbs have. The city pulls and breaths them into it's vast lungs from about 8:00 to 9:00, and then exhales them from about 5:00 to 6:00.

I'm one of those people. I live in a Suburb. I like having a yard and a real house and not having to my neighbors listen to the radio stations offensive to my tastes. It's great.

But with the advent of the freeway life can more easily become work and home, black and white, here and there, bland and bland. Get up, brush teeth, pass through a portal at 65 mph, work for a eight hours, rush through the portal the opposite way, and I'm home. Not too bad, but not too great. A Greek Philosopher once contemplated such a life of sensible utility. His response was concise: "But where is the mustard?"

I'm not a philosopher, but I will tell you one place you can find some mustard: when you get off the freeway.

In a time not long ago, in place ten minutes from where you currently live, towns used to be adorable little self-contained entities. They had main streets, center streets, storefronts, corner stores, boutiques, salons and barber shops, movie theaters, book stores, cemeteries, and mustard. Towns developed around hearts, not freeway exits.

It takes longer to get to the city from the suburb if you're meandering through the main and center streets of the five smaller towns that are sandwiched in between. As it turns out, those little towns are not just exits to be passed by on your way to work, or the mall, or wherever it is you go. Those little towns have histories and micro-cultures and old people who sit on their front porch, who wonder why life has been so different since the freeway.

Two weeks ago I was off the freeway and I realized that life is pretty good. There was a second hand store, a mom-and-pop-cafe, and dozens of other places that seemed like a good way to spend a Saturday. So why should I have to stay in my house, go to work, end up at the mall and the giant box grocery store, and no points in between?

I bought a camera, talked to a friend, and the travelogue begins. First stop, Sunnyside, Utah.