In 1970, when the Canadian economy wasn’t doing so hot, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau told his countrymen to, “Hit the road. Drive or hitchhike and see what Canada’s all about.” Traveling, he reasoned, would keep citizens happily occupied and pump some money into the country’s airlines, motels and destinations.
Were Trudeau alive today, he might offer the same advice to Americans. Not that the U.S. economy is in bad shape – it’s rebounding nicely, thank you – but the travel industry is still recovering from Sept. 11. Until the routines of air travel and lingering concerns about its safety settle down, many Americans will gladly do as the Canadians did 32 years ago and hit the road.
In the process, they’ll find out some interesting things about their own country. For instance:
Interstate 25, New Mexico’s big north-south highway, follows the almost 500-year-old route between Mexico City and Santa Fe. That route was based on trails created over the centuries by Indians, and before them, animals.
There’s a new national park in Colorado: Black Canyon of the Gunnison. It’s not big, like Yosemite or Grand Canyon, but it’s one heck of a hole. The park’s main feature is its 2,000-foot cliffs, sometimes only 1,500 feet apart, that straitjacket the Gunnison River. The closeness of the cliffs blocks the sun, thus, the name “Black Canyon.” (See Website)
There’s music in a lot of unlikely places. How about a classical music festival in Las Vegas (see our Festival article)? Or opera houses in remote desert mining towns (see our Opera article)?
In southern Louisiana, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has built a shunt where the Mississippi River meets Atchafalaya River. It seems that in ancient times the southwest-trending Atchafalaya was the Mississippi’s old course to the Gulf of Mexico. When the Mississippi later changed course and headed east through what is now New Orleans, the Atchafalaya became a secondary stream. Now, however, the Mississippi wants to change direction again and use the Atchafalaya to reach the Gulf. The Army Corps of Engineers is determined not to let it happen. If it does, New Orleans will become the fastest, largest ghost town in U.S. history.
At more than 6,000 square miles, Adirondack Park in northern New York State, established in the state’s constitution in the 1880s as a “forever wild” mountain preserve, is five times the size of Yosemite National Park and 20 times the size of New York City. Out-of-staters often bypass this magnificent collection of heavily forested mountains and lakes, which in many ways is the East’s answer to the great parks of the Far West.
Chicago, which stands to regain its “Second City” title if secessionists have their way in Los Angeles, is also known as “the Windy City.” It turns out that that moniker has nothing to do with Chicago’s prevailing winds (Boston, New York, Honolulu, Dallas, San Francisco and Kansas City, among others, are windier). The “Windy City” description comes from New Yorkers who were describing Chicagoans’ late 19th-century boast that their city would soon overtake New York as the biggest in America. Alas, in 1898, No. 1 Manhattan joined with No. 3 Brooklyn to permanently win the population sweepstakes going away.
Little Columbus, Indiana, population 40,000, is the closest the U.S. has to a living museum of modern architecture. Over a 60-year period the town has accumulated a number of houses, churches, civic buildings, schools and office buildings that have been designed by some of the greatest architects of the 20th century: I.M. Pei, Eliel Saarinen, Eero Saarinen, John Carl Warnecke, Edward Larabee Barnes, Roche Dinkeloo & Associates, Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier and Robert Stern. In 1991, when the American Institute of Architects asked its members to rank U.S. cities in terms of architectural quality and innovation, they ranked Chicago (2.8 million residents), New York City (7.4 million), Washington, DC (700,000), San Francisco (750,000) and Boston (580,000) as the nation’s top five. Columbus was ranked sixth. (Go to our newsletter archives and select May 2001 for more on this delightful little city.)
When you drive through Tennessee, remember the great Cherokee Sequoyah, born there in 1776, who never learned to read, speak or write English. But, fascinated by the white man’s “talking leaves” – printed pages – this self-taught man single-handedly developed a syllabary of the Cherokee language that allowed his people to become literate almost overnight. Subsequent scholars say that Sequoyah’s solitary accomplishment, in which he discovered by himself phonemes and the basic rules of phonetics, was an act of profound genius.
In 1919, young U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower headed a truck convoy that drove across the U.S. from Washington, DC to San Francisco. It took the party 62 days to traverse the 3,251 unpaved miles between the two cities. The expedition was marked by innumerable delays and breakdowns, all attributable to the miserable roads it encountered. Ike was furious from the experience. Later, when Ike used the Germans’ own magnificent autobahns against them, he saw how a modern highway system could aid a country. When you’re cruising the Interstates this summer, credit those two experiences for Eisenhower’s 1956 decision to ask Congress to fund the construction of a modern U.S. highway system.
Some people say Duluth, Minnesota, birthplace of Bob Dylan, reminds them of San Francisco. Huh? Turns out there may be something to it. Duluth, a port town at the far west end of Lake Superior, is built on hills that rise from the lake. Most people there have a view because their immediate neighbors are either slightly higher or lower than they. Like San Francisco, the town is cool in summer, thanks to breezes off the lake, the cooling effect of higher altitudes as you climb the hills and its far-north location. Downstate Minnesotans have been hip to this fact for years, coming up in July and August to enjoy Duluthian temperatures that are often 10 or 15 degrees cooler than most of the rest of the state.
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