William Marvel: Peregrinations

Age accounts only partially for my growing aversion to the road trips I once relished. Two hours is now about the limit of my tolerance for uninterrupted driving, but I can still pack eight of those two-hour stints into a day if I’m on the way home. Physical discomfort pales alongside the disappointment of watching our once-glorious landscape churned into endless corridors of homogenized commercial strips and suburban development. It’s bad enough watching the town where I grew up transformed into a generic tourist hellhole, but downright painful to be reminded that the same trend predominates from coast to coast.

In the past month, I covered about 6,500 miles of a country that I found alluringly diverse on long treks in 1967 and 1971. This time, I constantly had to remind myself which state I was in. Much of South Carolina is not readily distinguishable from Pennsylvania, and except for occasional palm trees the road from north Florida to east Louisiana might be mistaken for coastal New Jersey. The contrast between brand-new development and neglected, decaying communities provided the principal variety.