A Separate Reality on I-95

By Jane O''Reilly

On and on and onward, running north on I-95. Hit the road on Saturday night, gotta be there by Tuesday. No time to dally. The Florida Keys stretch of U.S. 1, a two-lane drag strip, is already behind. Ahead, forever, lies the East Coast of the United States of America. Interstate 95.

After 200 miles, hypnosis sets in, the body rigid, mesmerized by the rhythm of left lane to right lane, right lane to center lane, forward to pass the red Honda, fall back to let the red Honda pass again. Minimum 40 m.p.h., maximum 65 m.p.h. most of the way. Spend the night in a motel sprawled in the wasteland of an interchange construction site, the cavernous lobby enclosing a bleakly misplaced chandelier, as a cave might contain a waterfall briefly sparkling in a flashlight's beam. The room is nasty, a shivering 52 degrees F as the air conditioner roars, its Off button broken. In a pancake house, tired women, Laverne and Rosalie according to their name tags, who have spent a lifetime on their feet, shuffle up to offer waffles with whipped cream fresh from a can. Poor sustenance for the hundreds of miles of Florida to come.

Beyond the long curves of palmetto and Australian pine, huge billboards promise Treasure Coast, Orlando, Cape Canaveral, St. Augustine. But on I-95 there is no sign of habitation. Even the armadillos are dead. The highway flies over Jacksonville and descends in the low salt marshes of Georgia. Savannah, by some gracious concession of the engineers, is only 14 miles away, a snoozing 19th century time capsule. At Mrs. Wilkes' famous boardinghouse, breakfast is served on 13 platters, and a man at the table says he works on the railroad.

"Not," he says, "that there is much of a railroad left." Sneak out of town on a back road, over the river, through the marshes of South Carolina, / the old road lined with abandoned "cabins for the night" and empty pickup trucks with hand-lettered signs still promising FRESH PEACHES. Back on I-95 the world narrows down to a river of concrete flowing between canyons of still leaves. Poles above the treetops display a shell, a star, double arches. The semiotics of travel.

On and on the ad hoc caravan rolls. A pair of fuel trucks, a Ryder rent-a- truck with a family in the cab and its Pontiac dragging behind, a double freight truck, half a peripatetic house marked WIDE LOAD (for shallow living) pass and pass again in symbiotic progression. They finally fetch up -- without a sign of recognition from the drivers who have traveled for hours more or less together -- in the lee of an aptly named roadside restaurant called Huddle. "Lady," snarls the gas-station owner, "don't you ever clean your headlights with a squeegee. Stuff gets in it, and the next guy will scratch his windshield." At another stop, 200 miles farther along on the fast-food chain, a hopeful French tourist inquires, "Ou est la salade?" Cherie, you are in the land of American fried here. No salad, no apples, no milk. Just mysterious bundles from some hellish central kitchen, lying sodden beneath the infra-red lamps.

Unwrapped, they prove too awful to eat. Just tip them into the bin marked THANK YOU and leave, moving past the plastic chairs rooted to plastic tables, the idea apparently being to facilitate hosing the place out, like a stable, during some lonesome midnight hiatus.

Somewhere south of Fredericksburg, Va., exhaustion obliterates caution. Turn off into a mercury-lit nightmare. Motels, shopping strips and truck stops lie scattered on the landscape. Out of the chaos of blinking signs and curbless entrances, a motel's canopy appears. The lobby seems assembled from unfinished lumber constructed to meet a wistful marketing illusion, something between motel and convention place. Members of a meeting of a fellowship for disabled Christians wander about, wearing their names on paper stickers. Hand over a plastic card for a room in which a television set flickers on with MTV and a radio offers spurious opinions on contras and condoms. Junk food, junk music, junk opinions. Where are we? Where is the nation beyond the highway? Civilization speaks through the public radio stations in the 90s on the FM dial. Back in North Carolina, somewhere south of High Point, National Public Radio's All Things Considered had come through the car speaker, talking of a book named Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls, about life in the mills as people moved into the cities from the sharecropper cabins glimpsed even at that moment, empty and ruined, through the leafy barriers of I-95 -- a landscape explained. In Maryland, the density and grace of America's true culture slides into the car as a huskily intense jazz deejay celebrates Charlie Parker's birthday.

Late at night a college radio station discourses brilliantly on Rachmaninoff's piano technique. Whole regions, with accents and traditions and communities of their own, come in over the air, echoes of reality in the netherworld of I-95.

From Washington to New York City, new cars join the flow, upscale Volvos and BMWs. Turning off to the New Jersey Turnpike, the road becomes a delta, flattening, spreading out, careening and jostling forward at 55 m.p.h. The trucks are shunted off to a side lane and traveling along, nose to tail, bumper to bumper, they look like . . . yes! . . . a train! Remember trains? Surely trains were more sensible than this, a 20th century folly, this stampede of steel roaring toward the Lincoln Tunnel.

The best that can be said for it is that it is, in a way, a triumphant synthesis of individualism and collective cooperation. I-95: a sort of Outward Bound for drivers.