highway musings

I really love driving through Chicago at night. It's so huge and exciting and alive. And I don't mean the actual city, although I like that on its own terms. No, I mean the highways themselves.

I suppose most people would say I'm just easily awed. But it's not like it's something I haven't seen before. It's not like I'm some country rube that's never left my little town in rural Indiana. I've seen insterstate highways, and numerous large cities (in numerous foreign countries, even). But really, they're so huge when you really think about it. I-90 through Chicago is mostly twelve lanes—twelve lanes—of traffic, with the Metra tracks in the middle—think how wide that is. If each lane is what, twelve feet across, plus the shoulders and the tracks, you're talking well over a hundred feet—that poor chicken'd have a hard time crossing this kind of road. And the overpasses have always amazed me, ever since I was little—bridges upon bridges, stacked three and four deep, curving up and down, left and right, soaring over empty space and each other, cars criss-crossing over and under other cars in seemingly random directions, but all ending up going where they need to go. And the lights, all the lights, a constant stream of red taillights on one side, and the oncoming white headlights on the other, and the impossibly tall orange streetlamps, endless rows between each set of lanes, snaking on and on until they merge with each other and all the other lights and disappear over the horizon. It's all so huge and brilliant!

Now, don't get me wrong; the environmentalist in me rails at the miles of concrete and steel and the tons of noxious fumes emitted daily by the traffic. It's a long way from the pioneers and their dirt roads, that's for sure. But that's neither regrettable nor commendable; it just is. Hopefully, we'll wise up someday and think of some new form of transportation that's not quite so disgustingly wasteful, and it will have wonders all its own. And that will be good. But for now, the child in me still loves the lights, the vast concrete expanses with their orderly lanes, the soaring chaos of bridges upon bridges stretching impossibly across the fume-filled sky. It really is marvelous.