Every Mile of 80

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways of the United States of America was authorized in 1956 by then-President Eisenhower.  The system, as originally designed, was declared complete in 1992.  It currently encompasses 47,856 miles of paved highway.  It is second in the world only to China’s network.

Interstate 80 (I-80) is a transcontinental portion of the Eisenhower Interstate System.  It run from downtown San Francisco, CA, on the West Coast of the United States to Teaneck, NJ, in the New York City Metro Area.  I-80 encompasses 2,899 miles, making it the second longest highway in the system following I-90 (3,020 miles).  I-80 rolls through 11 states: California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.  Over the course of the past nine years, I have driven every mile of it.  

Of course, the drive itself didn’t take me nine years.  I-80 reduced what was a two-month journey at the beginning of the 1900’s to a reasonable 5-day journey, coast to coast, if driven straight through.  My journey on I-80 began nine years ago when I first drove from Illinois to California.  To be more precise, it started in the San Francisco Bay Area on the return journey home to Illinois.  I covered most of I-80 from San Francisco to the Chicago area, skipping a section as I diverted to Denver.  Several years later, as I drove to California again, I covered that section of I-80.  By about 2010, I’d covered every mile from Chicago to California, as well as every mile from Chicago east to the intersection of I-80 and State Highway 8 just north of Akron, OH.  Over the course of the next several years, I slid back and forth from Chicago to the East Coast States of the US along 80 countless times, always inching closer, but never quite reaching, Teaneck, NJ.  It would take 5 more years until I would reach the eastern terminus of I-80, connecting to I-95 north and the George Washington Bridge into New York City. 

Every one of the 2,899 miles that make up I-80, from California to New Jersey, passed beneath me, my hands on the wheels of about four or five different vehicles.  I have seen America, up close, from one coast to the other.  I’ve watched the urban jungle of New York City sublime into the suburbs of New Jersey.  I’ve watched those suburbs turn into the Smoky Mountains of Pennsylvania.  The woods mountains turned into rolling hills that made way to the field of the Midwest.  For hundreds of miles, I followed those fields as they again turned to hills and grasslands, the grasslands making way to desert and a Great Salt Lake.  The desert hills turned into mountains, and those mountains kept growing into the Great Rocky Mountains.  I drove over those mountains, through the legendary Donner Pass, then down into the valleys and flatlands of California, onward until the Great Road disappears somewhere along the western end of the Bay Area Bridge and into the very city of San Francisco.  I’ve seen it all, driven it all.  Every last mile.

Our planet is small.  We forget this.  We are tiny in comparison, so it seems so huge at times.  But if a man like me, without even trying, can traverse the entirety of a continent within their lifetime, then the smallness of this rocky orb should be evident.  I could jump on an airplane right now, on Monday, head out to Seattle, WA, and begin the trek across I-90, the longest US highway, tomorrow.  I’d be in Boston, MA, by the end of the weekend.  I’d see some pretty amazing things along the way, too.  3020 miles, the total length of I-90, is 12% of the total circumference of the Earth herself.  The planet is small, my friend.  Very small.  Just 24,901 miles around.  I’ve owned cars long enough to be nearly 300,000 miles.  That’s 12 laps around the planet.  Again, not very big.

I feel humbled, honored, and very, very grateful as I sit here and contemplate my journey across my America along Interstate 80.  I do not take her for granted.  I do not take the liberty and freedom I enjoy, the very things that make such a journey possible, for granted, either.  I am fortunate, beyond words and beyond measure.  It has been a great trip, and now it is over.  2899 miles is a long way to travel.  I think I will rest now.

For tomorrow, the next journey begins…