The Insterstate System

One thing you can follow along with my book, somewhat, is the progress of the American Interstate system. As you may know, this network of limited-access highways, named for President Dwight Eisenhower who initiated it in 1956, took 35 years to build.  That puts 1971 smack in the middle of its construction history. You surely can see the start-‘n-stop nature of the interstate in the pages of We Picked Up. Some states were further along than others. Nebraska, for instance, had almost all of I-80 built when we crossed. Kudos to them. But I can’t say the same for Nevada. Turn to page 116 on Day Eleven. I write, “We gained sporadic distance at best as a series of kiddie rides brought us through dry alkaline gulches, broken by hills and mountains, empty sagebrush reservoirs, and canyons stripped by quarries. The interstate was complete, incomplete, complete, incomplete.” The pain in the neck was the most common place for the interstate to be incomplete was around towns. As a hitchhiker, this was frustrating, because you wanted to avoid towns that weren’t your destination as they would slow you down. A couple of nice things about the interstates back then was police weren’t doing an efficient job in patrolling them—you could “usually” get on the highway proper and hitch directly on it, especially in way-out places like Wyoming. Other states were more strict to varying degrees. Also, the system wasn’t fully “discovered” by the public, meaning traffic wasn’t a circus like it is these days. There was adequate traffic flow, but sparse enough so that drivers still could pull over in a safe manner to pick you up.