Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (46 page)

Recognizing some of the images of 40 in both Maryland and Colorado, Frank fell under the spell of the photographs and then realized they might have the same power to create in his parents an irresistible urge to return to the mountains. He checked the book out and took it home to leave on the living room coffee-table, casually opened to a Colorado scene, and then waited for it to work its magic.

The magic failed. His parents didn’t catch the hint, but destiny did, and for reasons other than an opened book, the family moved back to Denver, only to return once more to Maryland a couple of years later. Frank assuaged his second loss of the Front Range by tirelessly checking out the library copy of
U.S. 40,
returning it when due, waiting the required hour while hoping no one would claim it, then checking it out again. He did that for eleven years, taking the book home week after week. Then the day came when the library put the worn thing into the sale box and sold it for a dime, and Frank had to soldier on without it for several years. Things ended happily: by midlife, through the Internet, he had found and bought fifteen copies, giving several away to people he met along 40. He knew the book as a priest does the Mass, or Satan and Santa Claus your transgressions. In quest of images and history, Brusca estimated since 1979 he had logged a hundred-thousand miles on that one highway, although he’d never done it coast-to-coast in a single trip, as Stewart did twice for his book.

If the photographs in
U.S. 40
got FXB started, it was a 1973 article in the
Baltimore Sun
about a man, Ned Nye, who was photographing all the National Road milestones he could find, that put teenage Brusca in motion. Dropping the paper, he got onto his bicycle, pedaled to Ellicott City and, with new understanding, studied the incised granite of Number Ten as if it were a Rosetta stone or a tablet dropped by Moses on the way back down the mountain.

Six years later, Brusca began his own search for and recording of the National Road markers once numbering well more than five hundred between Baltimore and Vandalia, Illinois, 760 miles west. Of those hundreds of mileposts (some merely wooden fingers pointing the way), perhaps 350 originals or replicas remained (several no longer at their proper mile), virtually every one of them photographed and described by him.

After he was old enough to drive, using Number Ten as his establishing datum, he began cruising the route, his gaze moving from the side of the road to the odometer and back to the right-of-way; after a mile, if he hadn’t seen a marker, he’d stop and kick around in the brush for it. In places, the post was only obscured, but in others it had fallen or, worse, it was vandalized or had vanished entirely. Over the years, he found original markers in museums, reused in a rock fence, built into the foundation of a barn, and one set into the wall of a tavern. Nobody, not even Brusca, knows how many must have ended up in the bed of later pavement.

Between the National Road milestones and Stewart’s Highway 40 photographs, FXB’s project was born, and from those, if he himself was not quite reborn, he was surely reconfigured. After his family, the point of his days became the methodical documentation of a three-thousand-mile, three-century-old route over which his seven homes along seventeen-hundred miles of U.S. 40 have never been more than fifteen miles distant. When he began, he thought he could complete his documentary survey, his then-and-now pictures, on a single, two-month trip west. Thirty years later, he was still at it.

5

Building a Time Machine

F
ROM A SINGLE INSCRIBED ROCK
that would almost fit into a toy chest and from an initial idea a child could understand, Frank Brusca’s project developed over three decades into a complex creation yet unseen in this country: a means of going back in time to travel along what is the most significantly historic cross-country route in America, one that encompasses an eighth of the circumference of the earth.

U.S. 40 comprises pieces of Indian paths, colonial post roads, Washington’s Road, Braddock’s Road, the Baltimore National Pike, the Frederick Turnpike, the Bank Road, Cumberland Road, National Road, Zane’s Trace, Boonslick Trail, Santa Fe Trail, Oregon-California Trail, Smoky Hill Trail, Berthoud’s Road, Hastings’ Cutoff, National Old Trail, Lincoln Highway, and the Victory Highway. The progenitor of most of Interstate 70 and portions of I-80 was once a central artery of eight major cities and the Main Street of a few hundred towns and villages. It intersects every major north-south U.S. highway and, in one form or another, has been moving freightage of merchandise, job lots of culture, passels of animals and people, diseases and medicines, food and mail, science and religion, for a third of a millennium. When the federal government began numbering highways, there was even talk of making an exception and marking the route as U.S. 1, although east-west roads were scheduled to have even numbers.

Were a traveler from Rome or London or Tokyo to ask where to see the most representative sweep of America — from ocean to ocean; from cornfields to oil fields to goldfields; through the Great Plains into four mountain ranges; from forests to prairies to deserts; from sea level to more than two miles into the sky and down again; where precipitation ranges from sixty inches to five; where lies military history, from the French and Indian War to the latest undeclared war in Whereisitstan (an early use was moving troops and matériel); where travelers can find a meal of blue crabs at one end and Dungeness crabs on the other, Chesapeake oysters or prairie oysters; can see barns, skyscrapers, the largest aboriginal earthwork in North America, the tallest arch in the world, tenements and mansions, neighborhoods of every major ethnicity; can cross four continental rivers (the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, and Colorado) or a dozen regional ones, from the Potomac to the Sacramento; can see three great bays (Delaware, Chesapeake, San Francisco); can find capitals of six states, and six former capitals, with another half dozen and the seat of federal power nearby; and can pass within an hour’s drive of (by my estimate) about a fifth of the nation — the answer would be U.S. 40. No other highway comes close in significance.

You can recite these facts to a foreign traveler, but just like us, few will undertake the route because not many of them come here to see the commonplace heart and soul of America. Even Europeans can’t resist a sham European castle, especially if it’s in a drained Florida swamp. When plastic and plaster simulations are easily at hand, who could want a thousand-year-old mound once the urban center of aboriginal America — after all, Cahokia is made of dirt. A number of people living along 40, antediluvians though we be, consider the desire for synthetic America a blessing, and we sleep in contentment knowing U.S. 40 lacks cachet and that it will become a destination for only a dedicatedly curious Parisian or Yokohaman — 
or
a fellow Yank.

Rumors of a “Celebrate We Aren’t on Route 66” parade are ill-founded because heartlanders understand America needs a half-continental highway of concrete-teepee motels, fiberglass dinosaurs, cobra gardens, and sheet-metal whales. It’s been some years since I heard anyone complain that 40 has never had a hit song (unless you consider the country-western “Idaho Red” one), or that it has no Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, or a classic movie, or a television series, or that it’s never been called the “Mother Road” (although it clearly is) by a renowned writer better at fiction than history. The Ur-Mother of American transcontinental highways remains within her limitations, without hype, able to show only history. Forty is to Route 66 as Beethoven to the Beatles, Beowulf to Babar, sponge cake to corn pone. It’s true, staid U.S. 40 may be short of goosey merriments, and, as even Brusca will admit, it’s a highway requiring a little effort and perhaps some knowledge in order to get your kicks on it.

Of the seven original, uninterrupted two-lane transcontinental highways, all are junior to 40 which can trace one of its several origins back to 1651. It was among the earliest topographical sinews holding America together. With independence secured, few threats concerned George Washington more than the fledgling Union fracturing into separate nation-states. Believing physical communication central to unity and commerce, the perpetually practical Washington worked for and invested in a canal and roadway to link the eastern seaboard with the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. (George, incidentally, lost his first battle along the future path of 40.) In this sober light, the National Road is the Appian Way of America, and it was the central overland-route Anglo-Americans first used to come into the heart of the country.

Frank Xavier Brusca was not Anglo-American. His paternal grandparents arrived here from Priverno, Italy, a village not far from the actual Appian Way. He was raised in Catholicism but through DNA testing later found he may have in his ancestry a few Sephardic Jews forced out of Spain by the Inquisition, some of whom, the
conversi,
converted to the Church of Rome. Ancestors aside, Frank inclined toward Quakerism and also, while not a spiritual path for him, vegetarianism (nothing better than a supper of eggplant Parmesan or mapa tofu). Frank’s teenage daughter, Elaine, sometimes accompanied him on his research excursions along 40 or on train trips the pair took simply to see the country. His wife, K.C., not much of an automobile traveler, honored his obsession but did not share it.

He was of modest height and broad-shouldered, and without his vegetarian diet and cycling, he might have edged toward the stocky. He was bespectacled and wore his hair and beard closely cut, but what you were more likely to remember about him was a nearly ceaseless expression of contentment, an evident delight often matched to the degree U.S. 40 was in his mind. With the highway not far from consciousness, his dreams also must have put a smile on him, a result of a requited devotion.

That gift of the old highway (aided by a little tofu and his bicycle) had carried him into his fiftieth year the last time I saw him, but that number was less important than other figures you might want to translate into days necessary to acquire or create them: he had about a thousand U.S. road-maps of the oil-company variety. Of them, he said, “My mother called me one morning after I’d moved to my own place. She said, ‘Frank, I finally did it — I threw out all your maps.’ I dropped what I was doing and rushed to my parents’ house and pulled the maps from the trash bins at the curb. And that was even before I really knew how much they would mean to my project.” Frank Brusca without maps was Count Basie without a piano, Bern-hardt without a stage, the Bambino without a bat.

He also owned some seven-thousand postcards depicting scenes along Highway 40. But what he had in even greater numbers were documented photographs from his own hand: more than three-thousand high-resolution black-and-white images, nearly the same number of color transparencies, and at least twenty-thousand digital images. From that treasury, he was slowly and methodically assembling electronic files and a manuscript to document sixty years of U.S. 40 as it had passed through alterations, some so slow they looked like stasis, others of shocking swiftness, some that ravaged and others that renewed, all of them across a continent of landscapes sharing a single highway.

Even as dominating as his absorption was, for nearly two years after their wedding he was reluctant to share it with K.C. because of his concern for what she might think of a man who dreams highways as other men dream of picking the right lottery number. Then, on a trip to Indiana along 40, she at the wheel, Frank began making notes in a way he hoped was not surreptitious but simply inconspicuous. A recently wed man, he did not realize then that a husband writing notes on his knee will catch a wife’s eye as if he’d pulled a kitten from his pocket. “What are you writing down?” she said. And suddenly, indeed, the cat of proverb was out of its bag, and Frank had to come clean and admit to a passion that dare not speak its name: he was hopelessly enraptured by 3,100 miles of pavement. He awaited her response, and that’s when he learned their union was strong. If K.C. thought his interest a touch eccentric, she neither laughed nor discouraged him. Discouragement arrived from elsewhere soon after.

In 1983, husband-and-wife geographers Thomas and Geraldine Vale published
U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America,
a photographic resurvey of some of the sites Stewart had recorded almost a third of a century earlier. Frank said, “When I saw their book, I was crestfallen someone had beaten me to the project. I was devastated. It took a long time to recover and find my way again. Their work was good, but it was incomplete because they rephotographed only about seventy-two percent of Stewart’s hundred-and-fifteen images appearing in the two editions of his book. And their goal was different, especially so after I began to rethink mine. They made trips over three years. My travels now cover thirty years — even though I consider my first twenty-three years as preliminary fieldwork.”

FXB did not toss off answers. He weighed a question and framed his responses as meticulously as his repeat photographs. “You could say their book — after I rallied from my dismay and disappointment — I think it helped me clarify and expand what I was trying to do. My project became bigger, far bigger once it was alive again. Then, thanks to the World Wide Web, I realized my interest — maybe not my obsession but at least my fascination — might be uncommon, but it wasn’t unique. There are other Route Forty road enthusiasts out there. Some of them like neon signs or old motels or diners. I love those things too. A lot of people go for roadside architecture or some other aspect of commercial archaeology, but I haven’t found anybody else documenting the highway to the degree I am. And here’s a big difference — I want to continue documenting Forty till I no longer can.”

Using four different cameras — two manual 35 millimeters, a medium format, and a professional digital — Brusca over the years had hunted down and photographed all but six of Stewart’s sites, including several that never appeared in
U.S. 40.
Some views were extraordinarily difficult to locate exactly, one of them even forcing Frank to examine half-century-old cracks in a sidewalk to confirm it. After he unequivocally established the location of a site, he would make three types of images, each with multiple exposures, and record the date, hour, and minute, the latitude and longitude, the weather, and the traffic statistics. If an exact viewpoint was no longer possible — like the roof of the demolished President Hotel in Atlantic City — he considered other solutions, such as hiring a boat or helicopter to get his camera in position. If tree growth obscured a vantage, he waited till winter; for one old water-tower no longer in existence, he got permission to climb the microwave tower that replaced it; if a neighborhood had become dangerous for a visitor with expensive cameras, he asked the police to join him. The best repeat photography demands such persevering exactitude, and Brusca was untiring in rephotographing a scene accurately.