Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (47 page)

On his return home, he made digital overlays of his images with Stewart’s to create in stunning precision a deep view into time. The work of two photographers became considerably greater, especially when Frank added his 360-degree panoramas, each of them requiring at least two dozen linked images. “I always wondered what existed beyond the view of Stewart’s lens,” he said. “What the view was behind him. Nobody will have to wonder that about mine.”

George Stewart was a novelist, historian, and professor of English at the University of California, and the man who first gave names to storms (inspiration for Lerner and Loewe’s “They Call the Wind Maria” came from his novel
Storm
). Wanting to portray and interpret the typical, ordinary, and commonplace actualities along the Main Street of America, Stewart was not much interested in people or fine scenery or the picturesque. If an image of his does contain an individual or two, it’s usually happenstance; if a photograph rises above merely a good snapshot, it was more the result of beautiful terrain than art. Although a friend of landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Stewart was after something else: he wanted his book to say only, “Thus it was when I passed by, in my time.” He understood common does not mean trivial. Because George Stewart, the first practitioner of “photographic odology” — the study of roads — chose U.S. 40 before anyone else was documenting a highway as a place in itself, no other route in the world can surpass the continuity of images when Brusca combines his with Stewart’s.

Frank said of him, “He was traveling in the golden age of American two-lane highways when U.S. Forty was the major cross-country route. He recorded it just before the interstate system came along and began overrunning it or turning it into frontage and secondary roads. In his pictures and words, you can hear the future coming on fast. But still today, there’s much more of Forty left than of Route Sixty-six. Most of Forty is still there, even in places where it no longer has a number. Out west you can sometimes see a defunct strip running off to nowhere.”

It’s useful to remember that the highway, like the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, was a complexity of intertwined roads, never a single thoroughfare. Not only did it continually change many of its alignments, it also in places had simultaneously several paths: Business Route 40, Commercial Route 40, City Route 40, Truck Route 40, Alternate 40, Bypass 40, Temporary 40, Detour 40, Old 40, New 40, 40 South, 40 North. Trying to visualize its structure across the body of America is like trying to see the circulatory system in your body.

One afternoon I asked FXB to pull from his computer a map of the various alignments over the years 40 has struck across Missouri and through my town. Later I learned what I was asking for: it took him one evening — three decades and one evening. But the result is a lovely piece of cartography just now unavailable in any other library anywhere except Frank’s (and mine).

With technology unknown to Stewart — or even to the Vales — Brusca created in his computer overlays a kind of digital motion-picture of the past, as he morphed Stewart’s images into his own later ones. It was a time machine allowing virtual travel into yesterday: on a screen, two-lanes become four, an old tavern vanishes into thin air, trees give way to billboards (more rarely, vice versa), a suburb rises from a pasture, a Studebaker becomes a Subaru. But the mountains abide and sometimes also the forest on them, and the prairie is still prairie, and it is those images that give promise we are not yet too late to control the juggernaut of landscape destruction.

If Brusca’s work is not exactly time-lapse photography, then it is time-gap photography. His time machine, of course, can travel backward only to 1949 before turning around to come forward, moving across both years and space, but if you believe an image of what is to come can be discerned from what has gone before, then you can see in his work a future emerging.

And from that movement, questions arise: Where is Brusca’s virtual highway leading? What will the future learn from us? And about us? Will people of another time judge our quotidian, creepingly incremental changes to be as significant as the cataclysmic ones bound to happen? Is the slow rise and slower collapse of the Colosseum a parallel to the empire that built it? Are the uncounted days of scientific failure preceding a single microstep forward in discovering the plasmodium parasite in the guts of an anopheles mosquito — are those humdrum laboratory hours equal to the brevity of a Presidential assassination or the collapse of a skyscraper? Is Stewart right that the commonplace is not synonymous with the inconsequential? When it’s happening, just where is ordinary history?

6

Finding the Kaiser Billy Road

B
ECAUSE THE NATIONAL ROAD MILESTONE
in Ellicott City is for
me a quoz of the first order, I appreciate its close escape from being swallowed by the old building behind it as I do its significance, longevity, uniqueness, and the way it sits there with its weather-battered face like a plump way-god to bless all who pass. One October evening years ago, it further imprinted itself into my memory after I overheard personifying words spoken by a woman whose pearls and haute coiffure led me to take her for a Howard County peeress. Atop the marker was a jack-o’-lantern truly giving Number Ten the look of a compact statue. Her gentleman, clearly familiar with the stone, pointed it out to her and, by way of explanation, said, “There’s the little chap, my dear,” and she said, “Why, Albert! You didn’t tell me he’s a cute little son of a bitch!”

I suppose he is, and I suppose one person’s son of a bitch is another’s way-god, but I know Number Ten has enough power to have a life within my life — another attribute of the best quoz. That piece of aged granite has led me beyond its own particular mile into mileages and places and people far more distant. A good quoz of a way-god can do that too.

Some time ago the marker began transforming my abstract conception of the National Road into a material reality that comprehension and memory could visually grasp; an intangible notion of cultural transport and transmission suddenly had form and body, and the stone became a synecdoche for the old high-road itself linking the Atlantic seaboard with the great central rivers leading to the Gulf.

Number Ten is a piece of infrastructure that once helped build the Union and maintain it against rankly greedy men who plotted to fragment America for personal gain. (Consider the likes of conspirator Aaron Burr wanting to “detach” certain territories, or James Wilkinson scheming a personally lucrative secession of Kentucky and Tennessee to Spain; General Anthony Wayne called him “the worst of all bad men,” and a business rival said Wilkinson was “a mammoth of iniquity . . . the only man I ever saw who was from the bark to the very core a villain.”) For reasons of fragmentation alone, I believe the Ellicott City mile marker meant almost as much as their own hearthstones to Washington and Jefferson and Madison, all of whom may have ridden past it. As arteries of tissue and their supporting structures are to a heart, so are arteries of communication and their components to a democracy.

From the Beyond I hear my old stiff-backed American history professor, a sarcastic avatar of negativism, scolding, “Hold on there, Socrates!” (We all were Socrates, women too.) “Is a single hunk of rock of real societal significance compared to something like an atomic bomb or an analgesic to ease an arthritic joint?” Today I’d answer him in my blue-book with:
When Number Ten was set in place, America needed transport more than either an atomic bomb or the easing of the President’s lumbago because the ready movement of a national economy and its culture — for better or worse — was of greater import than nuking Indians or easing the movement of George’s spinal column.
(Socrates could then take his C minus and go home in good conscience to sleep the bliss of a baby.)

When I met Frank Brusca, I had no idea how many other National Road mile markers existed.
But he knew.
In fact, he knew more about the mileposts — whether in granite, sandstone, cast iron, wood, or replica fiberglass — than anybody else on earth, and he could show me his photographs of every one he’d found, which was nearly every one still in existence. (I admire such unquestioned expertise in a field because I have no unquestioned expertise in any area except in my own history, about which I can say, without concern for contradiction, I am the sole authority and will likely remain so; that, however, does not mean
my
version, to pick one example, of what happened between me and a throw pillow and a lamp shade fifteen New Year’s Eves ago cannot be gainsaid.)

Frank knew Ellicott City took its name from three founding brothers, one of them father to surveyor Andrew Ellicott who in 1798 (the time Number Ten was set) laid out and oversaw the physical cutting of a boundary between the United States and Spain, a line today visible as the Florida border below Alabama and Georgia. (Ellicott, coincidentally, became a chief witness in the 1811 court-martial of General James Wilkinson.)

These are some of the reasons, forbearant reader, that brought Q and me to Westerville to visit Frank Brusca in his home eleven miles north of Old Highway 40. One Wednesday morning we were all in his van with the license plate
ROUTE 40
as he drove us east through southern Licking and Muskingum counties, the whole way narrating, at first concentrating on sandstone markers still standing at the side of what used to be the National Road before it became U.S. 40. In places, the highway was just shy of being chockablock with them, and a resident here or there had turned the 170-year-old posts into little gardens with a surround of flowers, while other people had whitewashed them and blackened in the inscriptions to make them easily legible from a vehicle. They were a kind of secular road shrine, like those little wayside, wooden crucifixes once prevalent in the Tyrolean Alps or the carved-rock
dosojin
protecting travelers in old Japan. These American stones, though, honored not deities but history and continuance, things only now and then accorded respect along a U.S. highway.

For each one, FXB could give a story or detail; he even knew particulars about virtually every mile missing its stone, and his narration bespoke his life as a chantey does a sailor’s. At one of the spots lacking a marker, he told of a man of wealth and some national recognition (whom he didn’t want named) known to send out a crew to dig up a loose milepost for his collection, only to lock it in a warehouse. Frank was disturbed by such questionable removal of public property and responded in several
legal
ways, one of which was to buy at auction for two-hundred dollars a single Ohio stone and return it to its original place. Brusca does not have enough hundred-dollar bills to protect the remaining markers in Ohio, let alone in four other states, and that’s another reason his thorough documentation is important. “In England,” he said, “there’s a Milestone Society to look after their markers. We need one here too.”

Ohio is notable in having so many markers still in place, as it is also in having so many miles of the National Road and early Route 40 still extant, a number of them yet open to travelers forgoing parallel Interstate 70. In some locations, Old 40 remained a thoroughfare even if it had lost its federal number; in other segments, the road was a forgotten piece of pavement serving only farm machinery or as a court for a basketball game. Across those rolling hills, the outliers of the middle Appalachians, U.S. 40 was concrete here, asphalt there, but in its finest permutation it was well-laid bricks shined by eighty years of rolling tires.

Along the way were the old stone-arch bridges known for their configuration of a stretched S as well as a recent concrete-bridge in the shape of a Y, the fifth with that design at Zanesville. A mile south of it, we stopped near the Muskingum River for lunch at Nicols, a café from the age of
FRESH HOT NUTS
machines, the one at Nicols still functioning with heat furnished by a twenty-five-watt lightbulb. Over our sandwiches, Frank continued the stories and histories, never detouring from U.S. 40 or doubling back or losing his way, the whole time smiling as do people who have found passionate purpose; happily for him, his was taking him years to express in its fullness. Even when he talked of police who, in the age of terrorism, would stop to question why he was photographing a bridge or even a stretch of road in the middle of some vacant nowhere, he smiled. If he had more difficulty than Stewart in getting permission to climb a tower or grain elevator or to stop along a four-lane to take photographs, even those tangles of red tape made him smile because they were U.S. 40 red tape.

Frank said, “Stewart’s road notes don’t help me much in locating people who appear in one of his photographs, but I enjoy trying to find them. There were never many, of course, and only a few are still around. After almost sixty years, finding them is harder than identifying some of his locations, but by using the Internet, I discovered one person living in India, and she remembered Stewart. But the most recognizable faces of all, two small boys, cute little guys, in front of row houses on West Fayette Street in an African-American section of Baltimore, I haven’t even come close to finding out their fate. I showed the picture around the neighborhood but learned nothing.”

“Of all the miles along your beloved highway,” Q said, “which are your favorites?” Frank closed his eyes as if he were watching U.S. 40 unreel in his head. When he’d reached San Francisco, he said, “Kansas. The openness of the prairie, I just love, even though a patrolman in Wamego — a different one every time — seems to come along whenever I stop there to photograph that site. And Berthoud Pass over the Rockies west of Denver is special. And there are a couple of dozen diners along the way I really like. The S bridges. A decommissioned section in Reno. Should I keep going?” She asked what he didn’t like, and to that there came no ready answer, but finally he said, shaking his head, “Out west, rattlesnakes. They like rocky outcrops that are also good places to take a photograph.”