Ramparts to Vortex

When I was about ten, my father drove his pink 1955 Cadillac next to some temporary barriers, and we looked north.. seeing a ribbon of concrete running as far as the eye could see, then south seeing much the same.. except it ended at the bridges being built to accommodate four lanes of concrete. I had never seen such a straight and huge highway, even though we had visited southern California only a couple of years before.. this was unique in that it was completely empty I suppose. Running through the still rural Willamette valley, splitting Eugene and Springfield along a new line. They were mostly rural at the time, Eugene a college and mill town, and Springfield a mill town. This road would be I-5 and would stretch 307 miles through Oregon, dividing it and yet pulling it sometimes willingly and sometimes, kicking and screaming into the sixties. Interstate Five would grow to a full length of 1382 miles, along all of the west, covering thousands of square miles in nearly impermeable concrete..

In fact, i doubt seriously anyone knows the exact amount of land covered by this convenience for our two hundred million automobiles and trucks.. but we do know some of the consequences beyond that of helping eliminate some of the finest farm land in the world in the Willamette valley and driving the railroads out of business. The original concept of the interstate system was foisted off on the nation as a defense plan, making it easy and swift to move troops and equipment from one place to another.. One can’t help but think of the blitzkrieg and the autobahn, making it much easier to invade Poland and Belgium.
But it has also brought big city life to the small towns along its path, there is no place to hide along that corridor, its all one big metropolis and urban down to the narrowest wide spot in the road. The drugs, crime, and family division that were an inner-city phenomenon before the interstate highway system came home to rest in all of that long stretch of urban growth area.

I grew up with an extended family, my aunts, uncles and cousins met often, sometimes every sunday, at my grandparents home where the kids played, the parents talked or played cards and we felt a closeness of family that has evaporated along with the rural nature of that life. Knowing that you had family ties, feeling them with a reality impossible in a decimated society, fragmented along interstate highways, was lost to western Oregon, and I suspect to many other places as well.

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