Life is a Highway

The Long Walk: A beautiful road in Galway, Ireland.“Putcher seatbelts on please!” rang out over the loudspeaker on the bus when everyone had boarded. My friend and I looked at each other incredulously and buckled up. My immediate thought was, “We never have to do that shit in America.” Years of bus riding at home have given me a rebellious attitude towards seatbelts on buses. But as the ride got underway, I quickly realized how comforting the feeling of the seatbelt was. Because at home, I ride in cars all the time. Not necessarily in New York, but whenever I meander back to New Jersey I am blessed with the comfort of my own car, seatbelt strapped firmly on. It is a sanctuary, an emotional and mental freedom that it is difficult to experience while being completely tied to mass transportation. When I think of travel in America, I think of getting in the car and driving away. Throughout the planning process of any trip my friends and I have taken here, there has always been at least one day where I’ve thought, “If only I had a car.” On this particular bus ride, my friend and I were on our way from Luton Airport outside of London, into the heart of the city itself. London is, of course, notorious for its incredible car traffic, and it’s easy to see why. There is simply not enough room in that place for the big highways that span the New York tri-state area. You don’t want to have to ask the Earl of Whatever to move his palace that’s been in the family for centuries the way you can ask the gas station owner on Route 80 for his property. The towns here are also very much clustered together, with spans of land in between. As soon as you think you’re in the middle of nowhere, there you are somewhere again. The land has been mapped out on this continent for centuries. The geography and the roads are dictated by an ancient agrarian system that has never held American soil for long. The open road is often depicted in synonymy with the American Dream. I never quite understood why until coming here, where the open road is never quite the open road you think it is and there is no golden land to the west, or metropolis to end all metropolises in the east. Flying down the interstate at 80 mph don’t fly here, cause it’s hard to get interstate, and once you get there, you realize it’s somewhere very much like somewhere you’ve been before.