Where are we going?
Taking the nation's pulse along U.S. Highway 50
In the U.S. highway system, major east-west routes start with 2 in the far north and end with 98 in Florida. Major north-south routes start with 1 on the East Coast and end with 101 on the West Coast. The numbers ending in 0 and 1 are the most important.
The number across the middle, U.S. Highway 50, lives up to its role. It’s in the mountains of California and Colorado, the emptiness of Nevada, the windswept plains of Kansas, the cornfields of Illinois and a crowded thoroughfare in our nation’s capital.
Two big vacations in 2023 took me to both ends of U.S. 50, in Ocean City, Maryland, and Sacramento, California. In between, the highway passes by places that can teach us a lot of lessons, but bring up just as many questions that we’re struggling to answer.
Washington, D.C.: Constitution Avenue
U.S. 50 crosses the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and runs on the north side of the National Mall. Constitution Avenue passes between the White House and the Washington Monument. It also goes by the National Archives, where the nation’s founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights — are on display.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Those are words a Virginia intellectual wrote in the Declaration in 1776, words a Georgia preacher challenged on the National Mall in 1963, words people in every state are debating the meaning of in the 2020s, especially “truths,” “equal” and maybe even “we.”
At the time of my D.C. trip, the national discourse, or at least the national yelling-at-each-other event, was about the school shooting in Tennessee that resulted in the deaths of six people and the shooter. Tennessee’s U.S. senators proposed spending $900 million to turn schools across the nation into fortresses with armed patrols. Tennessee legislators and the governor approved $230 million to do it in their state.
There are many components of the issue and I’ll just say this: It will be 25 years ago in late April and I still remember what I call “the Columbine dream.”
St. Louis, Missouri: Poplar Street Bridge
U.S. 50 has bypassed downtown St. Louis since 1974. Before that, it crossed the Mississippi River on the Poplar Street Bridge, which today carries I-55, I-64 and U.S. 40. Five blocks north of the PSB, in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, is the Old Courthouse. It was there that Dred Scott sued for his freedom in 1846, kicking off a decade of court cases.
Between October 1838 and May 1840, Scott and his family lived at Fort Snelling, on the west side of the Mississippi River, next to what’s now Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. That’s Fort Snelling, Iowa Territory, where slavery was banned under the Missouri Compromise. It’s also possible that Scott lived in Davenport in the mid-1830s. By modern standards, you could say Dred Scott was an Iowan.
But in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Scott wasn’t an American citizen.
Today, crossing between Missouri and Illinois is easy. But citizens on one side have certain rights that they don’t have on the other — in both directions of the political spectrum. More and more, such divisions are being taken to the Supreme Court, whose approval and trust among Americans has plummeted in the past two years.
Eureka, Nevada: The Loneliest Road in America
In 1986, a Life magazine story about U.S. 50 through Nevada included a description of the road as “totally empty.” The Nevada Division of Tourism took the insult and ran with it, challenging travelers to take “The Loneliest Road in America.” I did so and have the certificate to prove it.
My travels have given me the opportunity to see the breadth, depth, and diversity of this country, in all meanings of those words. This western vacation covered facets of this nation from the Chinese workers instrumental in construction of the Transcontinental Railroad to Great Basin National Park, the second-least-visited national park that isn’t an island or in Alaska.
U.S. 50 in western Utah is 100 miles of “magnificent desolation,” akin to what Buzz Aldrin said about the moon — layered rock formations and salt flats. (In comparison, I-80 across northern Nevada is 400 miles of sagebrush, and will make you want to apologize for nearly every joke you’ve ever made about Nebraska’s scenery.) It was a stark contrast to the stop-and-stop-and-go traffic I endured in San Francisco days earlier.
Dealing with diversity is the basis of many chapters of America’s story. There are some periods of time where we’ve dealt with it better than others.
Sacramento, California: El Dorado Freeway
In the mid-19th century it took a certain kind of person to cross the barren landscape between the Rockies and Sierras. It took someone like Kit Carson, a frontiersman who played a key role as a scout in securing California’s independence and later statehood in the Bear Flag Revolt and the Mexican War.
Kit Carson International Academy was just off the U.S. 50 freeway in eastern Sacramento — until June 22, when the Sacramento City Unified School District cancelled Carson. The district cited Carson’s actions in an ambush on tribes in the Sacramento River valley in 1846 and a military campaign to force bands of Navajo onto reservations in the 1860s. Without Carson, California might not be part of the United States, but that’s not enough to save him in today’s climate. He’s far from the only figure or feature of American history to be challenged in the past year.
A renewed effort to remove Iowa-born suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt’s name from a building at Iowa State University ended with it being retained. The Washington Post reported that teachers in Washington state wanted “to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful.” The book in question? To Kill a Mockingbird.
The road ahead
In 2023, the fault lines in this country could be traced along U.S. 50:
In Sacramento, at the Planned Parenthood “My Body, My Voice” storytelling booth at the California Museum…
In Colorado, where a section of the 14th Amendment dormant for 150 years has been thrust into the spotlight…
In Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where nearly 60 books in school libraries have been challenged…
In Illinois, where the state legislature banned libraries from banning books…
In Indiana, where a near-total abortion ban took effect, and in Ohio, where approval of a constitutional amendment superseded a similar law…
In Bridgeport, West Virginia, where a transgender student’s challenge to that state’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” is likely headed for the Supreme Court…
In Ohio and Maryland, where recreational marijuana is now legal under state (but not federal) law…
At Arlington National Cemetery, where a Confederate memorial was removed at the end of the year…
…and of course, in our nation’s capital.
In each place, the same questions run underneath: Who is America? What is America? Why is America? Just how united are these United States?
We are less than 1,000 days from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That milestone is coming just as everything about this country’s past, present and future seems up for grabs.
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has warned of a “loneliness epidemic.” People in this country are more connected online and less to their communities. Seeking out the commonalities and reconciling the differences that make this nation what it has been, and what it is, are essential to moving forward.
It doesn’t require traveling the Loneliest Road in America to do so.
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