A Line on the Map

You have to hand it to Haynesville: The town keeps its chin up. The busted little oil boomtown in the northwest corner of Louisiana has been in decline for thirty years. Its population, now around 2,500, has dropped by almost a third since 1980. Its onetime great wealth is all but gone. Most of Main Street is closed down and boarded up; even the barber gave up and went back to driving a forklift. But Haynesville looks a little different from the desolate American small town you may be imagining. A few years ago Keith Killgore, an art teacher and pharmacist who operates one of the few surviving businesses in town, decided the place could use a little sprucing up. Onto the plywood veneer covering one row of Main Street buildings, Killgore and a handful of his students painted a row of false storefronts: a charming little cafe with a round French table and chairs, a stylish ladies’ boutique offering dresses and shoes and hats for whatever make-believe special occasions might be happening around town, a cartoon flower shop, a pretend toy store.

The renderings aren’t intended to fool anyone. They’re not lifelike enough to make you reach for a door handle or try to stand under one of the two-dimensional awnings in the rain. They’re just a patch, meant to show that the idea of a complete town survives even if the fact of one doesn’t. We know what’s supposed to be here, they say, and we’re saving its place for when it comes back.

Killgore’s imagination is at work elsewhere in the town as well. When the old Planter’s Bank burned down at the corner of Main and First streets several years ago, Killgore got a few people together, cleaned up the lot, and fashioned it into a rudimentary park with a grassy patch of yard bisected by a paved walkway leading to a white-columned “porch” with American flags adorning the corners and rose trellises on either side. This too is a faux facade, a mask worn by the charred brick wall of the adjacent building. You can sit in a wooden rocking chair here, but you can’t step inside for a glass of lemonade.

From this prosthetic porch there is an excellent view of the “Welcome to Haynesville” mural on the opposite alley wall, made visible by the collapse of the bank. Kilgore painted this montage with slogans and icons that represent points of local pride: GATEWAY TO NORTH LOUISIANA, it says (true, if you’re driving in from Arkansas on the two-lane Highway 79), and HOME OF THE BUTTERFLY FESTIVAL (the area is not particularly rich in butterfly specimens, but the town needed something to replace the now-defunct Oil Patch Festival), and Home of the Golden Tornado (the Haynesville High School football team, 14-time state champions). On the left we see a set of railroad tracks and two young men bass fishing (the boy in the front of the boat’s got one on the line!). On the right we see an oil pumpjack and, between a truck hauling logs and an eight-point buck leaping past a pair of pheasants, a fat stripe of black paint with yellow dashes and an Interstate 69 highway shield that’s moving so fast it has a motion-blur tail.

This mural, mind you, is a good 45-minute drive from the nearest interstate — which is Interstate 20, not 69. But a town can dream. While the railroad tracks in this representation of Haynesville are a nod to the past and the present — freight trains still come through town, but they don’t stop anymore — the highway totem is a tribute to an anticipated future. I-69 in this mural is like the figure of Jesus in a fresco of the second coming: the long-awaited savior that shall come one day from above to reward all who believe.

“Above” in this case is north. I-69, as it now exists, starts up at the Canadian border in Port Huron, Michigan, makes a wide curve along the outer orbit of Detroit through Flint and Lansing, plunges south into Indiana, through Fort Wayne, Muncie, and some of the wealthiest and fastest-sprawling suburbs of Indianapolis, and then halts abruptly on the north side of the city’s squared loop, I-465, where a flashing yellow sign reads FREEWAY ENDS. This relatively short 360-mile piece of interstate is really no big deal. It’s a stretch of dotted, divided asphalt that gets a little wider and more congested near the big towns, a little boring in between. Along it, people drive, listen to the radio, sit in traffic, talk on cell phones, get into sometimes fatal accidents. Hotels and restaurants cluster at the interchanges. Trucks stop for gas. Factories close and move overseas. And in the outskirts of the larger urban areas, bunches of houses with green lawns sprout up from the fields.

But I-69 is remarkable for where it doesn’t yet go — but where it one day might: another 1,400 miles south to Mexico, through Evansville, Indiana; Paducah, Kentucky; Memphis, Tennessee; Clarksdale, Mississippi; El Dorado, Arkansas; Shreveport (and, yes, Haynesville), Louisiana; Houston, Texas; and on down to the border towns of Brownsville and Laredo. This corridor, in the vast gaps between the major cities that prop it up like tent poles, is made up of the kind of America that Americans think of least. It’s not the familiar Interstate America, nor the wild, beautiful America of adventure magazines. It’s not even the quirky roadside America portrayed in kitschy travel shows. If you were to drive this unbeaten path as best one can on the state roads and U.S. highways that I-69 is meant to replace, you would have the chance to appreciate the subtle variety of our nation’s seemingly mundane body of grain elevators, water towers, and county courthouse squares. You would go for many hours without seeing a building taller than two stories. You would begin to suspect that some of the smaller towns in this country are nothing more than elaborate speed traps.

You would pass tractors and combines — not just in the fields around you, but on the road in front of you. If your window was down, you would catch the aromas of turkey sheds and sawmills and coal-fired power plants and vast acres of wet crops. The roads you traveled would be “uncontrolled access,” as the engineers say, and “at grade”: There would be driveways and stoplights, and you would be at the mercy of whatever surrounded you. Over hills, the road would rise and dip and twist. Where the landscape is flat and agricultural, the road would be barren and straight. And to towns of any size you would have to slow down and succumb, if only for a quarter mile.

When I drove this route, I decided that these old main drags look best at dusk. The cracked paint on the aging buildings smooths out in dim light. Power lines recede against the darkened sky, and the crappy old signs look rich and warm — bulbs, at least, don’t rust. When the lights come on in modern, newly developed America, fast-food places and retail strips can look cheap and alien, their vast parking lots lit up like airport runways. But along the smaller routes the mix of chain stores and mom-and-pops that remain looks more human and handmade. They nestle right up against the roadway, glowing like a string of Christmas lights. Somewhere on the interstate billboards blare and logos hover high like UFOs. But when the off-interstate motorist starts to think about stopping for supper or sleep, the minor highway village slips into something more comfortable, puts on earrings, and hums a slow, sweet tune.

Yes, living away from interstates has its privileges. It also has its pains. These same charming highways, which were the backbone of automobile transportation just fifty years ago, are now considered secondary routes, obsolete and inefficient. The interstates have guided a half century of industrial, residential, and commercial development in America, and very little of it has touched these towns, the populations of which, on the whole, are dwindling while the average age of their citizens is rising. The rural I-69 corridor is an America where things are manufactured, but not as many things as once were. It’s an America where great quantities of food are produced, but that task now employs far fewer people than it once did. Those who remain in small towns don’t necessarily do so as an aesthetic choice. They might not describe it quite the way I do. They might feel ready for something bigger.

Sometimes new infrastructure projects are mocked as “bridges to nowhere” or “roads to nowhere.” But a truth gets lost in that rhetoric: Once you build a bridge — or a highway, or a transit line — the “nowhere” at the other end becomes a somewhere. This is often the very point. It’s the reason people want bridges. It’s the reason people wanted canals and railroads, and it’s the reason that for the better part of two decades, the Mid-Continent Highway Coalition, a group of politicians, businessmen, and community leaders from seven states, has been lobbying to “finish” I-69.

If built, Interstate 69 would be by far the most significant new highway construction since the original interstate system. The road, as supporters envision it, would connect the busiest trade crossings on the Canadian border to the busiest trade crossings on the Mexican border. The plan was hatched in the early, relatively innocent days of the North American Free Trade Agreement, when the highest hopes about it seemed as plausible as the fears. The coalition, thinking grandly, dubbed the project “the NAFTA highway” and promised the forlorn regions in its path all the perks of international trade and economic development — trucks, tourists, and Toyota plants. Most of the communities along the proposed route are, like Haynesville, eager for its construction. They’ve waited for federal funding like farmers praying for rain.

While there’s no knowing what I-69 will bring, there is plenty of speculating. In Memphis and Houston, it is said it will support booming suburban growth, decrease congestion, and improve air quality. In the notoriously poverty-stricken Mississippi and Arkansas Delta, it is supposed to lure new industrial jobs and droves of tourists. In the piney woods of northwest Louisiana and east Texas, it could bring baby-boomer retirees looking for a pleasant place to settle down. On the Texas Gulf Coast, it is expected to provide more efficient connectivity to the ports. Up and down the proposed corridor, eager towns have fought one another for inclusion. Local papers publish frequent editorials extolling its coming and breathlessly cover each small step toward construction.

But it takes an awful lot of time and money to build a highway these days. Tonight there will be licensed teenagers out driving (doing God knows what) who weren’t even born when this last great highway was first imagined. More than $1.3 billion in federal money has been devoted to the project, mostly for pre-construction planning, but the full cost to complete it is estimated to be $30 billion, a figure that will almost surely rise as plans become reality. Federal laws and policies such as the National Environmental Protection Act have, since the 1960s, placed hurdles in the way of new highways: To win funding, states must enumerate the potential benefits, catalog consequences, and consider alternatives. The requisite studies for I-69 have been costly, tedious, and time-consuming, and the intervening years have given people time to think. Local conversations about where to put the road have morphed into larger questions about whether it’s worth the expense, whether it’s needed or even wanted, and whether it might actually harm the middles of nowhere it’s projected to pass through.

In southern Indiana, organized opposition to I-69 is as old as the plans for building it. In the forested hills and small farms around the college town of Bloomington, stopping I-69 has become the cause célèbre, the stuff of bumper stickers and yard signs, heated public meetings, pointed folk songs, and federal lawsuits. The road’s proponents have tried to dismiss the growing chorus of rabble-rousers as knee-jerk environmentalists and selfish NIMBYs. But their grievances extend beyond the lines of property and cut across ideologies. Democrats and Republicans, young and old, hippies and hicks alike have come together to insist that the area’s lack of interstate is more of a lucky break than a curse. We like things the way they are, they say, so take your progress someplace else.

In the last decade, the I-69 project found itself tangled in a wider debate over how roads should be funded. For more than fifty years, gasoline taxes have paid for the vast majority of highway construction. But the federal fuel tax has remained a flat 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, and revenue can no longer keep up with the price of maintenance and the hunger for new capacity. Many state governments have turned to privatization as a way to fill the gap. Banks and toll-road operators, many of them foreign-owned, have eagerly obliged, paying multi-billion-dollar up-front sums for the privilege of operating American roadways — and tolling them for profit. In Indiana, a Spanish and Australian consortium paid $3.8 billion for a 75-year lease of the state’s toll road, and Governor Mitch Daniels earmarked a portion of the proceeds for construction of Interstate 69. In Texas, I-69 became a component of the Trans-Texas Corridor plan, an ambitious vision for a new 4,000-mile web of privately financed toll highways, railroads, and utility lines. The banking crisis and ensuing recession cooled this rush toward privatization, but only temporarily: Stimulus money wasn’t enough to clear a backlog of maintenance work, the gas-tax-financed Federal Highway Trust Fund required congressional intervention to avoid insolvency in 2009, and there are reportedly billions of dollars still stockpiled in private hands, ready for investment.

There are those who take for granted that roads should remain under public control, who reject the notion of an international corporation making money on American drivers, and many of these same people believe that the United States has been hurt by globalization. The pairing of these issues has turned I-69’s NAFTA branding into a serious liability. Citizens have alleged that the road is part of a corporate and governmental scheme to bring Canada, Mexico, and the United States together into a North American Union, opening our borders and forfeiting our sovereignty while lining the pockets of global profiteers. Rural ranchers in Texas and young vegan anarchists in Indiana share these fears (if not much else), and with the addition of these disparate demographics, the grassroots resistance to I-69 has grown stronger and spread wider. Activists in Indiana occupied trees along the planned right-of-way and chained themselves to trucks at an asphalt yard. At rallies in Austin, farmers drove tractors down Congress Avenue with flags bearing the taunt of Texas independence: COME AND TAKE IT!

On ultraconservative talk-radio programs and liberal independent-media Web sites, commentators have told their audiences that I-69 is not just a road but an important symbol — even an instrument — of geopolitical oppression. These strong feelings have occasionally spilled onto the national scene. The Republican congressman Ron Paul made thwarting the “NAFTA superhighway” a keystone of his failed presidential bid. The long-dormant John Birch Society found new purpose in these perceived threats to freedom and warned of the coming North American Union and its telltale roadways. And Lou Dobbs took regular umbrage at these highway plans, which he called a secret plot by the “superelite.” “It is absolutely a transformational moment,” he said ominously, and vaguely, after one report on his CNN show. “People of this country . . . are going to have to decide what is going to happen with this nation.”

The people of this country made one big decision in 2008, and the election of Barack Obama took the transportation conversation in new directions. President Obama has championed high-speed rail and mass transit over new highways. “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” he told a Florida audience in 2009. With the interstate system now built and its effects clear, a growing alliance of transportation progressives is hungry to chart a new future largely by bringing back the neglected modes of the past. We have plenty of roads, these people argue, and unbuilt “zombie highways” like I-69 should be put out of their misery. They say it’s time to reconsider the way we design our communities, to rethink how America moves.

Not that these weighty issues seem very relevant to a hungry town like Haynesville. But over time, the magnitude of the project has made Interstate 69 a fault line for many of the key questions confronting Americans: not just matters of transportation policy, macroeconomics, and land-use planning, but also the tug-of-war between urban and rural, and the blurry distinction between standard of living and quality of life. This is what struck me in piecing together this complex story — how the face of America is shaped in places struggling with preservation and progress, how the character of this country is decided a little more every time a factory closes, a farmer sells his fields, a town opens its first Walmart, a city allows its first casino, or a daughter moves to the big city. In all of this, our transportation system plays a significant role, helping to determine where we work and live, how well, and with whom. Developers and speculators have always known the power of transportation, and people living happily or unhappily in quiet, forgotten places learn it quickly when the surveyors show up.

So who makes these decisions on which so much depends? The future is hammered out every week in boardrooms, state capitals, public hearings, kitchens, and courtrooms, where business leaders, elected officials, and everyday citizens haggle over issues of eminent domain, urban planning, and development. Along an imaginary line down the center of the country, these struggles have a name — I-69.

The highway has spread optimism and dread. It has inspired extravagant plans and incited rebellion. Advocates and opponents alike say they’re fighting on behalf of future generations; both sides warn that communities will suffer if the other side gets its way; and everyone accuses everyone else of living in the past. In its absence, this hypothetical highway has become a powerful presence, a conductor of grand hopes and fears: It will come one day to save or destroy the places in its path. It will bring jobs and culture. It will be the end of beauty and peace. It is a bridge to the future. It is a relic of the past. It will keep the young people from leaving. It will carry them away faster. It will save small towns. It will plow them under.

I-69 is the best of highways. It is the worst of highways. It could be the last great interstate built in America. Or it might never be finished at all. ◊