Country Roads, Take Us Home

Among the countless monuments scattered throughout the District of Columbia, perhaps the most obscure is a modest stone pillar known as the Zero Milestone. To this day, it is the point from which highway distances from Washington, D.C., are measured. But on the day it was unveiled--July 7, 1919--the United States did not have a highway system, and a journey by car across the continent to California was still an ordeal.

“[W]hen the car appeared,” writes Pete Davies in “American Road: The Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of the Motor Age,” an agreeable and accomplished blend of history, nostalgia and armchair adventure, “there was nothing for it to drive on.” On that day in 1919, the U.S. War Department dispatched a convoy of 81 military vehicles on a trek from Washington to San Francisco--an audacious and elaborate undertaking styled as the “first transcontinental motor convoy.” Given the lack of roads and roadside services, the convoy included two tanker trucks carrying gasoline, two mobile machine shops, several cargo trucks loaded with spare parts and a monstrous contraption called the Militor that was specially designed to haul “a lamed or stranded vehicle out of trouble.”

Among the 37 officers and 258 enlisted men in the convoy was a 28-year-old lieutenant colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had not managed to reach the fighting front in World War I, as Davies points out, and the desk-bound career officer was hoping that a trek across the continent would be an adventure. But the key man was Henry C. Ostermann, a civilian who headed the convoy in “a gleaming white Packard Twin Six--America’s answer to the Rolls-Royce.”

Ostermann possessed a crucial skill that most Americans and all of the officers and soldiers lacked. “[H]e had driven from coast to coast across America no less than nineteen times,” explains Davies. “Or, to put it another way, Ostermann was driving the pilot car because he was the only man who knew the way.”

“American Road” makes the point that Americans had fallen deeply in love with the automobile by 1919, and they were clamoring for the opportunity to hit the road. Some 6.5 million vehicles, manufactured by 550 companies, were crowding the roadways of America, such as they were. Members of the so-called Good Roads Movement--a coalition of automobile enthusiasts and the automobile industry--were lobbying for the completion of a transcontinental route comprising a number of roads, called “the Lincoln Highway,” which was being built in fits and starts across the continent.

“[I]t is not the work of a year; it is not the work even of a decade,” declared one of the early highway boosters. “It is the work of a generation.”

The U.S. Army saw the strategic value of a national road system. “As a military necessity, the Lincoln Highway should be constructed so that the heaviest artillery could be rushed from one coast to the other,” one officer had declared in 1915, when the Army still relied on mules and wagons. The first motorized units were organized by the Army in 1916 to enable Gen. John Pershing to pursue Pancho Villa after he raided a border town in New Mexico. By the summer of 1919, only months after the end of World War I, the Army was eager to show that it had learned the lessons of the world’s first mechanized war.

So the first transcontinental motor convoy was “one of the greatest publicity stunts attempted in the history of the country,” according to a newspaper in one of the towns along its route--and it was a publicity stunt with more than one motive, as Davies shows us. The Army sought to attract fresh recruits as well as funding for its postwar operations, the Good Roads Movement hoped to draw support for the Lincoln Highway, and the automobile industry was stoking the appetites of American drivers for new and better places to drive their cars.

Along the way, Davies allows us to see the juggernaut at eye level as it crossed the country’s picturesque landscape, and he reminds us of the brutal ambitions that the expedition symbolized. On the first leg of the journey, for example, the convoy reached a covered bridge in rural Pennsylvania that was too low and too frail for some of the military trucks; the heavier vehicles were forced to ford the river, and the roof of the bridge was hacked open to permit the higher vehicles to cross.

“These old wooden bridges are a thing of the past,” carped one of the officers to a local reporter, “and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to run over them and break them down to show how poorly they are constructed.”

On Sept. 1, 1919, the convoy edged around Lake Tahoe and crossed into California, a place that had created its own bureau of highways as early as 1895 and passed its first state highway bond issue in 1910. “California had embraced road building with a fervor that went far beyond the merely practical benefit of a decent highway,” observes Davies. Five days later, the trucks were delivered by ferry to the Embarcadero in San Francisco, where they were welcomed with a ceremony that included the dedication of a second milestone, exactly 3,251 miles from the one in Washington.

Today, the Lincoln Highway is long gone, except for fragments, and, outside of Davies’ book, mostly forgotten. Much of its old route was replaced by a later era of federal highways, including stretches of U.S. 30: “The name Lincoln flickers alongside it--appended to a retail court, a school, a body shop--like the distant memory of another world, a world long ago bypassed,” writes Davies. And the old federal highways have been bypassed in turn by the interstate freeway system that was launched during the Eisenhower administration, “the biggest civil-engineering project in the history of the world.” But “American Road” shows that we live in precisely the world that the boosters of the first transcontinental motor convoy so richly imagined and so ardently desired.

The Nogales Highway links two places with the same name, one in Arizona and the other in Mexico. “Ambos Nogales”--literally, “both Nogaleses”--is a study in words and images of the towns on each end of the highway, the “nonidentical ‘twin’ towns joined and divided by the border,” as essayist Lawrence Taylor puts it.

The prose in “Ambos Nogales” is intense and colorful; the photographs by Maeve Hickey are mostly spare and monochromatic. But they both conjure up a vivid sense of place, focusing far more on Mexican Nogales than its American counterpart, and they both show the endearing human face of a backwater that one expatriate dismisses as “una caricatura de Mexico”--a caricature of Mexico.

“Ambos Nogales” takes a more affirming and embracing view of “a world in which human life is, paradoxically, at its most constrained and most liberated.” We meet “El Negro,” the leader of a local gang called Los Rolling Stones, and Blanca, a working mother who toils in one of the foreign-owned assembly plants called maquiladoras; we see a little boy wearing a castoff Donald Duck T-shirt with the legend “Where’s the Chicks?” and a slim young bullfighter in the traditional garb of a toreador. And we encounter the so-called tunnel rats, the children who live in the storm drains that run beneath the border between Mexico and the United States.

“[E]verybody,” says one of the citizens of the Mexican Nogales, “has a right to his own craziness.” But the authors of “Ambos Nogales” see the same scene with considerably more compassion--”a dramatic and endlessly surprising revelation of the human spirit.”