Pan Am Highway Blues
Photograph Source: Angelica Jacobi – CC BY-SA 3.0
A friend of mine, long past and now hitchhiking on some eternal highway, used to hitch the Pan American highway every January. From the first time I heard about this road, I had always imagined it as a long road that ran from the northern Mexican border to the tip of Argentina. My friend dispelled me of that notion, describing it as neither a continuous road or a singular one. A new book by Shawn William Miller titled Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World’s Longest Highway shatters that notion once and for all. Furthermore, it explains why such a road will never be built and what exists instead.
Miller, who teaches history at Brigham Young University, remarks in his introduction that “unlike most histories of colossal infrastructure (this history) is not meant to be triumphal.” Instead, it is an examination of the highway, the intentions of its champions in the capitalist and political worlds, the geographic challenges of its construction and its perception by those who have used it or happen to live near it. It’s a story that includes human hubris, a certain kind of adventurer, an indifference to the environment conjoined with the environment’s indifference to human attempts at its exploitation, death, and humor. The reader is not only provided with a history of a highway; they are also provided with history itself.
In the histories of the colonizer and the colonized, the edifices of the colonizers (not to mention their armies and diseases) forever change the lives, habits and even cultures of the colonized. The decades-long construction of what is nowadays considered to be the Pan-American highway was no different. Although the road in its numerous manifestations has never seen the traffic like the roads people who live in global cities are accustomed to, its presence has created a certain type of interaction between those who travelled it and those who lived near it. Usually involving the buying and selling of goods and services, those interactions exposed previously isolated natives to people and phenomena they might otherwise never been aware of. Likewise, the introduction to people and cultures unfamiliar to the travelers on the roads traveled provided those travelers with the opportunity to increase their understanding of humanity. Of course, like many such interactions between the indigenous and the foreigner, not every foreigner on the road utilized their interactions in this enlightened way. Indeed, Miller’s anecdotes reveal a perception of the indigenous people by the interlopers as potential hindrances and, at best, cheap labor. Miller does acknowledge that there were exceptions to this general perception.
An interesting element of the history in Dream Road to Pan America is how much of the road’s construction and existence was the result of certain industries in the United States. Those industries—mostly the auto and highway industries—were considerably smaller than they are today, but as Miller’s history moves forward in time, one is also witnessing the growing power of those industries. When one looks at the world today, reading this history reveals how rapidly these industries rose to the positions they now hold in the world’s economy. After conquering the US imagination and economy, neither industry stopped at its borders. At the least, a combination of hype, political pressure and bribery, and a human desire for mobility combined with a lack of concern for the environment and human and animal life brought us to the situation we now exist in. This text is both a case study and a metaphor for the process I have attempted to describe here.
Many readers of Dream Road to Pan America will not be aware of the numerous “races/contests” undertaken by fortune-seekers, celebrities, rich adventurers of the leisure class and various scientists. Nor will they know of the Motor Boys book series, most of which were written by Clarence Young (pseudonym for Howard Garis), author of the Uncle Wiggly stories. These books, written in the early twentieth century, were adventure stories written for boys and were similar in format and style to other book series that began around the same time (Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins). The book series was not part of any advertising package for the auto or highway industry, but the books were popular and created an interest in both. Perhaps this is why Miller mentions it in his chapter titled “Adventures in Roadless Road Trips,” which is about what the chapter title says it’s about. These journeys were part adventure and part hustle, both for funds and in terms of travel. The books of these contests that often followed were of questionable veracity, but read by many nonetheless. Jack Kerouac’s classic novel of the road On the Road could be considered a hopped-up manic, hipper and equally embellished example of this kind of travel book, only without the pretense of being factual and for a very different audience. Not just a history of the not truly existing pan American highway, Dream Road to Pan America is also a history of American highways in general, their actual cost and their cost in other ways that we continue to discover, both good and bad.
(The title of this review was borrowed from the ZZ Top song of the same name.-Ron J.)
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