June 29, 2006: Palm Springs & Altadena

As articles in this week's New York Times and Christian Science Monitor reminded me, President Eisenhower signed the law that created the Interstate Highway System exactly 50 years ago today. Since today we drove on that very system back to Los Angeles, the apotheosis of the freeway, and since it enables us to undertake this very trip, it behooves us to consider the role it has played and continues to play in our nation's history.

The system was inspired partly by the German Autobahnen (another thing we can blame Hitler for). Taking nearly 50 years to build and costing nearly $500 billion to construct, interstate highways extend nearly 50,000 miles to every state in the US. They constitute the largest public works project ever undertaken by man, and while they've helped to unify us as a people, they've also isolated us in our cars and our mega-suburbs, becoming our primary consumer of resources and producer of pollution. Our country has more cars than people. While this may seem unremarkable to some, it is responsible for changing the way we live as much as electricity and airplanes and antibiotics have.

Like the Internet, our highway system was first developed by the military. My father, who was something of an expert on this subject, told me that in the event of war on American soil, its inner lanes, one in each direction, were intended to be dedicated to military traffic. The outer lanes were for citizens who would be evacuating cities either threatened or destroyed by nuclear weapons. Fortunately, neither contingency has ever been realized.

As my father also pointed out, the colossal quantity of money consumed by road building and maintenance, abetted by lobbying from car and tire companies, has in most cities prevented the development of effective public transportation systems. This is a loss we pay for every day in dirty air and traffic jams. Dad always bemoaned the loss of Los Angeles’ Big Red Cars, a streetcar system that was ripped out and replaced by freeways. Since our greatest investments in transportation infrastructure have already been made, it will prove next to impossible to change our national priorities – until a crisis intervenes.

Before I move on to the day’s events, I should mention one other important milestone and its connection to my father. This summer is the 200th anniversary of the return of Captains Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery, whose expeditionary road trip from St. Louis to the Oregon Territory, as Washington and Oregon were known then, took place before there were any roads there. Thanks to Dad’s interest in genealogy, I know that Meriwether Lewis is my great-great-great-great-great-great uncle. Dad gave my brother the middle name “Lewis” in his honor.

The boys went swimming with their mother this morning while I gassed up to make the return trip to L.A. From experience, I expected that gas would be relatively expensive in the Los Angeles area - $3.11 a gallon - but I was pleasantly surprised that the price in Palm Springs was only two cents more per gallon. In the afternoon, we had barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs and strawberry smoothies at the resort before we packed up and checked out.

Mom had another exciting moment in the parking lot just as I was putting her walker in the car. She lost her balance, leaned against our luggage trolley, which started to roll, and executed a slow-motion fall to the asphalt. Debbie was fortunately able to get hold of her in time to decelerate her descent. She was unharmed, but both a guest and an employee rushed over to ensure nothing dire had happened. Ah, the thrilling lives of the elderly!

We made a few stops on our way back to Altadena. The first was to photograph Palm Spring’s Hotel California, a place well-known to fans of yet another L.A. rock legend, The Eagles, who sang, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

The second was to visit the town of Cabazon, a few miles west of Palm Springs. It’s famed for two things: the 27-story Casino Morongo resort, one of the largest Indian hotels and casinos in the US, and those icons of roadside Americana, the World’s Biggest Dinosaurs. These huge concrete structures, an apatosaurus and a tyrannosaurus, were featured in the film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.

Bizarrely, the dinosaurs were purchased in 2005 by a Christian group that wants to promote creationism (aka “intelligent design”). Dinosaurs have always been one of Tommy’s fascinations, and religious fanatics are one of mine, so we climbed through the apatosaurus’ tail, entered its belly, and found thousands of "educational" toys, books, and displays intended to debunk the concept of evolution.

I asked Tommy what he thought of Bible literalists who don't accept evolution and believe that the earth is thousands rather than billions of years old. “Absolutely ridiculous,” he told me. “Everything changes. Everything evolves.”