…about highways.
Highways seem so permanent. But they’re not. Sure, short-term they don’t move much, but over longer time-spans, they change like the tracks of streams finding the path of least resistance. Take Route 66. That famous Highway was a single road connecting Chicago to Los Angeles with a distance in 1926 of almost 2,500 miles. As a continuous marked highway it’s gone now, replaced by the interstate highway system, but over the years it was in service, the road didn’t always follow the exact same route. There were a number of improvements and realignments over the years. One realignment in New Mexico entirely bypassed Santa Fe! By the 1960s its length had been reduced to 2,278 miles.
Where I’m going with this train of thought relates to current day highways. Modern roads are marked with mile-markers; ascending numbers from west to east and south to north, by state. Your position on the highway can be identified by mile-markers. Freeway exits are identified by their mile-marker. So what happens when a modern road suffers an “improvement”? Maybe a city is bypassed. Maybe part of a road is washed out or falls off the side of a mountain and a better route is determined for the rebuild. What if a few miles are knocked off a route? Or added? What does that do to all our location codes? If the fix is between mile-markers 50 and 75, and knocks 5 miles off the trip, what happens to mile marker 90 or 100? Does the highway just skip five miles on its markers and leave the exit numbers the same? Or does exit number 80 become exit 75? Changing everything would be impractical because every single exit number and mileage sign downstream of the mileage change would have to be replaced. But if they leave all the signage the same, all the following mile markers wouldn’t be true!
We’re home at Sandpipers. Big week next week. Judy gets the other eyeball surgery before dawn on Monday. Tuesday we get the day-after follow-up appointment and from there go straight to get our second Covid shots.
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