Easy to See :: Really Sacred

Easy to See :: Really Sacred Martyn Smith

© Martyn Smith, 2023 Published in the United States

Preface As I put the finishing touches on this visual essay about the

so unremarkable, are the ones that most call out for inquiry.

landscape of the Interstate, I thought I’d see what ChatGPT

I suspect that these spaces that hold a treasure of assumed

could tell me about the stretch of Interstate 90 I was writing

values. This visual essay began as a challenge to myself to

about. The results were extremely bland, and so I asked the

write about an experience that resists commentary and

AI service to “add details from the landscape.” I was still

interpretation. As I started to write about this stretch of

disappointed with the result:

Interstate I unexpectedly started thinking about a contrasting

The drive on I-90 between Elkhart, Indiana and Toledo, Ohio passes through rural farmland with fields of crops and rolling hills. The landscape is dotted with small towns and forests, and you may see occasional bodies of water such as rivers, lakes,

space I’d visited twenty years earlier—a stretch of desert road heading out of the city of al-Quseir on the Red Sea. I recalled seeing there the signs of ruined infrastructure, and graffiti

and streams. As you approach Toledo, the terrain may become

in multiple ancient languages. Surely that was also a world

more built up, with suburban developments and commercial

whose meaning was invisible to its participants.

areas appearing alongside the highway. There may also be some light industry and manufacturing visible along the route. Overall, the drive is characterized by rural, agricultural landscapes with some urban elements as you near Toledo.

The hardest thing for an AI to mimic will surely be insight drawn from bodily presence in a place. Summarizing a legal brief or themes from a historical text is one thing, but to see the landscape as a sensing body and to put a finger on the social meaning that inheres in things will be hard for AI. It’s also true that from a conventional point of view there’s not much to say about this one stretch of Interstate.

I tend to take the idea of “no place” as a challenge. The places that become invisible because they are so ordinary,

Infrastructure might seem an odd interest for a scholar in the humanities, but media theorist John Durham Peters has recently called (half-seriously) for “infrastructuralism” as a follow-up to the theoretical perspectives of structuralism and post-structuralism. Such an Infrastructuralism would give attention to the “the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all the mischievous work done behind the scenes.” At its most basic such work would “make environments visible.”

To my way of thinking the work of infrastructuralism could be accomplished best by a traveler, who asks questions of things in the landscape, and then answers those questions in a process of steady reflection.

The Route from Appleton, Wisconsin to Boston, Massachusetts

Interstate 80/90 between Elkhart, Indiana and Toledo, Ohio

In the fall of 2020, while Covid was still a major concern, we drove from northeast Wisconsin to Niagara, New York in one day.

We completed the drive with a minimum of stops, which meant a full day of driving. Between Chicago and Cleveland we followed Interstate 80/90 through northern Indiana and Ohio. For a couple of hours, while passing through some of the most ordinary scenery in America, I sat in the passenger seat and snapped photos. This short essay is built upon the photos I took on this trip, ordered to follow my thematic line of thinking. An Interstate Highway is about nothing more than transportation, but I wondered if I’d be able to find intersections between this common road and social or even religious values. The Interstate

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Highway System is the very definition of national infrastructure. When people imagine an “infrastructure bill” they think about repairing highways and bridges. This familiar web of highways stitching together the population centers of the United States goes back to President Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. These corridors are maintained by individual states, but the money comes from the federal government through tax revenues. These highways barely participate in local culture, being mostly marked by the gas stations, motels, and restaurants that are common around the country or region of the country. The Interstate System nourishes a generic national culture, and drivers are mostly happy to pass right on by the towns and cities

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that come up along the way. Once the Interstate System was funded in 1956, it needed a distinctive sign, and our familiar Interstate shield was developed. The colors for this shield would be red, white, and blue, borrowing from the US flag (appropriate for a truly national system of linked roads). The signage here provided two Interstate shields since along this stretch Interstates 80 and 90 come together as a single highway. Near Cleveland the two would diverge, one heading north the other staying pretty much straight ahead. This stretch was also part of the Ohio Turnpike, meaning this stretch of the road had periodic tolls. These Interstate shields are officially known as “reassurance markers” since they don’t alert drivers to changes, just reassure them

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that they are still on the same route. Interstates have an impenetrable sameness. What is there to say about a common scene like this one, approaching Toledo, Ohio? That McDonalds sign is recognizable around the world; its menu items are no mystery to most motorists. The TA sign to the right of McDonalds stands for Travel Centers of America, a national chain of gas stations, but which has an impressive density in the Midwest. These are all elements of the infrastructure for moving people and stuff around the United States. Scenes like this are so repetitive that they don’t get written about. They are a blank spot of the American experience, known but also unknown in any reflective way. I’m trying to write about the Interstate experience as if

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readers were looking back on these roads from a transformed future country. Some years back I read the book Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by the prolific Texas writer Larry McMurtry. He’d made it his goal to travel the Interstates and write about that experience. But what I noted was that he couldn’t say much about what was in front of him, and he moved quickly into digressions on regional writers and local history. He writes at one point: “I think I have a pretty high curiosity, but there’s really not much for even the highest curiosity to latch on to as one follows the 70 across Indiana...” (Interstate 70 is on the southern end of Ohio and Indiana.) I am taking that as a challenge, and these photos will keep me on task to write about what

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was actually in front of me on this road trip. For an experienced driver there are no mysteries in this photo. The elements that compose the scene are interchangeable, so we could be anywhere. We are looking ahead on a standard Interstate (two lanes each direction, separated by a grassy median). The orange pylons and lane-shift warning signs alert drivers to coming roadwork, and tell us that we should prepare to slow down. That blue sign advertises businesses coming up at the next exit. Lodging will be available (useful in late evenings as drivers begin to feel sleepy). Up ahead that overhead green sign identifies an exit for the connecting state highway that takes drivers to Wauseon, Ohio (pop. 7,500). The reason why we can drive through scenes like

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this on cognitive auto-pilot is because there exists a manual that codifies the purpose of each color. The colors are treated like radio wavelengths to be used only for specific communicative purposes. These were codified in the 1971 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (known as MUTCD). This manual is updated every few years by the Federal Highway Administration. On the MUTCD page reproduced above you see that the purpose for different colors is closely defined: orange for temporary traffic control, blue for road user services, and green for direction guidance. (Exactly as we see these colors deployed on the previous image.) We don’t feel the need to reflect much about the Interstate in part because so

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much attention has already been poured into its design. While driving we encounter sign repetitions that are diagrammed neatly in the same federal manual that sets the color for the signs. The end result is a feeling of unconscious ease on the part of drivers. We know how each action will play out because it’s staged so meticulously. Because of this we treat the Interstate as

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Google Street View image

a neutral zone that doesn’t demand inquiry. If you can drive a car on the US Interstate, you can drive on any highway around the world. By means of Google Street View I dropped in on one highway in Malaysia (left) and another in Turkey (right). The signage was in both cases a variation on what drivers encounter on a US Interstate. This influence stems from the fact that cars first gained widespread popularity in the US, and so early solutions to infrastructure challenges also originated there. It was natural that other countries wouldn’t start from scratch with their own highway design, and so the colors, signs, and patterns of flow became an element of the US system that went global (with allowance for some variation). The brown signs along US

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Interstates are the ones that most draw my attention. If blue signs represent sites for corporate brands to make their appeal to drivers (McDonalds, next exit), then brown signs are an opportunity for communities make their pitch (stop here and see this site of outstanding interest). Sometimes these brown signs advertise a site that carries only marginal interest. The Howe Grammar School was opened back in 1884, and became a military academy in 1895. So it’s not amazingly old. I see on Wikipedia that this school closed in 2019 (two years before we drove by), so perhaps the brown sign was an attempt by Howe to wrangle some value out of this site even in decline. The school is closed, but now it’s a tourist attraction! We had a distant goal for this

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first day of driving—still three states away—so we couldn’t think of stopping. I’d later read more about this school online. The Howe Military Academy had been affiliated with the Episcopal church. Its chapel was the school’s most noteworthy feature.

Two lines of wooden box pews faced each other across the nave, giving the church an old school format we don’t often see. Its arch Englishness was enhanced by burials in the crypt. In 2020 this whole campus was taken over by Great Commission University, an Evangelical college dedicated to missionary work. On its website this new “university” professes deep respect for the past, but it would be better to note the discontinuity, revealing a shift in the Midwest from building quirky ties to the past

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to this commitment to an Evangelicalism that seeks to replicate itself endlessly around the world. However empty of interest the this landscape looks from the Interstate, towns like Howe with its old military chapel do have stories to tell. But the Interstate system passes over most things regional in favor of the practicalities of long distance travel. The brown signs are a blunt tool for alerting travelers to a few local stories. Interstates bypass city centers, offering access through slower “business loops.” In the vacuum of local interest, what thrives are corporate outposts that represent specialty coffees or pizza or chicken sandwiches.

These pit stops offer a concession to the embodied reality of long-distance driving. What does best at convenience stops are

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well-known stops offering well-known products. The Interstates build up a para-economy at their exits. Especially where an Interstate intersects with another highway, there’s bound to be an island of businesses catering to the needs of both human bodies (food, sleep) and cars (gas). Employees at these exit-island businesses live in nearby towns, but only in the accents and appearance of workers do we get a hint of the local culture or demographics. The Holiday Inn Express is the budget version of Holiday Inn, often located along highways for pull-off convenience. For about $150 it’s possible to get a clean room here for the night, but there’s not much here to excite anyone and so little temptation to stay an extra day. The motel is surrounded by a skirt

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of parking lot, necessary since Interstate drivers are its single customer base. Of all the signage along US highways, the white speed limit sign is the one that has attracted the most controversy. The sign is white since it communicates a regulation. It’s boring in every way, but in the mid-1980s the rock song “I Can’t Drive 55” attacked the sign, or at least the speed regulation it represents. In 1974 Richard Nixon established a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour, but over time US drivers chafed at that low limit. In the 1980s the speed limit went up to 65 mph, and in 1995 the limit was entirely left up to individual states. The simple white sign symbolizes a classic American conflict between group safety and risky personal choices. One characteristic

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of the US Interstate system should be that it carries no religious messaging. There is no sign color set aside for religious reminders. The establishment clause of the United States Constitution prohibits direct support for any religion. But that’s not to say that our Interstates don’t have a clear religious message that becomes evident at many points. It’s not uncommon to see billboards like this one, which preaches a message of salvation only through Jesus. The people who put up these private billboards—or groups that place such messages on commercial billboards—imagine that they are winning souls. That’s what they tell themselves, but what they actually achieve through such signs is the Christianization of this otherwise public space.

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The primary illusion of our time is that we sit facing a screen and order things that show up at the door. We use various metaphors to cover up the physical nature of this experience. We interact with the “cloud.” The smile on Amazon’s boxes and delivery trucks puts a definite emotion on the process of clicking for an order. The bulky infrastructure for this online system is hidden in exurbs one step beyond the suburbs. We cherish the magic of click and delivery, but there’s nothing like a drive on one of the busy Interstates to remind that it’s not all clouds and smiles. An intensely physical and unmagical infrastructure underlies everything that shows up at the door in a neatly packaged box. You could be forgiven at times on Interstate 80/90 for

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thinking you were driving on some wheeled railway. So many semitrucks had grown to three full trailers (legal through Ohio and Indiana), and then add to that the sheer number of trucks. At times they melded together and started to seem like a full train rumbling past on the other side of the divided highway. These Interstate mini-trains wore their corporate logos, whether that was FedEx, UPS, Amazon, or WalMart. Their sheer numbers swept away any notion that they served the local communities we could see from the Interstate. This was about crossing empty space as efficiently as possible, and I suspected that these triples would end at a warehouse set outside Chicago for deliveries. The Covid pandemic had made everyone aware of the

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extent to which we depend on infrastructure. Some positions like truckers and first responders got a lot of love from public signs, and this was true along the Interstate in 2020. This electric sign thanked all truckers for “keeping the country moving!!”

The message was put up by the RV/MH Hall of Fame. I knew that RV stood for “Recreational Vehicle,” but MH I needed to look up, and it turned out to be “Manufactured Housing”—more commonly known as mobile homes. We drove past and so missed a chance to walk through this large warehouse of curated examples of the vehicles and mobile homes that built this industry.

More than once on American highways I’ve run into a “hall of fame” that I never knew (or would’ve guessed) existed. Gasoline

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is the commodity that keeps this Interstate system running. Signs like this one standing above the roadside trees and advertising the price of gas and its corporate delivery systems are found up and down every highway in the US. This sign signals the price for a gallon of gas, either regular unleaded or diesel. The price for gas at this time was still in its pandemic low, which dates this photo. If global warming is to be kept manageable, this whole roadside energy system will have to be transformed, along with attitudes toward transportation. Perhaps we’ll drive less, or perhaps we’ll sit in some parking lot as our car batteries charge.

Either way it must all change, and so it’s time to take a look at all this gas-related stuff we hardly notice because of its familiarity.

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This Kwik Trip gas station and convenience store isn’t far from my home back in Wisconsin. People might use more or less gas in their daily lives, with a shorter or longer commute to work, but since it’s hard to get around in the US without a car, there’s no getting away from these stations unless you buy one of the growing number of electric vehicles (EVs). The guess of many analysts is that this small wave of electric vehicles will grow year over year, and this stop at a gas station will finally be a memory (at least the part about filling up a car with gas). Even things that are mind-numbingly common eventually disappear (imagine the infrastructure that existed for horses in the late 19th century). One goal for me in this series of visual essays is to note

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everything that makes up our physical landscapes, even if so familiar as to fall outside of our attention. This is the basic interface for getting gas into a car. Customers have two options for buying gas. The most common is to use a thin credit card to slide into that slot with the yellow border. Increasingly that same card can be just waved in front of a sensor, present in this case above the regular slot. A screen asks for a pin number to verify the identity of the person using the credit card. The more cumbersome option would be to actually walk into the gas station and pay with a live person, who would then activate this pump #4. There are two types of gas on offer, the standard choice is rated “87” (with corn-derived ethanol mixed in), and the premium is “91.”

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Press one of the yellow buttons and the nozzle will shortly be ready to pump. Our actions around this pump are ritualized, or at least routinized. Most people can almost sleepwalk through a fill-up, inserting a card and pushing buttons without conscious thought. The interface is a screen, which prompts actions and asks questions: “Would you like a receipt?” Any aesthetic

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considerations have been wholly eliminated. One fill-up and my car will run something like 400 miles. When it comes to getting the gas into the car, this metal tube fits loosely into the fill spout on one side of the car. Once in place I pull back the trigger on the nozzle and at that point I can even feel the cold gas running through the nozzle. This whole pump system keeps precise measurement, calculating the gas to the 1000th of a gallon. It’s not a thing of beauty (actually the opposite), but this nozzle is the tool by which energy moves from the gas industry into the world of private use. It’s one of the only points where we see and smell the fossil fuel that underpins so much of modern life. Turning for a bit to another time and place, I’ll start by

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mentioning my favorite work of Arabic literature, the Travels of Ibn Jubayr. Ibn Jubayr made his trip from Andalusia to Mecca and then back from 1183-5 AD. He didn’t stop after arriving in Mecca by way of Egypt, but made his way north to Baghdad and then to Damascus. He didn’t cover the outrageous distances we see in the travels of Ibn Battuta 150 years later, who got all the way to India and China. Reading Ibn Jubayr I had an insight: what makes travel writers important is the simple act of writing down what’s in front of them. No other class of writer makes this their task. What makes for lasting travel writing isn’t the splendor of the prose, but the humble willingness to write down the world—to be a servant of places. A foldout map in the

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modern translation of Ibn Jubayr details his path for readers. He arrived in Alexandria by sea, then traveled up the Nile until he reached Middle Egypt (those cities of Qus, Qift, and Dandarah). From there he headed across the eastern desert to Aydhab on the Red Sea. Ibn Jubayr didn’t leave us with this itinerary as bare fact, but described details of this trip: “Across this desert no one will journey save on camel... the best and most comfortable camel litters used on them are the shaqadif, and the best of these are those made in Yemen, for they are covered in leather and are roomy.” Even on a ride across this bare desert in the year 1183 there were luxury accommodations to be picked out by the discerning traveler. After reading Ibn Jubayr in 2002 while I

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was living in Cairo and learning Arabic, I’d wanted to see the Red Sea shore further south than the resort towns. Travel literature invites this desire for repetition in a physical space. I took a bus from Cairo to the Red Sea port of al-Quseir, and from there I hired a taxi to go inland along the desert road that ends at the Nile. I was in an old taxi, windows down to let in some air. I recall these desert experiences when reading again about a shade contraption described by Ibn Jubayr: “The traveler and his companion in counterpoise will thus be veiled from the blaze of midday heat and may sit reclining and at ease beneath its covering.” His long medieval journey wasn’t without its comforts. I made my way into the desert with a hired taxi, following the

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straight blacktop road. We stopped at a site that was clearly a part of a much older system of transportation and trade, ranged near this old well. I love desert scenery but it would be quite different to experience the desert from atop some plodding camel, even riding on a comfortable litter from Yemen. Ibn Jubayr described his experience in such landscapes: “With his companion he may partake of what he needs of food, or read, when he wishes, the Quran or a book; and whoever deems it lawful to play chess may play his companion, for diversion... To be short, it eases the hardship of travel.” It speaks highly of a civilization to have such pleasures available, but he seems to have little to say about the desert scenery through which he passed. No convoys

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of semi-trucks today head from the Red Sea to the Nile Valley. The popular resorts are far to the north. The main lines of global transport bypass this route, heading instead through the Suez Canal, but that wasn’t always the case. The trip across the desert to the Nile Valley was once the quickest way to get goods to the Mediterranean. This ruined caravanserai lay just off the road, and while it was hard to say just how old its stone-piled walls were, its square interior and storage rooms could only make sense within an ancient system. Through Ibn Jubayr we glimpse what this kind of route was like: “We wished to count the caravans that came and went upon this road, but could not... the greater part of this merchandise was the loads of pepper, so numerous

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as to seem to equal in quantity the dust.” Today nothing could be seen that might be said to equal the dust. Like no place else, a bare desert stamps our minds with the planetary forces shaping the Earth. Human constructions for the “global” world have the tendency to blur our consciousness of the underlying reality. Though the modern system of gas-powered travel had made its way to this valley, the road was small enough and the taxi old enough that the hold of this global system felt tenuous. I could almost imagine Ibn Jubayr and his caravan rounding that curve. And travelers far more ancient than him had stopped here to give thanks to a god before completing their final stage of travel. Those slower forms of travel, and their necessary stops along

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the way, gave desert landscapes like this time to make a real impression on minds. These towers, built at intervals atop the hills surrounding this road, were a common feature. They would’ve taken much effort to build in these dry conditions, yet their purpose isn’t obvious. An academic paper on Egypt’s desert routes calls them “the most prevalent and enigmatic man-made features as their purposes have not been positively determined.” Various possibilities are examined: they could be route markers, security guard posts, or signal towers sending news of ship arrivals from tower to tower. For ancient travelers and transporters they would’ve been part of a readable system, and in that way similar to our Interstate system. Perhaps aspects of

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our highway system will someday seem enigmatic? Where this route from al-Quseir to the Nile became a narrow defile, the rocks were covered with graffiti. Everyone traveling this route had to come through here, so humans from many times and cultures had found it hard to resist leaving some mark behind. Much of the graffiti was from ancient Egypt, including formal hieroglyphs as well as more informal images. Neatly inscribed Greek writing lined some of the rocks. Contemporary Arabic graffiti was here too. Travel is a mode of writing that relishes and marks the ephemeral nature of human existence. From the planetary perspective all human creations could be summarized by such graffiti, reaching a greater or lesser level of finish. The

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ancient hieroglyphic texts and Greek writing identify this route as a well-trodden ancient path between the Red Sea and the Nile Valley. Whatever the content of all that writing, those texts symbolized long distance trade and global connections. In the midst of that writing were hints of a whole other way of relating to this desert landscape. The Bedouin presence here was marked at several points by an ibex, inscribed here with long—though exaggerated—horns. Such ibex images help us see this desert as home, not solely as a transportation challenge for long distance traders. These ibex are now endangered in Egypt, but they were once hunted for food by the Bedouin. These creatures were part of a nomadic life way in which there was no further

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place to which people wanted to arrive, they worked simply for survival in this very desert. My first website, years ago, was entitled Old Roads, based on the message of Jeremiah from the Bible: “Thus says the lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” I was drawn to the application of travel as a metaphor for the study of the ancient world. The study of the past, or confrontation with an open road, can liberate and lend a sense that our locked-in systems can be built anew, re-imagined. On the Interstate it was hard to imagine how anything could ever be different, but this desert road heading out of al-Quseir made me think about all the past systems that

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had come and gone, and even what it could mean to be at home in a landscape. In al-Quseir I stayed in a hotel that had taken over and renovated a merchant’s house built in the early 20th century. I had found the hotel thanks to a write-up in the Lonely Planet Egypt guidebook. It’s walls were constructed of coral blocks and the wooden balconies looked out onto the Red Sea beach. The road from al-Quseir to the Nile valley was ancient, but this port city had been used by successive powers. Even the British Empire had made use of it for transporting Indian spices to the Mediterranean right up until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Today that past infrastructure of global trade has been replaced by that of global tourism. Bypassed cities like

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al-Quseir hope for a trickle of curious tourists, or the eventual opening of large resorts. A block or two inland from our hotel was this dusty fort restored by the American Research Center in Egypt in the 1990s. Forts of a similar size have become nationalist symbols for Gulf states like the UAE (even featuring on their currency), but there was no question of that happening here. This was just a dusty fort, always to be overshadowed by Egypt’s famous Pharonic ruins in the Nile Valley. The Ottomans had built this fort in 1571, and it was later occupied by the French, English, and the Egyptians. Those cannons doesn there were from 18th century Europe; the small boat was an example of the local craft once used for pearl diving. Modern visitors strained to

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understand how these things once fit together into a coherent system. At some point all these things had made up the infrastructure for a working economy. The houses near the center of al-Quseir carried many examples of Hajj wall art. The pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam, but it’s required only for those who have the economic means. Anyone who completes the Hajj receives a new title added to their name (“Haj”). In this image the owner of this residence identifies himself as Haj Saad Hamza al-Salmi. The classic image of the black Kaaba surrounded by people makes the visual claim that he was present in Mecca for the Hajj. The means of travel to Mecca is made clear by that large ship. People living on the Red Sea

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coast go north to Suez to get on a pilgrim ship running down to Jeddah on the Saudi side of the Red Sea. I took as many photos of Hajj wall art as I could. Take this example, featuring presumably the husband and wife who lived in this home. The two are kneeling in front of the Maqam Ibrahim near the Kaaba in Mecca, the place where Abraham once stood to call the nations to belief.

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This is the art I most appreciate: not framed museum pieces, but sites where belief seems to push itself into expression on the everyday surfaces of life. From the wall of the fort in al-Quseir I looked out on the city (the Red Sea can just be seen beyond).

The one structure that truly stands out is the minaret, whose speakers would sound the calls to prayer. These buildings aren’t of the luxury variety, and toward the back you see a standard unfinished building with rebar sticking out from support beams.

On the building directly opposite it’s possible to glimpse more of the medallion-like images that claim completion of the Hajj.

Ibn Jubayr, seeking to complete his own Hajj back in 1183, arrived at another Red Sea port (Aydhab, which was further south

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than al-Quseir). He wrote about newly built houses made of plaster, though most of the structures were simple booths constructed of reeds. Al-Quseir was once a similar stopping point on a major trade route, offering the closest crossing point from the Red Sea to the Nile Valley. Remnants of this logistical importance remain, but all that grows harder to interpret, and stranger, since the city had come to feel like the end of the road, not a crossroads. It’s a place you look around and say: “OK, nothing is happening here.” The world is filled with cities that have been passed over when canals are completed or highways improved. Often the cities remain, along with much of their population, but the economic purpose is lost. Along an arm of al-

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Quseir’s harbor were beachside cafes. The entrance to one of them was decorated with colorful lights, so as to be conspicuous in the evening. At the top was a contraption that might at first look like a cartoon snake, but is actually (when lit up) the Arabic word for God (Allah). This pious sign fit well in a town that had so many markers for Hajj completion. The cheap plastic chairs

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at this cafe have become a global marker for nowhere. That impermanence is a stark contrast to this stark basalt object near the ruined caravanserai. Upon seeing it I first imagined it to be some abandoned altar. Just across the road was the wall of ancient graffiti indicating ancient worship. But looking again at this object it appears much more recent, not ancient at all. I can see the marks of some hard chisel against the black stone, and no indication of wear from long ritual use. So I can’t figure what it was ever for. Is it some broken feeding trough? I’m driven to return to the idea of an altar. Perhaps this could be a model for an altar to an unknown god along our modern Interstates, which recognize no divinity. Empty basalt altars like this should be hand

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carved and set as lonesome and enigmatic calls to the sacred. Returning now to the I-90 as it ran through northern Indiana, I was in the heart of the pleasure craft business. No altars here! I passed concrete fields of new RVs standing ready to take retirees into the heart of the National Parks or along the roads of wild Michigan. Unsightly businesses abounded, like this one, servicing RVs and pontoon boats. Though Americans proudly sing “America the Beautiful,” they must usually be thinking about places other than home. Beauty is always “out there,” reachable by means of expensive motorized vehicles and boats. It’s far more difficult to find signs of pride about what’s “right here.” On the Interstate I try to imagine the motivation for the structures I pass,

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and look for sites where someone has made a design choice for the sake of the land itself. Infrastructure on the Interstate stood without any attempt at disguise or beautification. Cell towers within cities are often hidden away as palm trees or set atop water towers, but here on this long highway they simply stretched into the sky as isolated steel lattice towers. Those pad-like antennas at the top show that this tower is primarily for cell phone reception. It was built tall since the main users here were travelers along this stretch of highway.Those antennas were handling all the data appearing on screens inside vehicles. Whether a trucker is texting home or a kid in some backseat is watching YouTube, that information is getting relayed by these towers.

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When I passed this site I had no access to what all this machinery meant. I could say broadly that I associate those silos with grain storage, and the name of this company (“Gro Alliance”) seemed to hint in the direction of farming and seeds. I was drawn to this sight along the Interstate because of the otherworldly symmetry in that metal machinery. At the moment of driving past I couldn’t have given even the most elementary account of the purpose of this stuff. I think that’s a big problem in our era. We know far too little about the infrastructure that underlies our lifestyle, and that’s at least one reason for our political division.

Gro Alliance isn’t some secretive farming corporation. They maintain a website that reaches out to customers in modern

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business-speak: “Seed Supply Chain Solutions for Future-Focused Companies.” That might be opaque, but actual information manages to come through, and it’s possible to watch YouTube videos or read Facebook posts that show this facility at work gathering the corn that will before long become seed. This seed will then be used on farms around the US. The issue is that no one cares. The highway system alerts travelers to sites like a 19th century military chapel with a brown sign, but the assumption is that we’ll drive past Gro Alliance without any questions. We need some special color for signs that inform us about infrastructure we encounter. We should be invited to stop and learn about sites like Gro Alliance. Every place on the electrical

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grid has these small bounded substations where high voltage lines enter local systems, and from here that electricity gets distributed into manageable lines (which eventually reach individual homes). Since you can’t just send a high voltage power line into a home or business, these substations are a necessary part of our landscapes, rural or urban. What’s remarkable is the extent to which we drive insensibly past this infrastructure. For me this is why it’s important to use a camera, it forces me to be conscious of what I’m seeing and so allows infrastructure to step into conscious view. Without a camera and my specific goal of seeing the Interstate, I don’t think I’d have ever seen this substation. There were moments along the way when I looked out

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the window and the landscape looked perfect. The properties seemed orderly, the fields well kept. This is one version of America. Since this was 2020 there were political likelihoods to consider. Who would these people turn out to be if I knocked on theh door of this house? In the majority of houses along here I knew I’d meet Trump supporters. The signs are there: big truck, trimmed-to-the-edges yard, an above ground pool. This is also someone who helps make the country work. Our political division falls between the economic barrier of infrastructure and meaning. These two have been divided so that we barely see each other across that line. Coming into Toledo, Ohio we left the open farmland (with occasional infrastructure) and started to

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see actual neighborhoods. Swanton was a small town about 30 miles west of Toledo. It had a population of around 3,800. Its Wikipedia page tells me about an August corn festival, featuring a parade, volleyball competition, singing contest, and a car show. The famous people from Swanton included an MLB pitcher and an NFL wide receiver. Since celebrity has become the anchor for place meaning, it’s hard for a town to claim value without such examples of individual success in sports or entertainment. I have yet to see a Wikipedia page for a small town that lists some young person who went on to be an expert in some academic field. Celebrity is the currency that gives meaning in America. Many travelers pass Swanton, but it sits huddled

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in its own world. Long distance travel is dominated by its own closed set of concerns. The exits offered islands of gas and food.

The signs pragmatically directed drivers toward multiple destinations. Most drivers were striving to get from point A to point B. It felt like trucks in particular had become more swervy and distracted than they used to be. We passed this truck accident, and wondered how exactly it had happened. It appeared to be an unforced error, and thankfully I saw no reason to suspect dire injury. What I’m getting at is that the Interstate is a world of its own. We were flowing in a stream of vehicles with little or no connection to landscapes outside our windows. When I was young and starting to take a lot of photos I often turned my camera

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onto the clouds. It was part of a transition between snapping photos of myself with friends and taking photos that caught the world around me. I saw clouds as a living abstract painting. It wasn’t the cloud shapes that held me (I’ve never been captivated by seeing faces or shapes), rather I was drawn to the shifts in texture. Soft focus blocks of white (like something from a Rothko painting) sit behind or even infiltrate more focused shapes. Along these long stretches of Interstate through the flat Midwest it can feel like the sky makes the one real offer of transcendence amidst landscapes that refuse the very notion. After Toledo I stopped taking photos. Or rather, I took over the driving again on our trek to Niagara (and then on to Boston). A little ways past

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Cleveland we stopped to fill up. We had made it from Wisconsin to here on two tanks of gas in our rented and oversized SUV. We were moving our daughter so that she could start her graduate school program in Boston. Covid was a concern, and this was several months before the vaccinations would start to roll out. We were doing our best to pass the route wholly within the Interstate bubble, but every so often we had to stop and interact with the world—if only with automated payment systems. The Interstates systematize and encourage such sealed-off travel. At Cleveland the two Interstates that had run together split apart.

We took the northern route—Interstate 90—since that would eventually take us to Boston. We curved north and came into

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Buffalo. It wasn’t much farther to arrive at Niagara, where we would stop and the following morning walk around the famous falls. We stood on the American side with a crowd of tourists. The Canadian border (normally reached by that Rainbow Bridge in the distance) was closed due to Covid. Niagara Falls can be imagined as the ultimate roadside attraction, and easy access to symbolic natural sites is one easy-to-understand reason for the Interstate System. When we bind up the continental US in the imagination it’s often by means of linked natural sites (“from the Redwood Forests to the Gulfstream waters...”). Here on the American side of the falls I got a sense that this site was within reach of millions willing to drive a few hours, and I wondered if

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Google Earth image

that ease of access had now become a liability. In the foreground of this Google Earth image is the entrance to the Niagara Falls State Park, leading visitors to the overlook points. In the other direction the park opens onto the downtown. The Niagara Wax Museum of History sits nexts to a Hard Rock Cafe among the low rise buildings. Popular food destinations ranged from Indian restaurants to the memorably named Mother Cluckers (a chicken joint). That tall glass-covered building is the Seneca Resort and Casino, finished in 2002. By staking out that central position the Seneca Casino offers itself as the top Niagara experience.

Its competitors in déclassé glory are a bevy of midlevel hotels like the Comfort Inn, Wyndham Garden, and Holiday Inn. The

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Niagara Falls remain a powerful in-person experience. The mass of water plunging off the escarpment is deafening as it descends onto the boulders along the bottom. It feels like this is all about the physics of water meeting rock, with lots of help from gravity, but the staged feeling is hard to escape with even cursory reading about the history of these falls. Since 1950 the Army Corps of Engineers has diverted up to 50% of the water for hydroelectric power. The remaining water flow is carefully controlled for maximum visual effect. In 1969 the flow was entirely cut-off so that the rocks on the edge could be bolted into place and its curtain-like appearance effectively preserved. The crowds at Niagara were the thing that had to be preserved!

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Perhaps because of all that past staging, Niagara Falls was a New York State Park rather than a National Park. It seemed odd that a globally famous site would be administered at the state level. It should be a national something or other, because it was a rare democratic space. This wasn’t some exclusive crowd. My impression was built on the popular dress and style of the people around me, and the mixture of ethnic groups and races. It’s possible the Canadian side (a Sheraton Hotel and a casino visible in this photo) attracts another crowd. But on the American side it was like there existed something super famous that everyone could see and experience. The next day we were back on I-90, driving east across upstate New York. We stopped for a look at

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the grounds of the Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine, alerted to its presence by a blue sign listing some attractions at the next exit. At the heart of the site (which we couldn’t resist) was this coliseum, built in 1930 at the location of the Mohawk village where three Jesuits were martyred a full 300 years earlier. All eight Jesuit saint-martyrs from around North America were represented by a white statue over an entrance. The site as a whole caught my attention with its three layers of meaning: roadside attraction, Christianized landscape, and recognition of the Native American past. It was unclear how the location of this village had been determined, but one sign credited General John S. Clark, who in the early years of the 20th century had tried to map Native

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sites. In the small on-site museum we could examine this model of the Mohawk village of Ossernenon. It was here in 1646 that Father Isaac Jogues and two Jesuit companions were killed by the Natives, who suspected that the missionaries had introduced yet another wave of disease. Besides the killing of the Jesuits, this was also the birthplace of Kateri Tekakwitha, born in 1656 (so ten years after the death of the missionaries). Tekakwitha died at the young age of 24, known for her devotion and virginity.

Since being beatified in by Pope John Paul II in 1980, her saint profile has been on a steady rise. So the grounds of old Ossernenon has two independent claims to pious attention. Father Jogues, with a Catholic mission located beside the Mohawk village,

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made it his business to carve signs into trees. So far as he was concerned, this was a landscape ruled by demons. To counter their influence he carved the name of Jesus and Christian crosses into the trees. He attributed this feeling to spiritual warfare, but he was dimly aware of an anthropological truth: peoples set their stories onto the landscapes that surround

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them. Sensing this Native story, Father Jogues was drawn to inscribe the Christian story on this dark forest. That story of Father Jogues setting the name of Jesus and these crosses onto the trees of the forest captured the imagination of the designers of this shrine and its grounds. Out in front of the circular church is a small grove, containing a walkway that allows visitors to walk the Stations of the Cross (that brick structure on the left is one station). The trees throughout this grove are marked now with small red crosses. It’s as if the ancient Ossernenon of the Mohawk still has to be kept at bay. Or perhaps it’s comforting for visitors to see this reenactment of the Christianization of the forest primeval and the parallel erasure of Native stories and beliefs. That

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great coliseum a the center of the site was closed due to Covid, but the museum displayed photos that let me see how it looked inside. All the interior support columns were marked with the name of Jesus and a cross, recalling the work of Father Jogues.

Worshippers could look around and imagine that this sacred work had been completed, and the Native forest had actually become a church. At the center, the altarpiece is in the form of a rustic fort or mission. The church as a whole sets out a symbolic version of initial settlement and then the complete takeover of the landscape by the cross. In the end Christians have become at home, and North America could be imagined as a church. That’s the larger message of this shrine it would seem. Christians

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understand the image of Jesus on the cross to be connected to a specific time and place. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem claims to contain the ground where it happened. So a crucifix properly would be imagined in the arid landscape of Palestine. But with its universal import, Christians have decided that the image belongs everywhere, and isn’t limited to the place where it happened. A crucifix can be set up in the jungles of South Asia, the mountains of Peru, or here in a forested tract of Upstate New York. Its addition provides a focal point for personal meditation (note that red chair), but also communicates that a particular landscape has been added to this universal dominion. The drama of the Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine takes on a

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Google Earth image

new focus when seen from above on Google Earth. The round coliseum easily stands out. The bit of forested land to its left holds the stations of the cross and all those trees with red crosses. Running above it is Interstate 90, also known as the New York State Thruway. Above that the Mohawk River is visible (where the bodies of the martyrs were thrown in 1646). If the site originally tried to tell a story about Christianizing the landscape, it now also reached out to the mass of indifferent drivers on the Interstate/Thruway (built in the 1950s). Whatever the outward confidence in the Christianization of the past landscape, the site evidently feels uncertain about the current state of religion. I’ve circled in yellow some additions to the site that appear

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designed purely with highway travelers in mind. These blue spruces, seen from a distance, formed a cross on this hillside. From up close the cross shape isn’t clear, but something must be signalled since trees don’t grow like this on their own. A handpainted sign explains that this tree-cross symbolizes “the planting of the faith in New York.” Out in the middle distance I could see cars and trucks hurrying along Interstate 90, and beyond was the Mohawk River. The carved crosses by Father Jogues in the 1640s were for human beings walking in the forest. Those crosses represented an attempt to Christianize the Native forest. But this hillside cross was an attempt to break into the far narrower experience of the modern Interstate. This statue of Our Lady of

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Fatima isn’t large enough to command the hills around the Mohawk River Valley. For those visiting the shrine it provided the illusion of command. The statue’s plaque presents a somewhat circuitous argument for its sacred quality: a statue was blessed

by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican Gardens in 1983. Then a short while later this statue was “cast from the same mold” as that other one, and when it was erected here it was blessed by the local bishop. Not far away is an even smaller monument for unborn children, put up by the Knights of Columbus (always on the abortion beat). In this location the message of these statues fizzles out, overshadowed by the sight lines of the landscape. They are signs only for those who already believe and are standing

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Google Street View image

on this site. We should distinguish between the assumed landscape and chosen stops. What is truly sacred within any society won’t be coded as a roadside choice, but as a given fact. The Interstate is set up for the comfort of the choosing Self. Its rumble strips and color-coded signs aim to increase bodily safety and preserve the Self. Fossil fuel consumption is another part of the assumed landscape. But the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville is a choice. It’s a site at which some (likely Catholic) travelers will be drawn to stop, but as a pure object of choice it falls away from the sacred. We can guess that Father Jogues didn’t nail crosses to trees in order to make Christianity just one choice for drivers on the Interstate. On the Interstate travelers

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are made aware of the invisible lines that divide states from one another. Often as not these borders don’t follow any natural feature but reproduce lines drawn on some map in a conference room, and so we are insensible of moving from state to state.

This is the sign marking the point where Interstate 90 crosses into Massachusetts from New York. These signs are presented as a mere “welcome” but they are more fundamental than that word makes it seem. The system of states is the underlying political fact that lends meaning to the Interstate system. By signs like this the basic political terms of the nation are worked into the consciousness of all travelers (something that happens without a choice). Interstate travel in a private car is also a model for

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the independent Self. One reason fossil fuel use has been so hard to curb is that Interstate travel isn’t just a practical convenience, but a symbol of identity. Walt Whitman wrote of taking to the open road “afoot and light-hearted... the world before me.” But his “long brown path” has been paved over and expanded many times over since then. Woody Guthrie was a successor to Whitman, and his anthem “This Land is Your Land,” though written in 1940 and so prior to the Interstate System, fully presages this system. Once again in Guthrie’s vision, it’s the ability to wander that lends value to the Self, whose range has expanded to the entire continental United States. This is how the concept of the sacred is mixed into the nondescript stuff of the Interstate.

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The Form of the Visual Essay This is one in a series of visual essays that interprets places in the US and around the world. Except for some historical images included for comparison, the photos were all taken by me in the process of travel. My goal as a photographer isn’t to capture a site from the perfect time of day and just the right angle, but rather to see the world from the common point of view of an embodied person. The typical look of a place is my starting point for critical interpretation (not a professional image as one might see in an architectural book). No photos in this collection have been gotten by guiding a drone up in the sky or making use of a telephoto lens for a close-up.

This is the common world that presents itself to every eye.

For the past years I’ve worked to discipline my mind by demanding that thought be generated by things I can see.

In his essay “Nature” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about becoming a transparent eyeball. I’ve long been drawn to that idea of becoming a pure perceiver, an interpreter. I like the feeling of arriving at a place and trying to empty my mind of expectations and becoming alert.

Landscapes speak. They speak of the collective values of those who inhabit the space. They reveal more clearly than any written constitution the power structure of a society.

Group identities that give meaning to individual lives find external expression in landscapes. This can all be read if we become attentive. That’s not to say that landscapes speak with one voice. They are alive with competing values and identities. When I become most still in a place, most emptied of my Self, it feels like there’s a conversation that I can hear going on. The voices come from not only built structures but the natural features too. With time the voices of a place gain clarity. There are the insistent voices of the present, as well as the fragmented and fading voices of past ways of being. And the camera is my tool for taking note of these conversations.

I’ve called these collections of words and images “visual essays,” but together they become a photographic documentary. What I don’t like about film documentaries is that they are so often composed around the voices of individuals. Documentaries need talking heads to hold the interest of a mass audience. I was drawn to a different kind of documentary project: what if places were allowed to speak? That’s the project here. Landscapes are ultimately a human creation, but they speak a collective, not an individual, story.

One detail that will help to explain my approach to place is Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion: “A system

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of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive,

but it nevertheless represents a type of expertise. It

and long lasting moods and motivations, etc...” It’s the

requires a feel for history and change, and a willingness

first phrase of that definition that I’d like to highlight—

to look not just at the postcard vistas, but at the signs and

the “system of symbols.” The implication is that the study

ephemeral things that build meaning into that vista. It

of religion isn’t about getting inside the consciousness of

means looking at what other visitors take for granted. Our

people, but about interpreting the external symbolic world

global world needs academics who are skillful perceivers

created by each and every culture. Everything about the

and connecters. We underestimate the insight of travelers.

human landscape is part of this system of symbols, from

We are grateful for the descriptions of a medieval traveller

the architecture of buildings, to the monuments, to the

like Ibn Jubayr as he passes through the Islamic world on

clothes people are wearing, to the signs and graffiti and

his way to complete the Hajj, but we forget that our own

murals. These are ways that people express a collective

places need patient describers like him.

story about who they are. One further inspiration I’ve

Technology ought to bring about a shake-

taken from Geertz is his view that the essay is the form

up in academic forms, especially in the Humanities.

that can best hold the work of interpretation.

Experimentation has marked other fields. 20th century

I hasten to add that this is by no means a work of

poets struggled to find the literary forms that best

anthropology. The strong preference in academic work

expressed their thought. A.R. Ammons typed out poems

is to develop a single point of specialization. The goal is

on narrow strips of paper, finding that form of limitation

to burrow into a specific place and then report back to

helpful. I claim that same range of experimentation for

the wider community. A wealth of ethnographies and

my own work. After a season of visual experimentation I

historical monographs have flowed from this system. One

arrived at this system of using paired photos with running

thing academics don’t often do is write travel narratives,

commentary to present the story of places where I’ve spent

which by definition means setting aside specialization

time. As these essays accumulate they will become an

and becoming a conduit for serial impressions about a

extended study of global places in a time when landscapes

place. Such writing is the opposite of focused expertise,

and cities are threatened around the world.

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