It is a long and drowsy ride down Interstate 88 when it’s noon on a Sunday and hot on a deteriorating Greyhound bus. The sun is too bright for sleep and the interior too gloomy for productivity, so the only thing to do is to watch the green rolling hills and rivers, the small towns cut in half by cars that speed by but never stop, the mines and smokestacks and high schools, dormant on Sunday or maybe forever. Laid before the rumbling bus, this panorama invites reflection on the simplest things, like what we take for granted.
The gradual curves of I-88 wind their way from Schenectady through Albany to Binghamton and beyond. As most drivers can attest, the route is often closed to one lane and plotted by series of orange construction cones. They are markers of the never-ending struggle to hold open the way west, to invite people outward and forward to Binghamton to advance their fortunes and careers.
If it is true that Binghamton is “The Twilight Zone,” then I-88 is the hypnotizing way in. A desolate 118-mile stretch spotted with isolated cars, at times it can appear like an ancient abandoned road carved through the forest by a proud and extinct people. Like ancient sailors fearing the edge of the world, a lone driver must wonder what is coming around the corner.
Most of the time, though, a few cars gather and cruise in synchrony. Affixed to many of them are faded green “Binghamton University” stickers. Eighteen-wheelers barrel ahead, carrying too-eager consumers their treasured brand names. Workers and visitors, residents and professors, make their way down I-88 from Albany or elsewhere on far-flung missions.
Fellow travelers are reminders that we all crisscross roads day in and day out, inscribing on them a record of our needs and wants, of our aspirations and plans. Roads regiment our movements, directing us through places and time, from one opportunity to the next. They are the thresholds that connect and divide the disparate lives we lead and the fragmented places where we live. They inscribe us as we inscribe them.
To some, I-88 must symbolize the surrender to excess: construction on a massive scale, completed in the 1980s but still breaking down often (two truck drivers were killed on I-88 in 2006 when the asphalt could not hold up to torrential rain), infrequently used. Was it a waste of taxpayer money?
The namesake of the “Senator Warren M. Anderson Expressway” (I-88’s official name), Republican state Sen. Warren Anderson was a Binghamton resident and the majority leader of the New York State Senate until 1988. He knew, as do many Binghamton residents who lived here before I-88 was complete, that in those times a trip from Binghamton to Albany took five hours. An older couple that lives near here described the pre-I-88 trip to me: leaving in the morning with a cooler of beer, they wound around back roads for hours, burning gas and drinking beer (two things that were less illegal to do in the old days), and they were lucky to get anywhere before the afternoon.
This is a trip that Warren Anderson surely wasn’t too fond of, and it’s a trip that many of our peers here at Binghamton would not want to make a few times a year. Highway funding is an example of government investment in infrastructure that might be expensive, even wasteful, but is obviously necessary.
“Where would Binghamton be without I-88 and other highways,” I wondered as I looked out the window of the bus. Where would I be going to college without them? Where would a new generation go to law school? How would we replace thousands of graduating engineers, managers, teachers, nurses and others if Binghamton University were not here to prepare them for their careers?
What roads aren’t built yet that should be?