Among the major highways whose business it is to ferry people and goods across county and state lines there is an easy-to-spot date-based divergence in building style. There exist 'old' and 'new' roads, the former evident between the eastern mountains and the Atlantic coastline from the Carolinas northward and in the close-in parts of the big older metropoli in California and everywhere else and the latter, built in a great spurt, blasting across the vast continental interior between all these places. Old roads, mostly two and four lanes although some have been the subject of periodic 'improvement' projects through the years, exhibit a passing respect for curvaceous landscapes, hugging river bottoms and hillsides and avoiding expensive shortcuts like the notchcuts that allow drivers to pass through mountains rather than around them. One likes to think of old roads as being both about the drive and about the places in between rather than about the finding of efficiencies and the hewing of a continental economy. This is probably overly romantic--exploding rates automobile of usage and incremental improvements in technology do more to explain the obsolescence of the old roads than some great ideological shift--but for the makers of T-shirts and the exploiters of cultural memes it has been a useful fallacy, the cult of Route 66 exerting a greater pull now than during the road's heyday in the middle of the last century. The crisp but uninspired rest stops and the gaudy neon gas mart signs rising from the earth every few exits along the new roads reinforce that lizard-brain memory of a rosy before-time in which arterials didn't consciously ignore the small towns and villages between the more populated areas they sought to connect. Everything about the new roads is arranged in advance for us to the point where we find ourselves growing steadily more nervous the farther we venture beyond the neon exit lights, hearts pounding at the thought that we might soon be reduced to asking a pedestrian or small business owner how to find our way back to the interstate, souls begging God for the release of that blue and red numbered shield. It must have been different once, we muse, visions of neighborly gas pumpers and smiling bespectacled trinket-shop ladies dancing across the blacktop rushing toward us.