The highway, for me and for my fellow Deadheads, as well as for countless other individuals and communities, has been a quintessentially American spiritual technology of the twentieth century. As both symbol and concrete (or asphalt) reality, as metaphor and metonym, the highway has figured deeply as a space of freedom, transformation, discovery, individualism, danger, hope, and new beginnings. Though a twentieth-century development, the highway’s spiritual roots lie further back in the seafaring trajectories of the European pilgrims and entrepreneurs who saw in their westward movements and explorations the possibilities of fulfillment of purpose and discovery. Ever since, the frontier and pioneers have defined at least one vector of the American Dream. From Mormons to missionaries, speculators to homesteaders, natives to immigrants, movement across the American continent has been an essential element of the American soul.
A thorough study of highway spirituality would also have to include formative roots in Transcendentalism and the Romantic painters of the Hudson River School, among other American imaginaries that identified God in nature and, especially, in the abundant American landscape. The nation’s traditional tension between wilderness and technology, described aptly by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, finds a dialectic still point (or is it a monstrous energy?) in ribbons of asphalt upon which people drive to connect to the American land. In what amounts to a material form of Zen koan, highways are the connecting arteries between National Parks, which are sites of deep spiritual resonance for many who travel great distances for the chance to walk and drive through protected nature. As I understand it, the “spirituality” evoked, provoked, or invoked by the highway is tied to the particular cultural and social history of the United States that provides the stories, characters, events, metaphors, and resonances making up a spiritual idiom that merges with (and emerges from) the languages and experiences of physical mobility.
Life is a highway
I want to ride it all night long
— Tom Cochrane, “Life is a Highway” (1991)
Although “spiritual” is so often cast as the antonym to “material,” any consideration of the venues, forms, and technologies of spirituality in America quickly must concede matter’s inescapability. In the case of the highway, the material produces the spiritual by laying down the grooves of physical space to be traversed, again and again, adding layers of experience, legend, myth, and memory over time. To travel the highway for any substantial distance is to move through space that is occupied by a century of ghosts, each moving through that space similarly, along the same trajectories, passing through the same landscapes and towns and crossing the same rivers and mountains. Moreover, those ghosts have stories—stories that have shaped and been shaped by a particularly American sense of authenticity and liberty. Spirituality here means a sense of getting to the real by stripping away the conventional, staying on the move to slip out of the confines of being pinned down by the stasis of habit. The authenticity and spirituality of the road is premised on the idea that the real is elsewhere, or can be reached by leaving the familiar behind. The highway is the space of potential, not here nor there: it is liminal. A “temporary autonomous zone.”
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