The US Highway System pre-dates the Interstate Highway System begun in the 1950s. This older system, built in the 1920s and early 1930s, includes such well-known roads as Rt 66, which crosses the United States East-West and Rt 1 which follows the Atlantic coastline North-South. Rt 62 – perhaps less well-known – binds the country from Niagara Falls in upstate New York to the Rio Grande River in El Paso, Texas.

In the middle is Oklahoma City.

If you were raised near the upstate New York terminus, you would drive approximately 1400 miles south and west on Rt 62 to reach Oklahoma City.

Your route would start high above Niagara Falls, take you through the eastern edge of Buffalo – the first of many faded cities, sufficiently prosperous in the 1950s to attract the highway’s passage through it – past Our Lady of Victory basilica and rusting steel mills of Lackawanna, NY, and the (still thriving) Erie County fairgrounds,

through rural backwaters of Pennsylvania, with played-out coal mines and oil wells, boarded up storefronts and lost towns

to the rolling grassy meadows of Amish country in Ohio (Berlin, Killbuck, Millersburg), through Columbus (if you are foolish enough to venture into the city on the old section of Rt 62), then south through towns with picturesque names, like Washington Courthouse (so named to distinguish it from four other Washingtons in Ohio) to Ripley

and across the Ohio River into Maysville, Kentucky (hometown of Rosemary Clooney), then – turning West again – to Georgetown and Paducah – passing through Horse Cave and Beaver Dam along the way,

and across the Ohio River again near the point where it empties into the Mississippi and into an almost undocumented 3-mile ride through an Illinois swamp.

Rt 62 crosses into Missouri, where not 50 miles further down the road, the traveler meets the Mississippi River in full splendor at New Madrid, site of the strongest earthquake ever to take place on US soil (it changed the river’s channel). The road goes straight and flat through southwestern Missouri

and into Arkansas and the Ozarks, joins, follows, and acknowledges the Cherokee Indians’ “Trail of Tears” across rugged hills and mountains,

across the Arkansas River to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the Cherokees formed their nation on what appeared barren land with rivers of oil running underneath it.

The land stretches out flat, Indian casinos mark each tribe’s territory; the road is straight and lined with fenceposts, and a hawk or eagle sits watch and hungry at every mile from Tahlequah to Oklahoma City on Rt 62.

If a person had actually traveled those miles, so many of those miles past humble places filled with people struggling to keep their farms and towns alive, how could you possibly think of killing anyone? Especially, if you grew up in a place like that yourself?

“The government” in these places is not huge and unyielding – at least, it doesn’t appear so to a person passing through – as in some way, you did, en route from rural western New York to Oklahoma City. “The government” is the county courthouse, the modest city hall, the storefront post office. And “corporate America” is probably best represented by the gigantic Toyota Plant in Georgetown, Kentucky.

But then, you have to ask yourself: Why was it built there? Why is it welcomed there?

And – while you are asking questions, ask about another new dominant industry: prisons – why?

Because people have farmed out the land in many places, because small industries can scarcely survive, because people gotta work, people gotta eat.

These places are not Shangri-las – places where an older superior life form has stood still. Often, to an outsider’s eye, the modern conveniences – small town life revolving around WalMart , the local factories spewing oddly-colored smoke into cloudless skies – seem oddly self-destructive. Striking the numbers of people we saw in these small places using nebulizers, but it would be a far reach to see them as greedy capitalists; desperate would be more like it.

What is the point – then – of making a point of killing and maiming hundreds of people of modest means, who grew up in towns like yours, and perhaps met some small measure of success through obtaining low level civil service jobs in a modern building in the state’s capital, or maybe, not having met success, merely visiting social service agencies to verify their eligibility for modest government entitlements like Food Stamps?

Because it’s possible?

It made no sense to me in western New York in 1995. Having traveled the road from upstate New York to Oklahoma City, seeing the poverty, the need, the small territories of modest success, it makes even less sense now.