It's Highwayland.

Highwayland is the America that connects the other Americas together. It spans the entire continent by itself, but everywhere else is only a short drive from it. No one lives there, but everybody passes through. The interstate highway system didn't create Highwayland, but homogenized and unified it.

Everyone is a little bit comfortable in Highwayland, but also a little bit bored. It has McDonald's, Subway, Taco Bell, a Cracker Barrel, a 4-story 1-corridor hotel with indoor pool and fitness center that offers free copies of USA today in the lobby, a 2-story discount motel where the room doors open to the parking lot, the dine-in restaurant open from 6 to 10, two gas stations or truck stops across the road from each other, each with their own bustling convenience stores that sell sausages, egg rolls, and round tacos that cook on the hot dog roller, with 128-oz fountain drinks, all for $4.

If it were too interesting, people wouldn't want to leave, and the transit dimension would clog up with loiterers and squatters.

You can take a photo of Highwayland from anywhere in Highwayland, and see all the same features, but you can also strike out in a random direction from Highwayland, travel 15 minutes, and find a place unlike anywhere else on Earth, with its own local character that is instantly identifiable to anyone that has ever been there.

Sometimes the local character is strong enough to overwhelm Highwayland, just for a few miles (Highwayland abhors kilometers), and the uniqueness seeps in. Maybe you can see the city skyline, or a university campus, or a hospital. It doesn't happen often, though. Highwayland craves sameness. Mostly, it is the realm of the consistent, the predictable, and the reliable.

Thanks for your comment! It was a very enjoyable read, and in its style is reminiscent of some older mystery novel authors.

It's a shame that photography doesn't get the respect it deserves as a visual art.

Ernst Haas took basically the same picture in New Mexico in the 60's.

https://www.mbphoto.com/artists/167-ernst-haas/series/other-...

For the record, here's the spot on streetmap (the exxon is now gone) https://goo.gl/maps/wFx9ESH6vyBKk9mYA

Looks a lot less...interesting than the photo.

> Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.

Does it really have to be so ugly to be functional? This isn't some out of the way piece of infrastructure, these are areas of high traffic density and it is not unreasonable to ask why aesthetic considerations are so universally ignored in these types of areas in this country.

I asked the same thing about the engineering offices where I worked, and found that the reason why was because the offices didn't matter much for the people in them- we move around a lot, and the only time you're in an office is when you're figuring something out in CAD or the like. The people who work all day long in offices understandably have better furniture- we just don't need all that much.

People- interactions- matter more than places do- the happiest family I've ever met lived in a poorer neighborhood and their house was obviously not doing well.

What point are you trying to make? That there is no point to aesthetics because the only thing that matters is interactions with people?