The Mother Road

Steven Price tells us what we missed along Interstate 80

Some folks travel America’s interstates with white knuckles, red eyes and dulled senses. This mighty network of pavement gets them where they want to go in a hurry, but from here to there is a blur of crowded rest stops, bad food and overpriced gasoline.

But maybe the guy who spends six hours in cruise control, with one eye on the speedometer and the other scanning for troopers, has seriously missed the point. Maybe interstates can hold the same charm of the old winding two-lanes, where traveling wasn’t necessarily to go somewhere, but simply to go.

This interstate attitude adjustment is courtesy of Steven Price, UW- Madison’s director of University-Industry Relations. For nearly two decades, Price has indulged a deep curiosity with the mother of all highways, Interstate 80, which girdles the continent from New York City to San Francisco.

While Road Hog pushes his luck in the passing lane, Price and family tool merrily along Interstate 80 in a 1989 Chevy Van, towing an orange trailer fashioned from his old Datsun pickup bed. They take their time, pulling off all the exits to drink in the local flavors. Not a bed of wildflowers or rock outcropping passes by without exploration.

“I have stopped at every turnout on I-80 from Sacramento to New Jersey,” Price declares. “No part of I-80 is uninteresting to me.”

All of this wanderlust has actually gotten Price somewhere. Price is the author of an unusual travel guide that invites readers on a milepost-by-milepost look at the great highway. He is tackling the project in statewide chunks, and so far has self-published richly detailed volumes on Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Ohio guide will be available this spring.

Price has become the unofficial historian, botanist and geologist for all that I-80 encompasses. His guides steer clear of the standard chamber-of-commerce blather, inviting readers to really understand the land. He tells you who first settled there and how they made a living; what type of woods or what variety of farm you’re zooming by; or where to collect fossils or find an eccentric museum.

Why I-80? By coincidence, Price spent 15 years of his life in I-80 towns — Sacramento, Des Moines and Cleveland — and traveled it by necessity. But his fascination with the interstate grew. “The more you know about a place, the more interesting it becomes,” he says.

He began taking notes of his observations, carrying geology and botany books in his car, scarfing up all the local brochures and recording thoughts on tape. (While recording once on a Wyoming roadside, Price was bitten in the boot by a rattlesnake. His startled wail is preserved on tape.) After a while, Price’s basement became a personal I-80 archive.

The highway is now Price’s vacation destination. For many summers, the Price family would choose a stretch and spend three weeks combing the towns, parks and sites within a 30-minute drive of the Mother Road. They camped every night along the way.

Price’s four sons, two of them restless teenagers, seem to enjoy the slow ride. “They have a great disposition for travel,” Price says. “But I have a fear that my kids, when they grow up, will never take I-80 again.”

In fact, I-80 has a narrative beauty, as one of only three interstates that span from Atlantic to Pacific. Starting in New York City, the road runs through New Jersey, the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania, the industrial belt of Ohio and Indiana, the corn of Illinois and Iowa, the endless plains of Nebraska, the craggy cowboy terrain of Wyoming, the desolate salt flats and deserts of Utah and Nevada and the Sierra Nevada range of northern California to its termination at the San Francisco Bay.

Price says the most amazing things along the way are not the obvious destinations, but the smaller surprises.

The only patch of virgin forest along I-80? Not California, but Ohio. The Goll Woods of western Ohio was spared from fire and chain saws by being deep in the Black Swamp.

The most beautiful waterfall? Not Wyoming, but New Jersey. The Basalt Falls, 30 miles from New York City, is a dazzling sight, he says.

The most historic stretch? The route through Nebraska, which follows the old Oregon Trail. It’s not by accident — the same contours and lines of the land determine interstates as they did frontier trails.

The most scenic view? A portion of I-80 through the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania literally carves through the mountain. Called “Big Rock Cut,” drivers get the sense of actually entering the mountain.

The weirdest sight? In the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, where the skyline is broken by a huge bulbous sculpture, built by a Swede who felt the landscape needed some relief.

Price even finds redemption in visions of industrial blight. Near the Illinois-Indiana border, I-80 spans over the Thornton Quarry, a mile-wide, quarter-mile deep limestone pit. To the untrained eye, a hellhole. But Price dug deeper, and found that the hole actually exposed a 500-million-year-old ocean bed festooned with fossilized coral, making it valuable to scientists.

“It’s the details,” Price says. “Knowledge of the details changes the complexion of the whole trip.”

Price once considered leaving university life and opening a travel business that would cater to eco-tourists and hobby historians. The I-80 series represents a compromise, something that still ignites his passion for travel.

But the secret to great travel is not where — but how — you move. People who blow by his Chevy van in a flash of metal may never understand.

“You have to change your habits on the interstate, take more of a get-on, get-off philosophy,” he says. “You can recapture all this feeling of back roads and blue highways on the entire interstate system. Just get off them — for five minutes.”