Interstate

The interstates are at once the largest and the smallest thing America ever built: seen from above they form a continental grid, a nervous system holding together a country too vast to know itself; seen from below they are any old exit ramp, a gas station at two in the morning, a motel with its sign lit for nobody. This is their double nature: the macro and the capillary in the same ribbon of asphalt, the imperial infrastructure and the smallest detail, the whole continent and the cup of coffee the diner keeps refilling until you say stop.

And in between, holding the two scales together, there is the car. In America the car has never been merely a means of transport: it is the shape freedom took when it needed a body. Getting in and driving off is the founding gesture of an entire imagination, the promise that a full tank is enough to change your life.

I knew that world before I ever saw it. I had grown up inside it without ever having been there, through the films, the songs, the record sleeves, the photographs of those who had crossed those roads decades before me. Rural America was an imagined country before it was a real one, and I drove a long way to go and check whether it actually existed.

These photographs come from there, from an eighteen-month journey in search of that imagined country: something I could not have described if anyone had asked, but which I recognised every time it appeared beyond the windscreen — a rusted sign, a silo on the plain, a white wooden church in the middle of nothing.

What I found was not identical to what I was looking for, but the two resembled each other closely enough that I could no longer tell them apart. That is what the interstates mean to me: the symbol of an entire imagined world, and the proof that if you drive it long enough it becomes true.