I’ve spent more time in a car over the last month than is healthy. At the end of April I drove from Boston to northern Virginia, then rode shotgun to and from the odd no-man’s land that is the corner of West Virginia that borders Maryland, then drove back to Boston. A week later I drove from Boston to Syracuse to Watkins Glen to Ithaca to Boston. And just this past Saturday I was passenger in a day trip from Boston to Lime Rock Park and back. All told, I think I put in just under 40 hours of seat time. Just over a day and a half. A day and a half in cars either boring or inhospitable, on interstates and roads that once were, by myself and with friends. A long drive is a bizarre thing: It is a cross between looking at a long unending mural and living an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There is the destination of course, but we all know that the destination is often a mirage, a dream, a thing you can only imagine as you pass signs for places like Old Weathersfield and Weedsport—and signs that say “NEXT EXIT 35mi”. The mind focuses on act of driving and on the monotonous scar of highways like I-90 in western Mass and I-95 north of Baltimore.

About an hour or so east of Syracuse, I-90 slices through a number of small towns and villages. At 75mph, these towns are brief and quaint, usually complete with the requisite white church, clusters of houses, and faint feel of past industry. I am not sure I can imagine living in one of these towns, seeing the highway every day, seeing countless people pass and travel and honk and speed, and know that the entrance is 2 or 3 towns away. It is not simply a matter of distance. Residents of Frankfort, for instance, must drive through Ilion to Mowhawk in order to reach I-90. That the distance is barely 8 miles is irrelevant. To get to Phelps, NY, you must exit at West Bloomfield, which sounds like a town but is in fact a nest of highway cloverleafs 4 miles from Phelps. From there, you then drive parallel to I-90 to reach the town. As I rode the scar through some of these villages, I wanted to stop downtown and understand their relationship with it. Did it bring them visitors? Give them a means of escape? Whatever the attitude, they cannot ignore it. Unlike here, where I-95 curves around the city and through the suburbs without much presence (usually you can hear the highway before you can see it), these middle New York towns have no such cover. Before I-90, they were connected by the railroad; when I-90 was constructed, it went in the easiest place, with no regard for aesthetics or privacy.

In northwestern Connecticut there is a different existence. The interstate is out of sight and I am on Rt. 7, a small two-lane highway that is the artery for a region that appears to subsist entirely on the antique trade. It becomes an episode of MST3K here: Noah and I note antique shops directly across from antique shops. We see a garage full of older Mercedes, a pile of old Beetles, and a plate-less Delorean (a stick!) that certainly seems out of place. We pass a building with a sign at the sidewalk that says “school” and a sign over the door that says “garage”. About 10 miles from Lime Rock Park, the short but dangerous race track with the wonderfully frightening downhill, Noah and I encounter this sign: “7 SEPARATE ANTIQUE SHOPS  5/8mi”. As they must, I guess.

Nothing I’ve driven, however, quite matches the stretch of northern New Jersey just before the George Washington Bridge. I always drive this last leg of the NJ turnpike at night. Approached from the south, trees give way to oil tanks on the left and cranes and 40-foot freight containers stacked like shoeboxes on the right. The sense of size and proportion is so skewed that I have the ridiculous idea that I could lift one of the containers by hand. At this point all natural cover breaks away and the light pollution from warehouses, industrial complexes, Newark, and New York City imparts a distinct glow to everything I can see. I can see lights that appear to be attached to nothing, floating in the distance. Moments later there is the Linden Cogeneration Plant, a hulking sprawl of tanks smokestacks tubes and lights that dominates the western side of the Turnpike. Some of the pipes dart under the Turnpike and connect to tanks on the eastern side of the Turnpike. You do not drive past the Cogeneration Plant. You drive through the Cogeneration Plant.

You do drive past the airport, however. Passing Liberty International Airport is discomforting because there is no wall, physical or mental, between the Turnpike and the runway. I drive, just to my left a plane touches down, and I get the absurd idea that I can make eye contact with the passengers if I try hard enough. Meanwhile, more freight containers wall me in on the eastern side; this continues until the Vince Lombardi rest area, where the Turnpike veers to the west and I begin to be able to see Manhattan beyond Jersey City. The intrusions of the gas plant and the airport end (perhaps I am the intruder), I pass through the final tollbooth and the highway begins to wind towards the George Washington Bridge.

Crossing the bridge is a moment of calm, a moment to take in the height of the thing and the view of Manhattan alongside, before diving down into the Bronx, where brick and cement walls replace tanks and freight containers.

Travel by car—and I mean precisely the travel; the destination is irrelevant—is unlike anything else. Fly from Boston to Texas and you can look at a map and see that you’ve moved, but you cannot know how one gets from Boston to Texas. Driving, on the other hand, makes you (makes me, at least) feel as if you’ve seen the progression of subtle and extreme changes that can happen in 10 miles, or 100, or 500. I’ve driven through New Jersey enough to understand its dual nature now. When I run it south-to-north, I feel like I’m leaving one world and entering another. And no matter what long drive I’m on, I always feel a little bit like an intruder, an outsider passing through.