Word: roading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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America didn't invent the road as an art form, but each generation of pilgrims has helped perfect it, and every road has a story to tell. This story belongs to Highway 50. It's a cautionary tale, slipping through proud towns that died slowly, and a success story, widened and paved through the towns that were born again. It is a history book, surveyed by George Washington, planted by Johnny Appleseed, portaged by Daniel Boone. It is a tragedy in a mountain pass, winding round a curve at 11,000 ft. where the bus carrying the high school football...
When TIME decided to take a trip and ask some questions about what is holding us together as a country and what is pulling us apart, we took to Highway 50 because it would let us take our time. As transcontinental roads go, it is more like a street than a highway, a long, lazy course that skips the Beltway and heads right downtown through the clutter of our lives, with plot twists and cattle crossings and slow, shaggy climbs through the mountains with warnings to stay in low gear for the next 17 miles. The road begins in Ocean...
...along the road are laid out in miniature the four enormous changes this country is living through, all at the same time. The shift to a single-superpower world plays out not only in summits and treaties but also in the Utah desert, where patriotic citizens who once loved the Pentagon now distrust it enough to wonder about all the chemical-weapons stockpiles waiting to be incinerated in their backyard. The NORAD installation in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., built to track Soviet missiles, now scans the skies for space junk...
Sometimes it takes only a few people with the right sense of timing to revive a dying town. But prosperity doesn't make every choice easy: there are still arguments all along the road. Particularly in towns that began to totter after losing a factory or military base, you can hear the debate over the price worth paying for survival: What kind of industry, what kind of zoning, how many prisons? In Rising Sun, Ind., they ask if it is worth inviting in the riverboat casino, with all the cars and all-night grocery stores and Gamblers Anonymous meetings that...
...place is that we are able to be so divided over so many things yet still keep discovering ways to link ourselves and express those differences without flying apart. The telegraph. A love song. A protest march. The voting booth. And if all else fails, there's always the road...