Word: superhighways
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...City to Washington not long ago, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to stop for lunch at the next Howard Johnson's. A hot dog and some French fries and a dish of maple-walnut ice cream. That was what one had been doing on the superhighway to Washington ever since it was built back at the dawn of the Republic. But when that familiar orange roof loomed up out of the rain near Wilmington, Del., it turned out that the orange roof covered only a Howard Johnson motor lodge and the adjoining restaurant called itself...
...thriving civilization, a young and still unknown Carl Sagan that same year sifted through a thousand pictures of earth shot by a weather satellite orbiting only 300 miles up. In a paper entitled "Is There Life on Earth?" he reported that only one photograph, of a snow-covered superhighway cutting a straight line through a forest, showed any evidence of man's presence on this planet...
...unease, a chill in the air, or else a strong shock undermines or shatters composure. No rhetorical onslaught . . . can equal it; the intrusion, fluid and elusive or sharp and violent, destroys all past security." King begins with all the reassuring American trappings: the 7-Eleven stores, the ribbons of superhighway, the town high schools that seem part of an ordered landscape. Then come the hints of malaise and, abruptly, what A.D. Hutter, a professor of English at UCLA, calls King's "brilliant creation of a shared nightmare." A marriage breaks up and a trusted dog suddenly turns on its owners...
Cambridgeport was a major industrial area before 1950, but rising land prices and a new superhighway planned through the area forced many firms to relocate. The largest of these was the Simplex Wire and Cable Co.; which left 25 acres vacant...
...avoiding at all costs the multi-lane interstates that transform the landscape around them into identical blurry lines of trees from Boston to Seattle. He would stick to the back roads, the blue highway, and find towns as yet unmolested by the Howard Johnson convenience pitstop of the American superhighway. By the time he returned to Columbia, he had traversed some 11,000 miles in three months on the road...