Interstate 40
2026
You are our song.
I hear your rhythms and I’m pulled in deep. Diesel downbeats, lithium ion battery backbeats, cylinder strings strumming, drive tires whining, harmonies happening all at once, hammered into a soundtrack that never turns off.
You play Walt Whitman’s “varied carols” sped up on the turntable from 33 to spin at 78 and they all fall together into this gorgeous highway song.
There you are, you restless miracle of a road, you rascal, America’s restive umbilical cord. I’m admiring you from big eighth floor hotel windows in Albuquerque. Interstate 40, fast and fluttering, laced with racing big rigs hauling huge white trailers, gliding across a vast New Mexico horizon.
Barstow to Wilmington, you stretch across our continent with nothing to prove. You are our overlooked lifeline, a river of our foods, medicines and parts for our machines, the lamps we light and the clothes we wear. Diapers and drill presses, bourbon and batteries.
You burst with the energy of ten thousand companies rushing their goods to market. Entrepreneurs wither without you. You crackle with thousands of dreams of Americans on the move to new homes, new jobs, countless dreams crackling at eighty miles an hour, infinite economic and romantic opportunities.
There they are out on Interstate 40, sailing by, people roaring back and forth across an America that has never known how to stop dreaming let alone stand still. You understand our ambitions.
You give us a generous slice of our freedom. You rarely close, only when nature has her way. You let us build and grow and breathe, discover and deliver.
Rugs and radios, desks and dishwashers soar across the heart of our country in an endless parade. You let them all move faster at night, a cavalcade of shooting stars slashing through vulnerable darkness.
You rise above the others. Some may wonder, why not Interstate 10, with its outsized share of big cities, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston? Or Interstate 80? Is there something wrong about being too far north or too far south?
Not at all. You’re no latter day Mason Dixon line. Let the blizzards close I80 and let hurricanes crash across I10. None of these assaults matter.
I40 is where it gets personal. More than a half century ago, I hoisted my backpack over a barbed wire fence alongside you, pitched my tent on the high desert, cooked dinner and fell asleep to your song. I awoke to your summons and pushed west, forever caught in your spell.
No wonder I am transfixed, why I keep watching you from my hotel window. You are part of us all. As Americans, we may feel as if we’re not getting along with each other very well these days. But you remind us we’re doing better than we think. You know that what binds us fills up more tractor trailers than what disturbs us about one another.
You have seen us at our best and at our worst. You carry us through the Navajo Nation where our mistakes are on disturbing display. You know the wheels that rumble across you carry all sorts of travelers. Rogues and the self-righteous, frauds and fixers, desperate characters, dutiful husbands and wives, diligent business people and passionate lovers.
Big rigs race to loading docks. SUVs race to family reunions. Back and forth across the Continental Divide, across the Mississippi you pull America together.
We all know romance is not your strong suit. Neither is grace. We can’t wrap you in the mystique of a two lane highway, an old road with a pedigree. Route 66 and The Old Post Road are easier to glamorize. You don’t inspire refrigerator magnets and shot glasses, flasks and dish towels like Route 66.
But here in New Mexico you take us past petroglyphs and pueblos. In every state you cross you’re never far from what helped make us who we are. Maybe we just don’t always notice. We’re often a nation going a bit too fast. Those historical marker signs have a way of fading. Perhaps our understanding of America does as well.
Eventually, if we wish, you take us home. You are Eisenhower’s gift, America at our best. The countless ways you keep us together, if we give you a chance, is unlike anything else in world.
