Country of Exiles (8 page)

Born in 1927, Hunt, like McLean, came from poor Southern roots—in Hunt’s case, sharecroppers and devout Christians. He drove a truck for twenty years and made his first fortune selling a new kind of chicken litter, an absorbent ground cover concocted from castoff rice hulls. In the early 1960s, with financing from Winthrop Rockefeller (future governor of Arkansas), he built his own rice-hull processing plant in the town of Stuttgart; in time, he churned out more chicken litter than anyone in America. He also invested in trucks and built a highly profitable business. He paid low wages and sent goods farther than anybody else. Soon trucking consumed his interest, and he took brilliant advantage of the government deregulation of trucking in 1980s. By that decade’s end, he had fifty-three-foot trailers in his fleet. He opened fancy trucking terminals in St. Louis and Detroit, and he created a logistics department to match drivers with loads “for better use of equipment and on-time service.”
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In 1989, Santa Fe Railroad invited him to link his company with theirs, since both served the same routes. He jumped at the chance to combine his trucks with the cheap fuel and cheap labor of the railroads; together Santa Fe and Hunt formed a system in which the cargo could move in standardized containers that fit on railcars. In time, he struck deals with six other railroads and invested millions of dollars in new containers. He devised his own system for hauling cars called AUTOSTACKER, and he contracted to carry Mercedes automobiles, among other luxury items, from the East Coast marine terminals to points far inside the country.
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He also installed computers in his vehicles to predict the success or failure of shipments to defeat, or attempt to defeat, the weather in
its capacity to hinder or halt the delivery of goods and, most of all, to track the whereabouts of truckers around the clock on an hourly basis and to protect against trucker errancy.
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By 1996 Hunt was running a billion-dollar company, with more than 11,000 yellow and white trailers and 7,500 truckers, driving, on average, nearly 50 million miles per month. He added a Hunt de Mexico and dreamt of an imperial legion of immense trucks—each one capable of demolishing signposts, strewing roads with rubber debris, forcing all non-truckers into slow lanes, off the roads, or into cold sweats, and sometimes causing extraordinary mayhem—on highways around the world, supplying “multimodal, containerizable transportation service to a global marketplace.”
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The success of Hunt and McLean, as well as of other like-minded men, helped revive railroads, breathed new life into American trucking, and, in particular, made for the electrifying growth of the coastal marine terminals. By the 1990s, at Long Beach/Los Angeles ports, nearly 45 percent or more of all container cargo moved intermodally, and both ports boomed in part because they had introduced on-dock rail facilities, which moved goods directly to the sprawling downtown railyard in Los Angeles—thence elsewhere, deep into the country.
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At Newark and Elizabeth, the busiest of East Coast ports and site of the first U.S. containerized cargo facility, intermodal rail, too, was in place and all port growth pointed in an intermodal direction.
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To visit these ports is to be at the vortices of intermodal mobility. Nowhere else can one see so much systematic movement or get such a sense of the mechanisms conceived and marshaled to deliver goods to Americans. An abstract, geometrical cleanness distinguishes these port terminals; since the 1960s they have been completely reshaped by intermodal mechanization, leaving them nearly bereft of longshoremen
(20,000 in the 1960s at the Port of New York and New Jersey; only 2,000 in 1998). What remains of an older human landscape, for example, at the Port of Newark and Elizabeth in New Jersey, resides mostly in the whimsy of the old street names (Algiers, Suez, Calcutta, and Mohawk) or in the Seaman’s Church Institute, built in 1961 to serve the needs of the world’s seafarers. Other living things can be found at these terminals, of course, concealed in warehouses or hidden in shipping crates, animals or birds, even the rarest tropical fish, many smuggled in, destined for intermodal delivery to municipal aquariums or pet stores.
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The federal government, too, put its trust in intermodalism, just as it had in mergers and on behalf of the same historical trend—the combining of industries in the interest of the rapid movement of goods throughout the country and the world. In 1991, both Congress and the White House, in a major piece of legislation called the Intermodal Surface Transportation and Efficiency Act (ISTEA), raised intermodalism to an exalted place in the heaven of American mobility. ISTEA (and later laws) authorized Congress to spend billions not only on the interstates but also on other key arteries, from two- and four-lane highways to what were called “high-priority corridor roads.” It allocated money in every state to improve links between rail stations, seaports, and airports. It aimed for “intermodal connectivity” and for the “seamless movement of people and products,” helping to “make the United States the most mobile nation in history.”
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So far, this kind of legislation has fallen short of its goal, since ports, highways, intersections, terminals, and cities have been repeatedly overwhelmed by glut.
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Nevertheless, “the United States,” observed the
Journal of Commerce
, “has by far the best intermodal transportation network in the world.”
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ISTEA was reauthorized in 1995 as the National Highway
System Act and, again in 1998, in a $200 billion update that, among other things, legislated the building of a new interstate highway (I-69) stretching from Canada to Mexico and cutting through thousands of acres of farmland, forests, and countryside in the heartland of America.
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In the late 1990s, moreover, the federal government continued to embellish on the achievement of the interstate highways. It worked to bring the palace roads (the ones drawing people out) and the provincial roads (the ones drawing people in) into closer relationship with one another. Interstates, corridor highways, paved and unpaved roads, the dirt roads of towns and villages, have been more in touch with one another, less parallel and more intersecting, than they have ever been in American history.

The intermodal advancements of the last fifteen years belonged to a transportation and distribution system that, along with the merged corporations and the government deregulation and support, constituted a juggernaut for more and more movement, for connections but not for connectedness. It was a power poised and ready to make its way across all boundaries, to find its way, compel its way, push, push, and push, fashioning America, as it had never been, into a grid of terminals and highways, of ports of entry and ports of departure.

The impact of these combined changes has, in many ways, been positive. As writer John McPhee has shown, for instance, road building has been an incredible boon for geologists, because it has blasted open great swaths of the earth’s history, which otherwise would have remained hidden from view. The growth in ocean trade has also given new life to such port cities as Long Beach, Portland, Baltimore, and Norfolk; the future of
such troubled cities as Los Angeles and Oakland now seems brighter as a result of the commerce (although the Asian crisis may stymie this progress). Some analysts have argued, moreover, that electronic highways have helped revitalize place, especially for many telecommuting professionals who now stay at home with “a chance to play an active role in civic affairs,” as one said in 1995 in the
Wall Street Journal.
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(Technology, thus, doth make citizens of us all.)

The country’s rush of goods, however, has also required new levels of advertising, more seductions, so that at the end of every road there will be consumers ready to part with their money. In 1970 the total investment in domestic advertising was $19.5 billion; in 1985 the figure rose to $94.7 billion. But by 1997—even as the number of advertising agencies had plummeted, merged into big global companies—the amount had surpassed $230 billion, easily more than the rest of the world’s total. Television advertising alone increased from $3.6 billion in 1970 to nearly $50 billion in 1997.
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At the end of real roads, along nearly every interstate, there now appears a strip mall, another batch of warehouse retailers, or another sunburst of merchandising. In 1970 about 13,000 shopping malls existed in the United States, nearly all built after 1955.
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By 1997 there were nearly 43,000 shopping malls—5,500 of them designated as large regional malls and often owned by the giant retail investment trusts (REITs)—crowding the margins of such cities as White Plains, New York, and Houston, Texas. “There’s just too much retail chasing too few customers,” said Leah Thayer, director of retail leasing for Hines, the Houston developer. Big-box retailers have “popped up on seemingly every vacant intersection,” echoed the
Wall Street Journal.
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At one highway intersection after another has come another feast of nonplaces supposedly designed by developers
to be “real” places meant to make people feel secure and “at home.” Some of these places, built like garrisons with their own police, have covered thousands of acres. Thus, just off Interstate 270 North near Columbus, Ohio, retailer Leslie Wexler, in partnership with New York developer Georgetown Group, has “transformed” a 1,200-acre entertainment-retail complex into an old-fashioned town center called Easton. He has arranged stores, theaters, restaurants and bars, hotels, video games, and even housing into something that looks like an old New England town, “themed” with nineteenth-century-style streetlights and architecture. In classic American-developer style, Wexler had pillaged the past to impose phony meaning on a contemporary consumer space.
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One has only to travel the country to see what more highway retailing has achieved: along Interstate 35 in Minnesota’s capital metropolis, Minneapolis–St. Paul, which boasts the Mall of America; along Interstate 90, which joins Rapid City, South Dakota, to Spearfish Canyon, once uncluttered open-sky country; or along Interstate 35, where it passes through Austin, once a cosmopolitan oasis untouched by malls. Like so many small towns, Hope, Arkansas, once had a thriving downtown. In 1995, when I visited, it was mostly boarded up. But on the edges of Hope, along the corridors reaching to I-30, where Hunt’s yellow and white trucks whizzed by, I saw the usual strip malls, some dead, others living, filled with the usual suspects—Wal-Mart, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, etc.
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Many people have recognized the dangers posed by more roads or by widening the highways to promote more development, which invariably presages more retailing and then more highways, more trucks, and more congestion. Local residents—especially those in affluent towns and villages—have united to zone out more traffic, keeping what they have for as long as they can. Some have hired “place-oriented specialists”
who know how to carry out “history-friendly” growth and to protect communities from the disorderly fallout that comes with commercial construction along interstates and near old-fashioned downtowns.

Most people, however, do not belong to upscale communities. They cannot afford to pay for place specialists who will think and argue on their behalf. Most people have neither time, money, nor even the knowledge to consider stopping the developers, the turbulence, or the traffic. They are forced to deal with the threats to place caused by an economy that aspires to perfect intermodalism, channeling goods and people across the continent.

But there is more to contend with than the landscape of roads and highways. People must also deal with a new landscape of the temporary that has come to overshadow their lives—new kinds of work and living, a new set of mores, more flexible and uncertain. This transformation, too, has weakened the fabric of place.

Y
ears ago, the poet W. S. Merwin wrote a futuristic parable about people who tire of remembering. To rid themselves of this burden, they get inventors to build machines that will do the remembering for them. Small and compact, easily worn on the body, the machines remember precisely. They sort out the conflicting signals, the mess of ordinary human memory, and simplify experience so that people are able to achieve their goals efficiently and quickly. In time, even “children will be fitted with these devices at birth” and “they will be given new ones as they grow older and can use them.” That humans will be severed further from their usual selves will not bother anyone, for “the stages of such use will seem to reveal a new pattern in the growth of the individual and hence of the species.” But then a horror will strike: the first man will lose his machine, becoming a “ghost,” “incomprehensible” to everyone and to himself. A “terror” will pass through society, only to be forgotten as the people cope by denying the gravity of the crisis; they will
grow even more dependent on their inventions. But, then, “one by one … with growing frequency,” they too, will “begin to lose their machines.”
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This grim little tale contains more than just a little truth for modern mobile managers and professionals. In 1996, William Herndon, for instance, vice president of technology and specialist in mortgages for BankAmerica Corporation, presided over a staff of 125 technicians scattered throughout the United States who managed part of the bank’s computer system. A couple of years earlier, Herndon had given up his office to become a telecommuting executive. Armed with two kinds of computers, a wireless modem, a cellular phone, his own private 800 number, and a pair of “cowboy boots,” he went on the road, free to convert every hotel room into an office space from which to monitor his “far-flung operations.”
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Alone in the wilderness, this paragon of portability wielded his IBM ThinkPad 760 ELD laptop computer to keep electronic guard over his staff and in contact with his business partners. Sometimes he needed to get around fast, so he carried a Hewlett-Packard palmtop, which fit neatly into his pocket. He was “more wired than anyone I know,” said a friend. “With the right technology,” the fifty-eight-year-old Herndon himself boasted, “I can do everything on the road that I used to do in the office.” He delighted in carrying all his “techno-gear” in a green backpack.