There was an awful fog as we pulled into Savannah. Cold and humid. Seas of trees and sickly sticks emerging from barren swamps rushed by as a deep blue, then pale white void emerged on all sides. Through the night we’d blasted through Virginia and the Carolinas, the train’s speeds indifferent to little churches and parking lots we were cutting across. It’s one thing to go over 100 miles an hour on the Northeast Corridor, and it’s another to feel like you’re moving at highway speeds through Southern coastal hamlets. There’s a strange haste involved in night trains, where no one’s talking and the sleeping landscape is rendered a blur of passing tungsten lights and everyone’s trying to sleep but our bodies are thrown around in carriage cars.
That tension between stillness and violent motion is part of what makes riding a train beautiful, although it’s often accompanied by the stillness of a delay. Heading south out of the Northeast Corridor, there’s always a half-hour layover in D.C. as the engines get swapped from electric (running on the Amtrak-owned line from Boston) for the standard diesel. It’s enough time for a couple of smoke breaks or someone to run up to the Raising Cane's in Union Station. Last night, however, that layover was at least twice as long, although I lost track. The conductors came on the overhead to tell us they couldn’t find the engine. Where the engine went, I don’t know—they lost it? A quick check on Reddit and this has happened a lot lately, who knows why. Eventually they found it and we were back on our way—somehow with enough padding in the schedule to still be on track to make it to Miami early.
With Georgia we were back on the main thoroughfare, back on the old roads. Savannah is where Amtrak’s Silver Meteor/Palmetto line—its premiere and historic north-south run—meet back up with the Dixie Highway, the most significant American road, next only to its east-west predecessor, the Lincoln Highway. Both were spearheaded by Carl G. Fisher, the man that invented the American 20th century who time forgot.
Fisher was a man of the future—the Gilded Age of robber barons was behind the country, there were new ways to make a lot of money. It wasn’t so much about extraction, or even production—Henry Ford might’ve cemented his name in history, but what’s the use of a mass-produced automobile if no one buys them? Fisher sold things. He’s credited with creating the first car dealership, a surprisingly innovative idea at a time when his home state’s metropolis, Indianapolis, was home to dozens and dozens of manufacturers (albeit, some of those were just a couple of people with a garage making contraptions). Fisher’s first fortune was from acquiring a patent to acetylene headlights, becoming the main supplier of headlights in the burgeoning American auto industry—enriching himself, again, not with something he invented or personally toiled over, but figured out how to sell.
Today, Fisher’s legacy is mostly cemented in the bricks of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; he was the principal of four founders of that legendary two-and-a-half miles. When it was constructed in 1909, it was the second purpose-built, closed-circuit, banked oval race track—and the first of its kind in the United States. Early motor-racing was largely built on foundations already set, with cars whizzing around the dirt on horse tracks. But like cinema making the jump from taking up space in vaudeville houses to building specialty theaters, the car would soon build its own autodromes to display their unique, gladiatorial speed. Fisher was never interested in motorsports for their own sake, like the great Enzo Ferrari, who begrudgingly sold sports cars to fund his racing ventures. Instead, the IMS and its Memorial Day 500-Mile Sweepstakes Race was another way to boost car sales. This racing-as-advertisement chagrined Ford, who hated piloting his cars in races and believed they were a poor way to showcase vehicles for their intended purposes.
Automobiles in the early-1900s were unique for their freedom of movement, splitting the speed of train trips with the maneuverability of horse travel; at least in theory. Cars were unreliable, and the roads even worse—not to mention the impossibility of good navigation when you were out in the country, weaving between farm roads and forest trails. Fisher conceived of the first transcontinental highway project, the Lincoln Highway, which would stretch from New York to San Francisco. In practicality, the Lincoln Highway was still a nightmare to gumball across the states in, as was evident by the 1919 army convoy that a young Dwight D. Eisenhower participated in that would later lead to the Federal Aid Highway Act under his presidency. But conceptually, the Lincoln Highway was a marketing victory for the burgeoning auto market, with Fisher setting his sights on a new road.
The Dixie Highway was even more crackpot than the Lincoln—instead of solving a practical problem (transcontinental travel), the Dixie Highway envisioned a new future. The Dixie Highway stretched from the population centers in the Midwest down to Miami, then an oceanside backwater in a relatively unpopulated Southern state. Fisher’s idea was to turn Miami into a destination, a warm refuge from the harsh cold of the upper Heartland. Like the Lincoln Highway, the road itself on Dixie was less a construction project and more a mapping, figuring out routings across previously built roads. The development happened at the terminus: Fisher was a leading investor in Miami’s first big housing boom—and bubble—in the 1920s. It was, again, a vision of the future, of the kind that the post-war world would prove to be a disastrous mistake. As if foreshadowing the ways that interstate and highway developments would slice apart minority neighborhoods in cities across the country, Fisher’s development of Miami came with new housing covenants and strict racial segregation that would define the city’s shape even after so much of the late Progressive Era developments got swept away by the hurricane of 1926 and then waffled in ruin through the Depression.
As we pulled into Jacksonville, the Dixie met up with the old U.S. 1. Route 1 was always a more practical highway system than the Dixie, although even it lost a lot of its relevance, as many old American roads did, when it got bypassed by an interstate. But its former practicality still serves an analytic purpose, it’s still a vein running through the American landscape and psyche. The road’s the trail for Robert Kramer 1989 masterpiece Route One/USA to follow. A work of documentary elevated to fiction by including actor Paul McIsaac reprising his recurring character in Kramer’s cinema, Doc (first from Ice [1970] and then in the self-reflexive follow-up Doc’s Kingdom [1988]). Kramer and “Doc” return to the country they had left the decade prior, no longer able keep their radical flame alive in the increasingly conservative country.
In Route One/USA, they follow the road south, looking at the emerging America and the one left behind, talking to everyone from native casino owners, to young soldiers, trans sex workers, and Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson. Their portrait is one of a country in decline, the continued quiet and crushing weight that the country had been buckling further under since Kramer and John Douglas’ epic document of the diffusion of the American left in Milestones (1975). And like Milestones, along U.S. Route 1 Kramer and McIsaac find people persisting despite it all, an unwavering and infectious will to live.
We’re off again from Jacksonville, heading down that low-lying panhandle towards Fisher’s town-turned-megalopolis. As Fisher envisioned, Miami’s a destination where the American East flows into, stuffed with tourists and travelers. Even more to Fisher’s legacy, Broward and Palm Beach Counties have become the great refuge of American hucksters, with the people who enrich themselves not by making (although they talk a big game about it) but by convincing suckers to by their crap, whether a bad real estate deal or wholesale political ideology.