The Merritt Parkway, known to many Americans as a speed trap for David Letterman, has coursed for 69 years through southwestern Connecticut, linking what are now some of its toniest suburbs to New York. But after being added this month to the World Monument Fund’s list of most endangered sites, the four-lane, 37.5-mile road is enjoying a newfound status — alongside such treasures as the tombs of Egypt, France’s chateaux and Machu Picchu in Peru. [via articles.latimes.com]

I remember the way the Merritt appeared to me when I first drove on it a few years ago — with its unique, architectural overpasses and winding rights of way. Beautiful, but a tad smug. Being added to the World Monument Fund’s list can hardly help, and there’s something about a highway with its own preservation society that offends my Midwestern sensibilities.

The Merritt is a boutique roadway that has no analog in the nameless crease between North and South where I grew up (some call it Northern Kentucky). There, you don’t go anywhere if you can’t get there on I-71 or 1-75 — five lanes in each direction, which will still be one too few if an eighteen-wheeler loses its brakes on a harrowing buckle of highway south of Cincinnati, known — I’m not kidding — as “the Cut in the Hill.”

Despite its name, “the Merritt” — which doesn’t even allow trucks — strikes me as pre-meritocratic (and, thus, anti-democratic) institution, a gilded, Incan thoroughfare connecting New York to Yale with a pop-in at the Greenwich money plantations in between. You know where you go on I-71 and I-75? Well you don’t go to Concordia or Iona. (We keep a few B&Bs like these around so Easterners can enjoy four years abroad in the Heartland — Oberlin, Dennison — but these are for show.) No, you go to the Ohio State University or the University of Kentucky, the educational equivalents of the highways themselves — huge, publicly-funded factories where you fight for your education and no one goes back for the reunions except the band and the football team.

In the Middle West or Middle South — oh, I’ll just say it — in America, there’s something a little unseemly about getting sentimental about a highway. A highway! In America, we begrudge paying the taxes to even maintain highways, so we certainly won’t be setting up any societies to preserve them. And that seems right and good to me. Years ago, I was talking to a friend who was ragging on where I was working at the time. I was defensive and he was surprised. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to hate your job?” he said.

I feel that way about highways. We shouldn’t love them, with their inconvenient traffic jams and mazes of orange barrels. We should struggle against them. Man vs. highway. That’s an American story.