Ignornance

I have spent virtually all of my life in the Midwest. As such, the term "parkway" meant nothing to me in the first 27 years of my life. Sure I had fleeting experiences with parkways in those years. As a child, and adolescent, and teenager, and young man, my family would regularly take yearly vacations to the Jersey Shore. To get to the shore, it was necessary to travel on the Garden State Parkway. I never thought more of it than it just being a road. In Illinois we had highways, expressways, tollways, freeways, and interstates. For most of my life, I just assumed that "parkway" was just a euphemism for a road with no stop lights where you could go real fast if you got lucky and there was no traffic.

I have lived on the east coast for about three days now and have already been on two parkways (George Washington and Baltimore-Washington) and seen signs for at least one more.

But I am not as ignorant as I once was. I now get on a parkway and I take in the sights, I notice the brick that lines the street, I look at the trees that line the road, I look for good places to drop anchor and have a picnic, I study the bridges to see if there is any nuance in architecture that one unschooled in such things as myself could appreciate, and I notice the height of bridges and wonder if I could make it under in the U-Haul I drove to Virginia.

But mostly, I think of Robert Moses.

You see, I went through 26 1/2 years of my life not giving a shit about the term parkway because I did not know it really meant anything. I never bothered to care if it meant anything. It was just a word. A word for a road. Who cares right? I drive on it. It gets me to where I want to go. What more could I ask?

A hell of a lot more. After I read The Power Broker, I understood that there were a lot more questions about Parkways that I should be asking. There is a whole history as to how they came about. Money for construction being the most important. But how often do you ask what government agency spends money to build a new road? Maybe if you are from the East Coast you have that question, but not us "aww shucks" Midwesterners.

This is one small part of how one very long book changed my perspective of something I regularly experience but never really understood. But had I never read that book, I never would have a second thought about what a parkway is. I would have remained ignorant. When I had this realization, I hated myself a little bit. Why had I never asked what a parkway was? Maybe I had, but why did I not remember the answer?

It is cliche by now, but the old saying is that wisdom is knowing how much you really do not know. I keep striving to know, but to get everything is impossible.

But I have to try.