Turnpike

It’s a world that travels at 80 miles per hour. The speed limit signs may say 65 miles per hour, but you will feel like you’re standing still if you follow the rules. I’ve been driving the New Jersey Turnpike for over 35 years to visit family in northern New Jersey and Connecticut. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had to drive it several times a week to north Jersey to attend to family matters. It’s just over 122 miles of multiple lanes. It’s the sixth busiest toll road in the United States, and one of the most heavily traveled highways in the country. As I enter the turnpike at exit 6 from the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading north, I feel like I’m being sucked into a vortex of blacktop and screaming steel.

You get pulled along with everything from the Mini Cooper to double tractor trailers making deliveries all up and down the east coast. The scenery is a dreary and mind numbing sequence of industrial buildings and farm fields. There is no visual relief. Unless you count Met Life Stadium in the Meadowlands swamp. You couldn’t enjoy the view, even if there was one. You have to keep up the pace. You are driven to get where you are going to get off the turnpike as fast as you can. The most important visuals are the exit signs and the signs telling you how many miles it is to the next rest stop. The rest stops have their own personalities. There are 12 rest stops on the main turnpike from the Clara Barton Service area in the south to the Vince Lombardi Service area in the north.

Clara Barton was the famous nurse who founded the American Red Cross and cared for soldiers during the Civil War. All the rest stop stops are named for people with a New Jersey connection. Clara Barton opened a free school in 1852 in Bordentown, New Jersey. It help teach over 600 pupils. She was eventually replaced by a man because the school board didn’t think a woman was fit to run a large institution. And you thought legendary football coach Vince Lombardi only had the Super Bowl Trophy named after him,. He has one of the biggest rest areas on the turnpike named after him because he taught and coached high school football at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, New Jersey long before he became famous. The history lessons go on to include presidents, poets, and inventors. President Woodrow Wilson was once governor and president of Princeton University. President Grover Cleveland who was born in Caldwell, New Jersey and died in Princeton. He was the only president to be elected to two non-consecutive terms in 1884 and 1892. We can’t forget poets Walt Whitman and Joyce Kilmer. Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey and also got a bridge into Philadelphia named after him. Joyce Kilmer, who was a man by the way, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and died at 31 fighting on World War I. The man who gave us light and sound, inventor Thomas Edison had his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Now, of course, called Edison. There are others. But you can check them out when you’re driving the turnpike.

The New Jersey Turnpike has achieved almost iconic status among American highways. Comedians joke about what exit they’re from. The cigar smoking Tony Soprano pulls a toll ticket along the turnpike in the opening sequence of “The Sopranos”. Songwriter Paul Simon wrote about “counting cars on the New Jersey Turnpike” in his song “America” which tells the story of a cross country trip with his girlfriend in the lonely search for the meaning of America. Cars and highways are part of the American character. They allow us freedom to travel and explore. It started with families in wagon trains heading west looking for a new life and their own piece of the dream. I view the turnpike as a necessary evil. We hate it, but we can’t live without it. It does get us where we want to go. But you never look forward to getting on it, and you can’t wait to get off it. One version of hell is driving on the turnpike for eternity with all the exits closed. But maybe someday my driverless car will make the ride less stressful, and I can just sit back count the cars. Until someone cuts me off. Do you think those cars will have a button to control road rage?