At the intersection of Interstate 70 and Baltimore’s 695 Beltway, there is a sign proclaiming Cove Fort: 2,153 miles.

One day when I was a wee lad, my father took me out to the driveway of our court in old town Greenbelt, MD. Of course, then it wasn’t known as old town. Putting his arm around my skinny shoulder (I said this was a long time ago), he said to me “Son, step out on this road, and it will take you anywhere. A lot of men over a lot of years have gone to the trouble to lay it down so you can get anyplace you can imagine.  It changes names, but it is all the same road. Your road.”

At least that’s how I remember the birth of my fascination with the road.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig to Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon,  From Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again to Arlo Guthrie’s City of New Orleans, and Travels with Charley by Steinbeck and Me and Bobby Mcgee by Kristofferson as sung by Pearl, and KIng of the Road by Roger Miller and Kerouac’s On the Road and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and The Adventures of Huck Finn by Clemens and Eighteen Wheels by Kathy Mattea, and Toby Tyler by James Kaier and Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and Ventura Highway by America and By My Side from Godspell and Somewhere over the Rainbow by Arlen and Harburg as sung by Garland, Patti LaBelle, and, of course, Iz,  and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Doug Adams and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins–well, it’s nice to know the yearning for the mystery of the road is fairly widespread.

Let’s not forget Country Roads and Back Home Again and Sweet Surrender by the incomparable John Denver.  Do you have your own favorite book or song of the road?

And the lesson often seems to be that, at the end of the traveling, one really, truly finds home.

Of course one has to go, anyway, to discover that.

I’d often wondered where Cove Fort was.  In a different, long-ago world, I hitchhiked every inch of I-95, and I-70 as far as East St. Louis from Baltimore.  But never Cove Fort. On a quiet, sunny morning from Cedar City to Moab, we chugged on through Cove Fort.  Nothing but sagebrush and rocky escarpment.

I am sorry to report that in Cove Fort, Utah, there is no corresponding sign reading, Woodlawn, MD Park & Ride: 2,153 Miles.  Nothing marks the western terminus of one of the great engineering marvels of the modern age.

I was tempted to wake the kids anyway. But it will keep til we get to Greenbelt.  It’s the same road.