As I go to school everyday, I take the 405 freeway to the 73 and get off on the second exit that charges a toll. I also took a similar route when I was going to middle school. As I have travelled this length several times, I started to wonder about its origins, where it goes and why the tolls exist in the places they do. For example there is the 55. If you get off of the 73 freeway southbound onto the 55 and keep going, you run into the end of the freeway quite quickly, in only about three miles.
As a kid when I heard that the freeways ended, I imagined a giant wall that simply blocked driving further and would leave citizens at a dead end. Instead they continue on, like rivers. As the 55 ends on the southern side, the street narrows, becoming a highway along the beach on the Newport Beach Peninsula. I am not sure where it goes after that, yet this reveals some of the curiosity behind these vessels of transportation.
There are some freeways one could drive down for hours and never find the end, always wondering if just the next exit might give them some better luck. I assume just as a river, the Newport Peninsula side of the 55 freeway would eventually wane more and more narrow or eventually connect back to another road, possibly ultimately perpendicular to its original path.
I always get excited when I notice that I pass an exit with a low number. I will check if the direction I am going yields lower and lower numbers and if, to my delight, they do, I know that something is about to be different. Or maybe I will find an answer to my endless questions about these freeways. One time I was going south on the 405 and I drove past exit 3, then exit 2, to my dismay after that was exit 1C.
I had to wait a couple more miles before I passed 1A and to my surprise, I was forced to merge onto the 5 freeway: another end. Another link that I have tied in my head with freeways is similar to that of a human circulatory system. As I travel the length of the road, I imagine my car as a red blood cell of sorts. This image solidifies itself in my mind as I look around me at all the other people, cars, and individual stories just as significant as mine that I will never know. I am just another hemoglobin molecule among many.
Our car transports us to different places. Blood rejuvenates itself with new oxygen in the lungs, just as we take city streets to go home and recharge our batteries to attack the next day. Following this idea, different places can be seen as organs. I flow to school, a place to help us mature and become better people in the future. Men and women go to work in order to fuel human society, or the body. Just as a humans’ cells can exist outside of them yet we are nothing without our components, humans can exist outside of a society. Yet without inhabitants, or when its people are attacked or killed, civilizations die.
