Exit to Nowhere

Newsletter 2023-07-10

[This is the last newsletter without an audio version. Presumably, we’ll arrive home sometime later tonight. Either that or this is the road trip that never ends. I’m scared to find out.]

Minneapolis, I love you, but we need to talk. You’re a first rate city. Your people are, as advertised, Minnesota nice, which is way better than North Dakota mean or Nebraska indifferent. Your NFL stadium has a roof, a cutting edge cold-weather technology that nearby Wisconsin has yet to master. Your famed Mall of America is the size of actual parts of America. The first floor alone can hold three Delawares. Yet, despite all these wonderful qualities, you have one glaring shortcoming: There’s something very wrong with your roads.

Your interstates seem to have been designed on a dare. I’ve never seen such flagrant abuse of exit-only lanes in my life. I was driving across your fine concrete, minding my own business, when suddenly my lane became exit-only and disappeared. I could either be forcibly ejected onto local streets or merge left into the next lane to stay on the interstate. But ten seconds later, that new lane became exit-only, too. And then the lane after that and the lane after that. It was like a video game where I had to keep moving because the ground was constantly falling out from under me, only, instead of trying to dump me into a lava pit, you were attempting to spit me out into random neighborhoods. I wasn’t concerned about my safety—your roughest block is the one where people sometimes forget to say please and thank you—but I still didn’t appreciate being pushed around. That’s not very Minnesota nice at all.

The weirdest part was your interstates never ran out of lanes. As quickly as they dropped off on the right, they reappeared on the left. They came from tunnels below and overpasses above and everywhere in between. There was always someone merging. That’s the primary pastime for your state. Boating, hiking, and snowmobiling were just a ruse. People wake up at the crack of dawn and rush to the interstate to squeeze into perpetually converging lines of traffic. The roads go from three lanes to two lanes thanks to a surprise exit-only lane no one wants to take only to go right back to three lanes again due to a new road that connects out of nowhere, bringing in hundreds more vehicles that will soon have to merge when the right-most lane becomes exit-only again. I can only assume there are subreddits and fan pages run by merging enthusiasts where they gush about all the fun they had sliding their car between two other vehicles as the number of lanes randomly contracted and expanded for no discernible reason. It’s their passion, and I’m happy for them, but I shouldn’t have been forced to share in their eclectic hobby. I had places to go. Apparently I was the only one.

I must admit it took me a decade to notice this quirk with your road system. Most of my trips were through you rather than to you. My aunt lives on the far side out in the suburbs. I visit her every July for our annual family reunion. This year, though, I decided to explore. We arrived days early to enjoy your great institutions. We started off on our way into you with a stop at the aforementioned Mall of America. I picked it mostly because it didn’t charge admission. I thought we were sight-seeing. My kids thought we were shopping. That fundamental misunderstanding cost me a lot of money. After visits to the Lego store and Croc outlet, we left with a giant bag of the finest plastics your local merchants had to offer. We were off to a great start.

I didn’t notice the disappearing lanes that first day because Lola was driving while I worked on a newsletter. If she was negatively affected, she didn’t alert the world by complaining loudly and using all the replacement swear words that are necessary when little ears are around. Self-censorship is gosh darn frustrating. We arrived at my aunt’s house without incident. She had graciously offered to let us stay with her for our extra nights in town, saving us hundreds of dollars in hotel costs while exposing herself to thousands of dollars in damages. She has white carpet, glass tables, and fragile art everywhere. It’s the kind of house my kids should only be able to view from a safe distance, preferably from the other side of bullet proof glass. The day we showed up, she lost hundreds of dollars in meat during a power outage, had to stop mowing when she was only halfway done with her yard because part of the mower deck flew off, and got an unwanted call from her doctor. Bad things come in threes. She was too polite to say it, but the arrival of my family was misfortune number four. We planned to be out and about for the next two days to protect her from additional disasters. Unfortunately, Minneapolis, your insane interstate system made keeping that promise as hard as possible.

Photo by Steijn Leijzer on Unsplash

The next morning, it was my turn to venture out onto the roads of the greater metropolitan area, which, at the time, I still naively trusted. We have a membership at a small museum in Indiana that lets us visit hundreds of other museums in the same network for free. You had four on the list. All I had to do was drive to them. I didn’t realize that was the biggest catch ever. Like Bilbo Baggins stepping off the path through the Mirkwood Forest, as soon as we strayed from our usual course, we were in trouble. Lanes started dropping left and right. Actually, just right. The right-most lane was ephemeral as dandelion fluff in a stiff breeze. Google Maps didn’t adequately prepare me for any of the disappearances. It told me to go straight for ten miles without mentioning that, if I didn’t merge left every five feet, my lane would vanish and I’d be cast out into parts unknown. It’s possible your transient lanes were a feature, not a bug. You’re so great that the road designers wanted us to enjoy all of you by tossing us into different neighborhoods randomly against our will. When I did actually want to exit, I still wasn’t safe. Every off ramp split in two in the middle of a sharp curve, forcing me to make an unexpected last-second decision on which way to go. I chose incorrectly one hundred percent of the time. You did not look kindly on mistakes. One wrong turn made me take a seven mile detour with nowhere to change course in between. Minneapolis, you’re a great city to drive in if I know exactly where I’m going and never, ever change my mind. You were the last place on earth I should have been allowed behind the wheel.

I realize this all makes me sound like a country bumpkin, but I live and work in Indianapolis which isn’t exactly small. According to Wikipedia, Indianapolis is the eighteenth largest city in America, while you’re forty-sixth. The existence of St. Paul messes up those numbers. You’re too nice to engage in hostile municipal takeovers. Meanwhile, Indianapolis swallowed up everything it touched and then some. The problem wasn’t a difference of size, but of philosophy. Despite the squiggly edges along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Indiana is a square state for square people. We build our roads on predictable grids with tidy ninety-degree angles. You, on the other hand, are a water city. Of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, 9,984 are located directly within your municipal boundaries. There’s also the Mississippi to deal with. Roads start out diagonally along the river until they hit a lake, at which point they become incomprehensible squiggles. Instead of a grid, your basic road plan is a toddler scribbling on the back of a restaurant placemat. Now make half of those scribbles turn into exit-only lanes and you’ll know why my blood pressure doubled every time I buckled my seat belt. Thanks, Minneapolis. My cardiologist can afford a new boat because of you.

My kids complained the whole time, but not about the roads. Those were strictly my problem. Before we went to the children’s museum, the girls said they just wanted to stay at my aunt’s house to swim in her pool. Once we were at the museum, though, they complained when it was time to leave. Waffle especially enjoyed an exhibit that let her put cardboard boxes on a hand-operated conveyor belt. She was basically roleplaying being an Amazon warehouse worker. Jeff Bezos could have a huge untapped child workforce if he can bribe the right lawmakers. From the children’s museum, we walked to the science museum. I was thrilled that I didn’t have to drive again and pay for parking for a second time. Getting into that parking garage in the first place took years off my life. Despite being at the children’s museum, it clearly wasn’t built to handle minivans. Apparently everyone in Minnesota hauls their kids around on the back of Vespas. We stayed at the science museum until closing time, then walked back to the van and drove to my aunt’s house. This time, I was ready for your disappearing lanes, even if I wasn’t any better at navigating them. My aunt had a home cooked spaghetti meal waiting for us, complete with red sauce in her very white house. We ate outside. It was the right call.

The next day, I planned to take the kids to two smaller museums that we could also get into for free. The girls protested as loudly as before, but, as usual, their objections were respectfully ignored. These museums were well outside of the downtown area in some of the other quadrants where your exit-only lanes had been trying to dump us all along. One was in a fancy neighborhood near a lake at the end of a spiderweb of one-way streets. When we went to leave, we didn’t have any cell reception, stranding us without GPS. That raised the question of how our phones were able to get us there in the first place. It was the Hotel California of Minnesota. We drove at random for several miles until our devices found civilization again. For lunch, we made the kids’ favorite stop of our entire weeklong vacation: Eating at Chili’s. Your roads were terrible, Minneapolis, but you did give us a large bowl of queso and bottomless nachos. That balances things out a bit.

When we got back to my aunt’s house that afternoon, the first of my relatives had arrived for the family reunion. After that, all I had to do was sit in one spot and drink. The alcohol helped me figure out how to fix all the problems in the world. I’m not a civil engineer or a transportation planner. In fact, I have no expertise in anything, except perhaps at complaining, which is really what most of being a comedy writer is. In my completely unprofessional opinion, rather than getting rid of lanes only to add them back in, you could just keep the ones you had in the first place. It’s a revolutionary idea, but I bet you could pull it off. In the meantime, I won’t be venturing into your downtown again anytime soon. I think I’ll wait till my kids are a little older. Then I can make them drive me around. I look forward to complaining about every place they take me.

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Sick of gridlock? Become a prehistoric flying reptile. They’re immune to all traffic laws. My children’s book, You Can’t Be A Pterodactyl, comes out July 25th. Here are a few sample pages.

Yes, I took these pictures in the van. It was a VERY long trip home.

Snag a copy here: The Book. Pick Main Street Books at the link for a signed copy.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James