Boston, Massachusetts, October 10, 2017
America’s longest highway begins in the cradle of the Revolution.
From the five-way intersection about 2 miles west of the center of Boston you can see the lights for left field of Fenway Park, on the other side of the (below-ground-level) Massachusetts Turnpike. As you look east on the busy city street, near the giant Citgo billboard, three letters and two digits bestow a simple note: End 20.
Turn around and the vastness of the North American continent awaits, one mile at a time. It will take a while to get there, though. For nearly its entire route east of the Mississippi River, US 20 is overshadowed by Interstate 90, meandering through stoplight-clogged downtowns and suburbia, passing Empire State Plaza in Albany, the north end of US 19 in Erie (a sequential intersection), Public Square in Cleveland (the former north end of US 21), and the South Side of Chicago.
But then it opens up. In Iowa, the highway carries as much significance today as it did 92 years ago this fall, when the US highway system was created. In fact, it has more. For 60 years, forward-thinking officials and business backers have wanted a superhighway to efficiently transport people and goods across the state. And now that dream has become a reality.
After Sioux City, US 20 reverts to a two-lane road through one-horse towns, covering miles of open prairie turned to rangeland until hitching northwest to enter Yellowstone National Park. Technically, US 20 doesn’t exist inside the park, but you can’t get to the other side without passing by some of the most spectacular scenery in the world.
A whopping 12 miles in Montana opens the door for US 20 to go past Craters of the Moon National Monument and within a few blocks of Idaho’s state capitol, meandering through the middle of Oregon to Newport, where at US 101, US 20 completes its journey with the Pacific Ocean in sight.
If you had to pick something that captures the diversity of the United States, in all aspects of the word, US 20 is a prime candidate. At the same time, if you had to pick something that captures the unity of the United States, in a time when that is sorely lacking, two very different Albanys multiple time zones apart have something in common — the same highway runs through both downtowns.
There’s a US 20 superfan who I have helped along his journey to promote and plot out as much of the original route as possible. The seventh-longest signed route in the world comes in contact with trails that existed before the white man came, the Oregon Trail, and the Lincoln Highway.
Highway 20 is a special route, and today is a special day. Let’s celebrate.