Life-Giving Artery or ‘Cocaine Lane,’ I-95 Mirrors Land Along East Coast

A mile of interstate highway is 9,000 cubic yards of chewing-gum colored concrete, striped with 1,000 gallons of paint that reflects like cat’s-eyes in the dark.

Take Interstate 95, which stretches 1,836 miles from the Canadian border at this northern Maine potato town to Miami and blue-green Biscayne Bay.

Without a closer look it can seem just a couple of double lanes, long and gray and mute.

And yet this road speaks: Road signs are in French where it begins, Spanish where it ends. At the top, one points “Aux Etats-Unis”--To the United States.

Along its miles and miles, Yankee country changes tune to Dixie; New York, Philadelphia and other industrial centers and old ports give way to the little tobacco farms of North Carolina. Paper-white birch woods in New England become the sensuous wetland plains of coastal Georgia. Ringing Washington, D.C., it’s the Beltway, beyond which, in the bureaucrat’s geography, lies “real-life” America.

I-95 travels a path of history, following a colonial mail route at some northern points and touching what was called the King’s Road in Florida. Near Lexington, Mass., a plaque within earshot of the oblivious traffic marks where Paul Revere’s ride was ended by a picket of English troops.

‘Cocaine Lane’

After a drive from its start to its finish, it’s clear this is both an artery giving life to legitimate commerce and a “cocaine lane” watched by 15 states’ troopers. It’s a route home to tearful retirees and runaways. It’s been a landing strip, a laboratory, a morgue and even a place to be born.

“A highway is a dynamic thing,” Federal Highway Administrator Ray Barnhart said in an interview in his Washington office. “It changes with society.”

There are longer roads; there may be more scenic ones. But I-95, arguably the busiest link in the 30-year-old interstate system, may come as close as any to being Everyroad, illustrating how much more a highway is than so much aggregate rock and Portland cement.

That message becomes manifest within the first mile or so, at Houlton.

In the star-pocked blackness of 2 a.m., a glow pulsed on a ridge a mile off to the west from I-95. It was a trailer on fire.

It stood adjacent to Wilbur and Gladys Estabrook’s house, where they and their grandson were sleeping. The flames would consume the trailer, which belonged to their daughter, and scorch the walls of the house. But a drowsy passerby veered off the highway and raised the alarm.

‘We’d Have Been Burned’

In the Estabrooks’ kitchen, over the scratchy repartee of a police scanner that the family listens to for entertainment, Wilbur talked about the close call. “If it hadn’t been for 95,” he said, “we’d have been burned.”

The highway wasn’t always there, of course. Houlton people used to fish in a big frog pond where I-95 is now.

“We went up there when they were cutting the right of way,” Gladys Estabrook said, shaking her head as she remembered the tree stumps everywhere. “You couldn’t comprehend it.”

At the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoint, Floyd Munroe still can’t understand. At the border, he watches a young moose that hangs around what’s left of the swamp, he watches Canadians enter Maine, and he watches Americans pass the other way.

He said the roadway planners’ decision to locate I-95’s northern terminus just halfway up the Maine-New Brunswick border, instead of at the northernmost point in the state, “was a real boondoggle.” Making the crossing farther north, he said, would have kept travelers in the United States a little longer, long enough to buy lunch, say, or stay in a motel.

“That cost those towns north of here money,” he said.

Munroe sighed, then leaned into the window of a recreational vehicle whose windshield bore the hot-breath clouds of two coffee mugs on the dashboard and whose bundled-up occupants were headed for a vacation in warm South Carolina.

‘Like the Birds’

Climbing aboard, Munroe glanced in the refrigerator, found what he expected--nothing amiss--and waved the couple on their way as he and other agents do with 500 to 1,000 cars a day. “They’re like the birds, the snowbirds. They go where it’s warm.”

Sometimes, Munroe said, they’re heading for retirement far down I-95, and at the border they cry.

The downstream run toward Florida starts through rocky Maine farmland where the schoolkids get a potato-harvesting vacation, then through a corridor of birches that glow at sunset, over the brooding Argyle peat bog and finally past the myriad outlet shops.

Then it’s out of Maine, via the Piscatauqua River bridge, which gives a gull’s-eye view of the 17th Century seaport town of Portsmouth, N.H.

New Hampshire’s stretch of I-95 is among the shortest, and yet the road hazards there have sometimes been as bizarre as those in any state. The northbound lanes were blocked by a load of fish a few years back when a truck flipped, and more recently a fleeing cocaine suspect threw so much of a powdery substance out the window that a highway patrolman said it looked “like a snowstorm.”

“Cocaine lane” is the nickname given I-95 by a grand jury in Georgia, and it has taken on other monikers. One stretch in Massachusetts is “Silicon East,” for all its high-technology companies.

Not far from there, where the highway shares the overburdened pavement of old U.S. Route 1, Tom Daley runs a clothing shop, Jeans for ‘U.’ Once, an accident just outside diverted Interstate 95 through his parking lot.

Cars careen past, giving fits to drivers trying to turn into little stores like his. “They white-knuckle it all the way,” he growled. Lots of faint-hearted customers just drive on, he figures, adding that when a bypassing section of I-95 is completed he ought to do half again as much business -- “if I last that long.”

Not far below Daley’s store, at Lexington, Mass., I-95 finds a far more tranquil place, Minute Man National Park.

“At this well, April 19, 1775,” reads a plaque by the ruins of a house there, “James Hayward of Acton met a British soldier, who, raising his gun, said, ‘You are a dead man.’ ‘And so are you,’ replied Hayward. Both fired. The soldier was instantly killed and Hayward mortally wounded.”

The day they died, Paul Revere was intercepted by Redcoats after galloping across what is now I-95. “He definitely crossed down there,” said Gardner Lane, a park ranger.

News of the Revolution’s start was announced in following days with the tolling of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, again within earshot of what would become the highway’s right of way. Further south, the road glimpses the fort that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the War of 1812, and later rolls over campgrounds of the Civil War.

But back to the pavement.

It skirts Boston, and splits Rhode Island’s capital, Providence.

After intersecting the road that the old rich take to mansions in Newport, (far to the south, it will see their wintering grounds at Palm Beach, Fla.), I-95 sweeps into Connecticut, glimpsing the slums of New Haven and Bridgeport, as well as the enclaves of movie stars and millionaire executives, approaching New York.

Bridge Collapsed

One such blueblood town, Greenwich, with its yachts docked along the Mianus River, could be a setting for “Scenic New England” postcards.

The peace there was broken by a series of jarring noises one rainy June morning four years ago: a screech of concrete against metal, a scream of tires, a scrape of axles on pavement.

The sounds of a 100-foot section of the Mianus bridge collapsing echoed cross the country. At least 24 states ordered emergency bridge inspections. In the collapse, two tractor-trailers and two cars nosedived 70 feet into the river. Three people died.

Crossing the Mianus River bridge now makes one think. Maybe that has as much to do with the perspective a bridge gives as with this one’s history. Just 20 or so miles south on I-95, the George Washington Bridge presents drivers with the spiky skyline of Manhattan, which can set a tourist tingling or solidify the glaze over a commuter carpool.

I-95 glances off upper Manhattan, then quickly becomes the New Jersey Turnpike, heading south. Awash in cars and trucks, it floods past the Meadowlands, a shrinking swamp where concrete has been formed into Giants Stadium, into hotels and warehouses and, they say, into cement shoes for unlucky gangsters.

After that come Bayonne and Elizabeth, from whose landscape of smokestacks emanate news briefs in the New York papers headlined: “Foul Odors Reported in Jersey.”

Thoughtful Toll Collector

Just south of Elizabeth, Stephen Zawatski was collecting tolls at Interchange 12 when Evelyn Garcia drove up in a car spewing smoke.

As she told his supervisor in a letter: “Mr. Zawatski not only checked my car and drove me to buy necessary parts, but he also installed the parts in my car. He gave up his break even though he was working a double shift. I consider myself very lucky.”

No big deal, Zawatski shrugged. But maybe it was, if only by smashing the cast of the stone-faced tolltaker. “People don’t really have a very nice image of us,” he said.

It’s easier to stay on the turnpike, but a section of I-95 glides through Pennsylvania, slipping between Philadelphia’s dockyards and the old brick neighborhoods dominated by Independence Hall, where the Constitution was written, then enters Delaware, the first state to ratify it.

Delaware presents a corporate face, with logos of DuPont and other companies marking buildings lining the road. Business looks good. Jobs were the elusive dream of 38 Salvadorans huddling in the back of a rented truck stopped by police at Newark, Del., three years ago; the thousands the undocumented aliens had paid for passage to New York City were wasted.

Driving at night just below the Delaware line, travelers are arrested by a glowing vision on a hillside. There stands a floodlit madonna next to a floodlit sign: “Shrine of Our Lady of the Highways.”

The statue, explained Brother Thomas Brophy, who helps run the Roman Catholic retreat house on the hilltop, faces the spot on I-95 where 17 vehicles collided in a fatal crash in 1969. A witness, the late Rev. John J. Fuqua, conceived the shrine as a “prayer in stone.”

Mass for Drivers

Daily, the religious community prays for highway safety, and at least once a month a Mass is dedicated to all drivers. “It must help,” Brophy said.

After the highway jumps the wide, lazy Susquehanna River, catching a first glimpse of the Chesapeake Bay, it plows toward Baltimore Harbor. For years, travelers complained about the bottleneck there. Something had to be done: the feds first proposed a bridge, but eventually built a tunnel. In between, they met A. Shirley Doda.

“All we were doing was trying to save the fort. The fort was very sacred to us as children. You’d go in and you’d lower your voice,” said Doda, speaking of Ft. McHenry, which held off a British naval onslaught in a pivotal battle, witnessed by Francis Scott Key, in the War of 1812. A replica of the 32-by-40-foot star-spangled banner he watched still flies.

The bridge would have “overpowered” the fort, said Doda. So, for five years, she and her neighbors fought it--picketing the White House, camping out in front of City Hall.

“If you don’t have historic sites for your children to visit, what do you have? Just highways?” Doda said. “I know we were a nuisance. But when they held the ceremony opening the tunnel, the mayor said we were right.”

The $825-million tunnel was the most expensive single project in the interstate system.

Highway administrator Barnhart said that sort of thing--along with an increase in road travel, up 35% since 1974, to 1.7 trillion vehicle-miles a year--has him worried. “What are we going to do at the turn of the century?”

Restrictions on Roads

People want the convenience and economic benefits of four-lane divided highways, but more and more limitations are placed on where they can be built, Barnhart complained.

“You can’t touch usable farmland. You can’t believe the extremes to which the environmental movement dictates policy. If it were up to the parks departments, we’d have camouflage-painted stop signs.”

Barnhart’s office, a few miles off the arc of I-95 called the Capital Beltway, is decorated with a giant pair of scissors cutting a giant red tape. But he growls over boondoggles--including a wall to shield highway noise from a cemetery.

“It burns you,” he said, “to see money spent in non-productive ways for transportation.”

Still, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill creating the Interstate Highway system in 1956, the gross national product was $421 billion. Today, it is $4.27 trillion. “The country has been opened up to economic development,” Barnhart said.

Of the 3.9 million miles of roads in the United States, fewer than 42,500 miles, or roughly 1% are interstate highways, but those carry 20% of America’s daily traffic. The system, 97% complete, will cost $120 billion when finished in the early 1990s. Of that, $107 billion will come from the federal government, the rest from the states.

Among its payoffs is safety. In 1925, more than 18 people died for every 100 million vehicle-miles traveled; nowadays, the comparable average is fewer than three deaths, and for interstate highways it’s less than half that.

“Certainly the interstates generally are the safest roads,” said Richard Hebert of the American Automobile Assn. He credited breakaway light standards and other engineering improvements, but said road signs could be made clearer.

AAA advises its members on the best route to take on trips--say, from New York to Miami. “If you want the fastest, most direct route . . . it’ll probably be I-95.”

But some people don’t. They shun the “cruise-control” speeds, the limited access, the sameness of the broad thoroughfares that have made travel, for better and worse, less of an adventure than 30 years ago.

You won’t hear nostalgia about the pre-interstate roads from truckers along I-95. It used to take twice as long, Boyd Godfrey said, to cover the ground he was covering, hauling citrus from Fort Pierce, Fla., to near Washington. He was resting before dropping off the rest of his oranges and grapefruits, $8,223 worth wholesale, and making his way home to South Carolina.

At 72, Godfrey has been driving a truck for more than 40 years, easily a couple million miles. “Ain’t got sense enough to quit.”

Went Back to Trucking

He did quit once. “Got myself a job in a factory. Right alongside a highway. I could hear every kind of truck going by, by the sound of the engine. There’s a Detroit, and a Cummins and a Caterpillar. The sound of ‘em whipping by me, that sure did it to me.

“So,” he said, “I just quit and went back to trucking.”

It’s a fine job, if you have an urge to be moving, and Godfrey said he always did--though he complained about regulation, traffic and other pressures. Trucking can strain a family. “I’ve known several split up over it,” he said. “My wife, she never did mind. She used to ride with me. She loved it.”

Sometimes he took his young son. “I put cushions on the seat to where he could see out over the wheel and drive. That was the mistake I made.” Godfrey smiled. Boyd Jr. became a trucker, too, and now owns six rigs.

If a highway is a community, the truckers are its citizens. They live there, every day including Christmas, and pay the mortgage with their road taxes. Other citizens were there before, it’s worth remembering, some of whom paid other dues for passage along routes like that followed by I-95. In the Civil War, this was a campaign trail, and many paid with blood.

Forty or so miles south of Washington, I-95 skirts a cemetery whose rows and rows of simple headstones commemorate a bitter battle. A New York Times correspondent traveling with the Union troops wrote in December, 1862:

Newspaper Account

“The nation will stand aghast at the terrible price which has been paid for its life when the realities of the battlefield of Fredericksburg are spread before it. . . . The result thus far leaves us with a loss of from 10,000 to 15,000 men, and absolutely nothing gained. Along the whole line the rebels hold their own.

“Again and again we have hurled forward our masses on their position. At each time the hammer was broken on the anvil!”

Fredericksburg is calm now, and Lee Sanzo runs a shop in the old town, buying and selling relics of the war, some from people who comb the area with metal detectors.

Mississippi buttons, U.S. buckles, artillery fuses and bullets came from the right of way of I-95 as it was under construction.

“The whole war was right there,” Sanzo said. “There’s asphalt and rock over it now . . . (but) the campfires were everywhere, up and down the interstate.”

From Fredericksburg, the highway races to the Confederate capital, Richmond, then past the battle site of Petersburg, where last year a pilot, out of fuel, landed his crop-duster on I-95, was refueled on the median and took off again as troopers held back rush-hour traffic.

It’s largely rural country in that stretch, small farms in southern Virginia and northern North Carolina where for centuries tobacco has been cultivated and where some farmers have begun to diversify, just as the big tobacco companies have. Some are planting broccoli instead. Nonetheless, said Ken Bateman, an extension agent in Johnston County, N.C., “Tobacco’s still very much of a money-making crop in this county.”

Colorful Signs

Billboards advertise cheap smoke shops like Charlie’s Cigarettes. The Carolinas can claim the most colorful signs along I-95.

“When you Dine, Make it Swine.” At tiny Weldon, N.C., you have to go inside Ralph’s Barbecue to see that embroidered sign. Most of its advertising is by word of mouth.

Every month, about 40,000 pounds of meat goes into the smoker at Ralph’s, where eager diners don’t necessarily take off their coats and where the heaps of minced pork and chicken have a tart taste.

“My granddaddy was born around Emporia. This whole area uses a vinegar base,” explained Kim Franks, granddaughter of the founder, Ralph Woodruff, who started out simple along the road. “He would sit out there underneath this tree, and if he’d sell, you know, $15 or $20 worth, that would be a good day.”

Alan Schafer’s extraordinary enterprise just below the North Carolina-South Carolina line began as a hot dog and beer stand.

Now, “South of the Border” has 550 employees in peak season and gets a place of distinction in any compendium of roadside curiosities. Dominated by a restaurant under a huge sombrero roof, it has a 300-room motel, eight restaurants and a dozen shops decorated like ersatz haciendas and selling everything from rubber tarantulas and busts of Elvis Presley to plates imprinted with prayers or saucy sayings.

That’s not to mention the statuary, apparently molded from plastic. “Everybody wants their picture taken being hugged by the big gorilla,” personnel manager W.E. Vereen said, pleading no contest to a charge of tackiness at S.O.B., as it calls itself on the water tower.

S.O.B.’s pun-laden billboards entertain I-95 drivers for more than 200 miles. “You Never Sausage a Place,” said one adorned with a massive hotdog. “Pedro’s Fireworks! (Does Yours?)” asks another.

A quieter enterprise, an insidious one, is at work along the long road: the transport of cocaine and other drugs. State troopers have been taught “profiles” of drivers and vehicles most likely to be involved.

Prowling I-95 near Fayetteville, N.C., Trooper Terry Isaacs has made several drug seizures, though once he searched a truck and came up with only a poisonous coral snake. Another time, he stopped a speeding car and discovered $225,000 in cash hidden in stereo speakers. The driver dared not claim it was to cover tolls, and the money was turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“He looked shocked,” Isaacs said.

South Carolina Trooper Garry Rozier, too, makes drug busts, but at times he feels a chill approaching cars. Last year, a patrolman he’d been talking with hours earlier was shot dead on I-95. Nothing in the training manual prepares you to break the news to the widow, he said, recalling driving up to her house with another trooper and her pastor.

“It lingers in your mind,” Rozier said. “When you walk up to a car, you don’t know if it’s full of drugs and if the guy inside figures you’ve been looking for him.”

Saves Cops a Trip

From Rozier’s headquarters in Ridgeland, S.C., it’s an easy run down I-95 to Savannah, Ga., where cab driver James Driggers’ meter clicked as he talked about the community of the road. Hitchhikers get stopped by troopers, who call cabbies, who transport them to motels in town at no charge. It saves a trip for the cops.

“We do it as a courtesy. I’m sure we get paid back,” Driggers said. “You know, they see us speeding a little bit, and they don’t notice.”

Now 47, he’s always liked to meet people and chat. That’s one reason he accepts long fares--for example, from Savannah to Okeechobee in central Florida; charging $200 each for two people, he said, he saves them money over the airfare.

Besides, “People just like to talk. If I pick up two people--you know, a man and wife--and drive ‘em to Jacksonville, I know pretty much all there is to know about ‘em by the time we get there. But they know the same about me.”

The ride he described follows I-95 across the marshes of Georgia’s coast, “candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free,” as the poet Sidney Lanier described them. There might be a glimpse of shrimp boats churning toward packing houses at Brunswick. Before long there’s Jacksonville, Fla., where speedboats ply the St. Johns River under a toll bridge cursed by travelers.

It was near Jacksonville two years ago that a head-on I-95 crash had a different ending than might have been expected. A pregnant woman driving a pickup had a blowout and crashed into a car driven by another pregnant woman. The first gave birth to a healthy son, the second went into false labor.

Wintertime drivers crank down the windows at Jacksonville, getting whiffs of sea salt or citrus-perfumed air as they consume I-95’s last 350 miles. There are the cutoffs for St. Augustine, where Europeans clung to the New World coast decades before the Pilgrims landed, then the Space Coast around Cape Canaveral, the Treasure Coast and the Gold Coast. Disney World and other inland parks with assorted themes beckon tourists and their freshly stocked wallets, as do roadside fruit and shell shops.

Sales to Tourists

“The tourists, they want to bring home a present for their pets--treats and toys,” Natalie Chark observed from behind her pet supplies booth at the highwayside Daytona Flea Market, a bazaar of oil paintings, easy chairs and everything in between. “Flea markets used to be just garage sales,” Chark said. “Now they’ve evolved.”

There have been those, too, who prey on I-95’s throngs. A few years ago, bands of youths waylaid cars on the road in Miami, robbing drivers until the mayor ordered the cutting of bushes where they hid and police cracked down.

Dean Hamilton started noticing a different kind of victim of the highway a few years ago. He lives in Fort Lauderdale, a place runaways dream about until they wake up there. “I saw children on the beach, or out on the street, selling themselves,” Hamilton said. “I thought, anything to get them home.”

He commutes to work at the Trailways bus station in Miami, and has steered countless mixed-up kids back to their families via free rides the bus line gives runaways.

Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Puentes passed through his station. She’d fled troubles at her home in Miami, troubles she didn’t want to talk about, and there was a promise in the highway when she took off. “I felt good, ‘cause I was getting out,” she said.

But the last mile of I-95, when she was returning, held a better promise. “It was like you could feel you were coming home, that things were going to be better. And so far, it’s OK.”