In Southland, You Are What You Drive On

I keep having this conversation.

“Where do you live?” people ask.

“The South Bay,” I say.

“Ooh,” they say, pained looks flitting across their faces.

“That’s too bad,” they say.

“Actually, it’s pretty nice,” I say. “Great weather, fresh air.”

“Yeah,” they answer, “but the commute.”

I’m new here. The idea that you are your commute had never occurred to me.

“How about you? Where do you live?” I ask.

The answer to this question obviously varies with the person being asked. People name their neighborhood or town.

“And how do you like that?” I ask.

What comes next hardly varies at all. People start talking not about their houses or neighbors or prized local cafes, but about the local road system. They give driving directions to their houses. For reasons still obscure to an outlander like me, they seem to relish this. Those who enjoy it most give alternative routes.

So I’ve learned that in certain areas you can avoid freeways altogether and take something called surface streets (you know, the ones on top of the Earth’s crust, unlike, I guess, those down under). I know three different ways to get to the home of a complete stranger in Glendale. I know that if you live in Long Beach, you normally take the 710 to downtown Los Angeles. Or if that’s blocked, you can take the 91 to the 605. Or, in dire circumstances, the 405 to the 105 to the 110, which puts you in the same boat as me, the boat that floats not very quickly on the stagnant declasse river of the Harbor Freeway.

What is most striking about these conversations are not the directions themselves. More interesting is the frequency and fervor with which they take place. The message is clear: roads matter here in a way that would be dumbfounding elsewhere.

*

In most places around the United States the usual get-acquainted conversation, after hi-what’s-your-name, pleased-to-meet-how-are-you, goes directly to occupational investigation. Something like:

“What do you do?”

“I design nuclear warheads.”

“Oh, really, how interesting. Have you seen the new Brad Pitt movie yet?”

That doesn’t happen in Southern California.

In some places, you are what you eat. Or maybe what you drive. Here, you are what you drive on.

This point is made more forcefully--driven home, so to speak--by the local habit of modifying the names of freeways with the word “the.”

Elsewhere, it is sufficient to say, “Take I-5 north to the lake and jump in.”

Here, almost universally, people say, “Take the 5.”

There is no clear reason for this. It takes longer. The listener doesn’t profit. It doesn’t help identify the road in question. It’s just one of those little tics languages pick up.

*

Syntactic linguists (the people who study this sort of thing) have proposed a variety of theories for the use of definite articles as modifiers of place names.

They’re a little airy about how they say so--one began his speculation by referring to the “diachronic shift in referring practice vis-a-vis Southern California freeways,” another talks about “perceived morphological status”--but basically, they don’t have a clear answer.

Many highways here have names in addition to numbers, and common practice when referring to a named road is to use “the.” It’s the San Diego Freeway or the Hollywood. Some speculate this construction migrated into general usage with numbered roads.

However it happened, it wasn’t always this way. There was that aforementioned “diachronic shift,” a point in time when it began.

Now, says Kim Stowell, a UCLA linguist, it seems a standard fixture of the region’s evolving dialect, part of “the great mystery of how language changes.”

Stowell says he’d be careful not to read too much into it. I wonder, though.

Some linguists point to similar usages. Names of regions, for example, especially those that seem somehow remote or unknowable, the Yukon, the Ukraine or the Midwest.

Some time ago, it was common to say The Argentine, which was a sort of abbreviation for the Republic of Argentina.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

In Southern California, the idea of highways as independent nations does not seem at all far-fetched. They have their own set of mores, laws, and a language. It consists mainly of horns, gestures and curses, but it is a language nonetheless.

There’s even a spot on the Harbor Freeway, at the intersection of the 105, where there is such a mass of swooping, spiraling concrete forms overhead it creates the sense of a grand palace, a cathedral, or, maybe the seat of government.

That’s it: The Capital of the Republic of Roads.