Highway 10, Route 66, the Appian Way: great roads of history. But no armies tromped down 10 to lay siege to Motley, Minnesota; no legions marched for days across 66 to conquer Barstow and bring its riches back to Caesar. The Appian Way is the mother road of Western civilization, and it shares something with the great roads of America. I don’t say all this just because I’m on vacation and have to weld my travel stories to the titular theme of the column.
I mean, I do, yes, but I’m not wrong. The Appian Way is just like Highway 10. Bear with me.
The many tombs and monuments that lined the Roman road are gone, carted off by gleaners who reused the elegant stone for churches or homes or perhaps a nice shed for the backyard. For all we know the most gifted author of his day, now forgotten, had a tomb that ended up as a horse trough. There’s one massive tomb for the wife of the son of the fabulously wealthy Crassus, but it survived because of its enormity. We visited it as part of a bike tour. You have to pay to get inside. Crassus would’ve approved of that.
There are graveyards along Highway 10 as well, but there are a few differences. Unlike Mrs. Crassus’ final resting place, there are no facilities for sacrificing cows and sheep in the boneyards by the rural churches. The stones are humble and weathered, and without tending the earth grows over the small shoebox-sized markers on the ground. Even with care, the elements erase the names and dates. To travel the Appian Way and Highway 10 is to realize—
Oh, enough of this clumsy conjoining. The roads are nothing alike. Along 10, you can have some Worcestershire sauce at a cafe, a flavor many historians believe was similar to garum, the sauce favored by Romans who traveled the old stone roads! Nonsense. The Appian Way has stretches that have survived for millennia. Highway 10 needs the highway department to show up every few years and fill a hole. Vigorous weeds would disassemble the entire thing in less than a century. Highway 10 allows us to speed in cool comfort on a hot day, not walk under the broiling sun. The class traitor Publius Clodius Pulcher was murdered on the Appian Way, which led to a revolt that ended with the burning of the Senate. The only possible analogue would be people torching the Minnesota State Capitol because Garrison Keillor was assassinated by the People’s League for the Elimination of Winsome Rural Observations.
Let me stop this nonsense and tell you what we found at the end of the day, in Rome, after a journey that took us beyond the ancient walls of the city and back to the hotel’s rooftop bar: citizens of the far-distant province of Flickertailia.
That would be the Flickertail State, North Dakota.
“Excuse me,” said a fellow at a nearby table. “I heard you mention Fargo. You from North Dakota?”
Why, yes. I am. Wife and child here, from Minnesota, where we all live. And you?
“Minot,” he said.
“Fargo.”
And here there’s a pause while everyone sizes everyone up. Minot is not Fargo and Fargo is not Minot. No interstate serves Minot; only state highways thread through the northwest quadrant of North Dakota. Fargo has the intersection of two nation-spanning interstate roads, 94 and 29. Minot is remote. Fargo is four fast hours from Minneapolis, and from there you can fly to anywhere in the world. Fargo has culture and commerce and tall buildings, and its inhabitants probably think themselves lucky they languish not in the cold and vacant plains.
On the other hand, Minot has the military capability to destroy most life on the planet. If they somehow lose the fleet of B-52 Stratofortress bombers, they have about 150 ICBMs. So they have that going for them.
His bearing suggested a military career, so I asked if he was attached to the base. He was. I summoned my extensive knowledge of bomber lore, drawn exclusively from remembering Slim Pickens lines from “Dr. Strangelove.” We talked about maintenance and upgrades and routines and such. His daughter went to school in Fargo, 10 blocks from the house where I grew up. It was an unexpected conversation on top of a 17th-century palazzo on a warm Italian evening, but perhaps not that unusual, when you consider the old adage. All roads—in this case, North Dakota State Highway 83, Interstate 94 and Minnesota State Road 62 to the airport—still lead to Rome.
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