:: Route 3

Route 3 - Ian Frazier pour le New Yorker voyage sur la très fréquentée Route 3, New Jersey:

"The earth beside this kind of highway is like no earth that ever was. Neither cultivated nor natural, it's beside-the-point, completely unnoticed, and slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast. And yet plants still grow in it, luxuriantly --ailanthus, and sumac, and milkweed, and lots of others that know how to accommodate themselves to us. In the swampy parts, the common reed would take over the roadway in a blink if the traffic stopped.
The tangled brush and the reeds collect an omnium-gatherum of trash. I saw broken CDs, hubcaps, coils of wire, patient-consent forms for various acupuncture procedures, pieces of aluminum siding, fragments of chrome, shards of safety glass, Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups, condom wrappers, knocked-over road signs, burned-out highway flares, a highlighter pen, a surgical glove, nameless pieces of discarded rusty machinery, a yellow rain slicker with "Macy's Studio" on the back . . . Scattered through the grass and weeds for miles were large, bright-colored plastic sequins. Oddly, I knew where they had come from. Once, while on the bus, I saw a parade float -- probably from the Puerto Rican Day parade, held in the city -- pull up alongside and then speed by. A car must have been towing it, though I don't remember the car. The float was going at least seventy, shimmying and wobbling, banners flapping, and these sequins were blowing off it in handfuls and billowing behind."