We look at the present through a rear view mirror, looking at where we
have just been instead of looking at where we are going, McLuhan’s Medium is
the Message tells us. He, like the Tao pundits, can find cosmic messages
betrayed in their mundane hiding places, but you can find them through a joy
ride on our highways.
Ride east from Mobile through the time warp of the old
tunnel out over the Bayway to the Malbis exit and Highway 90. History is
enmeshed here at this corner of the Malbis plantation and the restaurant.
Riding through late 19th century Loxley toward Spanish Pensacola, your
perception of time changes. A few years ago the Causeway was the only way to
get to this corner of the old "Mobile Highway" now it is the Bayway.
The Bayway, capped off by the Wallace tunnel, is symbolic of the New Engineering that
has been overtaking our society. It marks its official arrival in Mobile,
although it probably began with Mobile Greyhound Park and can be traced most
recently to the new Hilton. Mobile is "growing up". New Money, with its
innovation and daring is here. The old ways have outlived some of their
usefulness, but life on the new mental interstates can be so fast we only
catch a glimmer of them from our mirrors as they go by.
The Bayway is sleek,
an extension of the interstate mentality of getting from here to there, the
fast road to some place else. Highways are concrete artifacts of our
sentiments, our priorities, and history. The Bayway is not only the major
artery now, it has imposed its reality on the Causeway by killing it. Survivor
of so many natural catastrophes, it has merely been circumvented. The road
goes on.
The interstate used to be a mindless 70 mph jaunt. The only thing
that’s changed is that it is now a nerve-racking 65 mph as we worry about gas
shortages and state troopers. Back on these desolate miles between Malbis and
Spanish Fort - the trees and woods, the straight-ahead two-lane blacktop, the
timeless little cities - we get a reprieve from this imposition. We can enjoy
the road for what it is.
But at the end of the road where it hooks back onto
the main artery there are the cosmic and real signs announcing the
multi-million-dollar shopping complex. The woods give way to bulldozers as
developers create the need for a mall out here in the wilderness that borders
the pioneer Lake Forest complex. The stretch of road is a microcosm of the
passage of time, the old forced to give way to the new.
We’re on the road to
Catch Up and it seems natural that we make our way - be it ethereal or
tangible - as straight ahead, as clearly delineated, as powerful and as
efficiently as possible. But let’s not forget the lesson of the Causeway, or
this little loop of highway here at Malbis, or the intersection at Grand Bay
or the beauty that once was a charming Fairhope. Let’s go down these highways
with our face full forward, knowing where we have been and where we’re going.
The mindset of future potential must not overshadow the debt we owe to the
past or we will be doomed, as McLuhan says, to attach ourselves to the
objects, to only the flavor of the most recent past as we march backwards into
the future.