Death On the Highway: An Interview with Ginger Strand

I’ve never been to Niagara Falls, but reading Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara made me think I have. The book, which looks at the faded tourist trap that straddles the US-Canadian border, examines the site from every angle: historical, cultural, political, personal, and most importantly, physical. The book is notable for its keen sense of place, a quality that’s rare in this increasingly online world. And it’s a quality that carries over into her new book, Killer On the Road: Violence and the American Interstate (UT Press), which tackles a subject near to my heart: the world we’ve created to accommodate cars.

The effect of cars on our landscape (and our psyches) is vast—something I like to harp on in my Letters from Pedestrianica. And Strand’s book, which mixes true crime and cultural analysis, looks at the various nightmares the US Interstate system has fostered. Not only are its long, lonely, anonymous stretches perceived as breeding grounds for serial killers, it has also irreparably scarred our cities, slashing neighborhoods in half, displacing already vulnerable populations, and making the establishment of long-term urban communities near impossible. I was excited to talk to Strand recently about road rage, the interstate as corporate welfare, and the acquisitiveness of the serial killer.

All photos courtesy of Ginger Strand. See more over at her website!

Matt Runkle: Killer On the Road is much less personal than Inventing Niagara. In Niagara, you relay the experiences surrounding your research, and frankly discuss the way the iconic falls became interwoven with your life. Why did you decide to maintain a more detached point of view in Killer On the Road?

Ginger Strand: Hey, great question! People hardly ever ask questions about form, and it's always disappointing, because form is what writers think about nonstop. Anyway, yes, Killer is far less personal than my last book. In Inventing Niagara, I wrote myself in as a way of giving the book a narrative through-line. And I wanted to convey the excitement of historical discovery—it can be downright exciting to root around in archives! But I used my own obsession as a way of tying the story together. So when I started Killer on the Road, I intended to do something similar, but pretty quickly I realized that I had to get out of the way of this story. The through-line was already complicated enough with the history of the interstates and the rise of the serial killer as an outlaw type, not to mention the serial killers themselves, and having the story of my discovery of all this was just too many threads. So I 86ed myself, because I was the least essential part of the story.  

MR: This book is great, by the way. I love how you make these larger connections that aren’t usually made in true crime. I rarely hear violence explicitly being linked to the car like this—which is weird to me, since it’s such an essentially violent invention. “Behind the wheel, we are all psychopaths,” you write, referencing studies that show that driving makes it hard for us to be perceived as human, and that we, in turn, dehumanize others when we’re behind the wheel. Are there ways, do you think, for drivers to overcome this dehumanization? Your book covers a lot of geographical territory, and I imagine you had to cover thousands of freeway miles in order to investigate each chapter. Did you learn anything about yourself as a driver during your research?

GS: I would say I became much more aware of what is actually going on when I'm driving. Like most people, I have a tendency to get annoyed and scream obscenities at other cars—now I realize that my road rage is actually a response to being deprived of a sort of recognition that we humans crave from each other. That helps actually! I do think that maybe just by recognizing what's happening somewhat, we can resist the dehumanizing effects of automobility. But our cars—getting bigger and smoother and more encapsulated—are not helping us. Everyone's in his or her own world, zipping along at 75 miles an hour, probably texting to boot. But the car is just one of the many, many features of modernity that is making us less humane.

MR: I’m also curious about how the car serves as a sort of prosthesis, and in what ways this might make people feel disembodied. Could this feeling trigger the gratuitous sort of dismemberment so commonly carried out by serial killers? 

GS: I think that a lot of the gratuitous dismemberment or necrophilia carried out by serial killers is about ownership. They want to completely possess another person. And that's not unlike the acquisitive urges often expressed with respect to cars. In fact, Ted Bundy literally said that what he wanted was to own another person the way you would own a Porsche.

MR: It’s interesting that the interstate was originally pitched as something that would break down class barriers, even as it sped up class stratification. From today’s standpoint, as we see the middle- and lower-classes pretty flagrantly under attack by those at the top, I’m curious: do you feel like there was an explicitly sinister intention behind the interstate plan? Or did those who pushed it forward actually have nobler intentions?

GS: This is, I think, one of the key points of the book. The interstate highway system was a stimulus program, but it was not about creating jobs or helping workers. It was about handing big profits to big corporations: General Motors, Ford, Portland Cement, Bechtel, Haliburton. In that way, it was the first top-down entitlement. That sort of corporate welfare has become pretty central in our economy today. And I think it has failed us as a nation. That's not to say that the conservative economic advisors who shaped this program in the Eisenhower era were ill-willed or malevolent. But I do think they were wrong.

MR: Your observations about the class motivations of serial killers are fascinating: the way their psychoses often seem to be fueled by class resentment, and the way victims’ bodies feed an acquisitiveness patterned after consumer culture. You also point out the class disparity between most real-life serial killers and their fictional counterparts (Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman), as well as the way the media exaggerated Ted Bundy’s cultured image. Why do you think the public prefers their serial killers to be upper class?

GS: It's an interesting question. The "upscaling" of the serial killer coincides with the serial killer becoming a recognized type of anti-hero. It makes him easier to get interested in—people are always more interested in hearing about the lives of rich people than the lives of poor people—and it also makes him more fun to hate and fear. So you can have someone like Hannibal Lecter, who is both terrifying but also weirdly admirable—he's so elegant, so sophisticated, so smart.  

MR: The book ends with the observation that the road, due to its anonymous nature, has always been a dangerous place. At an earlier point, you mention the Thuggee, a cultish group of highwaymen who supposedly killed millions of travelers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in India. The interstate, through sheer bleakness and velocity, intensifies that intrinsic danger, but I’m curious: How much of the sinister mythos of the road is kind of there in our collective unconscious? I know it’s probably a topic for another book, but I’m wondering if you came across patterns of Dangerous Highway stories in pre-interstate myths and folklore. 

GS: Oh yeah, the road has always been a site of danger. The word "highwayman" predates cars; the ancient Greeks feared crossroads. The road stands for a kind of fundamental unknowability—you don't know where the road goes, you don't know who might come down it. It's a site of mystery. And it's a literal embodiment of the passage of time, and we all know what lies at the end of that: death.

MR: I love the chapter on the way hitchhiking was seen by the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s: as a way to reconnect in the increasingly disconnected world being created by freeways. I pretty naively followed in their footsteps in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, hitchhiking back and forth across the country several times, sometimes feeling vaguely afraid, but ultimately deciding (as someone who wanted to write fiction) the insight I got into people’s lives was worth it. I decided that those who stopped to pick me up were either uncommonly nice or uncommonly crazy or both, and the conversation that was expected of me, while sometimes draining, was always worth it. During the hours I spent waiting at onramps, the absurdity of the interstate system really sunk in. The gap between how much constant movement there was and how long it took me to actually get moving seemed ridiculous. Do you think the interstate system could ever be re-imagined as something that more efficiently conveyed people, as a system whose primary function was patterned after mass transit rather than personal convenience?

GS: You never know what might happen as gasoline inches toward being correctly priced. There have been attempts in the past to institute things like official ride-share programs, and these things might come back. In fact, I was at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, a research facility for the Federal Highway Administration, and they had a huge ride-share bulletin board in their lobby! If the FHA can do it, why not the rest of us?

MR: The landscape of the freeway is one of death. Nothing grows there (besides the hardiest of plants, which are a landscaping afterthought). In your chapter on truckers, you detail the lack of nutrients available at truck stops. Is it a leap, do you think, to say that the lack of bounty at the Interstate’s resting points reflects its deathly terrain? And an even bigger leap to say that the killings it hosts are symptoms of a culture that is deprived of proper sustenance?

GS: I don't think either of those statements is too big a leap. The truck stops are helping to dehumanize the truckers who have to use them, and that in turn could very well be encouraging a small subset of them with sociopathic tendencies to go over the edge. They certainly are not creating an environment in which human connection and healthy human life can flourish. One of the most interesting things I learned about while working on this book is the criminological field of "place-based policing," which holds every crime is an interaction between a criminal, a victim and a place. Many of the places we are creating for ourselves—the landscape of the Sprawl is another example—are depriving of us of the humane elements we need to thrive. I might cite Arcade Fire's The Suburbs here.

MR: The book gives a re-cap of the Juarez killings, the series of murders that was an inspiration for Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Similar to Bolaño’s novel, Killer On the Road looks at these events as a kind of key to the future: as developing countries pattern their economies—and transportation systems—after the US’s, the already gaping class divide is widened even further, which results in violence like that of the Juarez killings. How did you not get depressed during your research, as you witnessed such patterns, and saw the repeated mistakes made at the expense of the disadvantaged, in the interest of those in power? Were there any findings that gave you hope for the future?

GS: I did get depressed!  This book was a total downer to write! So where's the hope? In a funny way, the highway system itself is a sign of one hopeful truth: the world can change. We had a world that was built in a certain way: dense cities and walkable small towns linked by a network of heavy and light rail supplemented by roads. We dismantled that world and built another one—less dense sprawling metropolitan regions surrounded by suburbs and exurbs and large farms, all linked predominantly by highways. We enacted that transformation in less than fifty years. We could do that again.

San Pablo Avenue

The following essay was written for a collaborative Occupy Oakland poster that's part of a group art show now hanging in Rise Above Gallery.

1.

San Pablo Avenue is an arterial that either begins or ends in downtown Oakland. It is one of the oldest existing roads in the East Bay, and was named Camino de la Contra Costa by Spanish colonists. In the pre-freeway US, it served as the fastest way to get up and down the opposite coast and was called the Lincoln Highway, and then US 40. Long-haul motorist amenities cropped up around this time, and portions of the street began to feel a bit like Vegas. You still see the leftover motels from these days: clustered just north of downtown are the Moor, the Twin Peaks, the Silver Dollar, the Isabella. Some of these are abandoned and others now serve as residential hotels. They’re so era-inappropriate, they look like they could vanish any day.

2. 

Despite the building of Interstates 880 and 980, San Pablo remains a street that is there to move cars, and thus a kind of terrifying place to be outside of one. It may no longer be a highway, but it’s still used to rapidly traverse long distances. It was built that way, and so it remains, despite the large volume of pedestrians who frequent the street.

The thing about the Interstate system is this: in order to compensate for the enormous divides it has caused in our cities—the increased distances and fortress-like walls—it should serve as a quarantine of sorts. It should free us from the drudging onslaught of traffic. A culture that cared about people would have recognized and dealt with this problem decades ago. But we’re not a culture that cares about people.

While it's important to make sure everyone can get where they need to go, freedom of automobility should not have such a negative impact on those who are in less of a hurry. In the early part of the 20^th century, a streetcar ran between Richmond and Oakland on San Pablo. It soon suffered the sinister demise all US streetcar systems did. Years later, the 72 bus line was put in place after an MTC study found that it would be cheaper than installing light rail. 

3.

Pedestrians on San Pablo tend to be marginalized—often because of poverty, addiction, physical and mental disabilities, and a dire lack of resources to deal with such issues. These problems are made worse by the street’s hostile landscape: “We don’t give a fuck about you” is (literally) driven home on a daily basis. This sentiment affects every sense and, because it’s mapped onto the environment, is swallowed whole. Intersections, which seem designed to kill those who try to cross them, amp up an already drastic culture of nihilism. People recklessly walk in front of traffic because of a) a complete failure of safe pedestrian crossings and b) low, low stakes for those navigating a landscape that continually reminds them of how little their lives are worth.

San Pablo’s deadly intersections are rampant. One example (which I wrote about in a Letter from Pedestrianica), is where Isabella crosses San Pablo. A recent Transportation for America report states that nearly 7,000 pedestrians have been killed in California in the last decade, the great majority of who were people of color and the elderly. San Pablo and 55^th, in particular, has been named as an intersection where pedestrian safety is neglected. The more marginalized stretches of San Pablo further south, however, are less likely to receive such scrutiny, as those with any civic power would never physically encounter such spaces.

 4.

As the city of Oakland sinks millions of dollars into an incompetent and fascistic police force, thousands of citizens go without their basic needs fulfilled. The California Hotel, located at San Pablo and 35^th, is notable historically for serving as venue for musical legends ranging from Billie Holiday to Sam Cooke, Little Richard to Mahalia Jackson. Today it serves as low-income housing, yet its tenants are in a constant state of uncertainty. The past few years have seen a labyrinthine series of shady financial disasters involving the city and several nonprofits, resulting in threats of building-wide evictions. This past month, the hotel’s storefront was boarded up with a sinister amount of expensive-looking wood. There are asbestos warnings posted, but no one spends this much simply to protect the public’s health—especially when the public is people walking up and down San Pablo. This wood looks like wood somebody bought expecting to make that money back thousand-fold. EBALDC, the development organization who owns the hotel, has already displaced the Howie Harp Multi-Service Center, a resource for the homeless formerly located on San Pablo and 18th. EBALDC’s development plans for the California Hotel claim that 25% of its units will be devoted to “low-income” housing.

Causa Justa, the group who helped organize the California Hotel’s tenants when they were threatened with eviction, has been kicked out of the building to make room for these renovations. They have since moved down the street to an abandoned church, a powder blue building with a rotted plywood ankh where its cross once was. This building is listed for sale with the following perk: COMPLETED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNS AND ALL CITY-APPROVED PERMITS FOR A 6-STORY CONDO-RETAIL DEVELOPMENT WITH UNDERGROUND PARKING ARE AVAILABLE.

What good is housing when it’s always on the brink of being seized? About as good as a sidewalk that would rather you didn’t walk down it.

5.

There are current efforts to re-imagine the uppermost part of Oakland’s San Pablo—53^rd through 67^th Street—as the San Pablo Arts District. The concept even has its own Wikipedia page. Any time a name is thrust upon a neighborhood like this, though, it’s really hard not to call bullshit. Some generalizations: Historical districts mean an erasure of embarrassing history. Arts districts mean an erasure of anything un-“art”ful. In other words, forget about the neglected and the trampled. Tramplings aren’t pretty and they don’t make money. They aren’t things you can put on a banner and hang from a streetlight.

Rather than create a destination, why not a place to exist? And exist with dignity. Somewhere that honors its history, that respects those who currently populate it and who make it what it is. Somewhere that makes sure each of its residents has a home, that when they leave that home, they know they’re in a place that gives two shits about them, and in case they don’t know, they can leave if they want to, they can get on a reliable train cheaply, and with ease. Somewhere that doesn’t desperately cater to yuppies in an attempt to become their playground. Because there are other ways of re-dreaming a neighborhood besides simply banishing blight.

6.

The longstanding businesses up and down San Pablo need to be respected, despite their lack of boutique-able appeal: Scend's, the Oaks Club, the Bank Club and Wally’s Cafe, Victory Furniture, Seng Son Marble Granite, and others. Many of these businesses are owned by people of color with deep-reaching roots in the East Bay. They may not get the glossy attention and city backing that ventures like the weirdly named Popuphood do, but the only meaningful way to revive San Pablo is a plan that doesn’t ensure their obsolescence. Oakland, rather than force-feeding condos or jewelry stores, needs to make sure its citizens’ basic needs are met. The arts will flourish organically once the lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid are put in place.

San Pablo Avenue consists of neighborhoods, not playgrounds. And despite its blight, the street is not a wasteland. Rather, it’s full of life; the cars that zoom on through are the deadest, dullest part of the whole equation. Why throw ourselves in front of them to make them stop?