Nowhere makes occasional appearances on Twelve Mile Circle. I guess I liked the underlying concept of a place of nowhere, which by definition had to be somewhere. So I mined this topic pretty hard with articles like Middle of Nowhere and X to Nowhere. I referenced it more recently in the latest Odds and Ends article. That one featured a road in Iqaluit, Nunavut named, literally, Road to Nowhere. People in Nunavut seemed amused by its existence and took photographs that they posted all over the Intertubes. It amused me too. It amused enough to wonder if there were other roads to nowhere actually called Road to Nowhere, literally.
Figurative Overpowers Literal
I ran into an immediate issue, the overwhelming figurative usage of Road to Nowhere describing journeys to extremely remote places or as a metaphor representing life’s unproductive tangents. Atop that layered several songs titled Road to Nowhere, like the one from Talking Heads released in 1985 or a completely different one from Ozzy Osbourne in 1991. Then there were two or three films with the title. Abundant pop culture references made it difficult to find any actual roads called Road to Nowhere. Nonetheless, I scrounged through my online sources and discovered a small handful.
More Attempts
Then I shifted gears a bit and tried another approach. If Road to Nowhere might be a problem then perhaps Nowhere Road might offer a solution. No dice. There were just as many songs and movies about Nowhere Roads as there were Roads to Nowhere.
Eventually I found a decent, real world Nowhere Road outside of Athens, Georgia. It was pretty significant too, stretching a little more than 9 miles (14.5 kilometres). Best of all it included the glorious intersection of Nowhere Road and Nowhere Lane (map)! That spot might be able to make a legitimate claim to being the best middle of nowhere anywhere, or at least the crossroads of nowhere, even though it didn’t necessarily seem to be all that nowhere.
It featured numerous homes and businesses along its multi-mile length, including Big Tom’s Christmas Trees.
Did I mention the boiled peanuts? — I guess you didn’t watch the video, right?
I never developed a taste for boiled peanuts despite growing up in the South. They always seemed much too salty and mushy to me. Maybe I’ve never had a good batch. They also seemed far more common further south than where I lived. So that probably explains why I never considered them a delicacy. I typically thought of Georgia as the home of boiled peanuts when they came to mind so its prominent placement in the video made perfect sense.
A Change of Direction
Then I threw in the towel. I had to go figurative because the literal examples simply weren’t cutting it and I still had a lot of space to fill in the article. Fortunately there were still decent examples in the wild that hadn’t made it onto the pages of 12MC yet. The most commonly referenced Road to Nowhere seemed to be one in Great Smokey Mountains National Park (map).
“The Federal government promised to replace Highway 288 with a new road. Lakeview Drive was to have stretched along the north shore of Fontana Lake, from Bryson City to Fontana, 30 miles to the west… But Lakeview Drive fell victim to an environmental issue and construction was stopped, with the road ending at a tunnel, about six miles into the park… The legal issue of whether to build the road was finally resolved in February, 2010 when the US Department of Interior signed a settlement agreement to pay Swain County $52 million in lieu of building the road.”
Even More
I found another one. Remember the Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan, Alaska? A few years ago I said,
“It was portrayed in the media as a bridge for the 50 residents of Gravina Island. That’s a bit simplified. Actually it was intended to replace the ferry and connect Ketchikan to its airport. That would have benefited 8,000 residents rather than 50. Still, it works out to about $50,000 per resident.”
Well, it turned out that the State of Alaska started building highway infrastructure on Gravina Island in anticipation of the bridge, before they secured the money for it. Funding for the bridge famously dissipated after it became a public symbol of pork barrel politics. Its construction never happened. This left Gravina Island with a beautiful $28 million, 3.2 mile (5 km) high-capacity road from nowhere to nowhere; “the road now ends, as it has since it was completed years ago, amid nothing but muskeg and scrub forest.” (map)
This article, more than just about any other, led truly nowhere.
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