CRUSING SLOW

Despite all the fast cars, “America’s biggest block party” is really about slowing things down.

- BOYCE UPHOLT

The arrangement was ingenious, if—by today’s standards, at least—fairly unusual. When Jim Hodge was in high school in North Carolina in the 1950s, a local Chevy dealership left a Corvette parked in the school parking lot, keys dangling. The rules were simple: licensed drivers only, put in some gas for the next driver—go free.

When your product is a hot rod and its purring engine, the best marketing is the thing itself. Hodge spent many evenings twisting through back mountain roads, wind roaring, tires singing—free-wheeling drives that cemented a lifelong love. Hodge is far from alone in his affection. Cars seem to be a particularly American mania.

Perhaps that’s because the automobile—while officially invented in Europe—“came into being here,” as Hodge puts it. “We had thousands of miles of open area that needed people to go.” By the 1920s, state and local groups were collaborating to create official numbered highways. U.S. Highway 66, which unspools from Chicago to Los Angeles, maybe the most famous. But U.S. 90, built in the same era atop a route once known as the “Old Spanish Trail,” is, as far as I’m concerned, in the same class. It’s a rare opportunity to drift along the highway, watching waves breaking across the sand. But there is one week each year that the road trip becomes difficult: in early October, during “Cruisin’ the Coast.”