Highway 287

Lately, highways have begun to fascinate me. I think it started with the realization that highway 6, just outside my HOA, is the same highway that goes through Copper Breaks State Park and Quanah, TX, and just past one of the first caves I ever entered without paying an admission fee and following a paid tour guide. Here, it has six lanes of slow, busy traffic, but in Quanah, it's a two-lane that doesn't pose much of a threat to the occasional armadillo.

I often make a trip to or from Houston and Wichita Falls. About half the trip is on Interstate 45, which some consider to be one of the worst in the nation, but which I find easy compared to certain stretches of I-35 south of Dallas. The other half is done on hwy 287, which goes right through Wichita Falls, and to the northwest, intersects with hwy 6... in Quanah.

Hwy 287 goes south from Wichita Falls through Fort Worth, Grapeville, Palestine, and Port Arthur. It goes north to Memphis (TX), through the Oklahoma panhandle, on to Denver, and then on into Wyoming, Montana... and eventually on to the Canadian border, though it keeps getting less and less important on the way, so that Google maps doesn't even bother with the number after it leaves Choteau, MT.

It never got the respect that Route 66 got - songs, TV shows, T shirts - but the original R66 was a two lane with no shoulders crossing that romantic desert west, while 287 was a mighty four lane divided highway almost every inch between the gulf coast and Denver.

The lesson is that if you're near the writers in LA or New York, you get attention out the wazoo. Everybody else gets nada, regardless of merit. That's why they call us "fly-over country." Yet, for some reason, we let those overpaid stuffed shirts tell us what we're supposed to think, and how to vote.

It's worth remembering.