In the spirit of John Green’s book of the same title, our theme for the month of October is “the Anthropocene reviewed.” Writers were asked to review and rate some facet of human experience on a five-star scale.

The thing about the New York Thruway is that it lasts forever.

Growing up, I never thought of New York as a big state. New England in general is pretty small, with all the little state lines from ye olden colonial days, and my family didn’t drive around too much. We would go north to New Hampshire to go camping every summer, and that would only take an hour. Once we took a road trip to North Carolina, which I’m sure was very long and exhausting for my parents, but it has fallen out of my memory. I really didn’t understand how states that looked so small on the maps in my textbooks could eat up hours of sixty miles per hour driving

However, once college was in the picture and I realized my mother wasn’t joking when she said she wanted her children to go to Calvin, trips from Massachusetts to Michigan were much more common. And to get from Massachusetts to Michigan, we had to go through New York.

The first time I drove on the New York Thruway, the New York stretch of I-90, my family and I were on our way back from my brother’s first year at Calvin. We had woken up at 6 a.m. in order to get the Prince Conference Center breakfast, and over coffee my mom looked at my dad and said, “Remember, seventy-three on the thruway.” Once we had made it through Ohio and the tiniest stretch of Pennsylvania, probably around six hours into the fifteen hour ordeal, both cars pulled into a rest stop, and I hopped in the driver’s seat.

I wasn’t a particularly experienced driver at the time, but the nice thing about the New York Thruway is that you just set cruise control and drive. I successfully followed my mom coasting at seventy-three, and I gained some confidence with highway driving and letting people pass me.

It is the prime spot to switch drivers and gain a little comfortability with the trip. When I did the drive coming out for my junior year with just my sister and I, it was the stretch that she took. It garnered quotes from her like “I think I was a hippie in my past life” and “If oranges were blue, would they still be called oranges?” When my best friend from high school surprised me at graduation, she drove the Thruway (sans cruise control) on our voyage back to our last summer in Massachusetts together.

The unfortunate thing about the New York Thruway, though, is that you are there forever. The GPS says three hundred miles to the next turn, and the only thing you can do is pop on the next episode of Serial, mentally prepare yourself for the amount of tolls you are going to E-ZPass through, and settle in.

When I go from Michigan to Massachusetts these days, I usually set off around 2 a.m., which means I hit the Thruway by 8 a.m. It feels like I am almost there: New York is New England! It’s 8 a.m.! I’m so close! But it’s always a lie. By 9 a.m., I am bored of the rolling green hills, the random barns, and the trees. By 10 a.m., I hit the “crying and talking to your dead mother” phase of the trip, which always comes no matter how good or bad my days have been.

Eventually, though, the Thruway sets me free. I see the sign for Massachusetts, and I get a call from my dad who has been stalking me via a phone location app welcoming me home. I still have two hours left in the drive, but I also have my favorite sign (“This spot is the highest elevation of I-90 east of South Dakota”) and the snacks I had been saving to carry me through. I appreciate that the NY Thruway got me to the Mass Turnpike, but I am never sorry to see it go.

At least it has good rest stops, unlike I-80. I give the New York Thruway two and a half stars.

Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson (‘19) is a virtual computer science teacher and a proud resident of Grand Rapids. When she’s not brainstorming the newest project to inflict on her students, she’s cooking semi-vegetarian food, reading too many romance books, and playing rhythm games.