When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must,
 it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.                                                                                    
                                                                                    
                                                                            JOHN STEINBECK, 1962

           The same year that John Steinbeck wrote these words in his cross-country memoir Travels with Charley, Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas. That year also saw the first Target store open in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Meanwhile, K-Mart launched in Garden City, Michigan. The era of the Big Box store, as we would eventually come to know it, was born. Steinbeck, who made his cross-country journey two years earlier, just missed the dawn of it. But he got a sense of what was coming: “The hamlet store, whether grocery, general, hardware, clothing, cannot compete with the supermarket and the chain organization.”

           Most of these pictures were made in towns along interstate highways, starting—as Steinbeck invites—near New York, and heading west to close in California. The sightless geography Steinbeck envisioned may have come true, as a grid of uniform retail stores and restaurants have blanketed the continent's (and the globe's) varied cultural and physical geographies. But the difficulty remains in whether there is something to see. Indeed, my astonishment, amusement and eventual weariness toward the landscape that seems to pose this question was the impetus for these pictures.

                                                                                                                       Jake Longstreth, 2008