Hinterlands

The California farmland that surrounds Interstate 5 grows virtually all non-tropical crops. Corn, soybean, tomatoes, almonds, grapes, garlic, cotton, apricots, asparagus, and even dill—acres of an herb used only in sprinkles to garnish delicate fish dishes. The fertile land serves as an important signpost of my journey, and of just how much space our national dinners take up. Other signposts alleviate the tedious ennui of the American interstate highway system. Mile 30: the Altamont Pass wind farm. Mile 161: the rotten odor of the Harris Ranch feedlot. Mile 190: Kettleman City, devoted, it seems, almost entirely to feeding, lodging, and refueling travelers. Mile 291: the winding Grapevine, where I stop for vegetarian fare in Frazier Park, weather permitting. Mile 353: the High Desert and Palmdale’s stark, bare beauty. There are no straight lines in nature, architect Antoni Gaudí liked to say, and there aren’t any in the trajectory of history, either.

Pacific highways, lifeblood of the West, connect regional economies and irrigate the land with flows of capital: shopping malls, industry, residential suburbs, agriculture—and, less visibly, prisons. Thirty-five of them sit along I-5, tucked far away from discerning eyes and out of bounds to journalists. They glower behind walls of concertina wire, nestled in the world’s breadbasket. Acres and acres of this strange fruit with no end in sight. They dissolve into the landscape, and passersby don’t have to consider what goes on behind their walls. After all, what’s one more body caged in a prison’s dark recesses? What’s one more blemish on an already pockmarked prison archipelago?

When I traveled the West Coast along its straight lines—I-5, I-580, State Route 16—the kind of driving evocative of some mythical “American freedom,” all this nagged at me. Every week in the spring of 2018, I drove from my home near Concord to the north shores of the San Francisco