Litter On A Stick: Billboards Make William Least Heat Moon Blue
A journey free from visual pollution
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON
"...Not long ago, when I was near Americus, Ga., a woman lighted up when I told her I'd grown up in Kansas City: “Oh, I love so much Kansas City,” she bubbled. “Those lovely boulevards. The Pass-e-o and that Ward Something one!” She paused, her face clouding: “But, oh mercy! What we had to endure to get across Missouri. That I-70, why it's a trashy alley of billboards and sex shops. I tried to keep my kids glued to their electronic games.”
I had no good riposte to her view of Eye-Sore-70 other than to admit my embarrassment at Missourians having more billboards per mile than any of the eight states that touch our borders..."
"...The uglification of I-70 is now so out of control it makes a certain kind of sense to consider that once jocular suggestion to designate the 250-mile corridor as Billboard National Park. A new, 21st century kind of Badlands. As the park motto, we can adapt the famous sentence from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye: “It's so putrid you won't be able to take your eyes off of it!” Come one, come all.
"...For those less cynically inclined, there is another choice. Today we have an unparalleled opportunity to right old abuses and treat ourselves more kindly and also show visitors that Missourians are not numbed-out yahoos caring not a hoot for the native beauty nature granted us.
Kansas City, once nationally known as “The City Beautiful,” should prove its mettle and vigorously call for reform of our trashed central corridor. We should demand that in the inevitable, inescapable remaking of I-70 it become a route of beauty, increased safety and (this is America) improved economic benefit."
William Least Heat-Moon is the author of “Blue Highways.” He lives in Columbia.
Read the entire editorial in the Kansas City Star
