Road Trip! With Google Street View | Post 1 | Maine
The United States always looks better from abroad.
I am an ex-pat. An expatriate. I am an American in Kigali, Rwanda, and the greater part of my last 10 years have been spent in Africa. When I was in the Peace Corps, encircled by mud huts and vast hectares of yam fields in northern Cote d’Ivoire, I read by lantern light Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage about Lewis and Clark’s expedition into the expanse of the Louisiana Purchase. In Ghana, my wife and I would climb into bed, prop a laptop between us, and watch complete DVD sets of Friday Night Lights, the soap operatic tales of small-town Texas football flickering off our mosquito net. Each election cycle I find the coolest online results maps and, from Sierra Leone or Kenya, zoom into random county after random county just to see which way the smallest precincts of, say, Minnesota went.
Today, this blog can do escapism one better than armchair book travel, TV, and internet electoral maps. It can undertake the Great American Road Trip — that cross-country, coast-to-coast adventure — and it can do so step-by-step, unbroken. With Google Street View.
Thanks to Google and its Street View project, we can stand in Times Square — and spin around. We can look at our own house, pivot right, and walk to the end of the block. We can locate a new restaurant and, before jumping in the car, click our way there from the interstate exit, noting landmarks and cross streets en route. And we could, if we wanted to, click from Times Square… to our house… to that new restaurant in one single continuous Street View session, crawling along the petabytes of images that Google has stitched together, north, south, east, and west, and fitted down inside the roadmap of the United States.
This, in fact, is what this blog wants to do.
Starting at the easternmost point on the U.S. mainland — at West Quoddy Head, Maine, to be precise — this blog will travel across the country to the westernmost reach of the lower 48 without picking up the pen (so to speak). We will start as far east on Quoddy Head Road as Google Street View will allow, and then we will click once westward, and then click again, and then again, and then again and again and again until we reach the West Coast. We will not ever depart Street View for the 30,000-foot (or 100-foot) perspective of Google Maps. We will not close our browser in Springfield, Massachusetts, and re-open it in Albany, New York. Rather, we will seamlessly move across the entire country in Street View, even if our views from Davenport to Sioux City, Iowa, are all corn. No fly-overs; no skipping.
And what a first image we have. There, at the very start of our sea-to-shining-sea voyage, is the Atlantic Ocean. And there, steps from the picture postcard West Quoddy Head lighthouse (built in 1858) are the two classic forms of cross-country travel: The road bike and the car. We can think of ourselves on or in either, or neither.
Each day’s travel — each blog entry — will contain at least one snapshot like this, one screen-grab from the stretch of America we have seen while clicking by. Yet my hope is that there will be stories to tell as well. Wikipedia will be our primary guidebook, our Lonely Planet or Fodor’s, for this trip. But once in town we may pick up a local newspaper (if it’s online, that is) or see what’s happening at the local high school (according to that school’s website). What is the statue in the town square? And who was the sculptor? The sponsor?
Ideally, then, this blog is not just escapism. It is meant also as travel writing, commentary, and history — done in and by means of the digital age. And yet it intends to eschew much about the digital age, in particular the now-now-now that heavily characterizes the internet today. It will take some time to Street View across the country, but this blog is not long-form journalism. It is long-form internet use. There is no Twitter account associated with this blog. I am not on Facebook. I am not, despite the example above, using Google’s products to find a new restaurant, see what today’s specials are, or tell my friends that I am there right now (and where are they?). Instead, I am wondering what we can find out about — and in — America when we use our digital tools in the long form.
Is this without precedent? I think so. On YouTube, there is a video of two guys racing each other across the United States on Google Street View. The winner clicked his way from San Francsico to New York in 90 hours. They did not stop to smell the roses. A nine-page $0.99 Kindle book by Douglas Hendrickson narrates a Street View walk around the author’s childhood haunts. But that’s not cross-country. Of course, scouring Street View for funny, shocking, and beautiful imagery is well-known as a form of entertainment and fine art. Check out streetviewfun.com for some amusing screen-grabs, or look at Jon Rafman or Doug Rickard for excellent examples of Street View as street photography. Teehan+Lax Labs’s combination of Street View with hyperlapse photography allows you to pick two points on a Google Map and generate a video of your Street View trip between them. That’s very cool, but effectively just a substitute for manual clicking. Finally, Kevin Dooley does appear to be traveling southward from Alaska to South America via Street View. He is posting neat Photoshopped images on Flickr and he told Business Insider that he traverses 60 miles in one hour. Dooley’s is an impressive set of images, and he does include captions from time to time. Still, Dooley’s focus appears to be on imagery — plus, he’s traveling north to south, not across America.
Thus, as far as I can tell at this juncture, no one has used Google Street View to take — and chronicle — the Great American Road Trip.
I face constraints. My current internet plan here in Kigali — a 4G LTE connection from BSC Ltd. — limits me to 1 gigabyte of data each day. Surpass the 1 GB mark, and I am throttled to nothing. So it’s a gigabyte a day — that’s as far as my bicycle legs can take me, as many hours I can stand behind the wheel.
So, select the bike or car in the parking lot at the West Quoddy Head Light (not, actually, “lighthouse”), and let’s roll out and take our first steps. Let’s see what America looks like from abroad, from Street View.
Originally published at www.mmuspratt.com on February 10, 2015.
