HIGHWAY: America’s Endless Dream.<i> Photographs by...

Ah, maybe it’s that roads are supposed to be magic and freeways practical. But in Cleveland, the Forest City, that belle of the North Coast, my parents thought the chief use of roads was to get from the West Side to the East Side and then safely back home. Very early I decided that my profession was to be Hitchhiker, my religion not that of Bum, Hobo or Drifter but of the deeper Wanderer, and although Cleveland is the Paris of Northeastern Ohio, my destiny lay down the roads that led to Elsewhere, USA.

In search of El Dorado and the Fountain of Age, my thumb gave me hundreds of thousands of miles--without joining a Frequent Hitchhiker program--first to Detroit and Pittsburgh. Thanks to a high IQ, I realized soon enough that these fine places were not my destiny and therefore headed out to New York, Key West, Los Angeles and points between. There were a few uncomfortable moments beyond the discomfort I deliberately sought: a short term in a Georgia jail during the sheriff’s peach-picking season, an overnight stay in a drunk tank in my hometown (Allen Ginsberg described the Cleveland police as the worst in a Northern city) and a few brinky sexual challenges for a teenage innocent including one pleasant invitation from a farmer’s daughter in Utah (Oh, where are you now, greedy Estelle?). I was an American kid whose first magazine was “The Open Road for Boys.” Like Jack Kerouac, I harbored a sneaky intention to write a novel. “The Man Who Was Not With It” is drawn from my time working in a traveling carnival. I also believed that someday an automobile might be mine and I could pay back the karmic miles I owed future hitchhikers.

Alas, hitchhiking has vanished like the 22-cent drive-in cheeseburger. Nobody is waiting for a ride on the ramps of American freeways. When occasionally I find a gracious extended thumb on, say, Route 1 heading to Big Sur, it feels like a nostalgia trip, like revisiting Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” And, of course, I pray it’s not an escapee from drug treatment or a hitchhooker.

Freeways have given birth to Offramp City, the continuous strip mall, fast-feeding trough and quick-sleep warehouse that kudzu-vines the nation. You put on your miles; you stop to gas, inhale some cholesterol, run the kids around the parking lot and konk out at the same damned place you stopped yesterday. That’s progress, folks.

These three books tell where we were and where we are now. Together, they offer an elegy, a celebration, a memorial, a history, a psycho-biography of the highway, and they imply a warning about the care of our souls. Nineteenth-century Europeans allowed for the Wanderjahr as a stage on life’s way. The various mom-and-pop places of America’s small towns, byways and different regions (and the Estelles) provided the necessary terra incognita for questing Americans living in the terror incognita of adolescence. The notion of the City on the Hill, the Empire City, El Dorado, Mark Twain’s “the territory ahead” all form something marvelous about American optimism. Elsewhere on the road will be better . . . if we can still find it.

The books partly encircle the engrossing matter of American space, the lines that intersect that space, the ways we cross that space, the meanings of our conquering space by paving it with road and highway. We hear of the engineers who thought the best way to deal with mountains that presented obstacles to road construction was to pulverize them with atom bombs. (Well, it was a can-do thought.) We hear of the beatniks and hippies and Depression bindlestiffs--and the questers in the paths of Daniel Boone and Huck Finn--who found the road a kind of rivering society with its own rules. (Perhaps, if inconvenient, they could have been atomized along with the stubborn mountains.)

In “Highway: America’s Endless Dream,” a book of documentary photographs, gritty and glitzy, ecumenically tragic and celebratory, the text contributes some jarring insights, such as: “In many states, highway-building during the Sixties accounted for well over half of public spending.”

Kris Lackey’s “Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative,” a study of American literature of travel and the road, is most poignant in the chapter on “Black Highways and the Impossibility of Nostalgia.” Black travelers can’t just wander, observe, adventure in freedom from constraint. They become “a product offered for the scrutiny of other consumers.” Far from being Ralph Ellison’s “invisible” people, they are constantly at risk of grief from others. Kerouac’s goofy minstrel-show sentimentality about “the happy, truehearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” does not fit the experience of John A. Williams, the distinguished novelist traveling on a magazine assignment, who was harassed, stopped by the police, pointed at, studied and perused, imprisoned in the concepts borne in on him. With variations for period and geography, every black traveler reports similar conditions. (I’ve traveled with black friends, and I can tell you “the territory ahead” brings tension it would not bring to me alone. Sometimes, of course, it also brings careful generosity, which is preferable to careless cruelty.)

“Divided Highways,” “as seen on PBS,” a statistic- and fact-stuffed report on the construction of the interstates, emphasizes the personalities, politicians and technicians who bulled the system through. Distances were fertilized with sprawl; mobility was matched with the antidotes of “edge city,” country malls, outlets, the McMegafeed battering of American difference. (The highway is fast, but the computer is even faster.) Public spending on grand conduits dried up sources of city life; edge city helped to create the desolation of the inner city with its burned-out blocks, its joblessness, despair and crime. In Detroit, where the automobile was a religion, construction of freeways seemed to relieve commuter congestion for about 10 minutes. Then folks moved out to the end of the freeways.

What happened to Los Angeles, to its street rail system, its orange groves and its air is too well known to need summary. L.A. has become America’s first space station on Earth. Stuck in a traffic jam on the 405, my driver began to yell pleasantries, road affability as opposed to road rage, at the man in the pickup truck in the lane alongside. I remarked on the amazing coincidence that she found a friend in the freeway crush.

“I used to go with him,” she said.

“But you’re so friendly; why’d you break up?”

“He moved to another part of L.A.”

Tom Lewis quotes the philosopher Theodor Adorno on the destruction of organic connection that results in “ . . . an absence of historical memories . . . a vanishing landscape.” Perhaps Adorno goes too far in his gloom, describing mass highways as “expressionless.” No. We may not like their expression; we may think of it as a rictus across the landscape, but it does express something, and it even produces thrills of pleasure and mastery. How about barreling down Interstate 5 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, singing along with your tapes, on a road so straight and event-less that you can sink into deep, trivial or Zen thought? You can still peel off near Bakersfield-Fresno-What’s-It at the Harris Ranch for high-fashion road ministrations. Or continue just a bit to a beer-and-burrito shack, where you can watch adolescent lovers battling it out in the parking lot.

Perhaps American space is indomitable on the ground, even by its highway systems. This is what a boy from Cleveland always hopes.