The Parkway does not want you to look sideways. That is the whole design. Every sign is angled at the windshield of a car moving north, and the effect after an hour is that you stop believing there is anything off the road at all.
There is. Turn at almost any light and within three blocks the noise stops. Not gradually. It stops.
What is back there is a town. Six thousand people or so, a high school, churches with gravel lots, houses on streets that were laid out before anybody thought to build a go-kart track. Somebody’s laundry was out. A man was doing something unhurried to a truck in a driveway and did not look up.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this piece writes itself and it is a lie. The easy version says the Parkway is fake and the neighborhood behind it is real. But the people in those houses work on the Parkway. It pays for the trucks and the churches and the high school. Calling it fake is calling their work fake, and I am not going to do that from a rental car.
The honest observation is smaller. It is that a town can be one of the most visited places in the country and still be almost entirely unseen, because the seeing all happens along a single line, at speed, in one direction.
I sat in a parking lot behind a shopping center for a while at dusk and listened to the Parkway from three blocks away. It sounds like weather.