"There are always miles of highways temporarily working as mere roads and crammed with sport-utility vehicles and four-wheel drives, strip malls full of chain stores, big-box outlet joints (many of which, mysteriously, have cafes attached, as if you actually might like to linger there in the middle of the bleak and soul-destroying nowhere), unimaginably huge churches and spanking new schools, no sidewalks and, the old chicken-and-egg conundrum here, nothing worth walking to anyway."