Dig up a highway and if you look with a sense of history you can, as with a cross section of a tree, see much of the past.

I thought about that as I opened Thursday's paper to see six layers of Second Street, Highway 30, Lincoln Highway, a half dozen strata on which America has driven for nearly a century.

The photo captured part of the massive road construction project along Second Street, a nine-month stretch of engineering and detours performance art using orange plastic, electronic signs and big shovels.

For Grand Island, the road some call America's Main Street is more than simply asphalt upon asphalt upon brick upon concrete. It's a landmark, a cultural diviner, a city divider, a silver ribbon carrying dreams to exotic horizons and back again.

The highway's history is well-known, including a fine book by Grand Island's Mary Elizabeth Anderson, "Link Across America: A Story of the Historic Lincoln Highway." A town's inclusion on the route meant sure success, the evidence of which became clear in Grand Island when the nation's system of interstate highways missed us by nearly seven miles.

You might say our ship came in Sept. 14, 1913, when Lincoln Highway's route was announced, but the moorings came loose 61 years later when Interstate 80 was completed in Nebraska.

Universal tether

Growing up six blocks from the Union Pacific tracks and eight blocks from Highway 30, I understood that the outside world lay just beyond that whistle, just past the big overpass west of town.

A walk downtown along Third Street on a Wednesday night could sate a kid's senses with lights and traffic and shoppers.

One block south, where the highway hummed along, however, the city had a different feel for a child, a thrilling sense of transience as the nation moved from coast to coast through Grand Island. Yes, movie stars would stop or stay at places like the Yancey, but the real star was the highway that brought them and took them away.

Unlike train passengers who were often blurs through windows, we could see these highway travelers, their shiny vehicles stopping and starting in a parade of local life.

Second Street the highway was important to a kid, a tether to universes yet to be discovered.

No highway could match it in my life. We would take Highway 34 to my grandmother's in York, an hour trip punctuated by Aurora, Hampton and Bradshaw. But the road did not hold the allure of an excursion to Central City or Shelton or especially an odyssey to Omaha.

But then that was layers of asphalt ago, tier upon tier of the past.

Halfway between

Second Street along with the railroad tracks divided Grand Island, north and south. Each came with its own junior high school, its own identity, its own way of seeing the other side. Every town has these turf tales, these jurisdictional cultures.

Of course, what the tracks and the highway divided, Senior High School served to unite.

We're going to spend another eight months and change driving around and past crews digging up our history, a road that has carried hundreds of thousands who were heading out, passing through, moving along.

But then that's the nature of a road. Every paved stripe of Second Street down to the dusty base we see today was designed to send America from New York to San Francisco and back to New York.

Oaks and maples and ponderosa pines reveal their ages when we look inside, timelines that, in the hands of the right scientist, explain climate and growth and drought.

Digging out the layers of a highway reminds us that we used the highway, Second Street, too. We used it to get from here to there, to pick up and deliver, to ferry groceries or kids, to complete a leg of a Sunday drive when Sunday drives existed.

On each layer, we shared the road with travelers on vacation, on business or on an attempt to satisfy the sweet siren of wanderlust.

We watched their taillights disappear, then we went home, safe in the knowledge that here, halfway between oceans and metropolises, we were indeed connected to the rest of the world.