A long time ago in a land far, far away, there was a viable intercity mass-transit service called the bus. And when a child turned five, that child could ride on the bus without parental supervision.

Me, for instance.

And so, every so often, my mom would put me on a Greyhound (or Trailways, I can't remember whch) in Salina, Kan. I would ride east for an hour, eventually landing in Manhattan. My grandma would pick me up at the bus station (a bustling place just off downtown) and I would hang out there for a few days before returning home.

I was already interested in maps even before I began making these trips (I continued to use the bus well into my college years), but it was those first journeys that helped bring home the notion of highways as the arteries of our lives. Not the vital blood vessels of the nation, as many people like to say, but the pathways by which all of us move around and connect to each other in mysterious ways.

For example, I live in Durham, N.C. Some of the major highways that wander through here are Interstates 40 and 85 and U.S. Highway 70. I-40 has a lot of connections for me. My brothers live in Albuquerque on the same highway, just 2000 or so miles away. My in-laws live just off I-40 outside of Nashville. I-85 wanders down to Charlotte, where I have a couple friends. As for Highway 70, it goes through Clovis, N.M., where I went to high school.

When I lived in York, Pa., U.S. Highway 30 was the main drag (I-83 cruised through as well, but since that runs only from Baltimore to Harrisburg, it's a short lifeline, to be sure). The original two-lane version of Highway 30 was known as the Lincoln Highway. It was one of the first (if not the original) cross-country byway, traveling from Atlantic City to Astoria, Ore.

Along the way, Highway 30 wanders through Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Cheyenne, Wyo., all the hometowns of a multitude of friends and family. Whenever I got stuck in traffic in York, I thought about any number of those people, perhaps cursing the same congested road in their city.

In fact, whenever I'm on one of these parallel lines, I often think of the people I know who might be sharing the same road as me. Our lives are obviously wandering down different paths, but at that moment, it's possible that we are treading similar pavement. I can wave to them in my mind.

My interest in maps was probably also fostered by a rather intense interest in rivers and their running. And so while U.S. Highway 24 or I-70 may have connected me to my grandparents when I lived in Kansas (or Kansas City), the Kansas and Smoky Hill rivers also allowed that connection. When I was in college, I would sometimes wander out and look at the Missouri River and think of the many people with connections to it, or the Mississippi or Ohio (or Tennessee or Cumberand or, well, most rivers which lie between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains.

Alright, so with rivers the concept can get a big excessive. Kinda like reckoning your relations; if you go back far enough, every single person in this country is an African-American. It loses meaning.

Or does it? By using these unorthodox ways of keeping track of my life and its most important possessions (the people in it), I find new ways to appreciate the richness of my own existence. I'm thinking that's a plus, no matter how strange the method.

Jon Worley lives one block away from northbound U.S. 15-501 Business Route in Durham, N.C. He travels to work every day on N.C. 147, I-40 and U.S. 401.