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I grew up at the intersection of two states and two highways, right at the westernmost point of Essex County, Massachusetts’ tumor-like northeastern extremity, where it begins to bulge up into New Hampshire. Officially, Methuen, MA was spawned around 1725 and grew to legitimacy during the industrial revolution when workers from the mills in Lawrence and Lowell spread into the town, but it really only came into its own with the development of the interstate system. This set Methuen at the all-important place where I-495, Boston’s outer ring, reunites with I-93 bombing straight up from the city, before the two divide again to shoot off to coastal Maine and northern New Hampshire, respectively. MA-213, a four-laner completely contained within Methuen’s borders, connects the two.

Though technically the 93/495 junction occurs just south of town in a byzantine interchange within the limits of Andover, Methuen arguably feels its effects more. Andover might have its vast swathes of hiking trails, Phillips Academy and a cute little Main St to help form its identity, but Methuen is a community that has defined itself by few things outside its relationship to these major roads. In the last several decades, the biggest thing to hit the town (actually, now a city: since the mid-90s, its official title, and I’m not making this up, has been “The City Known as the Town of Methuen”) has been an enormous consumer complex erected along the concrete banks of 213, whose influence has since caused strip-mall development to spread slowly out from the spot like an oil spill. The Methuen one sees from the highway looks like Las Vegas. The clear intention was to prey upon the passing motorists, luring them from a driving-induced stupor with glittery promises of McDonalds and movie theaters.

It’s not an easy thing to do, unless the drivers aren’t really on their game. Travel for another two minutes in virtually any direction and you hit Tax Free Salem, New Hampshire (as it is exclusively referred to on local TV and radio spots) where literally all of the same amenities are available for five percent less. Methuen’s commercial scene doesn’t appear to have been hindered by this fact, due in some measure to the fact that we locals never leave town, even to avoid the natural pitfalls of living in famously tax-happy Massachusetts.

This is perhaps the weirdest manifestation of Methuen’s relationship to its roads. With minimal traffic on 93, residents can get to Boston in less than 45 minutes and we can get to Manchester in about 20. But we remain profoundly uninfluenced by either city, and even as geographically claustrophobic high schoolers, we rarely travel to either one. Rather than the patriarchal relationship a major city is supposed to have with its suburbs, Boston was to most of us a distant entity, something for special occasions. You could get there easily, sure, but why bother? Methuen High positively teemed with Red Sox paraphernalia and dropped R’s, but there was rarely any question of where our true allegiances lay. Boston may have been nearby, but make no mistake—we lived here and Bostonians lived there. I could have casually flicked something out of my window and hit New Hampshire, but even it was hardly ever mentioned.

Occasionally, this isolation was expressed to unsettling degrees. The town that borders us (by way, incidentally, of a not-insignificantly sized border) to the west is Dracut, MA, our perennial Thanksgiving football rival. As we shivered in their metal visitor-side bleachers during my senior year, my friend turned to me and said, “You know, this is probably the second time in my life I’ve come to Dracut.” Slowly those around us came to realize that they had never really seen fit to cross over the western boundary of the city either. It’s not like there was anything too special in Dracut—since we had more or less everything we needed in our own town, why would anyone have bothered? His revelation was more or less laughed off, as if he had noted how remarkable it was that no one on the field was naked.

Methuen and the vast number of communities like it, though, are just one example of a paradox that’s relatively unique to this time, namely how connectedness can breed disconnect. Maybe it’s because we can get places so easily that there’s no thrill in getting there. We could drive south on 495 an hour or two towards the towns around Worcester, but the odds of their chain stores, suburban landscape, and commercial byways outshining our own are hardly great enough to justify the gas that would be spent on the journey. Similarly, the residents of those places could come here, but they don’t, for the exact same reasons. Methuen’s success, like that of so many other highway towns, is predicated on the idea that its aggressively outspoken commercialism can be fed in part by people who have to pass by us on their way to someplace else—the mountains or the ocean or the city.