A week before I was to pack up my car and drive the miserable 200 miles to Brandeis this year, I decided to drive about 60 miles to nowhere. My goal in doing this was to drive the Taconic State Parkway, a beautiful stretch of verdant roadway that originates in Westchester, N.Y., and ends in Columbia County, a few hundred miles northward. If I could get to Brandeis on the Taconic, I would make the trip weekly.Of all the things I miss about home, it is driving. I have a car here, but I simply have nowhere to drive it. Unlike New York, and to some extent New Jersey, my home state, it seems Massachusetts road designers do not consider driving a joy. If it did, it would not have built Route 128, a four-lane, high-speed, always-curving roadway with views of nothing but suburban sprawl for miles around.

New York built the Taconic Parkway during the height of the Great Depression to create jobs. The Parkway was designed simply as a park drive, for no other purpose than to give motorists a pleasant ride away from the city. Today, the Taconic more or less connects New York City with Poughkeepsie, N.Y., but the idea behind the road remains evident at every turn.

These highways put the gourgeous roadside views of lush parklands in plain sight of the enthralled driver. The lovely scenery can last forever unless the trees along the route obstruct one's view, but either way, it's a gorgeous drive. The Massachusetts Turnpike is certainly a pretty road to drive on, but its six lanes from Sturbridge to Boston make it too big. The stretch from Stockbridge to the Interstate-84 interchange, and its four lanes, is much more pleasant.

In my mind, however, there should be only one kind of road. I accept only small two-lane highways that zigzag with the natural terrain or similar highways that zigzag with the urban terrain. Massachusetts has a few of these, with tight turns and surprising stoplights, but they are few and far between when one considers the driving opportunities within 10 miles of my front doorstep.

The Hudson Valley is bursting at the seams with four-lane parkways, divided either by simple metal-rail medians or trees and grass. I appreciate both equally, as the former scares the hell out of me, since the parkways offer only scant space between the metal guard-rail and a car's left-side mirror, and the latter is just plain beautiful. I'm a fan of every one of those roads, from the Taconic State, the Sprain Brook, the Bronx River, the Saw Mill River, and Hutchinson River Parkways of Westchester, to the Palisades Interstate of Rockland and Bergen (in New Jersey) and the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, however, on Manhattan's East Side, holds a special place in my heart. Driving its length, from the Trans-Manhattan Highway in Washington Heights to Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, one sees everything. To the left of the car at first one encounters the narrow Harlem River and the Bronx, with its many bridges connecting it with Upper Manhattan, and to the right, the sprawl of the Heights and Harlem. Just a moment later, the Major Deegan Expressway and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx come into view on the left.

The FDR Drive follows the curvature of the East Side and one must be vigilant not to go off the road, over the barrier, and into the East River. Two hands are required to keep the car steady in the left lane when passing by Midtown, since the Jersey barrier that separates the two roadways is just a few inches away. The FDR seems to open up as you continue downtown, traveling southwest with the island. The stature of lower Manhattan, still grand even with something truly essential missing, seems to engulf the highway as one practically passes under it toward the road's terminus at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

I suppose, however, it is more than driving that I miss about home. I miss the diners, the convenience stores that actually stay open 24 hours, and I miss the Hudson River and the view of the George Washington Bridge from the highway, the boat basin, the town and everywhere else in a region dominated by it. I will never be at home in Massachusetts, without the river and the New York skyline, and the parkways of the Hudson Valley.

-- Matthew Bettinger '05 submits a column to the Justice