The Terminus

The God of Boundaries: The word “terminus” has a hell of an origin story

So, that point I made about the terminus being a surprisingly boring part of the federal highway system? Turns out that the term itself came from a not-so-boring place.

See, terminus is the Latin term for “boundary marker,” and that term eventually inspired a Roman god who would protect boundaries from all wrongdoing. What did that look like? Let’s refer to an Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry from 1911:

Terminus, in Roman mythology, the god of boundaries, the protector of the limits both of private property and of the public territory of Rome. He was represented by a stone or post, set up in the ground with the following religious ceremonies. A trench was dug, in which a fire was lighted; a victim was sacrificed, and its blood poured into the trench; the body, upon which incense and fruits, honey and wine were thrown, was then cast into the fire. When it was entirely consumed, the boundary stone, which had been previously anointed and crowned with garlands, was placed upon the hot ashes and fixed in the ground. Anyone who removed a boundary stone was accursed and might be slain with impunity; a fine was afterwards substituted for the death penalty.

Put another way: They took their boundary markers pretty seriously, largely thanks to Numa Pompilius, the Roman king (active from 715 to 672 B.C.) who is responsible for, among many other things, the Roman calendar. Also on his list of things he offered—the idea that there was a God named Terminus worth celebrating.

There was probably a deeper motive behind making boundaries something that needed a God, admittedly. According to Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives, Numa’s goal was to encourage peace:

He was also the first, they say, to build temples to Faith and Terminus; and he taught the Romans their most solemn oath by Faith, which they still continue to use. Terminus signifies boundary, and to this god they make public and private sacrifices where their fields are set off by boundaries; of living victims nowadays, but anciently the sacrifice was a bloodless one, since Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries was a guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing, and should therefore be clear from slaughter.

(Call it Roman-era soft power or something.)

The result is that these boundary stones had more weight to them than the road signs that end our long highways. In fact, they even had a festival on, of all days, the 23rd of February. As the Roman poet Ovid wrote of the celebration:

When night has passed, let the god whose marker separates fields be celebrated with the customary honors. Terminus—be you a stone, or a stump buried in a field—you too have divine authority from ancient times. You are crowned by two owners on opposite sides; two garlands and two libations are offered to you. An altar is built for you: here a rustic farm-woman brings fire that she has taken herself from the warm hearth on a broken pot. An old man cuts logs and skilfully piles up the chopped wood, and struggles to fix branches in the hard ground; then she kindles the first flames with dry bark, and a boy stands by holding a broad basket in his hands. Next, when he has three times thrown corn into the middle of the fire, a young girl offers up cut honeycombs.

Others hold jars of wine, and each one in turn is poured on the flames; the crowd, dressed in white, watches and respects this with silent tongues. Communal Terminus is sprinkled with the blood of a slaughtered lamb, and doesn’t complain when a sucking pig is offered to him. The simple folk of the neighborhood come together and celebrate with a banquet, and sing your praises, sacred Terminus. You mark the ends of nations, cities and great kingdoms: without you, the whole countryside would be full of disputes. You don’t go round trying to influence people, you are not corrupted by money, but with law-abiding good faith you guard the land entrusted to you.

I’m a guy who has never constantly thought about the Roman Empire, but I guess that’s about to change now that I know how these dudes party with boundary markers.

The massive road with no major cities and four termini: The story of U.S. Route 2

There’s not a U.S. Route 0, but that’s because we named it U.S. Route 2. Based on the rough grid system we use for interstates and federal highways, you can’t get much further north than this road, which hugs the Canadian border pretty much the entire way across.

Occasionally, it gets a chance to run into some famous friends—and in one case, it shares a terminus with one.

Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 2 end at around the same spot, at the border between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. I-95 is perhaps one of the most famous highways in North America, flowing through Miami, Jacksonville, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, among many other major cities.

The story of U.S. 2, however, is the definition of a long drive for someone with nothing to think about. The largest city it hits on its entire run is in Spokane, Washington (population: around 200,000), which is only five hours from its western terminus in Everett, Washington (population: around 100,000), where it hits another extremely notable major interstate: I-5. That road touches Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego. U.S. 2, which ends about an hour outside downtown Seattle, is the northern connection between two of the most important interstates in the country, and it touches each near both coasts.

But there’s just one problem with that: Oddly, after an excursion through mostly unpopulated parts of Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota (where it hits Grand Forks and Minot, two modest-sized cities), it runs into Duluth, Minnesota. Duluth is a fairly small city by most standards, but it’s the third-largest city on the entire highway. From there, it briefly clips Wisconsin before hugging the southern part of the Upper Peninsula, where it ends at another major freeway, Interstate 75. That road hits Tampa, Atlanta, Knoxville, Lexington, Cincinnati, and Detroit. I-75 represents what I guess we can call its Midwestern terminus.

And as is the case with many termini, it ends with little fanfare. R.I.P. long, boring road. (To be fair, the Mackinac Bridge, located directly nearby, is a pretty beautiful destination. Wouldn’t want to upstage it.)

Except, and here’s the interesting part, it comes back at the tippy top of Upstate New York, nearing but not quite touching the Canadian border. That’s the job of U.S. Route 11, a road that (minus a short excursion between Bristol, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee where it splits into two separate highways, 11W and 11E) goes all the way to New Orleans.

But we’re talking about U.S. 2, and U.S. 2 is in New York for less than a mile before it hits the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge and then transitions into Vermont. The highway only hits one reasonably large city on this entire section of the route, Burlington, though its Upstate New York terminus was only about an hour away from Montreal, a city of 1.7 million people. With apologies to Seattle and Vancouver, it’s the largest city within even shouting distance of U.S. 2.

From there, it glides through a handful of lightly populated parts of New Hampshire and Maine before it hits its final terminus, the quiet connection it has with I-95, perhaps the most important north-south highway in the country. (Apologies to I-69, which I hear is gradually building out and making a name for itself.)

Of course, I-95 didn’t used to be there, and previously, it had a Customs & Border Patrol location of its own, according to U.S. Ends.

So, why does this highway, in a largely rural area of the country with few population centers, appeal to me so much? I think it’s because I remember crossing the Mackinac Bridge as a child, reading atlases, and finding the idea that a highway just randomly stopped and then started back up again 700 miles away to be fascinating. If you wanted to connect the two halves of U.S. 2, you could always flow up I-75, make your way to the Trans-Canada Highway, and take that most of the way there. It’s a 12-hour drive, though. You might be better off flying.

Where did this road come from? Well, it has its roots in one of the first transcontinental highway systems in the country, the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway. First built in 1919, the goal was to have the road connect Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. While the modern U.S. 2 hits neither city, stopping in Washington State and instead hitting Bangor, Maine, it did create the blueprint for the modern highway, which is the northernmost cross-country U.S. highway in the United States. (Even if it does presume that you’re going to go into Canada for a solid third of the drive.)

While no longer named for him, Roosevelt’s memory and legacy loom large over this road. When it was completed in 1931, a large obelisk was built for him in Montana, at the Marias Pass. In a way, it’s the road’s spiritual terminus, if not its literal one.

If we think of termini as vertical, I guess it’s the highway’s tallest point, technically.