Ted Conover Read online

  ALSO BY TED CONOVER

  Newjack:

  Guarding Sing Sing

  Whiteout:

  Lost in Aspen

  Coyotes:

  A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants

  Rolling Nowhere:

  Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes

  TO JAY LEIBOLD

  I began to see how the road altered not only the way people travelled, but how they perceived the world.

  —J. B. Jackson,

  The Necessity for Ruins

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  One: Forest Primeval to Park Avenue

  Road or Not a Road?

  Two: Slipping from Shangri-La

  Road Ecology

  Three: The Road Is Very Unfair

  Double-Edged Roads

  Four: A War You Can Commute To

  Speed Up!

  Five: Capitalist Roaders

  Growing Broadway

  Six: Drive Soft—Life No Get Duplicate

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.”

  —Frodo Baggins of his uncle, Bilbo,

  in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring

  (The Lord of the Rings, Book One)

  EVERY ROAD IS A STORY OF STRIVING: for profit, for victory in battle, for discovery and adventure, for survival and growth, or simply for livability. Each path reflects our desire to move and connect. Anyone who has benefited from a better road—a shorter route, a smoother and safer drive—can testify to the importance of good roads. But when humans strive, we also err, and it is hard to build without destroying. Robert Moses, the controversial creator of highways around New York City in the middle of the twentieth century, wiped out numerous neighborhoods with his projects, turning vibrant communities (notably the South Bronx) into wastelands that have yet to recover. Of his actions he famously said, “In order to make an omelet, you’ve got to break a few eggs.” In a related way, the same roads that carry medicine also hasten the spread of deadly disease; the same roads that bring outside connection and knowledge to people starving for them sometimes spell the end of indigenous cultures; the same roads that help develop the human economy open the way for destruction of the non-human environment; the same roads that carry cars symbolizing personal freedom are the setting for the deaths of more people than die in wars, and of untold numbers of animals; and the same roads that introduce us to friends also provide access to enemies.

  In this book I present six of these roads that are reshaping the world. I do it by joining up with people on them—travelers to whom they matter in an immediate and practical way. The roads are presented roughly in order of increasing complexity, which is also the intentional order in which I traveled them over the past several years. Each has a theme: development vs. the environment, isolation vs. progress, military occupation, transmission of disease, social transformation, and the future of the city. Not each of the chapters is about a single road, precisely; one tells about a trip on a series of roads in China, and another about roads and streets in Lagos, Nigeria. Each is a story and a meditation.

  We in the twenty-first century are more numerous and better connected than people at any previous time in history. Networks are a principal theme of our age, and as the networks we are a part of continue to grow, we struggle to understand what that connectedness means. Not all connections are good. We save hours or days when we fly; yet it was the globe-hopping of a single promiscuous flight attendant that got the AIDS epidemic off to a fast start. We are threatened by terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda. The complex integration of the electric power grid, in North America as well as other parts of the world, means that a failure in suburban Ohio can black out large sections of the Northeast, the Midwest, and Canada, as happened in 2003. Politics and financial markets in one corner of the globe can affect financial markets everywhere. On a small scale, this means that a rebel attack on a Nigerian oil pipeline can cause a spike in world prices that will be reflected at the pump within days. Writ large, this means that a mortgage crisis in the United States can devastate financial markets around the world. Connection means vulnerability.

  But most of our networks, most of the time, appear to advance human progress, leading to greater efficiencies and broader knowledge. We realize, for example, that we are part of social networks that extend far beyond our immediate circle of friends. (John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation popularized the notion that everybody on the planet is connected to everyone else through a maximum of six intermediaries.) The extension of social worlds beyond a network of local friends is greatly abetted by electronic communications networks—wired and, increasingly, mobile telephones and text messages, and, most transformative of all, the internet with its e-mail, instant messaging, and World Wide Web. E-mail, instantaneous and practically free, seems overnight to have supplanted first-class mail, a staple of the postal network that only two or three generations ago was itself a transformative network.*

  Have electronic communications rendered road networks less important? Hardly. Our inner circle of friends, our home communities, are still connected by roads. Everything real, by which I mean everything nonvirtual—food, furniture, goods of every description (including computers, I should add)—might be ordered online but they actually arrive overland, by train or plane, perhaps, for some of their journey, but always substantially by road. (The bumper sticker you see on trucks reminds us: “If you’ve got it, a trucker brought it.”) Roads remain the essential network of the non-virtual world. They are the infrastructure upon which almost all other infrastructure depends. They are the paths of human endeavor.

  Roads have probably always played a role in the shaping of human settlement, but it was the Romans who first demonstrated what a large network of roads could do. The Appian Way was only the most famous road leading out of Rome; eighteen others did as well, part of a system that, at its peak, extended 53,000 miles. The Roman roads—and the empire—extended as far as the British Isles, over the Alps to Spain and central and eastern Europe, east to present-day Greece and Turkey, and through the Holy Land, all the way around the Mediterranean, including North Africa.

  Constructed over eight hundred years, they allowed for the movement of armies and the expansion of empire. Roman roads were nonpareil. Soldiers—roads were built by the military—dug a deep bed and then filled it with layers of gravel or other rocks, depending on the location. Principal routes were paved with cut stones that fit together with mosaic tightness; their bottom surfaces, sunk into the substrate, were diamond-shaped. The road was cambered—higher in the middle and gently sloping to the sides—to allow for drainage, and drainage ditches along the side were a common feature. So well were Roman roads made that many still exist. The empire’s most enduring monuments, some rutted with the tracks of hundreds of years of wagon wheels, these remnants run alongside ruins of inns or barracks, and parallel or undergird modern roads.

  As the Roman Empire grew weak, the Janus-headed nature of the network became clear. The advantage of the road could be a drawback: “barbarian” tribes began making use of Rome’s own roads to attack the empire. Armies of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Vandals, Germanic tribes once in the Roman service, rebelled. Alaric, the Visigoth king, first atta
cked Constantinople and next Italy, around A.D. 400; Rome finally capitulated after a blockade of roads around it in 408 threatened citizens with mass starvation. The fine roads were instrumental in effectively ending the Western Roman Empire.

  It would be more than fifteen hundred years before nations again took up road-building on such a grand scale. Among the things lost, in the centuries that followed, was Roman road-building know-how. Not until long after the Middle Ages, in fact, did any civilization approach the engineering artistry of the Roman road. Even if the legions of skilled stonemasons and other workers had been available in the eighteenth century, the narrow, metal-rimmed wheels of fast carriages would have rendered the Roman method impractical.

  Evenly cut stone blocks were still commonly used as a “course” underneath a gravel running surface when John Loudon McAdam, a Scottish roads official, thought that a superior pavement would be based on angular chunks of broken stone held together by natural interlock between the pieces, and then covered with a layer of even smaller stones, “small enough to fit in the stonebreaker’s mouth.” The grinding action of passing wheels would compress the two into a durable surface. In McAdam’s view, no rock bottom layer was needed—a huge breakthrough. The principles of macadam are still used today in highway construction.

  The other transformative technology, of course, was the internal combustion engine. High-speed vehicles required roads with different pavements and gradings. The era of prosperity that followed World War II, along with new mass manufacturing of cars and trucks, prompted unprecedented booms of road construction in the United States (notably the interstate highway system) and in Europe. As cars became available for purchase by millions of people, their use promoted the growth of suburbs, their demand for petroleum changed the geopolitical arrangement of the world, and their exhaust—and that from other machines—began a warming of the planet’s atmosphere whose ramifications become better understood, and more feared, every day.

  Being on the road is one of the ways I have always felt most alive in the world. Road travel has been a main story of my life, beginning with bicycle tours in the years before I could drive, intense pleasure in getting my driver’s license, and road trips and hitchhiking after I had, mainly during a college career that involved a few detours. One of these was a few months’ living with railroad hoboes—professional itinerants, essentially—in an experience that I turned into my first book, Rolling Nowhere. After graduate school it was back on the road for a year, in Mexico and the United States, with Mexican undocumented migrants, travels that became the basis of my next book, Coyotes. Higher education; road trip; higher education; road trip—the alternation was not coincidental. While I have benefited enormously from formal education, it has never seemed to me sufficient; it has repeatedly sparked in me a visceral longing for the lessons of life outside.

  What’s that all about? College to me, particularly at the beginning before I figured out how to use it, was about imposed learning. Travel, on the other hand, was an expression of personal curiosity, of a broader education less mediated by received thought. It was also a test of personal resources beyond essay-writing cleverness and the capacity to handle course-induced stress.

  And travel on roads seemed especially the right kind. Growing up in the American West, I had the idea that coming of age meant leaving the city, being tested in a place that was a little bit wild. Roads were the West in certain ways—civilized and yet often remote and unsupervised. Without question I was influenced by the ethic of the Beat and hippie generations that came before me, which saw travel as a masculine prerogative, if not duty. Kerouac’s On the Road, with its celebration of movement and its equation of travel with poetry, got under my skin; the day I left my aunt Janet’s house near Morristown, New Jersey, to begin hitchhiking west on my hoboing trip (Kerouac and I had New Jersey aunts in common), I remember Jan happened to be playing on her eight-track Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind” (“It’s knowing that your door is always open / And your path is free to walk”). Like so many songs of the day—the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man,” the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” and the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’ “—it extolled the spirit of the travelin’ man, of unfettered life on the road.

  Of course it goes back at least to Walt Whitman, the great American poet of the road. When I first read “Song of the Open Road,” I knew that we were from the same place. The speaker of this poem is happy to be going, glad to meet those he encounters (he lists them at length), rapturous at the journey and its possibilities, his travel a celebration of populism and democracy.

  From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,

  Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,

  Listening to others, and considering well what they say,

  Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,

  Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

  I inhale great draughts of space;

  The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

  My last book, Newjack, was about working as a guard at Sing Sing prison. One night I was part of a transportation detail, relocating to a different prison upstate a gang member who’d been involved in a brawl. For me, it was a rare opportunity to work outside of prison walls. For him, it was a rare opportunity to see the outside world. Our van pulled over for dinner at a service area on the New York State Thruway. I brought some fast food to the prisoner in the van and we talked while we ate. He kept looking over my shoulder to the big trucks he could see parked outside, the semi rigs, and as one pulled out, he told me, “That’s what I want to do when my bid’s done. Drive one of those things.”

  His wish made all the sense in the world. Roads are in so many ways the opposite of prison. Once I was finished wearing that uniform, I wanted to get back on them, too.

  One way to understand roads is to look at a map. I love doing this—following routes, tracing them with my fingertip, choosing turns, seeing a squiggly line and trying to picture the road it represents. Augustus Caesar put his son-in-law Marcus Agrippa (63?–12 B.C.) in charge of mapping the known world, a project that took twenty years to complete. Agrippa’s map was engraved in marble on a colonnade near the Roman forum. It not only located roads and towns but “illustrated the breadth of empire” and became, as John Noble Wilford writes, “an object of Roman pride. Maps have served this dual function in all subsequent empires.”

  Most recently, this pride can be felt in Asian countries, notably China and India, which are expanding their road networks at a rapid pace. China has announced a target of 53,000 miles of highway by 2020—a figure somewhat longer than the present-day length of the United States Interstate Highway System. (They are on course to equal us in cars just a few years later.) As I write, India is at the beginning of a fifteen-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highways. Smaller nations are also rapidly paving—Vietnam’s new Ho Chi Minh Highway is just one of many new regional roads in Southeast Asia sometimes referred to in aggregate as the Asian Highway. Kazakhstan’s plan to rebuild its highway linking China to the east and Russia to the west is being billed as “the new Silk Road;” that would strengthen a weak link in the giant road network known as the Trans-Siberian Highway. In the developed countries of the West, formerly dirt roads continue to be covered with asphalt as traffic grows. We’ve reached the point where it seems nowadays as though we’re paving the world.

  In fact, almost 1.5 percent of the surface area of the continental United States—an area about the size of Ohio—is now covered with “impermeable surfacing”: roads, parking lots, buildings, and houses. Roads constitute the largest human-made artifact on earth. American landscape architect J. B. Jackson concluded in 1980 that roads are “now the most powerful force for the destruction or creation of landscapes that we have.” The siting of roads determines patterns of settlement, the locations of hou
ses and businesses. The speed of cars upon them plays a role in how far from the road a structure will be: the older a dwelling in this country, it seems, the greater the likelihood that it was built near a road—sometimes right next to it, as in the case of my wife’s family’s farmhouse in New Hampshire. Horses and wagons were the traffic back then, and you had plenty of time to see them coming. These days the road is paved, and the cars whizzing by feel a little too close.

  A road can change a shoreline, offering motorists great views but restricting access for pedestrians. A new highway can bypass a little town, killing its main street, or bisect a neighborhood, killing a sense of community. A father at my kids’ school declared to me bluntly that as an ecologist he is “against roads,” and I know he is not alone: for those whose focus is protecting nature, roadless areas have a status approaching sanctity.* It is not hard to enumerate the ill effects of roads. As road-building continues its global acceleration, and the car hunger of Indian and Chinese consumers pushes global car ownership into the hundreds of millions, those of us in nations whose roads are well advanced (and a few of those in nations where they’re not, such as Amazon tribespeople threatened by roads) wonder whether there’s a limit to how much pavement and driving the earth can stand—how long, in the words of Joni Mitchell, you can “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”

  And yet, without roads and cars—or a viable alternative, which has yet to appear—all human progress, all economic activity, would stop. The kids need to get to school, Mom and Dad to work, food (and everything else) to market. Watching roads can be a way to look at history, to measure human progress and limitation. In the past century, the global road network has become a thing that might finally, truly, impress the Romans. With near unanimity, we proclaim their usefulness. They are the human world’s circulatory system.