by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
For a driver accustomed to obeying lane lines and feeling taken advantage of when somebody zoomed up the shoulder, the situation represented the complete breakdown of order. Here was Hobbes’s state of nature, every man out for himself. Of course, it wasn’t quite that extreme—a bit of enlightened self-interest kept most drivers from colliding with adjacent cars—but it was close. I noticed that the pressure became even more intense after a while because traffic slowed in the opposite direction, too, adding to the buildup on the median. As I sat in the back of the cab, I felt as though I was in the middle of a giant automotive mosh pit, helplessly part of an aggressive crowd.
Much of the time, other banged-up cars and trucks were so close that I couldn’t have opened my door to escape even if I had decided to. But that was a hopeless idea. In another hour, actually, I would find myself in the spacious but strangely empty living room of Police Chief Omiyale, drinking tea brought in by his wife, peered at by young children who hovered in doorways, discussing the cosmology of Nigerian roads and the strange political process that had resulted in five competing police forces in Lagos. At the moment, however, I was trying not to look at the young vendor who had assumed a fixed position directly outside my window. Dangling from his outstretched arm was a string of dead rats. He bumped them against the window to get my attention. I knew what these meant now, but a couple of weeks ago I had not. “Oh my God,” I remembered saying to Biola. “Who would buy dead rats?”
It had taken her a moment to understand what I was thinking. Once she did, she began laughing almost uncontrollably. “They’re selling poison, rat poison,” she explained between hoots of laughter. “Those dead rats just show it works. It’s advertising.”
After my interview with the chief, in the same taxi back to Bill’s, we found ourselves in the same kind of jam. This time my way of coping, as the sides of trucks and buses replaced the view of shanties and billboards, was to imagine an aerial perspective of the mess, à la Google Earth. From above, I could see that the battle for the median strip was in a way a version of the volume control engineered in places like New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge. On the Tappan Zee, custom vehicles known as “zipper machines” move a line of concrete dividers from one side of the roadway to the other depending on which direction has the heaviest traffic; similar systems are in place in Honolulu, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco (though the dividers on the Golden Gate Bridge are plastic, not concrete), Ontario, and Auckland, New Zealand. In Lagos, you could argue, the same thing seems to happen, but without the intervention of traffic engineers. I know which one I prefer.
In my mind I kept rising, so that I could see for blocks and blocks. I could imagine the yellow of the buses and taxis standing out against the gloomy gray of almost everything else; the other specks of color I conjured up were the pinks, greens, oranges, and reds of women’s traditional robes. I could visualize the evangelists’ billboards (“Lord, let us tell Good from Evil so that we do not Die of the Unexpected,” “Satan, Stop That Mess! A Prophetic Breakthrough Sermon”), beckoning men and women to lives of purpose and moral conduct. Evangelical Christianity and populist Islam were the fastest-growing religions here, and they were of a piece with the worldly grime and grit. They offered a path to higher ground, a spiritual elevation from the omnipresent squalor and constant threat of scam.
Higher yet, I could picture the boundaries of Lagos, those edges where creeping urban settlement met with field and forest. Roads connected the megacity to smaller ones, but this megacity was hardly alone: Lagos is “simply the biggest node in the shantytown corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan,” as Mike Davis has observed.
At night, from space, you’d be able to see an amazing band of lights across the coast of West Africa. At least, if the power was on.
EPILOGUE
ONE OF THE GREAT CHALLENGES in writing a book about roads is to avoid the inadvertent use of road metaphors. So essential a part of the human endeavor are roads that road-and driving-related metaphors permeate our language. Who among us hasn’t come to a fork in the road or been tempted by the road to ruin? Speed bumps, in the newspapers, are faced by everyone from Middle East peace negotiators to baseball teams making their way to the playoffs. Leaders who are asleep at the wheel routinely send our enterprises into a ditch. We spend so much time “on the way” in cars, ideally pedal-to-the-metal but more often stuck in a jam (what other non-human artifacts experience “congestion”?) or, the good Lord willing, cruisin’, that roads have become central to the way we think.
Your career puts you in either the fast lane or the slow. Some will choose the high road, others the low. Either way, there may be detours en route—you may find yourself on a rocky road, or a long and winding road, or you may hit a bump in the road. If that should happen, don’t let it drive you around the bend. Hopefully someone will help pave the road to your recovery. If not, you’ll fall by the wayside, running on empty, and it’s all downhill from there. So get a grip (on the wheel, that is), and consider taking the road less traveled.
The road to x is paved with y. That idea is up my alley. Don’t worry about the road ahead—it’s a straight shot. There’s a lot going on under the hood. Now that you’re in the driver’s seat, you’re going to want to avoid that deer in the headlights. You’ll also want to take a peek in the rear-view mirror. When you reach the crossroads, look both ways. If you keep going the way you’re headed, you’re going to drive it into the ground. It’s a total dead end. But the straight shot, that one’s paved with gold, so let’s green-light it. Let’s step on it!
Disagree? Then you can eat my dust, because this ain’t no two-way street. It’s my way or the highway!
And that, friends, is where the rubber meets the road.
Why are there so many road-related figures of speech? I guess because roads are the best metaphor we have for talking about life. The idea is a bit strange when you think about it: something that can be measured in miles likened to something that can be measured in days or years. But roads are all about passage, distance over time—miles per hour—and navigating a road involves choices.
With the most expansive metaphors, the road stands for an entire worldview. When we talk about “the road we’re on now” or “if we keep going down this road,” we’re talking about a whole set of choices and understandings about life or policy. The Chinese character tao means “way,” “path,” or “route,” and sometimes “doctrine” or “principle.” The Japanese word dō (pronounced “doe”) refers to a spiritual and physical “way;” karate-dō is the way (practice) of karate. In Spanish the words rumbo and camino, literally “path” and “way,” both frequently connote life choices and mindset.
My friend Jay, with whom I’ve done a lot of driving, observed to me once that roads have a dual nature. On the one hand a road is a purposefully constructed, even intrusive element of the landscape; on the other hand it’s self-effacing, just a means to an end. From a driver’s point of view, “it’s no place in particular, it’s always receding,” he observed—which reminded me of the Mac Davis lyric, “I thought happiness was Lubbock, Texas / in my rearview mirror.”
“Unless you get stuck,” Jay added. “Then you feel the doom of being nowhere, of being in a random somewhere not of your choosing.”
And that’s the foil to the whole road-as-means-of-self-discovery idea: a traveler can run out of psychic gas. While travel can be enlightening and eye-opening, we’ve probably all had moments when the movement came to seem just a waste of time—a spinning of wheels, if you will. The British writer Will Self, who walks places and then writes about it, decided to go by foot from John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens to Manhattan. He saved the $45 taxi fare but had this to say in Brooklyn:
Far from being elevated by Crown Heights, I can feel my mood dipping. Far from feeling the walk to New York as an achievement, I’m beginning to think this is just another slog away from commitment and engagement, and towards empty-headedness.
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sp; This idea, of course, is a heresy to the road-as-wisdom camp. It probably took an Englishman to write it.
In the American tradition, the road as setting for novel or movie resonates with our national passion for mobility, and our view of the road, articulated by Whitman, as a place where everybody meets everybody, where democracy happens. Leo Marx has commented that Mark Twain de-Europeanized the American novel “with one inspired stroke when he chose an illiterate fourteen-year-old boy, the son of the town drunk, as the narrator of his own road novel.” Huckleberry Finn and Jim the escaped slave travel not on a road, of course, but down the Mississippi River. But it’s still a road novel, not least in the way that their raft, just like the Beats’ car in Kerouac’s On the Road, is a distinctively male space that permits its occupants “to be together without the need to answer questions about why they want to be together.” And, of course, to seek holiness and truth, much as Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, did in 1991 and 1992, as recounted in Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild.
I was sorry not to be able to spend more time in the settlement of Samaritans, near Nablus, because the parable of the Good Samaritan, from the Gospel according to Luke, has long struck me as an essential story about the meaning of roads. A good Samaritan, as everybody knows, helps somebody he doesn’t know. The parable unfolds as a lesson from Jesus to a lawyer who has asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus asks him what he thinks one needs to do.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself,” answers the lawyer. But one part of that is not entirely clear: “Who is my neighbor?” he asks Jesus.
Jesus explains by way of this story: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’”
Jesus then instructs the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.”
I’m not a Christian, actually, but I like this story because it touches on the moral implications of roads. To me it’s like this: the world has many needy people. It also has fortunate people with various abilities to help. But who deserves help? Well, if you live in a small community, you help your neighbor. Fine, but what if there’s a road—and via that road, outsiders arrive? Are they your neighbors? Or if you yourself use that road to travel to another place, and while traveling you encounter somebody who needs help: is that your neighbor? (There’s a greater chance that you will meet this person on the road, because trouble happens on the road, and people needing help sometimes take to the road.) It’s an essential question of morality: who is our neighbor? And therefore, whom do we help and whom do we not? And it is roads, obviously since biblical times and probably since long before, that complicate this question, by introducing us to strangers.
What else does a road test beyond one’s conscience? Jay’s idea is that the road lends itself to experiments of all kinds because it is liminal, an in-between place outside the immediate control or supervision of constituted authority, where things can happen that are not permitted elsewhere;* lawlessness is both danger and opportunity. A related notion is that of the “roadhouse,” a honky-tonk outside of town where local restrictions do not apply and forbidden things are sometimes possible.
Last, roads have long provided a solution, in American life and elsewhere, to disappointments and the lack of local opportunity. You go somewhere else, you start again. Or you get started for the first time. As Bruce Springsteen sang in “Thunder Road”: “It’s a town full of losers / And I’m pulling out of here to win.”
That ethos might be poised for reassessment in light of high oil prices, the concept of the carbon footprint, and the notion that, given the disappearance of the frontier and the recognition that there is limited space on earth for ever-growing numbers of people, we need to stay put and clean up after ourselves, not simply forever move on.
And yet, stasis is not an option. In the words of Ibn al-’Arabi, a twelfth-century philosopher from Spain, “The origin of existence is movement. Immobility can have no part in it, for if existence were immobile, it would return to its source, which is the Void. That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or the hereafter.”
*Unless, of course, there is highway patrol in the vicinity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first conceived of this project, I had no idea how to fund it. Overseas research is costly. The answer came in three parts: Alfred A. Knopf, my publisher, which advanced me royalties; the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, which granted me a research fellowship; and several magazines, which assigned me road-related stories and paid for associated travel. I would like to thank National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Virginia Quarterly Review for their interest, and these editors for their support: Robert Vare, Gerald Marzorati, Ted Genoways, and Margot Guralnick (who also happens to be my wife).
Back in the early 1990s, The New Yorker sent me to East Africa to write about truckers and the AIDS epidemic. Twelve years later, I revisited some of the same places with the same men for chapter 3 of this book. Thanks to Robert Gottlieb for his early belief in me.
I owe a large debt of gratitude to Kathy Robbins, my agent, as well as to David Halpern and everyone at the Robbins Office. But most of all, I’d like to thank Jona than Segal of Knopf and my longtime friend Jay Leibold. Jon brought a series of ideas to the project that improved and deepened it in more ways than I can say. So did Jay, with whom I have been talking and thinking about writing (and a lot of other things) since we were fourteen. He is a generous and patient friend, an inspired and incisive editor, and the brother I never had. This one’s for you, Bold.
For a variety of assistance and support, my thanks to Nicholas Dawidoff (general counsel), Sharon Olds (protective shrine), John Thorndike (keen eye), Michael Collier and everyone at Bread Loaf (sounding boards), Estelle Bond Guralnick (rural haven), Lane Anderson and the Hertog Fellows program at Columbia University (research), Rollo Romig and Shahnaz Habib (more research), Joey McGarvey and Susanna Sturgis at Knopf; and Sarah and Geoffrey Gund, Frances Beinecke and Paul Elston, and Elizabeth and David Beim, for helping to keep Dodgewood great.
I would also like to acknowledge:
Peru (and Brazil): Timothy Currie, Peter Porteous, Antonio Ponce, Braulio Quispe, Geraldine Coll, Avecita Chicchón, Amyas Naegele, Carlos Llerena, Mikko Pyhala, Peter Menderson, Chris Kirkby, Dick Smith, Irving Foster Brown, Ph.D., Alfredo García Altamirano, Gene Reitz, Douglas Daly, Ph.D, Christiane Ehringhaus, Ph.D., and Anton Seimon, Ph.D.
Zanskar: Seb Mankelow, for help above and beyond; Dorjey Gyalpo, Lobzang Tashi, Sonam Stopgais, Brigadier M. A. Naik, Colonel Sabu-Joseph, David Dunbar, Peter Getzels, Venu Gopal, and everyone at the Oriental Guest House in Leh.
East Africa: Josephat Ogutu, Suleiman Abdallah, Job Bwayo, M.D., Ph.D., Ludo Lavreys, Kishor Mandaliya, M.D., Henry Pollack, M.D., Brad Wells, and Jody Gural-nick. And from my 1993 trip: Harry Hanegraaf, Lawrence Richter, Chris Grundmann, Maggie Bangser, Raymond Bonner, and Osman Mohammed.
West Bank: Cullen Murphy, Fares Azar, the al-Khatib family, Michael Tarazi, Blu and Irving Greenberg, Bob Reiss, Tabitha Thompson and Tarek Mango, Tom Casciato, Bob Abeshouse, Ghazi Abuhakema, Brooke Kroeger and Alex Goren, and Haim Handwerker.
China: Richard Henry, Li Lu, Shang Yuan, Xiangjie Zhao, Zhu
Jihong, Zhou Yan, Paul Tough, Susan Lawrence, Li Man, Cathi and Bette Hanauer, Jing Zhao, Amelia Newcomb, Asil Gezen, Graham Smith, Juhong Chen, Wang Yang, Robert Larson, Ling Huang, Guan Xiaofeng, Wang Hongsheng, Jake Hooker, and Donovan Webster.
Lagos: Biola and Oritsejolomi “Bill” Okonedo, Banks Akpata, Shey Tata, Tony Eprile, Buki Papillon, Lara Olajide, Jack W. C. Hagstrom, M.D., Sikuade Jagun, M.D., Moshood Kazeem, I. K. Mustapha, M.D., Kristen Mertz, M.D., Peter Nnaemeka, M.D., Vincent Okaa, M.D., Philip Heinegg, M.D., Laura Jones, Eric Anyah, Ogbonnaya Nwachuku, Pamela Chibogu Okechukwu (and her husband, Henry), Aino Ternstedt Oni-Okpaku, Blessing Njoku, Chris Adigwe, George Packer, and Paul Austin, M.D.
Also:
Peter Whiteley, Paolo Pellegrin, Breyten Breytenbach, William C. Chittick, Beth Conover, Ken Snyder, Rick Larson, Howard Carl, Teresa Keenan, Richard Cohen, Tim Dickinson, Jonathan Veitch, Carlton Bradford, Jack Noon, Craig Childs, and Mark Curby.
And at world headquarters, the center of my universe: thank you, Margot and Asa and Nell, more than I can express, for the long and loving leash.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
SOLDIERS ROADS WERE BUILT BY THE MILITARY: see Victor W. Von Hagen, The Roads That Led to Rome, pp. 34–35.
EVENLY CUT STONE BLOCKS: see M. G. Lay, Ways of the World, pp. 77-78. The only recent innovation is the addition of a waterproof layer of tar or asphalt over the stones.
LIKE SO MANY SONGS OF THE DAY: Hank Williams had recorded his own song “Ramblin’ Man” in 1951. And though the Temptations’ 1972 recording turned “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” into a soul classic, the Undisputed Truth, another Motown act, had recorded it earlier that year.