On Roads

In his essay A Native Hill, Wendell makes an interesting statement.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one.  A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.  It is a sort of ritual of familiarity.  As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape.  It is not destructive.  It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.  A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape.  Its reason is not simply the necessity of movement, but haste.  Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.  It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.  The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.

The reason I quote this is not only because I think it's true but because as I drive up to my parent's place at the foot of the Beartooths I'm confronted with the very act in progress.  Highway 78 runs from Columbus, Montana up the Stillwater valley to Absarokee, along the Beartooth front through Roscoe and ends at the sky resort town of Redlodge.  This highway is a gorgeous drive.  The stretch from Columbus to Absarokee is currently in its second stage of widening and flattening.  I've driven it many many times in my life.  It gave me the first white-knuckle, butt-pucker of my varied career behind the wheel.  (And that was a nice sunny day in the middle of July.)  The old highway was a swerving, narrow, mad-corner death trap.  The new highway is wide, straight, flat and fast. 

Now, I'm not sure there is a real distinction between old road and new road.  They both served the same purpose except the new one serves it better.  This may surprise some of you but I am a bit of a sentimentalist.  Or it may not surprise you at all since I am trying to find Wendell Berry and we all know that that is as good as being an idealistic, commy pig dog much less a "sentamentalist".  But when the old highway, on which I knew every curve and rise, went under the blade a few years ago I was deeply saddened and on occasion would burst out in angry lament.  But I soon realized that the new highway is much better and I've since gotten over my despondency.  I like the new one and am even looking forward to the finished stretch up to my parents corner.  My sentamentalist tendencies were bulldozed under with the old asphalt. 

With that said, I'm still saddened.  I realized this weekend the mechanized act of widening the road makes my psyche twitch.  They are literally tearing down hills and filling in valleys, ripping out stands of trees, fences, and ditches and reworking the surface of the planet.  It will bring a tear to your eye if you love that valley like I do.  This and I don't think the wide highway will do the locals in the valley any real good.  It will probably increase visitors and by extension absentee landowners and land developers.  That's shit. 

But it doesn't really matter what I think.  In two years I won't remember the old way and there won't be any sign of its existence.  The new highway is better than the old one.  You can see the deer coming, you can see cars coming, you can stay on the road when the weather's crap and we can get up to see my family faster.  But, I thought of Wendell's words as I drove by shattered trees, flattened hills and trampled land.  He's right in a very real, tangible sense and wrong in thinking it will be any other way.   The road will be there now for a millenia till the earth moves back.  But that's progress for you, they say.