music: Cowboy Junkies- The Trinity Sessions
It’s always amazed me how well the roads in this country get you to where you need to go. We should thank Ike for the larger veins and arteries that push our metal and rubber cells to and fro, but roads have been sponsored by all levels of our society, from the Feds down to the private citizens. The fact that there is continuous pavement between my house in San Francisco and my old house in Boston is quite an engineering accomplishment. but the real achievements in human ingenuity are those roads built through otherwise untouched and hostile landscapes. We can and should give thanks to those large sections of unpaved land such as the stretch of the Sierras in California, the tundras of Alaska, and the sandstone chasms of the Southwest, but we have to keep in mind that the only reason most of us has had the opportunity to take in such wonders is because of industrial America’s paved vascular tissue.
Just a week ago DJ 1ey and I pushed forth into the wild tangle of concrete and managed to navigate ourselves to Boulder, CO for an amazing wedding and reunion (and an AnizeCon of sorts now that I stop and think about those present). We then put the Camry back into the Utah backcountry, properly hiking the Needles section of Canyonlands after our first attempt in the spring of 2005, and putting some time into the oft-overlooked wonders found in the Escalante Grand Staircase. The continuous pavement then wound us through deserts, valleys, salt flats, and mountain passes until we ended up right where we started. What good would all those roads be, after all, if they didn’t take you to the edge of somewhere where there are no roads?
(There is much to say about Utah and what we found there, but there’s another place and time for that. Suffice it to say that we are already plotting our return: the Paria Wilderness Area, Hole-in-the-Rock Road, and the Maze are next up.)
What is more amazing to me is that the web of roads don’t just take you where you need to go, they’ll take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. Roads, from the seriously big Eisenhower arteries to the unpaved one lane country capillaries, have and will taken me and millions (billions?) of other humans places we couldn’t imagine, and places we could very well imagine, no matter how far away. I remember thinking about the magnitude of it all while driving last July: given the sheer number of intersections and possible turns, what would the improbability be of starting at 12 Curtis in Somerville, MA and ending up in San Francisco just on random chance? Infinitesimal. But you really could go anywhere.
Most of the time I’m disdainful of all those roads, especially when I rely on their currents while traveling. I’ve read too much Abbey, and grown self-righteous riding my bike around town, I think. I’m too conscious of those dead dinosaurs in my gas tank. But I have to recognize my own hypocricy. Without the road, there wouldn’t be a journey.
The staggering number of roads out there, and therefore number of traveling possibilities, reminds me that there are far more paths to choose than I would consider under normal circumstances. Upon returning from my motorized paddle up and down a few asphalt tributaries I fell into some serious changes back home: the ending of my job as a naturalist in the Golden Gate National Rec Area, the exciting and uncertain future of the band poised to either break out or fall on its face, the prospect of a couple free months which with to make music, explore, hike, surf, read, sleep, and indulge, and the highly likely return of missa toss at summer’s end. These are things keeping my hands full and keeping me up late. Sometimes life takes a couple months to reach a significant juncture, and sometimes almost every day is filled with groundbreaking, river-diverting events. Now is one of those transitory times, somewhere in between a routine-laden spring in the field and a blissful summer. No doubt the road and I will have a few reckonings before Labor Day hits, but for now I’d do myself good to be reminded just how much the river climbs, tumbles, and bends.
And, of course, know that my travels will not go as planned.
Posted by davidtaus at June 12, 2007 02:17 AM | TrackBack