The car has made our cities uninhabitable. It is also the best way to escape them. Hurry and take the road to the roadless area, because it won’t be roadless long. Too much demand.
The gas pump doesn’t know the beauty which it helped to see; and so the gas tax comes pouring in and the pavement comes pouring out.
And so we push the Big Wheel nearer the edge. The land of the free and the home of the auto dump. But man was born to wander.
This is taken from one of my all-time favorite books. It’s a Sierra Club – Ballantine book first published in 1967 and includes 63 original photographs taken with the worst equipment money could buy (the copyright page promises this). It is filled with such deep musings, comical quotes, and appeals to the John Muir in all of us. I read it on loan from a friend and loved it so much that I sought out a lightly used and lightly water-damaged copy on Amazon. I paid more than twice the original price of what I understand to be a 5th edition. It’s no collector’s item, but I wouldn’t trade it.
Our recent Wendell Barryism has had me thinking about this quote in particular at high frequency. It might be the cowboy in me (Do I get bonus points for referencing Tim McGraw?), but something about the middle line feels deeply true and hopeless. I’ve been to roadless places. They’re all surrounded – by roads! I once drove for 60 miles without catching a single radio station through what frontiersmen described as some of the most lifeless wasteland on earth. But, in spite of its emptiness, it had a highway.
Maybe I’m a little nostalgic for a time I didn’t live through, but there’s something beautiful about wild places. I’ll admit that there is also something beautiful about roads that are smooth and drivable. But the road, inevitably, domesticates the wild. It takes the isolation of nature and populates it with travelers, some of which cannot begin to appreciate what they have the privilege to observe and therefore cannot know what it is they’re complicit in destroying as they drive their vehicle across asphalt that was once ground specially designed to absorb runoff, prevent erosion, and keep a cycle alive.
It all reminds me very much of a John Denver song:
Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land
While it isn’t exactly Alan Jackson singing gospel music, it’s powerful. In the same song, he idealizes “walking in quiet solitude” in nature, utterly alone. I’d contend that being utterly alone is good for many reasons, but chief among these might be knowing who you are. To be surrounded by the majesty of nature is to be confronted with the smallness of oneself, and to be alone basking in that is to have space to answer what questions that reality raises. When we live in cities filled with skyscrapers, cell phones, and other monuments to the greatness of humans, we forget. Nature, in her raw, undefiled state has a way of instilling awe that declares what we should already know: that she was here before us, crafted by some great Artist – the kind of artist that paints with living flesh for pigments, carves with glaciers and rivers, sculpts with the wind and the sands of time, and trains the whole galaxy in the vast choreography of the heavens. That beautiful mystery is what makes the roadless place so special, and why the roadless place loses power as the road rolls into it.
Russell, T., & Russell, R. (1967). On the loose (5th ed.). San Francisco: Sierra Club – Ballantine.
(I hope yall also think roads count as technology)