The Great American Highway

"Nomad. I am a nomad. The odometer reached 70,283 miles yesterday. That's 4,000 miles a month for the last two months. I've lost count of the number of time I've driven 101--about twice a weekend (once = one way). I've got a tally in my gas records, and one day I'll count the 101 trips. I've driven 299 from Redding, and 36 from Red Bluff (twice)--once with my significant other in the car, admiring the wonderful scenery, the trees, the isolation, and a lone coyote on the eastern side. I've already seen snow down to 3,000' in the Siskyous. I drive 10-12 hours a weekend, keep two bags packed all the time, think in terms of being in two places at once--three tooth brushes (one for the road), do I need to get groceries before I go..."

I made that journal entry on 05 Dec 1998, near the beginning of what I call my "Highway 101 Nomad" era. My life companion had enrolled at Humboldt State University to get a master's degree in biology. I had a good job in Berkeley working for the Lawrence Hall of Science, a children's museum. For nearly two years, we lived apart. Nearly every weekend, I drove up to visit her. Sometimes she drove down, but mostly I headed north. Every so often, I'd go south to visit my parents, who lived in Los Angeles.

Highway 101 became my familiar, the length of California my home. This is when the realities of the carnage sank in. In a way, it is sad to think that it wasn't smashed insects or birds that caused the breakthrough. It was mammals, of all kinds.

Small herds of mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus, were always a joy to behold on the trips, but they also instilled a sense of caution. Dead deer were present on nearly every drive. I recall an Odocoilian that had been smeared down a twentieth-of-a-mile of highway by a semi, a voluminous splat followed by a two-hundred foot trail of crimson. Glad I wasn't that deer. Another time, while I climbed a low hill lush with stands of tanoak and madrona, I passed a freshly killed ungulate--it wasn't bloated by the sun. A little ways beyond, at a pull-out, sat a motorhome. I could see the driver in it clearly, sitting stiffly and staring forward. From a spinout I had on black ice many years in the past, I knew that stare. Driver shock, I called it. I understood immediately that this was the vehicle--the perso--that had struck that deer. A supposedly fun and relaxing weekend abruptly ruined by the death of a big, brown-eyed mammal, and potential loss-of-control of a massive vehicle. The road machine at work, demonstrating its indifference, its callousness toward animals of all kind.

Other mammals, of course, weren't immune to this brutality. Raccoons, Procyon lotor, for instance. I recall one that had been hit dead center of a truck's double wheels, which left most of the creature flat, save the peak of compressed flesh that happened to pass between the heavy tires. Many procyonids were simply shredded and painted down the slab by countless vehicles whose drivers didn't bother, or simply couldn't manage, to avoid the corpse. Such was the fate of mammals of all kinds. In this fashion, a powerful message was repeatedly written in blood: the road is a cold, indifferent creation that, like the indigenous peoples who have faced the powerful machine of progress world-wide, exists at the suffering of others.

Such is the message that American drivers face all the time, one that is typically ignored. "It can't be helped," some would argue, "for I need to drive to work, and I live out in the suburbs." Indeed, many Americans are now dependent on cars. I, too, am dependent on a car for my daily commute.

With such dependence enters a kind of fate. Fate: a path that has been laid out before us by a higher force (a deity, say, or Nature). Road: a path that has been laid out before us by a higher force (progress). Americans, in essence, have created a situation where fate operates as never before. The road becomes the perfect metaphor for not only fate, but progress itself. In this manner, roads are a logical outcome of an industrial society that essentially values "regularity, punctuality, constancy and industry" over life. Many Americans have become bound by a technology that is so pervasive that it can only rarely be avoided. The pervasiveness of roads reinforces the progress mindset, despite its brutality.

One Sunday evening in late 1999, I rolled onto Highway 101 south, after a nice weekend with my mate. A forest of redwoods skirted past to either side as I rumbled down the superslab at about 60 mph. The sun hung low, casting a warm yellow light on forest giants that had sprouted before there was a "New World." These were trees that had reached ancient status long before the first roads were cut through them, and such roads happened over a century before my particular drive. Now the old redwoods stood above Western Culture's symbol of progress, silently awaiting their fate. "Awaiting their fate" may be a cliché, but it is an appropriate one, for the road embodies fate. The trees' fate had been determined when the continuity of the forest was broken by a roadcut, allowing the warm sun to reach deep into the moist, sheltered woodland, and enhance local evaporation. Highway 101 was an open wound on the land, one that, even as the forest tried to heal, was constantly agitated by vehicles and road maintenance crews. Most of the trees that I passed had dead tops. They suffered from "edge effects" and were dying. The road determined their fate, as it determines the fate of many lives.

I rounded a broad bend and cruised the straightaway that approached the exit to Meyer's Flat. Emergency vehicles blocked the road. Flares burned on the asphalt like brilliant red stars. I slowed, broken from my music-filled reverie. Police guided me toward the exit. The reason for this abrupt intrusion to my anticipated smooth and trouble-free drive was scattered across the road before me. The devastation was unreal, alien, seemingly impossible. A black Acura Integra was upside-down, crushed and mangled. A Chevy Blazer stood further down the highway, broken, smashed on nearly all sides--it had rolled, though it had returned to its wheels. Broken glass, personal effects, toys, trash, were scattered everywhere.

And bodies. They were covered up, but blood had seeped from under some of the canopies. War. That's the word that entered my mind as my stomach turned, and my arms began to shake. It looked like a war zone. A place far away, like Afghanistan, or the former republic of Yugoslavia, where people fought, and died. But the death was here before me, real, tangible, horrible. I rolled down the exit ramp, in shock. I pulled off the road in Meyer's Flat, and sat still, holding the wheel. Like the motorhome driver who had hit the deer months ago, it was my turn for that distant stare. What was I doing on the road? Was it wise to drive so many miles each week? Was there a way I could quit being the 101 Nomad? If not now, how soon?

My mate soon learned how shocked I had been--I called her shortly after. The visions occupied my whole drive back to Berkeley, and the return trip to Eureka at the end of the week. The memory returns every time I pass through Meyer's Flat. My life companion also knew that one of my coping mechanisms is to study things that frighten me. The next weekend, she showed me the article on that particular accident. Out in remote Northern California, such a carnage took on an importance greater than in the big city, and was an significant news item.

The owner of the Acura had been an undergraduate at Humboldt State. She was driving northbound to Arcata, heading for a new week of school after a visit with her fiancé over the weekend. The driver of the Blazer was a mother of two who was transporting her children, and two children of a friend, southbound to home. For reasons unknown at the time the article was written, the Blazer veered into the oncoming lanes of 101. The stretch of road at Meyer's Flat is considered divided, though there was no divider, just a double-double yellow line. At the time, divided highways were posted 65 mph in California. Likely, both cars were traveling at this rate of speed when they collided. The woman in the Acura died instantly. In the Blazer, only the mother and one child survived. None of the children had been wearing restraints, and they were thrown from the vehicle when it rolled. The survivors were seriously mangled, and had to be hospitalized long-term.

Like a machine, the road, and the vehicles that are driven on it, are without feeling. The drivers themselves often tend to feign indifference, choosing to pretend that they are alone even as they participate in one of the grandest group activities yet devised. As a result, lives end. Young lives, old lives, full lives, empty lives. The road does not care. After each death, the road still is. The symbol of progress remains. Since the first automobiles in the United States, there have been about as many human deaths on U.S. highways as there have been Americans lost in all U.S.-involved wars combined. Even after millions of human lives have ended, the great slabs continue.

The road marks a kind of fate embodied in one of the greatest symbols of progress ever created. The road paints a powerful image of Americans moving ever-forward with unstoppable purpose. Due in part to these two traits, the road supports its own continued operation despite a carnage that most sensibilities immediately cry out against when the reality, suddenly and most violently, is revealed. In essence, the road, and its builders, have created a synergy that is a new and violent force of nature, one that the Earth in its multi-billion-year history has never before witnessed.

This new phenomenon will continue to spread across the globe.

-best,

Wolf Read