Footprints

IT IS SAID that the world’s longest road is the Pan-American Highway. Really a dense network of interstate roads that wend and purl through seventeen countries, the highway runs unbroken from Alaska to the foot of Argentina, except for a 160-kilometre belt of rainforest between Central and South America. Its northernmost point is Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s Beaufort Sea, the site of the largest oil field in the United States. Barry Lopez writes that the thousands of oil-production wells that punctuate the bay make it seem more like a portion of West Texas transplanted to the Arctic tundra. From here, the road follows a gentle arc through Alaska’s Brooks Range to Fairbanks, then south into the Yukon, where it bends east around the northern tip of the Canadian Rockies and surges over the plains of Alberta, skirting the Athabasca tar sands, to Edmonton, where the road forks. One tine heads south and east, reaching the edge of the Great Lakes before doubling back along the rim of Lake Superior to Minneapolis, followed by Des Moines, and the Great Plains cities in Kansas and Oklahoma, and on to Dallas, past the sprawling oil fields of East Texas. The other takes a line south and west to Calgary, cuts through the Blackfeet, Flathead, and Crow reservations of Montana, then to Wyoming and the new shale plays in Western Colorado to Denver. Past Albuquerque the road begins to curve east, dipping under the wing of the West Texas oil fields, to meet and rejoin itself at San Antonio.

Jack Kerouac’s last trip in On the Road followed some of this western fork, from Denver to Mexico, as if it were an enchanted journey to reach a fabled city. Kerouac declared it the most fabulous road of all: miles and miles of ‘the magic south’. With Dean Moriarty, he burned through a thousand Texas miles, past a seemingly endless succession of gas stations, to San Antonio, then arced south to Monterrey through a gap in snow-topped mountains, crossing the swamps around Montemorelos and the desert plain, to where, he said, every road seemed to point: Mexico City.

Kerouac’s journey ended here, in spring 1950, in a sump of tropical fever that sent him limping back to New York. But the road that fuelled his imagination continues to push south. From Mexico City, it pours like sand through the hourglass waist of Central America to Panama, where it crosses the canal on the Centennial Bridge. Two hundred and sixty kilometres farther south, the road breaks, briefly and for the only time in its enormous span, frustrated by a barrier of rainforest and mountains called the Darién Gap, where Keats once imagined Cortez standing captivated by his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. It resumes in Colombia, winding through the Ecuadorian highlands to Quito, west of the oil fields of Lago Agrio and Pungarayacu, and skirting the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Here it tucks in behind the rampart of the Andes and follows the Pacific coast, past more oil fields in the waters lapping around Lima, to Valparaíso in Chile, where it abruptly strikes east along Route 60 (passing through the three-thousand-metre Cristo Redentor tunnel driven through the roots of the Andes) to the baroque esplanades of Buenos Aires.

The final leg of the journey hugs the Atlantic coast all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Bruce Chatwin describes travelling along this section of the road in In Patagonia, where he notes that the conquistadors named the region for the billowing domestic fires of the Fuegian Indians. Magellan called it the Land of Smoke (Tierra del Humo), but, Chatwin claims, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered that it be renamed, reasoning that no smoke exists without fire. Chatwin’s journey took him through the Land of Fire along the final stretch of Argentina’s National Route 3, lit by the flares of oil rigs in the southern Atlantic rather than Magellan’s fires, to its terminus at Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost town, forty-eight thousand kilometres from where it began.

Modern roads connect the world we have made. It’s estimated that there are more than fifty million kilometres of roads worldwide, at least a third of which are sealed. That is enough paved surface to loop around the planet thirteen hundred times. China alone has more than four million kilometres of paved roads. The story our future fossils will tell is, in some respects, determined by this network. Many trace fossils are marks of passage, detailing where a creature passed through long ago. Although made by our machines rather than our bodies, roads will be as telling as any footprint in this regard. It’s a tale of massive displacements, of huge quantities of materials drawn from one place and laid to rest, like the bulb of concrete planted at the base of the Queensferry Crossing’s south tower, somewhere far away. But it’s also a story of the places that make the modern world possible – places excavated for their resources and left to ruin – that might seem very distant to those of us in the comfortable West, but to which we are intimately connected. And it’s about what flows through boreholes, pipes and engines and drives our need to keep extending the road: oil. ‘Oil is a fairy tale’, writes Ryszard Kapuściński. But like every fairy tale, Kapuściński cautions, oil is also a lie. It promises release, but in reality oil sticks us to the shadow places. To know this story, we need to know not only what will become of the roads themselves but also what they connect us to. Sealed asphalt and concrete may not receive a footprint, but nonetheless the road will be a reliable source of future fossils.

FIRST, THOUGH, we need to contend with a problem of perspective.

Roads furnish our imaginations with images of freedom. Journeys like Kerouac’s have come to stand for a sense of unimpeded progress and self-discovery, an open horizon connoting limitless possibility. Roads conjure what it feels like to be modern. They open up the world for us, but, as Emerson realized, they also dictate the direction we take. Roads accompany us for so much of our lives – how much time do any of us spend more than a hundred metres from a road, or out of earshot of their whispering voices? – and yet we have somehow trained ourselves not to really notice them at all.

In 1983, Vanity Fair commissioned the artist David Hockney to illustrate a story about the road trips Vladimir Nabokov undertook when he was writing Lolita. As he researched and wrote the novel in the 1950s, Nabokov crisscrossed the United States, driven always by his wife, Vera, in a 240,000-kilometre tapestry that stitched the east coast to the west. Hockney’s own road trip began with a journey through the Mojave Desert during an April storm. His subject was proving elusive, and the weather didn’t help. But the next morning, after some further desultory driving and photographing, Hockney proposed to his driver that they might find something promising at an intersection they had passed the day before. It took some time, but eventually they found it, and from the images he took over the next eight days Hockney would compose one of the twentieth century’s most iconic images of the road.

Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2 is a trap for the viewer’s perspective. A collage assembled from hundreds of individual photos, it depicts an unremarkable stretch of desert road where the Pearblossom Highway crosses California’s Route 138. The road tapers into the distance from a deep wedge in the foreground. Two parallel lines of thick yellow paint mark the division between lanes, running from the bottom edge of the picture to its midpoint, where it is bisected by the horizon of the blue, rippling Angeles Crest Mountains in the distance. Four road signs, yellow, green and red, track the right-hand side of the road towards its vanishing point; the scrub on either side is dotted with spiny Joshua trees and littered with discarded bottles, cans and cigarette packets. The upper portion of the painting is almost entirely taken up with the California desert sky, a big naive strip like the bar of blue a child might paint. The elements are simple and nondescript: asphalt, road signs, trees, mountains, sky. But the whole is dizzyingly precise. Every single image is taken in close-up and often head on (Hockney used a ladder to shoot the stop signs and to look directly down on each item of rubbish). Wherever it travels, the eye is arrested by detail; each crack in the painted road markings and flash of sunlight caught in the wrinkles of the crushed Pepsi can is intimately and immediately present.

Roads can do something odd to our sense of time and space. When we travel by road, we often do so in a kind of reverie. As a child, I would fill the boredom of long car journeys by imagining I was watching myself running alongside our car and leaping impossibly over the roadside clutter. It was a fantasy of perfect, unimpeded motion. Now, as I settle behind the wheel, other times and places – unresolved problems, anticipation of my destination, or unspooling threads of memories – fill my thoughts, and I find I can travel without really registering the world around me.

Seamus Heaney called this the ‘trance of driving’ and composed his poems under its spell, beating out their measure on the steering wheel. Many roads are laid out to suppress our sense of place. High verges built to muffle traffic noise also obscure our view of what lies beyond the road; the bland grey crash barriers barely register. The white lines progress relentlessly towards the horizon. For Joan Didion, driving on the freeway around Los Angeles involves a form of concentration so distilled as to become narcotic, ‘a rapture-of-the-freeway’. The lulling rumble of motor travel, the incantation of road signs marking the passage of miles, the low rush of our own slipstream – all can conspire to lift us out of time. In such moments we are, in a way, perfected. ‘The mind goes clean’, writes Didion. ‘The rhythm takes over’.

The history of modern road travel is the pursuit of the perfect road, the most frictionless way possible. A smooth passage through space is perhaps the fundamental promise of modern life, like a spell cast to release us from the heaviness pinning us to the earth.

This transmutation began in the nineteenth century with the railways. In the 1830s, mechanized transport increased the speed of travel by stagecoach by a factor of three, and in doing so put travellers by rail into a fundamentally different relationship with time and space. An 1839 article in the Quarterly Review remarked with breathless enthusiasm that under the influence of rail travel, the world would ‘shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city, and yet by a sort of miracle, every man’s field would be found not only where it always was, but as large as ever it was!’ Decades before Lewis Carroll subjected Alice to an enchanted regimen of shrinking and expanding, the railway had changed the world into a wonderland that mimicked the processes of geological time, contracting the planet’s greatest rivers to streams, its lakes to mere ponds.

With the invention of the motorcar, roads were built to mimic the perfection of the railway. Whereas the old highways had to adapt to the contours of the landscape, contorting to accommodate each immovable peak and valley, the railway simply drove its tunnels and cuttings through the earth. Twentieth-century roads were built to the same technical standards, forcing the land to submit to the demand for frictionless movement. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that the mechanization of travel induced a corresponding mechanization of travellers’ sense of their place in the world. The velocity of rail travel – as much as forty miles per hour in the 1830s – destroyed the depth perception that defined pre-industrial place-consciousness. While objects at a distance could be observed in a newly panoramic vision, their aspect changing rapidly as the train sped past, the foreground was lost to a blur of indistinguishable shape and colour. Pre-industrial travellers, moving on foot or drawn by animals, would be immersed in their immediate environment, but after the railway most travellers would feel that they no longer occupied the same space as the objects they saw out of the window.

This detachment is the common experience of the road today. As we travel on it, we are caught up and carried away; inured to our surroundings, bounded by steel and glass, we are absorbed by infrastructure, numbed by vibration. As we observe the world through the cinema screen of the windscreen, our minds travel elsewhere while our bodies journey to their destination. Mechanical travel blunts our sense of the world. Emerson said the railway fed travellers’ egocentrism, reinforcing the impression that ‘whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable’. But in Pearblossom Hwy. #2, every intimate closeup detonates our sense of stability. Hockney’s collage stitches us back into the scene. The dulling patterns that remove us from the world – the regular pulse of road signs marking distance reminding us that what matters is not where we are but where we will be, and the white ticker-tape road markings clicking by endlessly insisting that ‘here’ is in fact always several metres ahead – are replaced by hundreds of single moments. As if to remedy the enchantment of the perfect road, Pearblossom Hwy. #2 returns us to the here and now – or, rather, to a here composed of countless ‘nows’. The road, it seems to suggest, is a charm that must be broken.

SEVERAL MONTHS after I walked with my family over the new bridge, I set off early one Sunday morning to cycle over the old one. It was one of those immaculate November days, lit by the mica-sparkle of frost on quiet streets. The air tasted rich and golden. The only sound was the quick, dry chatter of brown leaves under my wheels and, once, the indignation of a skein of geese nagging one another across the tall blue sky.

The original Forth Road Bridge, the one built in the early 1960s, had been closed to cars since the opening of the new crossing. Only buses used it now, as well as cyclists and pedestrians, but these were infrequent. I’d seen the old bridge when driving over the new one or standing on the shore, and it seemed abandoned. I wanted to stand on it free of the surging traffic it had once borne. Doing so, I felt, might give me a sense of what will happen to roads themselves after we are no longer around to travel on them.

As I cycled through South Queensferry, the cobbled street telegraphed each bump through my front wheel. At the far end of the high street, the road passed under the base of the old bridge, its concrete flanks stained by half a century of Scottish weather. To the left, a concrete path wound up the bank to the deck. As I rose onto the bridge, the low sun cast a brittle silver road on the water. A scatter of small fishing boats nodded mid-river, and the cables of the new bridge shone like a flotilla of sails about to depart. In the distance, I could see Blackness Castle on the southern shore, a fifteenth-century garrison known locally as ‘the ship that never sailed’ because its tapered fortifications point prow-like over the estuary. A single tanker was making its way slowly out to sea. Snow softened the Ochil Hills away to the northwest, and behind the lower hills that ran down to the river to the east, the cooling towers of an ethylene plant at Mossmorran sent up an immense gout of steam into the cloudless sky. Periodically, the plant’s operators burn off excess gas when the industrial processes need to be restarted. The Mossmorran flare can burn for days; when it does, I can see it lighting the sky from my bedroom window. The most recent flaring had been only a few weeks ago, blazing day and night like the eye of Sauron.

I have friends who live on a street near the old bridge and have spent a lot of time in its shadow. The traffic noise used to be constant, at times as thick as the haar, the sea fog that sometimes rolls in here from the North Sea. But now all that rush and clamour had evaporated into an eerie quiet. The wind was still, but even so, the sound of the thin line of cars on the Queensferry Crossing was swallowed up by the space between new and old bridges.

Whereas walking across the new bridge I had felt the lightness of a new beginning, crossing the old one, emptied like this, felt like an elegy. ‘The end of the road’ is often used figuratively to describe our sense of things coming to a close, or of terminal intent, but I think we rarely consider the end of roads themselves. The poet Edward Thomas knew this when he wrote, in 1911, that ‘much has been written of travel, far less of the road’. But here was a road poised as if on the cusp of disuse, before the cracks began to appear and weeds embraced its towers.

At the bridge’s end I passed through a deep cutting in the hillside to allow the road through. Its sides were decked cheerily with yellow gorse, but beneath this and a dusting of green moss the exposed rock glowered redly. I was reminded of Roy Fisher’s beautiful poem ‘Staffordshire Red’, about the enchanted experience of driving through a rock cutting. Surprised by a turn in the road that leads directly through a sandstone cliff in the English Midlands, the poet finds himself, for a moment, plunged into a primeval landscape of dripping ferns and green light. Before he knows it, the road drops him back into the mild Midlands landscape, revealing the portal to be no more than a nondescript clump of trees. And yet he feels, he says, somehow altered, compelled to follow the road in a wide arc around the county until it returns to the cutting and pours him again down ‘the savage cut in the red ridge’, to feel once more the ‘brush-flick of energy’ touched off by this fleeting contact with an ageless mystery lying in wait among the ferns and moss.

I wheeled my bicycle beyond the cutting, to the knot of slip roads that carried traffic onto and off the bridges. Here, for around a hundred metres or so, the roads approaching both bridges ran in parallel. As I stood on the entrance to the stilled old bridge, I could see a steady line of cars moving onto the new one, and for a moment it was as if I were standing not on the old road but on a prophecy of that new road’s future.

One day – whether because the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves forces us to live within a more narrow compass or simply because humanity will, inevitably, no longer be around to use them – the roads that connect our towns and cities will be abandoned. The plant life we cut back to their edges will creep unchecked; their surfaces will split and rupture. Time will bring even the bold towers of this bridge down low. Although hard-wearing, most of it will be broken up and eroded. Persistent roots will worry away at their surfaces, and rains will wash them away. Some fragments, though, will be preserved as hints of the former whole. Like the oldest paved road in the world, a four-and-a-half-thousand-year-old stretch discovered near Cairo in the early 1990s, short sections will be buried beneath gathering sands, submerged by rising sea levels, or covered by land slips. Subject to unimaginable pressures that will warp and compress it, the hard-core base and asphalt surface will nonetheless be evident in the strata; and if, millions of years from now, the forces pressing one of these sections down into the earth are reversed, eventually the fossil road will be raised into the air like a new bridge. Embedded within this new cliff or mountainside, it will be a curious anomaly: a layer of rock that may have originated thousands of kilometres away from its resting place and a clue to the grey networks that once wrapped around the planet.

Tunnels have an even greater preservation potential, such as the twenty-five-kilometre Lærdal Tunnel in Norway – which is so long that it takes twenty minutes to travel through, and was built with three vast subterranean chambers, like the halls of mountain kings, each one lit to simulate sunrise to prevent drivers from falling asleep. The only real threats to their persistence into the deep future are earthquakes. The surface road network may yield only short fragments, each one only a kilometre or so in length. Perhaps less than 1 per cent of the Pan-American Highway will persist long enough to leave a fossil. Two hundred thousand years ago the Laurentide ice sheet reached as far south as Missouri – a new ice age would wipe away its entire northern section, while the weathering of the Andes will also erase stretches that pass through high latitudes. But the three kilometres that pass through the Cristo Redentor Tunnel would be protected, and tunnels like Lærdal and the Zhongnanshan Tunnel beneath China’s Qinling Mountains could preserve stretches of fossil roads twenty-five kilometres long, complete with curbstones, road signs, lighting, and painted road markings.

I turned back to the empty bridge and began to cycle home. As I was halfway over the river, a bus roared past. The slumbering deck trembled briefly, then returned to sleep.

ONCE UPON A TIME, writes the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri, a giant called the King of the Road lived in the forest. But as the forest shrank due to the people’s greed, he left and became the roads that the people travelled. He was a tyrant, with an appetite that could not be sated and the ability ‘to be in a hundred places at the same time’. Travellers left sacrifices for safe passage, but still, the immense appetite of the King of the Road exhausted the land, and famine arrived. The sacrifices stopped, and, enraged, the famished king began to attack the living and the dead. To mollify him, the people assembled an enormous offering, enough to feed an entire village. They delivered it to the King of the Road, who swallowed it in a single mouthful and then proceeded to eat the delegation who had delivered it to him.

When a second delegation met the same fate, the desperate people decided to kill the king. They collected poisons from every corner of the earth and added them to a lavish meal of fish, bushmeat, yams and cassava. This time, the ravenous king turned on the delegation first, then ate the feast they had brought in one swallow.

After this meal the King of the Road lay down, and his stomach began to ache. To quell the pain, he ate everything he could lay his hands on: rocks, sand, even the earth itself. Finally, the king turned on himself, consuming his own body until only his insatiable stomach remained. Rain fell for seven days and washed the king’s stomach into the earth. When the rain stopped, he was nowhere to be seen, but the people could hear his stomach growling beneath their feet.

‘The King of the Road had become part of all the roads in this world’, Okri writes in his novel The Famished Road. ‘He is still hungry, and he will always be hungry’.

The road is insatiable. Paved roads link together all the most fundamental and long-lasting changes we have made to the planet’s surface, from the deepest mines to the largest megacities; by them, we serve our addictions to finite resources. In the deep future our cities will be enormous sinks of countless future fossils, but virtually every last one will have originated far away and been transported to its new, distant resting place by roads. Each of the trillions of individual pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans reached the coast via a series of journeys down highways, from oil field to hand. Roads themselves create huge quantities of synthetic particles abraded from tyres and washed into seas and rivers, where they will eventually settle on the seafloor, to be sealed under a layer of mud. Burning fossil fuels has coated the surface of the planet in a thin layer of fly ash. These tiny carbonate particles have no natural sources and are so widespread across the globe in lake sediments and ice cores that they rival nuclear fallout as the primary signature of the Anthropocene. It’s thought that humans have modified more than half the planet’s land surface in some form or another. Roads open up remote regions for exploitation, linking them to urban or industrialized centres. Gaia Vince notes that every road driven through the Amazon rainforest is pursued by a ‘halo of deforestation’ fifty metres wide, leading to more landslides and erosion and contributing to an acceleration in the cycling of sedimentary materials around the planet. Humans now move more sediment on an annual basis than all the world’s rivers combined, around forty-five gigatonnes, increasing the likelihood that traces of us, including the roads themselves, will be buried and preserved as future fossils.