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A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places
A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places Published by Johnson Books (Boulder, CO) $17.50/240 pages/Softcover To order, call Johnson Books toll free at (800) 258-5830
Roads connect and they divide. They unite people and places, making the country seem as a cohesive whole. They also tear that same country apart: segmenting ecosystems, displacing life from the land, and dividing neighbors according to their views on access and wildness. No single aspect of industrial advancement has left such a mark upon our environment and our social fabric.
Much of the rhetoric on the subject of roads has been highly technical or emotional, but now, a collection of essays finally puts the issue into a philosophical and heartfelt context.
A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places, compiled by the nonprofit organization Wildlands CPR, includes works by 28 of the most prolific and thought-provoking nonfiction writers today - Barry Lopez, Mary Sojourner, Derrick Jensen, David Petersen and more - some of whom have written original pieces for the collection. Annie Proulx wrote the Foreword.
The roads addressed in this book are those winding through our wild places: the dusty, rocky paths leading to extraction dreams long forgotten or those currently being pursued. Such roads - a total of 440,000 miles of them on Forest Service land alone - are becoming increasingly popular with off-road enthusiasts, and the repercussions of this motorized influx into the backcountry are only now being realized.
The strength of this book is that it is more than a collection of rants or futile lamentations on this motorized backcountry invasion; rather, each work tells a story. These essays are penned by a diverse group of people, all united by their love for the land. Every author employs his or her own unique turn of phrase, a string of words sharpened to a point meant to pierce the awareness, to awaken the reader from her road-dependent reverie.
In the last section of the book, William Kittredge writes, "Without intimacy with one another and with nature, we tend to slide off into insanities." Although this is one of the closing thoughts in the book, it could also be a preamble. Many of the featured authors bear witness to these insanities: a square mile of Idaho forest containing 60 miles of dirt roads (picture a square inch with 60 inches of lines within its borders); or the Lower Forty-Eight's most remote spot being only 20.3 miles from a road; or the fact that more than one million animals are killed on our roadways each day.
Barry Lopez, in a poignant essay titled "Apologia," addresses this latter statistic. On a cross-country journey, he makes an effort to move the dead from the roadway as "an act of respect, a technique of awareness." At the end of the trip, after laying to rest numerous birds, rodents and ungulates, after scraping countless insects off the grille, he notes that this amalgam of death is "a catalog too morbid to write out, too vivid to ignore."
These essays remind us of the stillness we cause through our obsession with constant motion: the stillness of small beating hearts, of forests now unable to support their wildlife, of waterways dammed and clogged with road sediment. We are asked to redefine what is considered progress in today's society. Once, roadways were progress; now, true progress may require a relinquishment of those paths, a recognition of the fact that some things are more meaningful than machines.
Mary Sojourner, in "Not for Me," speaks as someone whose physical movement is limited by injury, the kind of person whom "the road-greedy claim to fight for." However, as she describes a painful, mile-long trek away from her car, into the desert, she shows us that there is much more to be found - physically, mentally, emotionally - in struggling to crawl one mile than in driving 100.
As Sojourner says, joy can be found in limitation.
Katie Alvord, in "The Entitled," echoes this sentiment. She describes a confrontation with a recalcitrant off-roader - one with an immense sense of entitlement - who insists upon driving through protected land. Reflecting on this, she says, "Despite our country's emphasis on individual rights, in practice we must always strike some balance between private rights and the public good." This statement exemplifies another common theme in the book: the need for self-imposed limits. We've lacked such restraint in this land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the writers in this collection present the stark reality of what can and will happen if we don't learn the virtue of limitation.
Kraig Klungness tells us that connection to place is impossible when dividing it into roaded segments. "Pepper Trail" reminds us that road-bounded wilderness is "a small box in which to fit a world." Ed Abbey rages against Industrial Tourism, and David Petersen denounces lazy and irresponsible hunters, "sitting all too comfortably on their motorized butts." Each perspective is unique, and all the voices speak with conviction.
Ultimately, the lessons of this book extend beyond roads, into the wild convergence of human rights and responsibilities. A Road Runs Through It transforms this difficult journey into an engaging and inspiring read.
All royalties from the sale of the book will be donated to Wildlands CPR. More information about road impacts and wildlands restoration can be found at the group's website: www.wildlandscpr.org.
Jen Jackson lives in Moab, Utah, where she combines her work as writer, wilderness explorer, environmental activist, and reference librarian as seamlessly as she possibly can.
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