Mary Soderstrom - Road Through Time

Road
through
Time

The Story of Humanity on the Move

Mary Soderstrom

2017 Mary Soderstrom

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or placement in information storage and retrieval systems of any sort shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright.

Printed and bound in Canada at Marquis. The text of this book is printed on % post-consumer recycled paper with earth-friendly vegetable-based inks.

Cover design: Duncan Campbell, University of Regina Press
Text design: John van der Woude, jvdw Designs
Copy editor: Elsa Johnston
Proofreader: Kristine Douaud
Indexer: Siusan Moffat
Map: Julia Siemer
Cover art: (front cover) Pleistocene human footprints from the Willandra Lakes, southeastern Australia. / Istockphoto; (back cover) Buzz Aldrins bootprint from the Apollo mission July , 1969 . Image credit: nasa

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Soderstrom, Mary, 1942 -, author
Road through time : the story of humanity on the move / Mary Soderstrom.

Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-88977-477-3 (softcover). isbn 978-0-88977-478-0 ( pdf ).
isbn 978-0-88977-479-7 ( html )

. RoadsHistory.. RoadsSocial aspectsHistory.. TravelHistory.
. Human beingsMigrations.. Social change.. Civilization. i . Title.

TE145.S63 2017 388.109 C2016-907590-7 C2016-907591-5

University of Regina Press, University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, s4s 0a2
tel: (306) 585-4758 fax: (306) 585-4699
web: www.uofrpress.ca

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. / Nous reconnaissons lappui financier du gouvernement du Canada. This publication was made possible through Creative Saskatchewans Creative Industries Production Grant Program.

This ones for Lukas.

Some of the travel described in this book was indirectly funded by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Qubec. I am very grateful for its support.

map: Early Human Migrations

one: On the Road, i

two: Bottleneck on the Road from Eden

three: Into the Woods

four: The Things They Carried

five: Warriors Roads

six: Across the Water

seven: Mystery Roads

eight: The Revenge of the Road

nine: Speeding

ten: On the Road, ii

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Early Human Migrations

All dates are very approximate. Paths are suggestions of routes.

Cartography: Julia Siemer, University of Regina, 2016.

Chapter One

P eoples eyes lit up when I told them I wanted to write a book about roads. Ah, yes, nearly everyone said, youre going to do another On the Road ! Since its publication in 1957 , Jack Kerouacs beat generation classic has become emblematic of the romance of the road, of inviting paths taken or not taken.

Some of these people have known me since I was young in the San Francisco Bay Area and wore black stockings and turtlenecks, long hair, and political buttons. They may even have seen me once or twice when I ironed my frizzy red hair to make it hiply straight.

Others just knew that Ive always read everything I could get my hands on, and that I followed my interests wherever they led me. Obviously, all of them expected a book that tried to be as edgy and adventurous as Kerouacs, with some facts thrown in.

I agreed that On the Road would have been a great name for my book, but I wanted to write something in a different register from Kerouacs sprawling chronicle of a hipsters wanderings. What interested me were the tracks that humans have made over time. Id written two non-fiction books about cities and transportation, and become increasingly convinced that the roads we build determine our future.

Roads are vectors for change and exchange, the most enduring monuments we have built. In the last century and a half, their proliferation and transformation from simple routes for pedestrian or animal traffic to motorways have had disastrous effects on the environment, our consumption of resources, and our health.

But Id never read On the Road , and I didnt put it on the reading list as I began my research. It was too light, too fictional, too far away from the roads I wanted to talk about. My idea was to start with an account of a road trip I took when I was ten with my mother and sister, which opened my eyes to a world much larger than the familiar one where time is measured in minutes, seconds, and hours. Then Id go on, giving a virtual tour of the roads that humans have travelled since a small band left Africa thousands of years ago. The book would end with another bus trip, this time through South America where a new highway demonstrates many of the dangers of our obsession with roads.

However, the paths we take often have twists and turns. Certainly, mine has. Despite a childhood and youth on the West Coast where the car was king, at twenty-six I came east to another country, another culture. Since then you might say Ive become a born-again pedestrian. For decades, Ive lived in one of North Americas most walkable cities, Montreal. On my travels, Ive trudged down country roads in Tanzania, strolled through the streets of Paris, Lisbon, and Singapore, and backpacked in mountains on both sides of North America. Roads have become a passion, and to my surprise, once I began to read Kerouacs book, I discovered that it is far more relevant to serious reflection about roads than I expected. Same thing for Cormac McCarthys dystopian novel The Road , while I learned much from Le Corbusiers The City of To-morrow and Its Planning and the ancient epic Gilgamesh . Well get to them all in good time, but to begin, let us return to those two summer days in the mid- 1950 s when my mother, my sister, and I rode the Greyhound bus from the southwest corner of the United States almost to its northwest corner.

What I remember particularly was leaving Southern California as the bus crept along the Grapevine and crossed Tejon Pass. On the north side, the highway switched back and forth, but the name did not come from its vine-like circuitous route. Instead, it was inspired by the wild grapes found by Native Americans and Spanish explorers when they followed a cleft in the hills to the pass. By the time we travelled the road, grapes were few and far between, and the roads transformation into an eight-lane freeway clogged with traffic had just begun.