New West Book Review

On The Road: A Review of “A Road Runs Through It”

By Jenny Shank, 6-18-07

A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places
Edited by Thomas Reed Petersen
Johnson Books, 226 pages, $17.50

It’s the time of year when many people hit the road for summer vacation, and the recent essay collection “A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places,” offers many opportunities for reflection during drives over miles of pavement.  Wildlands CPR, a Missoula-based nonprofit organization whose credo is “Restoring Natural Areas & Stopping the Motorized Abuse of Public Lands,” will receive the royalties from sales of the book, and although this group has a clearly defined mission, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the essays are carefully reasoned, well-written meditations on the existence and impact of roads, with hardly a polemic in sight.  Annie Proulx, who has lately been working to preserve the Red Desert in Wyoming, provides the foreword, and many well-known writers are featured, including Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Edward Abbey, and William Kittredge. 

The editor of the book, Thomas R. Petersen, mainly selected essays that had already been published, and in general, I think that this approach makes for a better collection--writers seem to be more inspired when they choose their own topics than when they have them assigned.  Petersen has divided the essays into six parts based on the subject matter discussed, from animals, to access for the disabled and off-road vehicle drivers, to the movement to un-pave roads and let these paths return to their natural state.

The first section of the book poses the question, “Why Roads?” and features writers who wonder whether we need roads at all.  One of my favorite pieces was Janisse Ray’s “Roadbed,” which begins, “People wonder why I’d make such a fuss about a road.  It’s only a couple miles of Georgia dirt, after all, and bad dirt at that.  The clay gets slick as pig grease in wet weather.” Ray goes on to describe why this unpaved country road that runs by the land on which her family has lived for generations is so important to her, and why when the county decided to pave it, it was a personal tragedy.  “We seemed to have gone crazy for roads,” she writes, “I have seen roads forced through salt marshes, through neighborhoods, through forests, through coastlines, through prairie and scrub.” When the road pavers come, Ray mourns the lost fauna and flora and the end of the quiet pace of life that the intrusion brings.

In Stephanie Mills’ essay, “It’s Delightful, It’s De-Lovely, It’s De-Roaded,” she invites the reader to “imagine not just forests without roads, but a whole earth without roads.” This will be difficult for most people, in part because families are so spread apart these days.  I agree that there are a lot of roads that intrude into the wilderness that don’t need to be there, but without the always thrilling miles of I-80, I would never see my extended family in eastern Nebraska.

In the next section, “Where the Deer and the Antelope Can’t Play,” the most striking essay was Barry Lopez’s “Apologia.” Lopez’s sensitivity to nature has long been a hallmark of his writing, but in this essay he takes this capability even further, mourning every mammal, bird, snake, and insect that he has killed with his car as he drives across the country.  He even stops to move roadkill from the highway to spare animals’ bodies further indignity.

In the “Much Ado About Access” section, I had fun re-reading the excerpt from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire called “Polemic, Industrial Tourism and the National Parks.” I was reminded of why Abbey continues to have such a devoted following of readers: he is very funny, in his cranky, irascible way, and a sense of humor is often sorely lacking in the writing of environmentalists, in part because they are so passionate about their mission.  I’ll take my dose of environmental medicine the way Abbey administers it any day.  He writes of people who travel to national parks in their cars, whom he calls “Industrial Tourists”:

“They work hard, these people. They roll up incredible mileages on their odometers, rack up state after state in two-week transcontinental motor marathons, knock off one national park after another, take millions of square yards of photographs, and endure patiently the most prolonged discomforts: the tedious traffic jams, the awful food of park cafeterias and roadside eateries, the nocturnal search for a place to sleep or camp, the dreary routine of One-Stop Service, the endless lines of creeping traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes, the ever-proliferating Rules & Regulations, the fees and the bills and the service charges, the boiling radiator and the flat tire and the vapor lock, the surly retorts of room clerks and traffic cops, the incessant jostling of the anxious crowds, the irritation and restlessness of their children, the worry of their wives, and the long drive home at night in a stream of racing cars against the lights of another stream racing in the opposite direction, passing now and then the obscure tangle, the shattered glass, the patrolman’s lurid blinker light, of one more wreck.”

In the final section, “In Defense of Wild Places,” Phil Condon poses a thought experiment in his essay “Kith and Kin of the Wild”: “Think of the change in the places of your lifetime, however old you are and wherever you might have come from.  Holding that vision, can you have any idea what the city you live in, or the country, state, nation, or certainly this planet will be like in five decades?” Most people who try this will come up with a chilling vision of the entire country paved over, but several of the writers offer room for hope in their descriptions of local projects to end road expansion and plow under existing roads.

“A Road Runs Through It,” is a carefully-assembled collection that should provide plenty of topics for discussion during those long summer drives.

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