The Routes of Man

61965993.JPG

By Ted Conover

Roads are the human world’s circulatory system, says Ted Conover at the start of this light-footed, chromatic and keen investigation into their two-edged consequences. Without them, life would grind, at best, to an arteriosclerotic shuffle. But roads are, often enough, a zero-sum game: They help develop economies while paving the way for environmental destruction, they evoke freedom and spell death, they connect and obliterate, usually the poor or slighted.

Conover draws a bead on six thoroughfares that have reshaped their worlds, one each in Peru, India, Israel and China, and two in Africa. And while roads provide a unifying theme, Conover emerges here as an entertaining travel narrator, offering a spin on Paul Theroux’s train journeys: He sought roads; he found people. (Conover has already evidenced that ability in previous books while traveling with hoboes and illegal border crossers, “Rolling Nowhere” and “Coyotes,” and his profile of Aspen, Colo., “Whiteout.”)

The spark that ignites this story is struck in a fancy New York apartment under construction, where an obscene amount of rare, perhaps illicit mahogany is being installed. How had so much of the precious stuff gotten there? To answer that question, Conover would have to track it to the source.

So, then, to Peru, the only country still exporting big-leaf mahogany, and not always legally. Conover’s hard journey will take him over a road, if it can be called that considering its decrepitude, to the far side of the Andes, to a woodcutter’s camp deep in the forest, away from the eyes and ears of authority.

This road, a primitive version of the long-sought inter-oceanic highway that dances in the minds of regional-development wonks, is a textbook example of the Janus-headed highway at work: the economic integration of a poor country that may threaten a pristine wilderness and heretofore undisturbed people, who will suffer infection and competition for foodstuffs, thus driven to less-hospitable land, hastening their demise. If Conover had the answer, he’d start his own nongovernmental organization.

Here, as well, Conover displays his skill as a travel writer, lovingly describing the Nazca Lines (the ancient geometric shapes that line the Peruvian desert) and the interior of mahogany (moistened by rain, the wood “became a deeper, more brilliant red than before, almost like a switch had been turned on inside”) – and all the stuff that looks like adventure only after the fact, like altitude sickness and swarms of flies.

In the Indian state of Kashmir, in the Zanskar Valley of Ladakh, the road is a 40-mile river of ice, upon which students take “advantage of the cold to get out of Dodge,” Dodge being remote villages like Reru, “a medieval warren of mud-brick houses.” Villages like these were the inspiration for the seductive nostalgia of Shangri-La, an ageless, alpine paradise unbesmirched by the honk and nonsense of modern life.

A road out of paradise sounds crazy, but Shangri-La is not a local idea and Reru is not everyone’s final port of call. Plus, the roadway being built beside the river – a wild, sheer-walled gorge in spots, the ice woefully thin – will be a great way to bring in military vehicles for India’s everlasting brouhaha with Pakistan over Kashmir’s future.

Conover ventures on, to the Mombassa-Kampala road, where he rides with a trucker friend from a previous visit. “You could have a lot of sex on the road in East Africa,” he observes, and voila – the AIDS Highway and the cost of connectivity: medicine in, disease out.

In Israel, roads are peppered with checkpoints that can turn a 30-minute trip into two or 20 hours of dreary indignity. Access to roadways knits or fractures your environment, depending on whether you are an Israeli or Palestinian. Conover takes the pulse of both parties, of both right and left political persuasions, and finds it most always racing with unease.

In China, with 2.6 percent of the world’s automobiles and 21 percent of its traffic fatalities, he joins one of the increasingly popular “self-driving tours,” with a well-to-do factory owner who treats the road “like a video game.” As its highways push westward, spurring its own manifest destiny, China reveals to Conover the glaring inequalities between town and country, the beneficiaries of the capitalist road and those left on the verge.

The interurban roads of Lagos, Nigeria, are his final stop, and straight out of Kafka. “Much of the time, other banged-up cars and trucks were so close that I couldn’t have opened my door to escape,” as he sits in an ambulance, sharing time and talk with its crew. The roads meld into one great traffic jam, a chaos of corruption and crime and prime hunting ground for gangs of young men. The moral: “It’s much easier … to make a roadway dangerous than to make it safe.”

It is an appalling, dystopian vision. Roadkill – no longer a lonely, squashed creature, but where the human project may well be heading.

(from the San Francisco Chronicle)