Fish scale in otter spraint on a fallen oak leaf between my fingers.
Otter spraint stained the smooth rock with a redness I’d not seen before. A translucent fish scale and tiny bones glowed in the shade beneath wintry stems crouching over the river’s edge. I’d been there a long while before noticing it.
My intent was not to think about treatment. Nor cancer. Nor my complicated life, in general. I just wanted to ‘fly-wheel,’ drift. Have some me-time. I didn’t even want to think.
Chemotherapy makes my skin sensitive. Finding myself alone, I braved it without a hat, the air whispering around my exposed ears. My rock-like bald head was shown to full sun and gulls cast avumbra over my vulnerability. I thought briefly of the death of poor, bald Aeschylus, by lammergeyer; hit by a tortoise dropped from talons at a great height. How sibylline for a thinker to be mistaken for a strike stone. I shuffled on my axis and continued observing the river.
So much for the fly-wheel.
On first arriving at the river, a pair of dippers had flitted to a stop on a shingle bank, and splashed beneath the ripples looking for food. Joy! I pondered what it would feel like to be a dipper submerged. Dippers exploit the physics of tiny air bubbles in protective sheens trapped around their barbuled feathers. It’s why they don’t drown, but drift back up to the surface to live and hunt again. Feathers also evolved from scales, like fish. Birds, fish, tortoises. Me. I looked at the back of my hand, and imagined bubbles shimmering there in the midday sun.
After searching for a place to sit among the flood debris, wrangled organic and human detritus, I felt distressed again. How did we ever let this happen? Eventually, I found a dry boulder to perch upon, life flows absorbing me as originally intended. This is my sanguimund; a visceral feeling of community belonging. And time lost all traction.
Me-time; so invaluable. Should we call it this? I don’t think so. It is simply living, which encompasses the passing of time and exchange within the nagorasphere. Time is not so pressing in comparison to living.
We need to think of breaths, not seconds.
(Cancer brings this kind of thought to you.)
How could we block out the possibility that, at an atomic level, merging with others might bring the biosphere into us, and us into it? More, with such coherence in a universe (or multi-universes) of unlimited complexity? There is no external environment, just as there is no definitive self. Inhale the faint breath of a dipper, absorb the odorous otter scent, feel the temperature drop when a gull casts a shadow over your bald head. They, literally, shape you.
The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, wrote that introspection does not reveal the presence of an enduring self; instead, a selection of fleeting perceptions. Our sense of self is, at best, partial. But we are reflexives among reflexives. At least Hume reintroduced the idea to Western thought of no singular self. For me, the ethos is not simply a renewed sense of a singular logos, nor a spiritual unity of mind. It is more than that ~ a constant interchanging with matter as mind/body/spirit, with other life forms at a material level (atomic, and in the nagorasphere). This exchange must be ethical to equate immanence, beauty. Everything meaningful is in the positivity of the best exchanges. All else fails, even in death. That’s why fluminism counts. It is love, at the very deepest.
I found a little fallen oak leaf and dipped it in the mustelid poo. I smelled it carefully, just to be sure. The whiff of jasmine tea made it a certainty. Otter! This was the first time I’d found signs along the lumbering River Taff through the City of Cardiff. I have observed otters playing in the River Ely just to the West, and hungrily hunting in the wilds of the Wye much further to the North. But this was just spraint. It was there; to be exchanged, melded into the symbiotic nature of nature. It brought to me another moment of self, the vision of a quick little being oscillating over the rocks at dawn. I could feel the wet on my fur, like the bubbles on my skin. She was me and I was her. Next time, she’ll sense me, perhaps, in a similar way.
Bearing witness to these wraith-like apparitions, I connected to her as I did with the dippers. Then, from somewhere other, otter spied me, took a breath and quickly melted into memory. So I put on my hat and walked home slowly, with neither introspect nor extrospect clearly defined. As it should not be! Because the experience is LIFE, immense and shared.
“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Sydney Harbour Bridge, photo by me.
Humans have been blazing trails for millennia. Our early ancestors followed the tracks of large migratory mammals who easily forged routes through the thickets of the wild. Then came the more orderly block pavias of early civilizations to resist the wear of the wooden wheel. The Romans made the roads straight and long, weapons of empire. Then, eventually, came the blacktops, McAdam’s sealed and tarred roads that we have come to expect today. Engineered to a T, with a hard surface of asphalt and aggregates mined from tar sands and quarried from glacial deposits, they are designed for the traction of rubber tyres spinning at speed. They exist for the motor car and transport lorry and perceived as a human right. They shape our streets, our broader habitations, our income, our shopping habit, family structures, schooling; the way we eat, live; the way we love.
Roads allow us self-willed freedom to travel, as far as the land will take us; as long as we have the money, and we’re not stuck in traffic. We even celebrate conquests over water and wetlands by epic concrete and steel bridges and gravity-defying tunnels. Roads are so deeply entwined with our modern sense of ‘progress’, that we light many of them up at night like theatre stages. We pour millions of tons of salt on them in colder climes and spend billions on regular maintenance. Keeping the roads open, whatever the weather, has become societal anxiety.
Emergency services rely on them. Tax and insurance thrive off them. Stumbling across non-paved roads seems novel; terrifying to some. Imagined destinations are only a part of the story; the road trip is as much in our psyche as the endpoint. Families can disperse widely, then be brought together again with just a tank full of fuel. Jobs seem plentiful when the radius of potential is widened by four wheels and an internal combustion engine. Employers can rent huge car fleets at discount, whilst fuel levies raise cash to build even more roads. New roads have become a symbol of economic pride and anything less a mark of underdevelopment.
Stop. Just stop.
Given all we now need to do to reconcile our place within nature, to exit the Anthropocene and enter the Symbiocene, it’s beyond time to re-evaluate roads and their place in our modern psyche.
Roads are one of the worst forms of human chauvinism, exclusively for human purpose, and only certain groups of humans at that, even when transporting livestock. They may as well be tall border walls to wild animals. Any attempt to cross is a death wish, known or unbeknown. I want to make their profusion a thing of the past, the end of the road for roads; McCarthy’s critique of the symbolic American dream dying a death.
Cars and lorries, even buses, kill and injure people and wildlife both along and perpendicular to the route. Particulates suffocate others, causing respiratory disease and death. CO2 emissions from journeys contribute to climate chaos and all the pain and suffering that stems from that. Even the heat stored by the darkness of the tar eventually rises into the atmosphere. CO2 and other gases, metals and compounds are pumped out in construction and maintenance, concrete supports, in vehicular steel and plastics manufacturing and maintenance, in fuel refining and logistics. Plastic, metal and rubber erosion pollutes. The industry causes all kinds of mayhem. And those nightly stage lights drain huge quantities of energy from our national grid, even with newer technologies. Light pollution disrupts wildlife flows in all kinds of ways. So does noise. The disturbance is rife. Harm also comes from erosion, the chemicals and salts, the leaked oil that pollutes the run-off and poisons the adjacent land and watercourses. More, by the litter, flying out of car windows and doors, blowing into those same hammered water courses, feeding plastic to the rivers that lead to the oceans.
Roads are human chauvinism to the extreme. Catching a bus or driving an EV does nothing to prevent so many of these harms. The planners, the engineers and contractors surely can’t know fully what they do. If they do know, it is for the expedience of modernity, the discount of life for the sake of a wage. I want them to, at least, stop and think. Roads are the flesh wounds of symbiotic terrafirma. They gash the soul of soils and then smother them to lifelessness. They fragment and divide ecological communities, including rivers in spate, trapping species onto millions of mini-biological islands in a sea of human development, shrinking wild genetic pools over time and causing conflict, competitive stress and poor immunity.
Salmon, bison, grey whales, red bats, monarch butterflies and arctic terns. Just a few existent vestigial species of migration, borne of the need to move great distances. Their dynamism is also the material embodiment of flow between places, linking the essence of life in one location to another, and back again. The nagorasphere is fizzing with exchange along these routes, and ecological niches multiply across space-time. Even dung and urine enrich, and with the loss of large herbivores and predators, this is particularly on a steep decline. Such sky-land-water disturbances can mean opportunities for species laying in wait along the way. Migration routes can mean more life, not less. The act of moving in nature should be ecologically fluministic.
Humans cheat the natural rules of terra-transit, by getting from A to B not as we were born to do, but by using roads and vehicles as quickly as cheetahs with the stamina of pronghorn antelopes. * Instead of creating ecological unity between social groups and different places, as the bison and the zebra do, we destroy it, flatten everything in the path of our industrial-laden vehicles, divorcing ourselves from the natural pace of bipedal movement. Speed is a thrill, an adrenaline rush. We race each other easily, we compete on luxury. We are seduced through design and marketing to buy into those organic curves, sparkling colours, exciting sounds and plush new-leather smells. Economic and social status is tied to the success or failure of the newest car advert. They are designed to bewitch.
Despite well-known migrations of the wildebeest, zebra, bison, caribou and antelope, terrestrial animals are less likely to migrate large distances. It takes big energy on slow pounding feet for forward momentum through gravity. It’s tough and needs flexi-tendons, fat reserves, power and durability. Other animals, it seems, understand entropy even more than we do. Movement through air and water, despite the friction, is more efficient over distance, the locomotive aided by favourable winds and currents. Bipedal humans, with their flat plantigrade use of feet, are relatively slow at moving across distances, but we have been so clever as to replicate a four-limbed, friction-reducing, rolling method of movement – the motor vehicle. Clever is not the same as wise.
We’ve disrupted the floloca by lacerating interconnectedness and by bringing disturbances along with the linear passage; hunters to the wolf, loggers to the redwoods, gas-garchs to the prairie to frack and spew poison. And then, to transport the aggregates, the asphalt, the ore and even more cars. Roads are made to make new roads. It’s nothing less than a globalized atrocity, the antithesis of feminism.
More still ~ highway robbery. Roads have brought massive social and personal pain to many indigenous and rural people, through exposure to new markets and social pressures, land theft and forced resettlement. Any economic benefits from infrastructure projects have been iniquitous and unfairly distributed. These tarred intrusions are the long, bony fingers of plutocracies, gouging and exposing floloca to abuse, exploitation, and submission to the power. This extends, literally, to roads for extracting road tar.
Ecologists refrain from being totally frank about their destructive nature. They call them ‘linear infrastructure intrusions’, hard, human lines carved through soft ecosystems, including highways, power lines, railway lines, pipelines, firebreaks, bridges, walls and fences. I’d like to call them ‘occasiones ad mortem’, opportunities for death. Because, really, that’s all they are. Each time we go on a road trip, we are taking our chances, along with those of many other beings, human or non-human. Even our ambulances and fire engines are not immune from crashing and causing harm. That’s why they ring those ear-splitting alarms, to lessen the chances. It’s all about risk. Why do we do this?
McCarthy chose a road as a symbol, the American highway, the bastion of the Fordist dream represented as a dystopian nightmare. Cars, lorries, vans, each driven by a single person in an idealized state of self-determination, rumble along the black tops, heating the atmosphere, igniting fires and creating the ash that falls like burned snow. So where’s the utopian dream, the bringing together of human and ecological community?
Now is the time, I contend, to let the main roads rot. Let the verges spread out to re-connect community and encourage us all to really step up in transit-creativity. Gather together. Look at the maps. Decide which roads we can do without. Do it in phases. But do it. Put our heads together in collective ambition. Demand from the city planners that any new or re-development needs to be designed around public space, footpaths and cycle routes. Rural villages can become whole villages again, not commuter satellites to towns and cities. We can still have systems for emergencies, a framework of narrow electric monorails that will take us swiftly, smoothly and safely to hospitals and care facilities. Historical linear streets can be redesigned with organic walking and cycle ways, gardens and wild corridors. We can still use disability scooters. Herald an era of localism, an era of clean air for our children, for living, work, food growing and leisure time. It’s a new ethology for a kinnage dweller.
And for when we really need to travel a distance, we can build unsealed, habitat-connecting permeable routes, with hemp concrete mesh and native grasses, that aid ecology not hinder. We can ride electric bicycles on them, and use light trams, with eco-bridges for perpendicular, ecological connectivity. We can use cable cars with beautiful views, and water balanced rail with feeder lakes full of aquatic life, and other methods low on technological complexity, high in pleasure and life.
Stop the bloodletting, the pain brought to bear so severely upon life. Mend the scars. It is nothing short of mutiny. Let us be wise again like our animal kin, and arrive at the end of the road, soon.
~~~~~~~~~~
*We use large trains too, on huge tracts of land poisoned with pesticides and cleared of vegetation on purpose to keep lines clear (another blog, perhaps).
I also wish to add this tweet and link to the blog. Plastics, rubbers, metals and other chemical contaminants in road dust, particularly around traffic lights (& junctions). Children are often most vulnerable to breathing and swallowing this dust as their mouths and noses are nearer the ground. Inner city demographics means that certain minority groups are hit hardest.
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