Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  The procession rested about twenty minutes later, next to a very large tree that had recently been felled. It rested in the middle of a long space just slightly larger than itself. The trunk was nearly five feet across at the base, and it was hard to take our eyes off the place where it had been cut through: it was bright red, the most striking thing in sight. It was almost pornographic, the way the tree’s insides had been laid bare like this.

  The long, straight trunk of the mahogany tree brought down all manner of smaller trees, vines, and understory plants when it fell. They were tangled up all around the periphery, in such profusion that the workers found it easier to climb up onto the trunk and walk down it to get to the other end of the clearing. I watched as they hopped aboard, treading briskly upon their trophy.

  Woodcutters at the camp I visited, near Peru’s Río Curiacu, pose atop their trophy. Left to right: Rolando (“Pikachu”), Miguel (the boss), David (“Shakira”), and Pablo (“Barbas”).

  I felt less comfortable, hopping aboard. The scene looked like others I’d seen in photos: hunters standing atop their fallen walrus, or whale, triumphant after bringing down a creature much larger than themselves.

  The workers decided to build the sawmill at the far end, and set about clearing a space for it with machetes. I arrived at the top of the tree. It was big-leaf mahogany, Swietenia macrophylla— an odd name for something that, I could now see, had tiny leaves. Furthermore, all the leaves were concentrated near the top: like other rain-forest trees, it competed for light up at the crowded canopy of the jungle. The trunk was essentially long and bare, its smoothness interrupted only by some encircling vines. Producing leaves that were confined to the shady understory would be a waste of the tree’s energy.

  As the workers hacked and swung their machetes, the sun bore down through the new hole in the canopy and the flies massed. Pablo’s sweaty back was covered with them. I returned to the big end of the fallen tree and stood back a ways in the woods, hoping the flies wouldn’t notice me. Miguel fired up the Stihl chain saw and sunk its giant blade into the flesh of the trunk at the other end.

  It began to rain lightly, then heavily. Smoke and steam from the hot two-cycle engine drifted through the air. My view turned a bit more gray, but with one exception: remoistened by the rain, the trunk of the mahogany became a deeper, more brilliant red than before, almost like a switch had been turned on inside. It demonstrated how varnish, polyurethane, French polish—human contrivances—do nothing more than bring out a color of the wood that was already there. A color of life.

  A neighboring camp was floating a raft of logs down the Curiacu, so Tim and I said goodbye to our camp and left to float down with them. They said I could pilot the raft, so I took off my shoes and rolled up my pants and climbed aboard. They gave me a very long pole. It was like punting in Cambridge, England, one of my favorite parts of graduate school, only this was better: the river was wild, my companions were rough, and the water felt warm and good around my bare feet.

  Oreste came alongside in his motorized boat, and the workers splashed him. The mood was festive: they were headed out of the woods, and back into town. I didn’t want to surrender my command, but as we approached Boca Curiacu, I thought I’d better, because joining the Río de las Piedras would be like merging onto the Cross Bronx Expressway from a dirt road, and I was a student driver.

  Their plan was to dock in Boca Curiacu for the night, and I can’t really explain how or why it went wrong, except that the landing required the assistance of Oreste—to keep the raft against the shore, as we rounded the corner and flowed into the powerful current of the big river—and Oreste wasn’t a very competent boatman. He arrived where he needed to be a few crucial seconds late, and tried to compensate by pushing the raft too hard: his boat rode up on the boards, submerging some of them. The workers pushed him off, but the damage was done: a few boards came loose and started to float away, like money blowing down a street. When his boat veered around after them, its propeller crossed another part of the raft, freeing a couple more planks. He managed to recover all but one or two of them, then headed back to where we stood on the riverbank. The water was running exceptionally high, taking pieces of earth with it from under our feet, and exposing Boca Curiacu’s archaeological past: stratum upon stratum of Cusqueña beer bottles, hundreds or thousands of them. I looked up as Oreste tossed us a rope to draw him in, then realized the other end of it wasn’t tied to anything.

  Back in Puerto Maldonado, the wood was unloaded and “certified,” the board ends marked with colored chalk to keep count of each lot. From storage yards such as the one by the port from which we departed and to which we returned, or others such as the one at Schipper’s mill, loads were dispatched to trucking companies for transit across the Andes. The wood went first to Lima and from there, in all likelihood, to the United States, perhaps New York. Some of the wood-carrying trucks took a different route over the mountains, not to Cuzco but to Puno. And of course they took passengers, atop the wood. One of them was me.

  As the wood climbed out of the Amazon basin, higher and higher into the Andes, the day grew dark and the air thinner and cooler. My companions were a welder, a mom with a toddler, and two teenage sisters with matching Shakira T-shirts. We tied a tarp across the top of the truck’s bed as rain began to fall again. Sometime in the middle of the night, the road became paved; the truck sped up and the breeze was cold, but I took enjoyment from the smoother ride and increased speed—to the prospect of leaving the backwoods and finding good food, a good bed, and fast internet service.

  The road from the rain forest up over the Andes is often abysmal, especially in rainy season.

  Under a blanket against the dark boards, I thought about the things I’d miss when I left Peru, like the great rivers and remote forest and, for some reason, the sloth at the Wasai hotel, the perezoso. I knew that land adjacent to the Wasai was being considered as the location of one end of the suspension bridge that would cross the Madre de Dios—and, as was confirmed in coming years, that’s exactly where it would go. It was to be named the Puente Billinghurst, after an early president of the republic, and it would be the largest bridge in Peru. Debris from construction would fall down on the hotel.

  I thought about how, over the thousands of years it took to evolve, the perezoso had never been at a real disadvantage for being slow. I was told that, when a perezoso wanted to cross a river, it simply walked in, closed its eyes, and then paddled slowly, slowly, until its feet touched the bottom again. If that bottom was on the opposite side, it was in luck; if not, no matter. It would just set off again.

  But within ten years, people said—maybe sooner—the bridge would be complete and there would be a through road. And soon the road, like other new roads, would be busy. And, while the Wasai’s perezoso might still make its way across the river, I didn’t think it could ever make it across that road.

  *The chapel celebrates a visitation by Christ to a cave on nearby Huanca Mountain during Spanish colonial times. An Indian laborer, Diego Quispe (the surname, common in the Andes, was the same as Braulio’s), singled out unfairly for a whipping at the silver mine where he was forced to work, had escaped and sought shelter in the cave.

  ROAD OR NOT A ROAD?

  A ROAD IS A ROAD IS A ROAD. Except when it’s not.

  Just as a guinea pig in the Andes is less likely to be found in a terrarium in a child’s room than on a platter at dinner, so there are paths that might look like roads but are not really roads as we understand them. Not roads, that is, built with purely utilitarian intent, to help move people and things from one place to another. They are roads built with other things in mind.

  Some extra-wide Inca roads, as mentioned, were reserved for rulers and their emissaries. They functioned as symbols of an empire’s dominion over subject tribes.

  To the north, in Central America, the Maya (A.D. 200-1000) and civilizations that preceded them left behind their own special kind of road, the sacbe, or “white road.” S
acies were paved ways of stone that often used a limestone mortar. Some were also extra wide—up to fifty feet. Many connected ceremonial centers, often pyramids or burial mounds; alongside them have been found shrines, places to burn incense, and stone vessels for water storage, suggesting that they were traveled by pilgrims.

  But other qualities set them apart from ordinary roads. One is that sacbes are perfectly straight—always. Not a single one curves. This meant a lot of extra work: in the Yucatán near Cobá, a ceremonial center and hub of sacbes, a pair of paths runs parallel across the land like a miniature divided highway. Then comes Lake Macanxoc. Instead of curving slightly to avoid the lake, one of the pair runs directly through it. The water is not terribly deep there, but in order for the sacbe’s surface to remain above water level, obviously, its foundation had to be built up from the lake bottom.

  Other sacbes are elevated a few inches or feet for no obvious reason; sometimes they look like a very low wall running across the landscape. The longest sacbe from Cobá extended sixty-two miles and was originally two to eight feet high, with sides built of blocks of cut stone. The first time I saw a photograph of a reconstructed one, traversing a field, its brightness and designed-for-walking scale reminded me of the yellow brick road—if the yellow brick road had been ramrod straight. Evidence supports the idea that sacbes were aligned with constellations. But it’s speculation that the white color made it easier for sacbes to be traveled at night.

  To a kid growing up in Denver, Colorado, in the 1960s and 1970s, “ancient roads” were in Europe. In fact, there were ancient roads less than five hundred miles away, in northwestern New Mexico near the Four Corners area. Some of these, probably built by Pueblo people between A.D. 900 and 1130, converge in Chaco Canyon, which was not explored by an archaeologist until 1896. It took even longer to appreciate the extent of the nearly two hundred miles of ancient road that are known to exist in the area. Unlike many of the Mayan sacbes, the Chacoan roads are usually very hard to see from the ground. As with the desert figures in Nazca, many weren’t discovered until air travel made it possible to see them from the sky.

  They had other things in common with the Nazca Lines: instead of being built up like the sacbes, they were scraped so that their surfaces were slightly below grade, with stones sometimes demarcating the edges. This resulted in the “roadbed” having a lighter color and different texture than the surrounding soil.

  But like the Mayan roads, the Chacoan roads were perfectly straight, they were built near ceremonial centers, they sometimes came in parallel sets, and they were oriented toward the stars.

  The longest and best-known is the Great North Road. From the ruins at Pueblo Alto, which was the nexus of several roads, the Great North Road extends about thirty-one miles on a path heading almost exactly true north, ending dramatically at an isolated canyon where there is evidence of wooden stairways and platforms that allowed descent straight down the canyon walls. Like most Chacoan roads, it has a width of about thirty feet—wider than many of today’s two-lane highways. For one long stretch it has a parallel road a few yards away; an aerial survey in 1983 discovered a short section with four parallel roads.

  The San Juan Basin, which these roads traverse, is an open, arid land of expansive views dotted with buttes and small hills. There is scattered sagebrush and grasses. The Puebloan peoples of the Chaco culture built many great houses of up to several hundred units, often with large ceremonial kivas. Archaeologists at first assumed the great houses were like little towns and that the roads connected them to each other, allowing for the transportation of goods for trade. But closer examination turned these assumptions on their heads. Many of the roads do not go to great houses at all; they lead to outsized features of the natural landscape such as pinnacles, springs, or now-dried-up lakes. Other roads leave the great houses but peter out only a few hundred yards away from the buildings.

  And though their ruins remind us of towns, the great houses apparently were not designed for ongoing habitation at all. Evidence suggests that they were occupied only occasionally, perhaps in conjunction with seasonal visitations by large numbers of pilgrims. Exactly how the pilgrims used the roads is unknown. Archaeologists have found large quantities of pottery shards not in the great houses but along the roads; the earthenware was not made locally but carried in from the Chuska Mountains to the west, perhaps with the goal of being intentionally broken as an act of ritual.

  Today’s Pueblo peoples (a group that includes the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Jemez) still occupy large parts of this region, and have ties to the old ways. Their traditions vary, of course, but they have in common the idea that souls live underground (as in a canyon; kivas were also sunk into the ground) and that certain sites, like Chaco Canyon, are sacred; and the solar calendar often specifies the timing of ritual journeys to certain mountains, canyons, lakes, and caves that represent shipapu—that is, places of emergence, portals to the spirit underworld. The road to the shipapu, frequently described as “straight,” is depicted in a nineteenth-century ethnographer’s report as “crowded with spirits returning to the lower world, and spirits of unborn infants coming from the lower world,” which suggests that the roads weren’t exclusively for the use of the living.

  Many Pueblo communities reenact creation and emergence events around important solar times like the solstice. Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, a Hopi, attended numerous niman ceremonies at the end of which “the kachinas leave, they exit the village on a particular path, and they just disappear off into the countryside, it’s called they’re going home” in the Hopi language.

  Now retired, Tuwaletstiwa was deputy director of the National Geodetic Survey, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He has assisted in surveys of great houses and documented the ways in which they were laid out in alignment with cardinal directions and the stars. A common feature of a Chacoan great house, he told me, is an enclosing berm with cutouts where segments of roads come into it. These roads remind him of the paths where kachinas would exit the pueblo in Hopi ceremonies; he suspects that the way many such roads peter out not far from the great houses means that they were ceremonial, “and that the passages into and out of the Great Houses were probably covered [tunnel-like, with wood or other material] to make it seem like people were emerging [from the underworld] who came out of them” during ceremonies.

  The longer roads were virtually unknown until fifty or sixty years ago, “because you just couldn’t see them.” Many were revealed by satellite images. From ground level, he says, the uninitiated have little chance of spotting a road unless they’re with someone who can help them and “unless you’ve got oblique light.” In other words, direct overhead light renders them practically invisible. Winter is the best time to search for east-west roads, because the sun shines from lower on the horizon. For north-south roads, sunrise and sunset are the best times, and “around the equinox is even better, because then the sun’s more east or west.”

  Tuwaletstiwa appreciates that expectation might also play a role—and not always a helpful one. Near Kutz Canyon, where the Great North Road abruptly ends in a series of now-broken stairs and scaffolds, many maps show a short road branching off northwest (“at about a 300 degree azimuth”) toward a ruin known as Salmon. He was exploring the area with a fellow enthusiast who took him “out there to see a cut through a dune,” which showed the supposed path of the ancient road. But Tuwaletstiwa doubts it, as he said most experts do now. That particular road “is like an urban legend—a Chacoan legend, if you will—that got on the map maybe forty years ago when people thought these places would [naturally] be connected.” But that’s when they still thought these roads were like other roads. Now that we’re pretty sure they’re not, he wishes people would stop copying the old maps and also, really, stop calling them roads, because “roads are utilitarian, and these were not. It’d be better just to call them pathways.”

  The ancients could do even better than that. According to research by Anna Sofaer,
an archaeoastronomer, the word “road” translates in Tewa, a Pueblo language, as “channel for the life’s breath.”

  TWO

  SLIPPING FROM SHANGRI-LA

  THE LINE OF FORTY WALKERS moved quickly, which was good for keeping warm but bad for keeping my balance. Because we were walking on ice, a frozen river. The Zanskar, walled in on both sides by a towering gorge, is the closest thing Zanskaris have to a winter road—the only link, once snow begins to fall, between their Himalayan villages and the outside world. And it’s only there for a little while, in deepest winter, when the river’s surface freezes enough to support human footsteps.

  Zanskar is part of Ladakh—the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. At about 11,500 feet above sea level, it has long been defined by remoteness. The valley has the feel of a cul-de-sac, because there is only one traditional road in and out—a dirt track from Kargil, an untouristed and predominantly Muslim town just a couple of miles from the disputed border (or “Line of Control”) with Pakistan, to Padum, the main town of Zanskar. Summers are short here, and the Kargil road is only reliably open four or five months a year, from the end of May to early October. After that, snow makes it impassable and the valley gets very, very quiet. Another road has been promised: construction has begun on an all-weather route through the gorge. But it’s a very big, very expensive project, and appears to be years away from completion. So for now, as they have for probably hundreds of years, Zanskaris rely on a traditional way in and out: an ice road, a forty-mile trail upon the frozen surface, which is called the chaddar.