Wendell Berry's Take on Roads

"A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography."

Wendell Berry in "A Native Hill" from The Art of the Commonplace

This quote reminds me of times when I had to decide between taking either US Route 101's concrete monotony, and Highway 1, which hugs the Californian coast-line, bluffs, and beautiful stretches of sandy beaches. Even the times that I've chosen to take Highway 1, it seems bearable only momentarily. The twists and turns seem nauseating. Or, is it the speed at which I drive that causes these terrible sensations? Traveling, while often regarded as a movement from A to B, requires room for absorbing the sights and sounds, smells and wonders of a particular locale. Why rush and miss everything in between? Are we that impatient? On my wife and my honeymoon trip to Madrid and Montreal en route back to Vancouver, we realized that we didn't want to tour through a country at a hare's pace and hardly absorb its local culture. Yet even a week's time in Madrid hardly does the city justice, especially as honeymooners and newbies to Madrid's late-night eating culture. One of the things that Esther and I have tried to remind each other is the good that lies in knowing the streets in our neighborhood. To walk the streets and to converse with our neighbors root us more readily in this place than driving just the two of us with the sole purpose of getting there. Why lose the in-betweeness and settle for roads that avoid as Berry puts it?

How can we better know our landscape and topography? How can we better contribute and participate in the shaping of the landscapes that both define our patterns of movement but also how our neighborhoods are shaped? What would it look like to make contact with our landscape?