Another great book

During my trip to Lassen, I found opportunity to read when my friend proved her ability to fall asleep instantly while I lay awake for hours waiting for sleep to come to me. I finished my current book “A Road Runs Through It” which is really good because I have three books lined up behind it waiting to be read. (I’m now reading two books at the same time, how’s that for enjoying my summer!)
The book was fascinating and beautiful at the same time. In the book various writers explore the topic of building roads through public lands and why America has done much harm with these roads.
Of course we all know roads are important because they provide us necessary access to things such as stores, hospitals, vacations, and family who live on the opposite coast, etc. However, when is enough, enough? The book explored the problems when we build roads that allow access to logging forests which shouldn’t be logged, access for off road vehicles which destroy whole ecological communities, access to wild lands that might be better explored slowly. One of my best friends and my oldest daughter pointed out that the slower things are the easier they are. I would add that the slower things take, the more wonderful they are. The best way to experience nature is walking and bushwhacking is my favorite. What wonders we miss when we speed by in a car trying to get to a location. If we visit Yosemite and only stop our car to ogle at spectacular waterfalls and rocks, imagine what we can be missing. I have always wanted (rather unrealistically) to start at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and hike to the summit and down into Nevada through some canyon. This way I could see everything and experience so much more than from a car.
Roads fragment ecological habitats and diminish their health. The book ends with stories of roads which are being undone and as I read I was reminded of the bridge of Beruna in C.S. Lewis’s “Prince Caspian”.
“They turned a little to the right, raced down a steep hill, and found the long bridge of Beruna in front of them. Before they had begun to cross it, however, up out of the water came a great wet, bearded head, larger than a man’s, crowned with rushes. It looked at Aslan and out of its mouth a deep voice came.
‘Hail, Lord,’ it said. ‘Loose my chains.’……
‘Bacchus,’ said Aslan. ‘Deliver him from his chains.;
‘That means the bridge, I expect,’ thought Lucy. And so it did. Bacchus and his people splashed forward into the shallow water, and a minute later the most curious things began happening. Great, strong trunks of ivy came curling up all the piers of the bridge, growing as quickly as a fire grows, wrapping the stones round, splitting, breaking, separating them. The walls of the bridge turned into hedges gay with hawthorn for a moment and then disappeared as the whole thing with a rush and a rumble collapsed into the swirling water. With much splashing, screaming, and laughter the revelers waded or swam or danced across the ford.”
We can do our world well by undoing many of the roads we’ve put in unnecessarily put in (500,000 miles on federal forest lands alone, which were mostly abandoned when exploitation was complete according to the book). This book was definitely a good and recommendable read.

"A Road Runs Through It; Reviving Wild Places" Edited by Thomas Reed Peterson