Ants on highways

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Brett Caldwell

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Brett Caldwell's biography and other articles by this writer

Google and Mungo. I am sitting at my desk staring at Google Earth. My computer is short of memory and the program seems to take an eon to finish loading. When it does, I can see the lonely planet in cloudless clarity, surrounded by a thin, cobalt haze depicting the atmosphere. Yellow lines, contrasting with the cerulean oceans and seas, circumscribe landmasses. When I press the left mouse button I can grab and rotate the globe. This helps me navigate. The latitude and longitude of the cursor appear near a window that records my apparent height. I scroll, zoom in and out until I am at about three hundred kilometres above the Earth – about the altitude of the international space station. From this point, the planet looks serene, encased within its eggshell-thin atmosphere.

I type in ‘Paris' and the globe rotates quickly. I zoom in until the French capital fills the screen and hover above its epicentre, Place de Grève, infamous as once being a place of brutal execution. Circular roads overlaid by an incoherent maze of alleys, lanes, streets and canals emanate from this central point. The River Seine wanders through the city on its way to the English Channel. I can see enough detail to make out cars, buses and trucks. A crowd of people, frozen in the very moment the satellite stole their image, waits to cross a pedestrian crossing on the Rue de Rivoli. The roads uniformity is pleasing; the route watched over by the statues of saints and despots.

I JUMP FROM CITY to city: New York, London, Kuala Lumpur, then Sydney, where similar scenes prevail. Each city centre is a maze. Each city fringe rambles to nothing. A web of highways radiates to join towns and other cities.

I spend several hours criss-crossing the planet. I look down upon mountain peaks capped in snow; some crowned by human endeavour. I follow the courses of power-filled rivers and drift over the canopy of potent Amazonian jungle. I contemplate the remoteness of some islands, sentinels, bound by capricious seas or swelling ocean.

I stare down on the epicentre of American military power, the Pentagon. The building's severe, precise geometry contrasts with the chaotic spaghetti of roads and highways around it.

I fly to the billion-year-old monolith Uluru. Massive, splendid and regal, sacred to the Pitjantjatjara people. Most of its bulk lies hidden beneath the ochre desert. At a height of seven hundred metres, the image blurs but I can see the crevices and folds that hide its secrets.

I type in ‘Lake Mungo', where archaeologists have found some of the most ancient of human remains. I arrive in an instant and hover above. From on high, the dry lake looks like a human foetus lying on its right side. The Arumpo-Mungo National Park Highway joins the middle of the lake, the unborn child's belly, and appears as a too-thin umbilical chord. On the lake's shores, twenty thousand years ago, a tribe of adults, adolescents and children left over four hundred and fifty footprints in the muddy clay flat on which they walked. The wet clay contained calcium carbonate, which later hardened like concrete. A layer of wind-driven sand protected them until recently. Now revealed, the footprints are prized by the world beyond the Dreamtime.

Prehistoric people trod ancient paths between their world and ours, often following the migratory routes of the great herds of beasts upon which they preyed. Many of their migratory routes, hunting trails and sacred paths ultimately became the roads and highways that linked civilisations and great cities.

Highways, as much as the cities they connect, symbolise human endeavour and achievement. But, like cities, they also represent the extent to which we have become dislocated from a more ancient and natural world. Autobahn, autoroute, expressway, freeway, autostrade, autostrasse – each has a name or number. We know where they start and where they end. Vehicle occupants sit strapped into ergonomically designed leather or vinyl seats, cocooned by hi-tech gadgetry and composite metal. On-board computers control braking and fuel consumption. Toll booths direct entry and exit.

Vehicles travelling along our modern highways move at speeds beyond the wildest imaginings of ancient people. Close objects pass as blurs of sound and colour; distant scenes linger and like vague thoughts, they lack the detail needed to understand their true nature. At night, the world along a highway is restricted to what we can see in the headlights – fleeting glimpses of signposts, the lights of other cars and, on occasion, the reflective eyes of the creatures that lurk in the shadowy verges.

ROAD KILL AND STATISTICS. High above the city, a shimmering plane arcs across the sky; unnoticed by those far below, its passing fades gradually to nothing. Inside the fuselage, airborne commuters ingest synthetic food, and breathe conditioned, desiccating air. Wide-eyed children peer through the aircraft's elliptical windows and daydream. Below, far below, a highway cuts its own arc, through the city, through suburbia and through the land. The nugget-black road provides a sharp contrast to the aircraft's white vapour trail.

Traffic crawls along the road's hot surface. Exhaust fumes rise above the cacophony of rumbling engines. Progress slows as vehicles attempt to pass a broken-down truck. The driver sits in the shade of a billboard advertising Radio 2GB. He smokes a cigarette, and swats at a swarm of black flies attracted by his sweat. After some minutes, he takes a final drag, inhaling deeply, and flicks the cigarette butt on to the highway. It lies on the road for a few seconds, smouldering, until extinguished by the wheels of a passing bus.

Scattered along the road's shoulder, discarded and dead things bake, blacken and moulder. The sickly-sweet smell of decay mixes with exhaust fumes. Pungent aroma wafts into the closed cabins of cars and trucks through open vents. The stench is short lived. Every other day, a worker in a bright yellow safety jacket scours the road for the dead and shovels the battered remains into a large, black plastic bag. Anything left behind is food for foxes and inky crows.

Thousands of people, and hundreds of thousands of animals, die in Australian road accidents each year, victims of bad driving, bad luck or poor judgement. More than 1.2 million people perish on roads across the globe, transcending the human death toll from hurricanes or wars on terror or neighbours. The dead are mourned, the statistic a part of modern life.

Along the margins of our highways, floral tributes mark the places of loss. For some, these roadside shrines are integral to the grieving process, a way of remembering loved ones whose lives ended so violently.

I am driving on the Hume Highway, south of Goulburn. Ahead, on a long, straight stretch of dual carriageway, I see a small roadside shrine; a bunch of plastic daffodils tied with a white ribbon to a gnarled gum tree. I wonder what happened. Who died? Did they car hit the tree? It appears undamaged. Did the victims get to hospital before they passed on? Are the flowers real or plastic? Who tends the shrine? Where do they come from and when?

Nobody wants their life's journey to end on the weedy verge of a highway, their passing marked by a bouquet of plastic daffodils tied to a tree. As I pass the memorial, it transforms into a flickering blur of yellow, white and green. Then it's gone. I glance at the speedometer. I am travelling too fast. I ease off the accelerator and set the cruise control a smidgin above the speed limit. A few deep breaths clear my head and improve my vigilance. Seconds later, I have forgotten the shrine.

In 2003, the economic cost of Australian traffic accidents was over $17 billion, enough to buy an unimaginable number of plastic daffodils. The figure is almost twice the federal health budget for the year.

Despite the figures and mathematical extrapolations that predict the probability of road trauma, the unexpected happens. In mid-2007, on an autobahn near Budapest, a truck, transporting rabbits to a slaughterhouse crashed. Five thousand rabbits swarmed on to the road, causing havoc with commuters and blocking traffic for several hours. Over five hundred rabbits died in the accident and about one hundred escaped into nearby woods. The rest preferred to sit on the road, chatting in ‘bunny' and enjoying the sun's warmth – only to be recaptured and transported to their fatal destination.