Rough Roads and Smooth

We took a road trip, my husband and I, driving from Ithaca, New York to Lovingston, Virginia.  It’s a 9 hour trip, driving through parts of five states:  New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia.  A pretty drive, the longest stretch—from the northern to southern borders of Pennsylvania—reminded me of a road trip I took as a very young child.  My parents were in graduate school at the University of Indiana.  We were headed for a Linguistics meeting, driving from Bloomington, where we lived at the time, to somewhere in upstate New York.  I was too little to remember that detail.  But one of my most vivid memories, oddly, about that trip is the sound of the tires going over the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  In those days, there were no ‘freeways’; you had to pay to drive on a good road; and I believe that all turnpikes were ‘toll roads’.  Anyway, the memory that has stuck with me for so many long years—at least six decades—is the rhythmic thump, silence, thump, silence, thump as we traversed the seams in the pavement.  This thumping went on for miles and miles (along with my father’s repeatedly expressed disgruntlement about the poor road condition on a turnpike!).  On this more recent trip, I am able to confirm that the state of Pennsylvania’s highways remains among the poorest—-certainly among states I know well.

Roads, or at least my response to them, intrigue me.  I was very surprised, when we returned to the US after living abroad for about half our lives, to discover some sort of deep appreciation deriving from the generally good condition of American highways.  Driving on them was and is a pleasure, when I compare it to driving in Indonesia.  We lived last in Bogor, a big city an hour or so from the capital, Jakarta.  In Bogor, the roads are extraordinarily well-travelled—meaning that bad traffic is a perpetual curse—and the roads are blessed with impressive potholes.  A major reason for the bad road conditions, of course, is the rainy weather.  Some consider Bogor one of the rainiest places on earth (approaching 4 meters/year).  But another important factor is the corruption that plagues the Indonesian Department of Public Works (certainly one of the most notorious government divisions for this ‘ailment’).  The funds intended for road maintenance make their way into the pockets of officials and construction company bosses.

During my life in Indonesia, I also spent a fair amount of time in the Outer Islands.  I remember a wild night ride from a remote village to Samarinda, East Kalimantan’s provincial capital.  Our field team had a driver, but he’d been driving for hours and hours on end—all day long and the day before that and the day before that.  I could see that he was exhausted, so I offered to drive.  My co-team members, all young Indonesians, were shocked and initially skeptical that I even knew how to drive.  We bickered a bit: my assurances that I’d been driving for almost half a century cut no ice.  Roads in Kalimantan were not like American roads, they reminded me.  My three years driving in Sumatra might have given me some relevant experience, in their minds.  I confess that my pride was also somewhat offended; childishly, I felt the need to demonstrate my driving skills, to prove myself capable.  I also wanted the young women in the car to recognize that women could also drive perfectly well.   So I took the wheel—I could do that, I was the boss—despite my team’s fearful demeanour (some were genuinely shivering with trepidation).  I proceeded to drive us back to the city, down treacherous hilly curves in the pitch black of Borneo’s rural night, on muddy logging roads that were as slippery as New York roads in an ice storm.  To top that off, the brakes were so bad I had to pump them on every downward slope!  It was a wild ride, but we did make it in one piece.

Another time, on the other side of Borneo, my husband, a couple of colleagues and I were trying to get back from our home in the remote wildlife reserve, Danau Sentarum, to the Provincial capital, Pontianak.  My nearly 11 year old son was waiting in the city with our tutor, and he was about to have his birthday—we didn’t want to miss it!  So, realizing that we were behind schedule and thinking a road trip would be faster, we got off our speedboat on the Kapuas River at the first likely opportunity.  Sure enough, where we’d dismounted, one of Indonesia’s ubiquitous vans was on standby, waiting for passengers to fill it up.  Having been the last one on, in numerous such vehicles in the city, I thought I would be smart and get in the front of the van, just behind the window into the cab.  No hanging onto the back for me this time!  Well, little by little the vehicle filled up with passengers and their baggage, and we set off on our trip.  It wasn’t long before I seriously regretted my seating choice.  The dirt roads, like the logging roads of East Kalimantan, were still wet from the night’s rainfall, and slippery as ice.  They’d been fairly newly made, joining up transmigration areas (to which Javanese farmers and others had been moved en masse), and meandered over hill and dale.  Our vehicle, however (typically), was not in particularly good shape.  The driver would gun the engine, despite the slippery conditions and the precipitous drops on either side of the road, to get a running start as we headed up the hill before us.  His helper hung out the open back of our small ‘coach’, waiting to see if we’d make it up.  When we began to slow and/or slide backwards, he would leap out, and stick wooden wedges under the back tires—the brakes being decidedly untrustworthy.  Then, back into low gear, we’d try again.  Seated in the very front, with a good view of what lay before me, I was paralyzed with fear as we crested the top of each hill and began our slippery descent, gaining speed again for the coming attempt to mount the next hill.  I was very aware of how absolutely impossible it would be for me to get out of that vehicle should disaster strike (as seemed both imminent and very likely).  Amazingly, again, we survived without serious incident.

Our three years in rural West Sumatra—near the border with Jambi, the adjacent province to the East—was indeed good practice for driving on Indonesia’s rural roads.  There, our project had its own [well maintained] Toyota Landcruisers, vehicles that are marvelous in the horrendous road conditions we dealt with daily.  I grew to love my dark blue, jeep-like Toyota Landcruiser.  This vehicle, assigned to me, became even more beloved after my driver, Sabar, added pink ‘eyelashes’ to its windshield wipers.  I liked the improbability of my having pink eyelashes on my car; but I also appreciated its ability to maneuver the awful dirt roads we confronted daily.  It got me out of many mud holes, traversed rivers where bridges had washed away, and mounted slippery hills with equanimity.

Anyway, I suppose years of this kind of experience gave me a somewhat different feeling about American roads than is usual (or than I would have had, had I lived a different life).  Despite living here in the US now for over four years, I still appreciate the roads and the ease with which I can drive my cute little red Prius—Jakarta car dealers would not even allow my Bogor-based employer, CIFOR, to test-drive a Prius, local road conditions were so bad!  In the midst of a New York winter, I borrow my husband’s grey 4 wheel drive Toyota Highlander, and activate my abundant and relevant tropical experience!

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