One for the road

It was indeed a long and very winding road. We were maybe hopelessly lost, as Karen said, but making good time, like Marvin the Paranoid Android and his friends, somewhere inside a national park that hid the nuclear physics laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. We were on our way to Albuquerque and had plunged into the forest singing Supertramp’s Logical Song at the loudest volume possible without disturbing the wildlife, when Karen killed a bird. Logically, sanely speaking, it was not her fault. She was driving, I was reading the map. We were lost, she said; I was trying to figure out where were could be. A small bird chose a moment when I happened to be looking up to fly headfirst and determinedly into the windscreen, committing suicide in one swift, unexpected, traumatic – for all of us – moment. Since we couldn’t stop, not with visions of being arrested for loitering around the edges of a nuclear facility of sorts, we drove on. I glowered at my friend; she tried to explain how it was not her fault. And while I knew, she compounded the felony by eating chicken – chicken! – at dinner that night.

Some of the roads we had driven on during our various holidays had been interesting. There was the straight stretch somewhere between Denver and Taos, which wound up and down but not from side to side – or that’s how it felt. It ran through an endless sea of violet sagebrush, the mountain air scented with the dry herbal fragrance of the plants that grew wild across the plain. Every now and then a small stall selling chillies of various kinds along with coloured corn and beads and baubles would pop up out of the side of the road and signs saying ‘Heritage site’ would find root at what seemed to be totally arbitrary locations.

Driving in West Texas is a pleasure, especially on the wide, double or triple lane highways. They may wind up, down or whichever side the terrain allowed them to, but they were always well maintained and smooth, with all possible hazards nicely signposted. What really impressed me were the signs telling drivers to watch out for roadkill as they coasted along. There was no real need for the signs. The roadkill was obvious. It punctuated the highway with a usually small, untidy, bloody heap of mangled animal, sometimes with its hair blowing in the desert breeze, sometimes a Mohawk of stiff quills quivering in the wind of automobile passage. It bothered me a lot to see what was once a porcupine or a rabbit or even a deer that had been so badly damaged by car wheels, but I soon got used to it and, in fact, wondered to my friend that the corpses were no longer littering the asphalt when we drove closer to city limits!

In contrast, roads in India are far more interesting to drive on. While the expressway between Mumbai and Pune is – for the most part – well maintained and in excellent condition, the old national highway was a lot more fun, even carsick me must admit. It wound and wandered through the hills, did magnificent hairpin bends and switchbacks and dived recklessly into tunnels and over flooded conduits with happy bumpiness. You could see stretches where the rocks had tumbled down the mountainsides and in parts the pretty waterfalls bubbled cheerfully down the cliffs and over the road itself. And as you drove along, you had to watch not for roadkill, but potential death, of the cattle that roamed unexpectedly across on a blind turn, from the trucks that came barrelling down on the wrong side, with the speeding cars that insisted on racing anything that ran on four wheels.

And it has been a very long, very winding and very exciting road for me. I hope there will be a lot more…