Defying Anthropology

I said I would write about the highway up to Parry Sound and Sudbury sometime, so I will. I'll start by telling you that the old Highway 69 was the most dangerous highway in Ontario. I'm not exaggerating. The winding two-lane trail to cottage country and the north was the cause of so much carnage, I can't even begin to describe it. I personally knew at least a dozen people who died crashing into the rock cuts or over the embankments of that lovely, but deadly road. Whether it was overflowing with tourist traffic in the heat of the summer, or coated with black ice in the dead of winter, Highway 69 was a killer. But it's gone now...

The whole time I lived up in Parry Sound, various governments promised that the highway would be flattened, four-laned and fixed. Ironically, the last two people I knew who died on 69 were killed right where the old highway met the new Highway 400 coming north. But the progress continued, and now it's nearly done. Only the short stretch across the Native reserve south of town remains unchanged, and now that the band has reached agreement with the government, that will be renovated too.

Which means that when I drove up to Sudbury last month, I drove to my hometown along a brand-new highway 400, through a countryside I had never seen before. The little gas stations, camps and hotels that had lined the old road were somewhere through the forest. The winding little highway had given way to a vast, flat, fresh grey macadam through an apparent wilderness of trees and lakes and rock. It's a sublime road. Not beautiful, but sublime: a large, impersonal, modern, and perfectly executed freeway through an achingly ancient landscape. It was fascinating through the sleet on the way up north, and astonishing in the endless sunset on the way back to the City.

But the most incredible thing about this new road is not the new beauty of the old forest, recently revealed. And it's not the marvels of modern engineering that make it so fast and sleek. It's not even the apparent disappearance of that old highway I knew so well. It's the new rock cuts. They're going to defy anthropolgy.

There were always rock cuts, but they were small and narrow. Now, that four lane highway cuts through near-mountains of precambrian shield, leaving monuments the size of the Egyptian pyramids, already dotted with Inukshuks, towering over the road. This is some of the oldest rock in the world. It dates to the cooling of the earth's crust. Nothing has even marked it since the Ice Age, and even that just left a few scratches.

But long after cars have come and gone, long after roads have lost their meaning, long after our civilization has bloomed and faded and been forgotten, these rock cuts - brand new blasts out of the earth- will be standing still. They won't have moved. They won't have softened. They will still be there ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million years from now.

And the people of the future will know somebody made them. That much will be obvious. But they'll have no idea why, or what they were for. They will never be able to guess what led people to change the crust of the planet itself in this strange way. They won't know about all the deaths on the old road. They won't know about the politicians and the promises and the programs. They won't know about the cottagers, the traffic jams, the little hotels and camps that are almost forgotten already. They'll just know that something important happened here. And the rest will defy anthropology.