A convergence of blog posts and emails set me thinking about roads

Scott writes a touching post on why his blog, Home Sweet Road, may remain at Home Sweet Home next year as he and his wife adjust their road trip plans. And at Matching Tracksuits, Gary writes about the challenging conditions in Poland at the moment: the corruption, the sagging infrastructure, the inadequate highway system. Meanwhile, my sister emails from Warsaw, describing a grief-stricken nation, feverishly holding on to the hope that the Pope’s written statement (to be read today) reveals a desire to have some part of him returned to Poland (she writes that this would mean so little to the rest of the world and so very much to Poles).

And then she writes, in answer to a question of mine, that the train that passes just a few miles from the Polish village where I lived for a number of years and many summers with my grandparents, is still chuggin’ along, even though the old East Warsaw train station from where it departs is now a shopping mall. But why not drive there? Why take the train?

Because the trip by road is, for the most part, not an easy one.

Roads traveled, roads not followed. Trains and roads, or rather no roads.

It struck me that people here probably don’t know this about Poland: there are very few roads in the countryside. Oh, there are roads alright – dirt roads, with ruts made worse each spring by rain, sandy, muddy roads, uneven, ungraveled, more suitable for the furmanki (horse-pulled wagons that still move people and merchandise from one place to another) than for small cars. Roads – such a basic thing.

The reliable trains pull through pastoral scenes of farmsteads and small towns just miles outside Warsaw. The few roads (and almost no highways at all) are crowded, so crowded as to lose their appeal, so that the images held by Scott – of empty roads beckoning, make no sense in Poland.

The road trip: it’s an American concept through and through, belonging to a vast land where you can travel for 365 days within just one state and never repeat a road.

In Poland, roads don’t beckon.

But places do: the forgotten outposts, off the beaten path because there is no beaten path, the villages where dogs bark at you, unused to strangers, unused to traffic of any sort. It’s quite a stretch of land, linking these places with Rome, with the Vatican. Tomorrow, I expect most villages will be linked with Rome not by roads but in other ways, as schools and businesses close so that people may follow the procession in the Vatican.

You really don’t need roads to go places.