The Road

Traffic is like nature. Traffic flows and banks up, it weaves and surges. Traffic makes shadows and streams. It hums and screeches and throbs. Traffic glows in the dark. Traffic can be heavy or light, like the rain. You and your car are part of the traffic yet you also observe this phenomenon, ‘traffic’, as if you were not implicated in it at all.

Over the past four-and-a-half years I’ve spent at least one thousand hours, in traffic, on the M80 Western Ring Road, driving between my home in Altona and my workplace at La Trobe University, Bundoora.

I can scan a line of cars as if they were clouds. I can anticipate a squall of cars or a dense fog of them, a welcome burst of speedy sunshine and space, the many moods of the road. I have learnt to read the road like a lover’s face.

Many days I spent more time with the road than I did with my partner and my children. I would often leave our house very early, at 6 am, to beat the traffic. Everyone would be asleep. I would tip-toe about the dark house, getting dressed, eating quickly, closing the door quietly behind me. Some mornings I would see the 5.58 am Flinders Street train pulling into the platform or moving off. The silver carriages glowed a joyful yellow and the level-crossing bells rang out across Truganina Swamp. But most mornings it was just the car and me, reversing into the dark, empty, silent street.

Our solitude never lasted long. We were soon joined by hundreds of other couples, driver and car, together alone on the slip-roads and freeways.

Like any lover, I was jealous of our moments together. I didn’t want to share my road with others. I hated the crowds. I wanted us to be alone, a foolish fantasy. But no matter how much I tried to time it right, we were never alone. Not at 6 am, not at 9.30 am, not at 6 pm or 7 or 8 either.

Even so, I planned our encounters carefully. I brought the road little offerings: a water bottle, a mixed berry muffin, a take-away latte. I selected mood music such as Gillian Welch, Black Mountain, Jolie Holland, The The, Public Enemy, Steve Earl, Iron and Wine, Lucinda Williams live, practice CDs for the various choirs I’ve sung in, epic concept albums such as Neil Young’s Noise or Mogwai’s latest: Hard Core Will Never Die but You Will.

Treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen. The road plays hard to get. The road is loose. The road is a hold out. There is never enough of the road to go around and there never will be, no matter how many extra lanes are added. And they are being added, right now. Have you noticed?

Stay calm, don’t react, don’t respond, stay in the left-hand lane, stick to the speed limit, ignore dickheads, drunks, speed freaks, the buzz of your mobile phone because ‘M8 it can W8’. Never ever give someone the finger or the fist.

The Western Ring Road, also known as the Metropolitan Ring Road, also known as the M80, also known as death valley, hoon central, bogan speedway, P-platers’ paradise, tailgaters’ testing ground, the Western car park or simply the Ring. The road is a place where Mad Max is not an old movie but a contemporary work in progress. ‘Set in the near future, MAD MAX presents a society descending into chaos. The forces of law and order are barely holding their own. The highways are terrorized by packs of lunatic speed demons,’ says the Twelfth Virgin Film Guide. True, true but where is the spunky, avenging Mel Gibson in black leather? We drivers have to make do with old fatties on Harleys.

The Ring Road has been there forever and you have been driving on it forever and the traffic jam will last forever. The Ring Road is only thirteen years old, a feral teenager. The Ring Road may be young and stupid but it is also democratic.

You might have a zooped up Nissan Skyline that can outrun any cop car. You might be a cop. You might be high up in a rig decorated with pictures of Sylvester Stallone in Rambo First Blood. You might have a Baby on Board. You might be driving a taxi or a cattle truck. You might be in a Ford Territory with a pair of metal testicles swinging merrily from your bumper bar. You might be a middle-aged lecturer behind the man with the big balls (three times, I’ve been in this position) and you are going to be late for your 9 am Tuesday JRN2CAJ tute even though you left your house at 6.15 am. You might be a student, commuting all the way from Geelong, who is going to be late for this tute also. You might be the handsome, suited driver of a lemon-green Mercedes Benz coupe with smoky windows and a number plate that reads CRUPT or you might be the older woman in the white Toyota bomb with a number plate that reads SOME 1. You might be Tupperware Jase in your hot pink hatchback on your way to a morning party in Greensborough. You might be about to miss your flight. You might be the driver of the Tarago with half your house in the back. You might be a dog-man who spots for the crane driver on the $980 million M80 upgrade or you might be the guy who drives the crane but so what, sucker?

The road doesn’t care who you are because you’ll all have to wait. And wait. And wait.

Roads were supposed to be paths towards modernity. Roads promised speed, progress, efficiency and power. Yet even in the birthplace of the big road, postwar America, there were people who doubted this vision right from the start. A young Marshall Berman watched machines crash through his part of the Bronx, ripping out houses, shops, whole neighbourhoods, to construct engineer Robert Moses’ Expressway and then he grew up to write All That is Solid Melts into Air, a vigorous, exciting critique of the destructive impulses that are part of modernity. Cultural theorist Stephen Muecke’s No Road (Bitumen All the Way) is about indigenous Australia but there’s a similar message about roads as structures that inhibit knowledge and destroy communities.

There are competing visions. In gospel tradition, emancipated people go ‘walkin’ down freedom road’ but for Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a pathway through the end of the world to the end of the world. In one of the best-selling self-help books ever, Scott M. Peck uses the road less travelled as a metaphor for change, hope and renewal.

The Western Ring Road is a little more Cormac than Scotty. As of mid 2011, 142,000 vehicles drive it every day. What are we doing all those hours on the road? What was I doing? What did I look at? What did I think about? What did I learn?

The road, my road, does not invite reflection, introspection or meditative stillness. To manage a long commute on a dangerous, crowded road that is constantly being rejigged and improved, a driver needs to suspend ordinary judgement. To drive on the road you need to forget some things (the beautiful children you have left at home, for example) and block out others (the carbon emissions that your car makes, the death or disfigurement suffered by fellow drivers in the many accidents you drive past).

But it takes time to reach this stage—alert zombiedom—and in the early days of my commute, my personality and character stuck with me in the car and my thoughts would run in both directions, like fast, free-flowing traffic without any median strip.

Outbound: This is terrible! What am I doing! I have become the person I used to pity and despise! I’m not even giving anyone else a lift. Emit! Emit! Emit! If I keep this up, soon the whole world will look like the road and there will be no trees, no birds, no grass, only powerlines and Sexylands and deserted Pipeworks fun parks and long bridges over dry gorges and limp wind socks and terrible defeated public art like those listing pale pink slabs of concrete like tombstones for a gigantic, wasted Barbie. Help me! Help me! Help … Oh, look at that, here’s the little ring road at the end of the big one and here’s my exit and here is car park number seven and here I am at work. How did that happen?

Inbound: Reality check! Life wasn’t meant to be easy (Scott Peck). That’s correct, I used to take part in Reclaim the Streets events and I twice rode in Critical Mass peak-hour protests and attempted to lift my heavy hybrid bike above my head on the roundabout near Melbourne General Cemetery but that was when I was young and childless and now I’ve grown up and can see that being fierce and one-eyed is a luxury that I can no longer afford. Compromise is okay. Compromise is good. I still believe. Anyhow, I don’t have a choice! I’ve got a family to feed! Suck it up, princess! Others have got it so much worse. This is the price I have to pay for the tenured job, the big back yard, the good local school, the affordable house, the nice neighbours. This is the compromise, the only option, the necessary suffering. And don’t forget the 17 per cent super.

Exit here now …

For the first year or so, I tried to break up the distressing drive with a once-a-week commute on public transport. I would catch a train into the city and then a bus out to La Trobe from the stop on Russell Street. A good run, which was rare, would take one and a half hours each way. A good run in the car would be just under two hours all up.

The road won but I had to learn to manage my inbound and outbound thoughts. I was getting so tired. Much easier to listen to music or the radio and just forget about everything. I would take myself off when I got into the car and put myself back on when I got out.

If I could get a customised numberplate to commemorate my time on the road it would simply read: AMNESIA. It is disturbing for me to admit that I remember very little about any of it.

Imagine driving for a living? Not taxis or buses or trucks but something really glamorous like formula 1 racing cars. Imagine being someone like Senna, the handsome, intense Brazilian formula 1 champion. I loved that documentary. I loved Senna’s soulful brown eyes and I loved watching him put on the soft white balaclava that went under the helmet. What a knight. Lots of the footage comes from a camera mounted next to his steering wheel. Senna’s car swallows the jumpy road. Corners loom then disappear. The buzz of the engine is awfully tinny and there is a vomit-inducing swell to it all, as if the car were driving over water rather than bitumen. In one such scene, Senna speaks about what happens to him when he drives. Senna says he is not really there. He is in a tunnel, on a different level of consciousness. Soon enough it becomes clear that this different consciousness is a form of prayer and that being in the racing car brings Senna closer to God.

I did not find God on the road. I found advertising. Billboards were able to pierce my amnesia. I would ruminate on the billboards. They were signs of things I did not want to think about.

For a significant period in about 2009, I found myself focusing on the long, brown thighs of the woman in a bikini who lay on her back in a sparkling swimming pool. I would look up at her as I drove towards an overpass out there by Essendon airport. The woman was both ecstatic and tranquil. Perhaps she was drugged? I would like to be drugged. The billboard surprised me because it was not advertising a getaway in Bali or Thailand, as you might expect. The billboard was for a new housing estate. The word ‘Mandalay’ comes to mind but perhaps that isn’t right. There have been many similar signs over the years, advertising new housing estates at the end of the road or on the diminishing slices of vacant land on either side of it. The bikini woman was the most bizarre but the others were strange too: the guy in the suit hugging some kids; the blond woman in jeans and a T-shirt walking some other kids to school; and, most unrealistically of all, the very young, unsupervised children frolicking on a swing made from a rubber tyre tied to a big old tree.

There are few trees on either side of the ring road. There are no cyclists, no footpaths and no pedestrians. There are sound barriers and houses and cranes and tractors and minarets and factories.

I did see a man walking along the road once, in the portion out towards Pascoe Vale where there is a small body of water that I will not call a lake. His car must have broken down but I had not seen it. I don’t know if he had car at all.

Another day I awoke from my driving slumber as I approached this body of water and saw a small sailing boat on it, with a pleasing red sail and a little tiller at the back and a boy crouched there, steering. I only saw a boat that one time.

On another day still there was a thick layer of mist across this water, an undulating layer it was, over the water and up over the gorse-covered hillocks on each side and I recalled how, as a child, I had fervently believed in little people at the bottom of the garden, naughty elves and grumpy gnomes, devious fairies and other dainty sprites who lived in the bluebells and hyacinths and wisteria and japonica and camellia and roses and daffodils and buttercups that flourished in our big, untended gardens.

Good trips: on 13 February 2006, squirming and writhing in the passenger seat, amniotic fluid running down both legs, Furlong Road exit, Sunshine Hospital car park. On 15 February 2006, wrapping the beautiful, bony baby in her cream crocheted rug (spider-web pattern), carrying her to the car, putting her in the capsule, sitting next to her in the back seat, watching the daylight pass over her delicate new face.

Bad trips: A semi-trailer in an outbound lane jack-knifes and hits concrete median strip at Thomastown. Two lanes are closed in each direction. Traffic reports advise drivers to expect delays of up to two hours. It takes two hours and fifty-five minutes to drive the 38 kilometres. The trailer has melted over the median strip, like icing down the side of a cake.

A truck jack-knifes, slides on its side for fifty metres and then collides with a car near Boundary Road, Laverton North, at 4.50 am. Immediate bottleneck. Inbound traffic banked back for five kilometres. Peak-hour drivers squeeze through one emergency lane. There is another nose-to-tail crash too. Rubber-neckers. Traffic reports advise drivers to expect significant delays. Journey takes two hours.

The three times I was behind the guy with the Territory and the metal testicles. Every trip I made in our old car when the window was stuck half open and we had tapped several layers of Glad Wrap over the gap where the glass should be.

The time the brakes went.

The time when the outbound and inbound journeys both took more than two hours due to accidents and roadworks and I got into our driveway, prised my hands off the wheel, stepped onto the concrete and found that my silly old legs wouldn’t even hold me up.

The time I’d driven out to uni with the oldest two in the back because I had eighty assignments to pick up. The baby was now at school but both the others were off sick. One had been spewing half the night. The other was hot and squeamish when we left home yet when we got to my office admitted that there were also ‘quite a few’ lumps on her body. An inspection confirmed this, a doctor’s appointment was made but the road was even more jammed than usual. A long journey, that one, made even longer by guilt. What kind of mother drags two sick children all the way to the far side of the moon to collect some blimmin’ assignments?

That was a very recent bad trip, in June 2011. Two days later I resigned.

On my last trip, the day of a farewell afternoon tea, I willed myself to stay awake, to take notice, to honour the road with my attention this one last time. The outbound run was a gratifying quickie but coming home was dreadful, more than an hour and a half. I was almost pleased to endure this, to pay a price one last time.

I saw two new billboards for two new housing estates. ‘Resort style living’, said one. ‘The good life is just round the corner,’ said another one. That was the actual wording and the picture showed a beautiful young girl riding a bike.

I had given up a tenured position in a university and I was now unemployed and yet all I could think about were these billboards. They inspired tenderness in me. I felt a pity, tenderness and solidarity for all of us on this road. The billboards were obviously ludicrous and untrue but every driver needs to dream.

© Rachel Buchanan