The Best Travel Writing 2006 - True Stories from Around the World

Sample Chapter: The Oldest Road in the World

by Phil Cousineau

We are all walking the ancient path.

On this moon-fled night what I’ve learned while looking up something else—is that the oldest road in the world is in danger of being lost.

I’m hunkered down over a glass of chianti at Mario’s, my local North Beach café, riffling through the pages of an old magazine when my eyes bulge under the weight of the following words:

"A project is underway to preserve a ninety-foot-long trail of human footprints in northern Tanzania that, scientists say, provide the only proof that man walked upright as many as 3.5 million years ago."

I read on to learn that in 1977, on the barren plain of Laetoli, two archaeologists on a team led by paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey were “larking about”—hurling dry elephant dung at each other—during a playful camp fight. One of the scientists tumbled and by sheer chance noticed some peculiar indentations in the dusty ground underneath him. Thousands of years of erosion had exposed the imprints of plants, animals, even raindrops that had hardened to stone through the millennia. Further excavation revealed that the animal prints had been made when they tramped over fresh ash from the nearby Sandiman volcano while the ground was still wet with rain, and over the millennia the ash set like concrete.

Two years later, Leakey herself discovered an even more tantalizing print—a single heel print she was convinced belonged to a hominid. Eventually she uncovered a veritable trail seventy-seven feet across the Laetoli Plain. Two or even three individuals had walked this way millions of years ago. Leakey surmised that the two larger ones were ambling side by side shortly after the violent blast, one slightly behind, unwittingly leaving a few prints behind them in the wet ash. The prints of the third, evidently a child, were laid, in places over the larger tracks.

Ingeniously, Leakey noticed that one of the prints left by the female turned outward, a single stutter step the scientist interpreted as a brief pause when the female looked over her shoulder. To listen to the rumble of the volcano while the ash fell all around her? To check on her child as lightning sundered the sky? To better hear the growl of a predator?

What moves me most about this serendipitous discovery is Leakey’s own description of what she saw through the scrim of time, what she read through her own fingerprints when she touched those antediluvian footprints:

“This motion, so intensely human, transcends time…a remote ancestor—just as you or I—experienced a moment of doubt.”

In the hopes of preserving this eerily human moment—and the compelling evidence of transition from “four-limbed arboreal life” to “two-legged travel”—Leakey’s team covered the fossil trail with polythene and river sand. But over time termites have chewed through the plastic. Acacia seeds hidden in the sand have grown into trees. Their roots are destroying the trail. Twenty years later, twenty-nine of the original sixty-nine footprints have eroded. The rest remain buried under river sand. Plans for the surviving roadbed range from surgically excising the tree roots and injecting acrylic into the prints, to covering it over with concrete, or even transferring the entire road to a museum in the shadow of the Sandiman volcano.

I finish the article and am overcome, as if I’ve swerved back and forth several million years in a matter of minutes. Why am I feeling such a cascade of emotion? Why all the concern over a trail left by unknown ancestors while Africa reels under relentless cycles of famine, slave trading, and warfare? Because “genetic memory,” as Richard Leakey has suggested, is the source of our fascination with prehistory? Out of the intellectual pleasure that the “unambiguous evidence for upright walking” means that locomotion may be the adaptation that set our ancestors apart? Or is it due to some vague sense of nostalgia for the original home of the whole human race?

I gaze through the red and yellow neon lit window of the café, and across the street to tree-lined Washington Square Park. In one corner looms a statue memorializing the fireman who have saved San Francisco time and time again. In another corner looms a monument to Juana Briones, a woman who fed the hungry after the 1906 earthquake. In a small grove lies a time capsule, not to be opened until 2079. Relaxed by the ruminations, my mind moves slantwise to an interview in which Laurens van der Post asked Carl Jung why we should be concerned about the fate of ancient cultures.

“Everyone has a 2 million-year-old man inside,” Jung replied, “if he loses contact with that he loses himself.”

Before I can figure out what he meant, I’m riven by strange dislocations of time. I’m back on the beach at Camp Dearborn, a boy of four or five. My hand is in my father’s. He is pulling me forward and I try to keep up, walking in his footprints in the hot sand, longing for the cool lake water.

He is pulling me forward.

Then once again time dilates and I’m flung forward forty years, taking my own boy’s hand and leading him down to the ocean. I’m pulling him forward. I’m looking over my shoulder and seeing him try to walk in my footsteps. He has to leap from one to the next, but he does, though the sand nearly swallows his tiny feet and his prints disappear into mine. But isn’t that the way it’s always been?

At the water’s edge he looks up to see if I’m watching him. I am. His eyes leap with joy.

It means everything to be able to remember all of this.

Phil Cousineau is a freelance writer, teacher, adventure travel leader, and documentary filmmaker. His numerous books include The Art of Pilgrimage, The Hero’s Journey, The Soul Aflame, The Olympic Odyssey, and The Book of Roads, from which this story was excerpted.



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