Intersections

In 2012, I wrote about an event that happened at this intersection a dozen years prior: It was a high speed collision, but of two birds—one that had the other in mind for breakfast.

No traffic that day could back up more than a single car at the light. It was a quiet crossing of two, two-lane roads through a field of sugar cane, a little opening in the woods that was cleared and planted.

But the fact of the traffic lights, then new and unnecessary, and the clearing of what would become these four busy corners, hinted at its future a quarter century hence.

Back then, it was a rural backdrop for a little avian drama. Today it’s a non-stop commercial hub, six lanes wide on a side, with a complicated dance of cars and destinations constantly pulsing through it.

Did someone have this place in mind? Perhaps tidier and less congested, with pedestrians strolling infants instead of running pell-mell for the shoulders, swinging plastic bags beneath their arms.

Did someone have this notion of progress? Or was it born of several someones in a city planning meeting, each seeing a slightly different vision of the future, all cleaner and better than it became.

Whichever it was, what we have today is what the rest of us made. We built it in increments, iterating short term solutions to problems emerging from previous solutions, until all the space we saw was filled—except the sky, which we could imagine crowded with vehicles and concrete ramps and billboards, and above these, a flow of drones bearing logos too small to see.

Human density respires as it grows. It retreats occasionally from some places as others swell. So, this intersection might someday erode; ratchet back lanes; turn gas stations into brownfields that become again bare dirt corners on the edges of cane fields.

No one knows.

We are bound by our sense of the present. A universe of unpredictable events created everything we see, and yet we think this present must have been intended. So complex! So efficient! Or such a mess as no one would have made except on purpose.

In fact, the present is a joint project. We can pull it apart and put it back together, make it better or worse; both of which we will likely do in our lifetimes and without more thought to one than the other.