If need be, everyone can walk 15 kilometers. It might take some of us all day, but the distance, roughly nine miles, is certainly traversable. For the developed world, a 15 km walk can be called an outing, a day hike, a backpacking trip. People plan weekends to do it; Boy Scouts can earn merit badges for it. In sum, walking 15 km is a luxury not a necessity. To cross that distance is what a private motorized vehicle is for.
In the developing world however, for subsistence rural farmers, a 15 km walk is a fact of life. Out in the countryside, pavement is a limited quantity and the sidewalk ends rather quickly or far from home depending on which way you are looking.
Walking is at once a part of the traditional, agrarian routine and yet a constant and obstinate geographic impediment to connection to the greater wide world.
Fifteen is only the average, used here metaphorically, it could be only 5 or 10 km, or as much as 20, 25 km and beyond. We are talking about fifteen kilometers of dirt, mud, earth roads between a community where someone lives and the nearest paved road, where the rest of the world lives.
As the crow flies the distances are short but the consequences are long and profound. The lack of all weather paved roads takes measurable distances and makes them really quite immeasurable in terms of time, economics, psychology, culture, receptiveness to new ideas and ultimately livelihoods.
Fifteen kilometers on asphalt takes a half and hour to drive. Fuel costs are negligible and produce will certainly not rot en route. The same distance on dirt roads can take an hour, an afternoon, a day. It really is any one’s guess, depending on the weather, road conditions and how big those erosion ditches have become since the last rain.
If there is a doubt whether a farmer can get out to sell or some one can get in to buy and transportation costs will consume most of his earnings, it’s a certainty that a farmers choices on which cash crop to plant will be severely restricted. Fifteen kilometers can be the distance and difference between subsistence and upward mobility.
We love to love nature. However, the catch is that we love to love it as long as it’s easily accessible through a reliable network of roads. Most of us enjoy the thought of spending the day out in the wilderness but with the benefit of being able to get away from it and return home at the end of the day.
We are quick to criticize large-scale public works projects that tend to pave the world over. However, we do prefer individual pavement projects that come right up to our garage door.
The next time you gaze upon that ubiquitous black expanse called asphalt, learn to step a little more lively and tread a bit more lightly, for it has taken us far. Let’s hope it starts taking the rest of the world, mired in mud and poverty in the same direction.
