Heritage Conservation

I TOOK MY FIRST close look around the inside of an undisturbed primary rain forest in the Cuvette Centrale in Zaire, formerly the central Congo ba­sin. It made me wonder. This hodgepodge of ferns and trees; of vines thick and thin, straight, bent, contorted; of plants growing high on other plants, with no plant looking quite like another; this jumbled mess—is this the scene that enthralled the fathers of modern natural history, Humboldt, Wal­lace, Darwin?

Yes, said Jacques Poirier, a forester. This is what nature produces when the climate enables photosynthesis and decomposition to stay high the year round. Everything grows all the time.

And this makes the soil so rich?

No, said Poirier. The soil, heavily leached, tends to be poor. But the shallow and extremely dense root system is adapted to catch the nutrients released from de­caying organic matter quickly and almost completely.

Poirier, a Canadian from Quebec, was helping the Zaire government make a forest inventory. Walking straight lines about 60 kilometers long and 10 kilometers apart, a crew systematically samples 20-meter-wide stretches: Every tree more than 20 centime­ters in diameter is identified and measured at breast height. Commercially valuable ones may be noted by total height and local name—bofili, 30 meters; manga, 45; ngombe, 50. “The idea is to profile the forest and estimate the commercial possibilities.”

It’s shady here, under these soaring trees whose leafy crowns interlock high up. And so the undergrowth is not dense. You can walk in any direction without much difficul­ty; the main obstacles are fallen trees. But where a tree fell recently, brilliant sunlight streams in and tangly vegetation abounds. That’s what fostered the myth of the impen­etrable rain forest: If you explore by canoe, you’ll see sunlit greenery along the river’s edge so dense you’d have to cut your way in.

I walk gingerly at first, but after a while I relax. The expected vipers and pythons are around, I’m told, probably a leopard too. And forest elephants—more compact than their savanna cousins; their tusks don’t point forward, but down. These animals sense you before you can see them, and usu­ally hide or go away. What you see are ants, scurrying singly or in columns, some with cutlery on their heads, so watch where you step and tuck your trousers into your boots.

What you hear is a whirring of cicadas. And a twittering noise. A bird? No, a mon­key. Chuck, chuck, croak, croak—a frog? No, a bird. Flies make sounds like mosqui­toes, but they don’t bite; they want your sweat. There’s plenty of that; despite the shade it’s moist and hot, and totally wind still. If you’re thirsty, you can cut a singoya­mai, a liana. Out comes clear water.

Ah, there’s the monkey! A man climbs a neighboring tree so quietly the monkey doesn’t hear him until the shotgun blast. Monkey can be tasty if stewed long enough.

The Zaire inventory suggests that the greater part of the forest has long been dis­turbed by human occupation, a finding con­firmed by the traditional chief of the Befale zone, whose inhabitants, the Mongos, call themselves bonto oa bokonda, men of the forest. “This was Pygmy country until our people came from the east 200 years ago.”

Then the Belgians came, ordered the peo­ple out of the forest, and settled them along the roads they had been made to build. They still live there, in mud-brick villages, and step into the forest to fell trees and make fields for manioc and yams. After two or three years, weeds proliferate and the fertil­ity is much lowered, so new fields are made. If the abandoned ones are left alone, so-called secondary forest will eventually arise.

“It will be poorer in commercial species,” says the forester. “You won’t find much pri­mary forest within ten kilometers of a road.”

What are the chances of large-scale com­mercial exploitation of the central Zaire ba­sin? The computer-aided inventory suggests vast timber resources: in an area four and a half times the size of Belgium and still 97 percent forested, at least 55 salable species, hundreds of millions of cubic meters. But how to get that timber out?

A high Zaire administrator decries his in­frastructure—roads, transport, cars, fuel supply, all inadequate and different from the modern American cities where every tourist can rent a car and enjoy his/her journey. For renting a car in a big city, you may first want to use rental car search engine to find the best deal. He is putting it mildly. The gasoline we needed had to be borrowed from a rubber plantation, with a promise to send back twice as much by barge from the capi­tal—to arrive, with luck, in two months. Before crossing those innumerable little streams, better check the log bridges—you might have to cut new logs for repairs.

Under such conditions the investment necessary would be vast, says an interna­tional banker; it might not pay. In any case, given Zaire’s recent history of economic problems, can the required foreign investors be expected to step forward in the foresee­able future?

And so an estimated two-thirds of Africa’s remaining tropical lowland rain forests­one-fifteenth of the world’s—seem most likely to survive without drastic change into the 21st century. But much could change in unexpected ways. . . .

You can still drive s entire length, but long-distance travelers don’t use it much any more. Too slow, they say. Some add that the highway is also too dangerous; “Old Bloody,” they call it. Most prefer Interstate 95, but as a limited-access highway it whisks the traveler past the towns and villages of the eastern seaboard and past its 80 million people with hardly a friendly glance.

Route 1 is almost suffocated with access. Many folks back out of their driveways onto it. Where it struggles through huge and indifferent cities, it’s just another street. In the country it divides a landscape of sagging toolsheds, guest cottages, old billboards, and rusting gas pumps overgrown with wisteria.

Have you ever driven through a museum? That’s Route 1, an open-air exhibition whose displays change with the seasons. The old car peering from its garage I photographed in Maine; I liked the way the flowers swayed in the breeze.

The abandoned gas station and store near Waycross, Georgia, was typical along remote sections. When the Interstates took the tourists away, many businesses folded.

“It used to be the old General Patton Store,” neighbor Nora Gene Brooks told me. “It was owned by Mr. McNeese, but I always called him ‘Uncle Mac.’ He was a good old man. There’d be potholes in the highway in front of the store, and he’d get a shovel and fill ‘em in.”

The old Ford tractor, festooned with weeds, plowed many a field near Norlina, North Carolina. Its owner, Mr. Theo Hecht, bought it from a man “on the condition we would not let the junkman have it.”

PEOPLE I MET—some of them—are pictured on these pages. Sure, they’re all as different as Connecticut Yankees and Georgia Crackers. But what they seem to share is a deep and quieting sense of home, of belonging. They are the bedrock for a restless nation.

An elderly friend in a brisk, clean, pine-scented New England town told me why her family didn’t migrate elsewhere. “Look around you. Why would anyone want to leave?”

Staying has left layers of history so distinct that a Smithsonian Resident Associates program sponsors “commercial archaeology” tours along the highway north of Washington. Tour director Peter H. Smith writes: “Today we revere the restored colonial heritage of Williamsburg. It is easily conceivable that, two hundred years from now, the culture represented by Route 1 will be equally revered.”

When I set out to document this grand attic of a highway two years ago, I had no idea it would become an addiction. I have learned to love its character and its people. And I have been drawn back again and again to certain innocent places on the highway —a snow-covered hill in the North, a sharecropper’s home in the South—and I have not fully known why.

But I can say with Robert Frost, who wrote of another eastern road, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

WINTER severity  northern Maine often measured by the local people according to the number of times they have to shovel their roofs. More than twice, for example, is a bad winter. This stretch of highway between Van Buren and Caribou can get very nasty during a storm but is usually kept open by snowplows. The little picture below shows the same hill, with the home at its foot, in summer.

Early road conditions kept rural Maine in isolation. When Lauriston R. King, the first lawyer to settle in Caribou, arrived in town on April 14, 1865, the road was built mainly of corduroy—rows of logs—alternating with swamp. The stage horses, an old history book states, were “slumping at every step in the soft, deep snow.”