When Kerouac said “The road is life”, I think he didn’t know how apt a description it literally is in some places, places where all public space is the road and not the road, and traffic roams as it pleases, overlapping the people, and vice versa. To live well in many countries, or at least the ones I have lived in, is to accept, with your whole heart, that everywhere is The Road. Believing in A Place Not for Vehicles is folly.
At home, traffic flows in neatly segregated channels. Any pedestrian forays into the territory of vehicles are tightly controlled with lights and stripes and sloping curbs. There is The Road and there is Not the Road. But remember- you are not at home. Adjust accordingly. You need to unlearn vigilance in some ways, or you’ll never get anywhere. You also need to learn new routes of acceptance.
You will come to know the intimacy of traffic and expect it to constantly rush whisper fast past the soft flesh of your body. You surrender to being the rock in the middle of the stream, to have it flowing around you on all sides. You accept that it slides past your vulnerable, capable of death self with nothing more protecting you than a bright hope and perhaps falsely placed faith that you can trust someone not to kill you with their weapon of choice vehicle.
And so you walk in the street and learn not to jump rabbit wary when you hear a motor coming behind; you step out and faithfully expect motorbikes to adeptly swerve around; you pay no attention to cars coming at you on sidewalks because who are you, mere pedestrian, to lay exclusive and frankly selfish claim to a sidewalk?
A parking space is wherever there is space to park, and the definition of space is widely expansive even when that actual space is not. A traffic light is a valiant effort but in practice is little more than a barely tolerated novelty. A stop sign is a suggestion made in a conciliatory “If it pleases you” tone, and the threshold for pleasing is usually unattainably high.
Painting lines on anything should be seen as pure artistic expression and not as anything meant to enforce ideas of traffic flow- come on, it’s just paint. Are you going to let PAINT boss you around? I thought not. A one way street is constantly having its high ideals of order crushed, and should probably just give up its unreasonable demands on direction.
There is, naturally, no real reason to clutter up a perfectly good construction zone with cones and lights and helpful directions as to how to avoid dropping unceremoniously into a hole. Similarly, when it’s dark outside, that seems to be the natural order of things- why fight it with reflectors to mark out a sharp curve, or harsh streetlights to illuminate the path ahead? Figure it out, do what you need to do, get where you need to be. You’ll probably get there in one piece.
To be fair, I have to say that traffic here in Vientiane is far less shocking than in Albania. It’s just that the popularity of scooters creates a whole other bag of what in the fresh hell moments. Something about a scooter lends itself to even more flagrant violations. You convince yourself “Oh, it’s kind of just like I’m on a bicycle, but… with a motor… but I mean, not a big motor… so I can totally go the wrong way for juuuust a moment, pull up on this sidewalk right quick, drive around these tables but I’ll do it slow, and then I can park right here.”
The justifications are endless, but honestly, even calling them justifications implies that these actions are outside the bounds- but they aren’t, because there are no bounds, and it’s just a Tuesday afternoon or a late Saturday night and you’re just driving on The Road, which is Everywhere and All Places.
You can, as you might imagine, get dangerously used to this kind of freedom, and the quickness with which I took to driving my motorbike and sliding in and out of tight places and shrugging off close calls would have shocked me if I could be shocked at this point. I have to thank Albania for inoculating me against any kind of traffic fear, as a driver or passenger. Nowhere before or after has provided as much catastrophic potential in the form of roads or traffic. I loved every minute of those road trips, even as I white knuckled and gasped my way through the early ones.
Never mind driving, though- simply walking was my first hurdle, to be specific about it. The first week I lived in Albania, I was trembling with heart stopping anxiety every time I had to cross a street. See, you just crossed a street- by that I mean, there was no look both ways wait for traffic to stop look at the light and then go.
You just crossed, and in the act of crossing, you signaled to traffic that you’d like them to cease barreling towards you, please and thank you. You never imagine a world where they don’t cease, or you’d never move. It’s like that trust exercise where you fall backwards, but with actual stakes.
Crossing a street of several lanes was an exercise in total blind acceptance of whatever might befall you, because if you couldn’t, on some level, just give up that reptile part of you that screams DO NOT DO THIS, YOU WILL DIE, you would be waiting on the corner of the Zogu i Zi roundabout until you did, eventually, die, because you could wait there for years while the endless swirl of cars fought round and round in a circle of diesel dust and blaring horns. So you just take a deep breath and jump in and trust the process.
An alternate title for this post could be “Exposure Therapy for Existential Anxiety”. This is truly how I think of it, because at some point, you just can’t be afraid anymore- you literally cannot produce that much fear in your body, and it gives up, and you just accept it, and then suddenly your threshold for “NONONO, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE” is raised exponentially. You level up into a new realm of lack of concern for this meat suit that lets you walk around. It’s somewhat liberating.
There’s really no way to say it without sounding far too heavy, but it really goes a long way in mitigating your garden variety excessive fear of your own death*. Something truly serious has to be happening to register on the meter, when you’re so constantly surrounded by dangerous practices, contaminated water, buildings with no safety regulations or fire alarms, potentially rabid stray dogs, mosquitoes who have the power to seriously screw you up, and underneath all of it, the pulsing knowledge that you have no easily accessible hospital to whom to place an emergency call if shit does, finally, get real.
You don’t have time to sit and ponder remote possibilities when you don’t really want to ponder close possibilities that aren’t the greatest. You find yourself reading about the all volunteer emergency service, Vientiane Rescue, and feeling inspired by their work, instead of seriously freaked out that until they decided to offer free labor the service just… didn’t exist. You take in “one of the worst road death rates in the world per capita” with a placid serenity. Whatever, it’s a Wednesday night, gotta hop in that stream and head to dinner with your friends.
Some days, I get on my motorbike and start to drive and am struck with the absurdly out of context realization of “Oh, I forgot to put on my seatbelt!” Then I actually laugh out loud, because I can’t remember the last time I wore a seatbelt in a car anyway. For a second, this realization starts to slide into trepidation. But then I shift through my gears and rattle down my road to take my place in the clattering crowd of scooters and just as quickly forget.
I’m a soft little rock, choosing to live in places with traffic that wants to know me and live next to me, and I have to trust everything will flow around me just so.
*I’ve spent the grand majority of my life obsessing over dying, and being terrified of it, in ways that I’m fairly certain are highly abnormal and unhealthy. People often tell me that I am brave for living overseas, or traveling alone, or other such things, but the secret is that my baseline brain function is to live a lot of my life in crippling anxiety and outsized fear. By pushing myself completely out of my comfort zone to a point where my corresponding fear is untenable, and it exhausts itself, I am finally free of that anxiety. Your mileage may vary with this approach.
Originally published October 22nd, 2014 on Blogger
