ENVIRONMENTAL Poem: McKnight Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15237, by Rin Pastor

after “The First Water is the Body” by Natalie Diaz

A road is not a body. It does not live or breathe—rather, it breaks itself open and swallows things whole. Even that is a poor metaphor, because the road is not a body. It is concrete with a mouth.

When I was learning to drive, my mother told me that Pennsylvania has too many deer. They jump in front of headlights and leave guts strewn across the highways. Cars split them apart like roads split us across fault lines. My mother told me that you can’t break if you see a deer.

The road is always hungry, but it is not a body. You can never tell what it wants to take or what it will steal from you. But it steals. It is always taking.

They call traffic congestion sometimes. I don’t know why, and I don’t think I ever will. A road cannot be sick from the function it was meant to serve. It is no more congestion than it is the hapless violence of automobile. I prefer suffocation, because suffocation is a violence, not a sickness.

In the Philippines, the roads are clogged and suffocated with tricycles and buses and cars—if you’re lucky enough to have one. The New York Times says that the poor infrastructure “Erodes Nation’s Growth Prospects,” but who is doing the eroding? The road splits forests and deer, and typhoons and winter storms open the road.

You can’t break if you see a deer. Better the deer than you. Better the deer than the car. There are so many of them, after all.

Sometimes, when you drive, you don’t remember it. You move without thinking, turn signals and stop
lights and white lines. They call it “highway hypnosis.”

I never finished learning how to drive. It scares me, the way the car is a beast and the road is hungry but neither are bodies. The way the deer guts will always be more of a body than the regenerative tar and concrete roads. Animals live in cycles. Roads exist in perpetuity.

Allegheny County has the worst infrastructure in Pennsylvania. In 2022, the Fern Hollow Bridge
collapsed. It injured four people, and six vehicles fell over 100 feet. News reports say that the collapse began when “the transverse tie plate on the southwest bridge leg failed due to extensive corrosion and section loss caused by the continual accumulation of water and debris, which prevented a protective rust layer, called a patina, from forming.” Reports were made before the collapse. The City of Pittsburgh never acted. The President was called and press conferences were had. It was a failure on a city, state, and federal level.

My mother learned how to drive when she was eleven. She learned in the suffocating roads on the
Philippines, and then she moved to Pennsylvania and failed her driver’s licence test twice.
The road is not a body. I don’t know what it is, but it is not a body.

In 2022, there were 5848 car accidents in Pennsylvania involving deer. At least 1264 people were
injured and nine were killed. I don’t know how many deer were killed. PennDOT “drivers are urged to maintain their distance from the animal.”

When Spain colonized the Philippines, they built roads to transport soldiers. Jeffery Kaja writes that highway projects were started in Pennsylvania by European settlers to “[reinforce] a conceptualization of roads as spaces that facilitated social, economic and political integration.” Robert Caro says that “Science, knowledge, logic and brilliance might be useful tools but they didn’t build highways or civil service systems. Power built highways and civil service systems.”

The records of Pittsburgh roads call McKnight Road a “major artery” built to accommodate soldiers
moving into the area after World War II. At the same time, Japanese colonization of the Philippines further destroyed the country’s infrastructure, deteriorating roads and stealing girls.

The Fern Hollow Bridge collapse severed a natural gas pipeline. Local residents were evacuated.
Reports say nothing of the world beyond the road and the people. The bridge was rebuilt in a year,
faster than the potholes and fractures that open along Pennsylvanian fault lines. If the road is not a body, what should we call these wounds? If these wounds hurt critters and cars, can we call them wounds?

It can cost up to $118 to drive from one end of Pennsylvania to the other. Highways beget power and need power to sustain themselves. Is this a life cycle? Is this what the road is so hungry for?

My brother crashed our car in a state of highway hypnosis. It was late at night, and his body was not his own. He was unharmed. The car was demolished, flipped onto its side and crushed into a tree’s flesh.

There was no deer, but in my dreams, I am always crashing into its soft and broken body, and its heart has stopped by the time I stumble into the grasses beside its corpse.